The next morning Elsie awoke, as was her custom,--when the very faintest
hue of dawn streaked the horizon. A hen who has seen a hawk balancing
his wings and cawing in mid-air over her downy family could not have
awakened with her feathers, metaphorically speaking, in a more bristling
state of caution.
"Spirits in the gorge, quotha?" said she to herself, as she vigorously
adjusted her dress. "I believe so,--spirits in good sound bodies,
I believe; and next we shall hear, there will be rope-ladders, and
climbings, and the Lord knows what. I shall go to confession this very
morning, and tell Father Francesco the danger; and instead of taking her
down to sell oranges, suppose I send her to the sisters to carry the
ring and a basket of oranges?"
"Ah, ah!" she said, pausing, after she was dressed, and addressing a
coarse print of Saint Agnes pasted against the wall,--"you look very
meek there, and it was a great thing no doubt to die as you did; but if
you'd lived to be married and bring up a family of girls, you'd have
known something greater. Please, don't take offence with a poor old
woman who has got into the way of speaking her mind freely! I'm foolish,
and don't know much,--so, dear lady, pray for me!" And old Elsie bent
her knee and crossed herself reverently, and then went out, leaving her
young charge still sleeping.
It was yet dusky dawn when she might have been seen kneeling, with her
sharp, clear-cut profile, at the grate of a confession-box in a church
in Sorrento. Within was seated a personage who will have some influence
on our story, and who must therefore be somewhat minutely introduced to
the reader.
Il Padre Francesco had only within the last year arrived in the
neighborhood, having been sent as superior of a brotherhood of
Capuchins, whose convent was perched on a crag in the vicinity. With
this situation came a pastoral care of the district; and Elsie and her
grand-daughter found in him a spiritual pastor very different from the
fat, jolly, easy Brother Girolamo, to whose place he had been appointed.
The latter had been one of those numerous priests taken from the
peasantry, who never rise above the average level of thought of the body
from which they are drawn. Easy, gossipy, fond of good living and good
stories, sympathetic in troubles and in joys, he had been a general
favorite in the neighborhood, without exerting any particularly
spiritualizing influence.
It required but a glance at Father Francesco to see that he was in all
respects the opposite of this. It was evident that he came from one of
the higher classes, by that indefinable air of birth and breeding which
makes itself felt under every change of costume. Who he might be, what
might have been his past history, what rank he might have borne, what
part played in the great warfare of life, was all of course sunk in the
oblivion of his religious profession, where, as at the grave, a man laid
down name and fame and past history and worldly goods, and took up a
coarse garb and a name chosen from the roll of the saints, in sign that
the world that had known him should know him no more.
Imagine a man between thirty and forty, with that round, full, evenly
developed head, and those chiselled features, which one sees on ancient
busts and coins no less than in the streets of modern Rome. The checks
were sunken and sallow; the large, black, melancholy eyes had a wistful,
anxious, penetrative expression, that spoke a stringent, earnest spirit,
which, however deep might be the grave in which it lay buried, had not
yet found repose. The long, thin, delicately formed hands were emaciated
and bloodless; they clasped with a nervous eagerness a rosary and
crucifix of ebony and silver,--the only mark of luxury that could be
discerned in a costume unusually threadbare and squalid. The whole
picture of the man, as he sat there, had it been painted and hung in a
gallery, was such as must have stopped every person of a certain amount
of sensibility before it with the conviction that behind that strong,
melancholy, earnest figure and face lay one of those hidden histories of
human passion in which the vivid life of medieval Italy was so fertile.
He was listening to Elsie, as she kneeled, with that easy air of
superiority which marks a practised man of the world, yet with a grave
attention which showed that her communication had awakened the deepest
interest in his mind. Every few moments he moved slightly in his seat,
and interrupted the flow of the narrative by an inquiry concisely put,
in tones which, clear and low, had a solemn and severe distinctness,
producing, in the still, dusky twilight of the church, an almost ghostly
effect.
When the communication was over, he stepped out of the confessional and
said to Elsie in parting,--"My daughter, you have done well to take this
in time. The devices of Satan in our corrupt times are numerous and
artful, and they who keep the Lord's sheep must not sleep. Before
many days I will call and examine the child; meanwhile I approve your
course."
It was curious to see the awe-struck, trembling manner in which old
Elsie, generally so intrepid and commanding, stood before this man in
his brown rough woollen gown with his corded waist; but she had an
instinctive perception of the presence of the man of superior birth no
less than a reverence for the man of religion.
After she had departed from the church, the Capuchin stood lost in
thought; and to explain his reverie, we must throw some further light on
his history.
Il Padre Francesco, as his appearance and manner intimated, was in truth
from one of the most distinguished families of Florence. He was one of
those whom an ancient writer characterizes as "men of longing desire."
Born with a nature of restless stringency that seemed to doom him never
to know repose, excessive in all things, he had made early trial
of ambition, of war, and of what the gallants of his time called
love,--plunging into all the dissipated excesses of a most dissolute
age, and outdoing in luxury and extravagance the foremost of his
companions.
The wave of a great religious impulse--which in our times would have
been called a revival--swept over the city of Florence, and bore him,
with multitudes of others, to listen to the fervid preaching of the
Dominican monk, Jerome Savonarola; and amid the crowd that trembled,
wept, and beat their breasts under his awful denunciations, he, too,
felt within himself a heavenly call,--the death of an old life, and the
uprising of a new purpose.
The colder manners and more repressed habits of modern times can give
no idea of the wild fervor of a religious revival among a people so
passionate and susceptible to impressions as the Italians. It swept
society like a spring torrent from the sides of the Apennines, bearing
all before it. Houses were sacked with religious fervor by penitent
owners, and licentious pictures and statuary and books, and all the
thousand temptations and appliances of a luxurious age, were burned in
the great public square. Artists convicted of impure and licentious
designs threw their palettes and brushes into the expiatory flames, and
retired to convents, till called forth by the voice of the preacher,
and bid to turn their art into higher channels. Since the days of Saint
Francis no such profound religious impulse had agitated the Italian
community.
In our times a conversion is signalized by few outward changes, however
deep the inner life; but the life of the Middle Ages was profoundly
symbolical, and always required the help of material images in its
expression.
The gay and dissolute young Lorenzo Sforza took leave of the world with
rites of awful solemnity. He made his will and disposed of all his
worldly property, and assembling his friends, bade them the farewell of
a dying man. Arrayed as for the grave, he was laid in his coffin,
and thus carried from his stately dwelling by the brethren of the
Misericordia, who, in their ghostly costume, with mournful chants and
lighted candles, bore him to the tomb of his ancestors, where the coffin
was deposited in the vault, and its occupant passed the awful hours of
the night in darkness and solitude. Thence he was carried, the next day,
almost in a state of insensibility, to a neighboring convent of the
severest order, where, for some weeks, he observed a penitential retreat
of silence and prayer, neither seeing nor hearing any living being but
his spiritual director.
The effect of all this on an ardent and sensitive temperament can
scarcely be conceived; and it is not to be wondered at that the once
gay and luxurious Lorenzo Sforza, when emerging from this tremendous
discipline, was so wholly lost in the worn and weary Padre Francesco
that it seemed as if in fact he had died and another had stepped into
his place. The face was ploughed deep with haggard furrows, and the eyes
were as those of a man who has seen the fearful secrets of another life.
He voluntarily sought a post as far removed as possible from the scenes
of his early days, so as more completely to destroy his identity
with the past; and he devoted himself with enthusiasm to the task of
awakening to a higher spiritual life the indolent, self-indulgent monks
of his order, and the ignorant peasantry of the vicinity.
But he soon discovered, what every earnest soul learns who has been
baptized into a sense of things invisible, how utterly powerless and
inert any mortal man is to inspire others with his own insights and
convictions. With bitter discouragement and chagrin, he saw that the
spiritual man must forever lift the dead weight of all the indolence and
indifference and animal sensuality that surround him,--that the curse of
Cassandra is upon him, forever to burn and writhe under awful visions of
truths which no one around him will regard. In early life the associate
only of the cultivated and the refined, Father Francesco could not
but experience at times an insupportable _ennui_ in listening to the
confessions of people who had never learned either to think or to feel
with any degree of distinctness, and whom his most fervent exhortations
could not lift above the most trivial interests of a mere animal life.
He was weary of the childish quarrels and bickerings of the monks, of
their puerility, of their selfishness and self-indulgence, of their
hopeless vulgarity of mind, and utterly discouraged with their
inextricable labyrinths of deception. A melancholy deep as the grave
seized on him, and he redoubled his austerities, in the hope that by
making life painful he might make it also short.
But the first time that the clear, sweet tones of Agnes rang in his
ears at the confessional, and her words, so full of unconscious poetry
and repressed genius, came like a strain of sweet music through the
grate, he felt at his heart a thrill to which it had long been a
stranger, and which seemed to lift the weary, aching load from off his
soul, as if some invisible angel had borne it up on his wings.
In his worldly days he had known women as the gallants in Boccaccio's
romances knew them, and among them one enchantress whose sorceries had
kindled in his heart one of those fatal passions which burn out the
whole of a man's nature, and leave it, like a sacked city, only a
smouldering heap of ashes. Deepest, therefore, among his vows of
renunciation had been those which divided him from all womankind. The
gulf that parted him and them was in his mind deep as hell, and he
thought of the sex only in the light of temptation and danger. For the
first time in his life, an influence serene, natural, healthy, and sweet
breathed over him from the mind of a woman,--an influence so heavenly
and peaceful that he did not challenge or suspect it, but rather opened
his worn heart insensibly to it, as one in a fetid chamber naturally
breathes freer when the fresh air is admitted.
How charming it was to find his most spiritual exhortations seized upon
with the eager comprehension of a nature innately poetic and ideal: Nay,
it sometimes seemed to him as if the suggestions which he gave her dry
and leafless she brought again to him in miraculous clusters of flowers,
like the barren rod of Joseph, which broke into blossoms when he was
betrothed to the spotless Mary; and yet, withal, she was so humbly
unconscious, so absolutely ignorant of the beauty of all she said and
thought, that she impressed him less as a mortal woman than as one of
those divine miracles in feminine form of which he had heard in the
legends of the saints.
Thenceforward his barren, discouraged life began to blossom with wayside
flowers,--and he mistrusted not the miracle, because the flowers were
all heavenly The pious thought or holy admonition that he saw trodden
under the swinish feet of the monks he gathered up again in hope,--she
would understand it; and gradually all his thoughts became like
carrier-doves, which, having once learned the way to a favorite haunt,
are ever fluttering to return thither.
Such is the wonderful power of human sympathy, that the discovery even
of the existence of a soul capable of understanding our inner life often
operates as a perfect charm; every thought, and feeling, and aspiration
carries with it a new value, from the interwoven consciousness that
attends it of the worth it would bear to that other mind; so that, while
that person lives, our existence is doubled in value, even though oceans
divide us.
The cloud of hopeless melancholy which had brooded over the mind of
Father Francesco lifted and sailed away, he knew not why, he knew not
when. A secret joyfulness and alacrity possessed his spirits; his
prayers became more fervent and his praises more frequent. Until now,
his meditations had been most frequently those of fear and wrath,--the
awful majesty of God, the terrible punishment of sinners, which he
conceived with all that haggard, dreadful sincerity of vigor which
characterized the modern Etruscan phase of religion of which the
"Inferno" of Dante was the exponent and the out-come. His preachings
and his exhortations had dwelt on that lurid world seen by the severe
Florentine, at whose threshold hope forever departs, and around whose
eternal circles of living torture the shivering spirit wanders dismayed
and blasted by terror.
He had been, shocked and discouraged to find how utterly vain had been
his most intense efforts to stem the course of sin by presenting these
images of terror: how hard natures had listened to them with only a
coarse and cruel appetite, which seemed to increase their hardness and
brutality; and how timid ones had been withered by them, like flowers
scorched by the blast of a furnace; how, in fact, as in the case of
those cruel executions and bloody tortures then universal in the
jurisprudence of Europe, these pictures of eternal torture seemed to
exert a morbid demoralizing influence which hurried on the growth of
iniquity.
But since his acquaintance with Agnes, without his knowing exactly why,
thoughts of the Divine Love had floated into his soul, filling it with a
golden cloud like that which of old rested over the mercy-seat in that
sacred inner temple where the priest was admitted alone. He became more
affable and tender, more tolerant to the erring, more fond of little
children; would stop sometimes to lay his hand on the head of a child,
or to raise up one who lay overthrown in the street. The song of little
birds and the voices of animal life became to him full of tenderness;
and his prayers by the sick and dying seemed to have a melting power,
such as he had never known before. It was spring in his soul,--soft,
Italian spring,--such as brings out the musky breath of the cyclamen,
and the faint, tender perfume of the primrose, in every moist dell of
the Apennines.
A year passed in this way, perhaps the best and happiest of his troubled
life,--a year in which, insensibly to himself, the weekly interviews
with Agnes at the confessional became the rallying-points around which
the whole of his life was formed, and she the unsuspected spring of his
inner being.
It was his duty, he said to himself, to give more than usual time and
thought to the working and polishing of this wondrous jewel which had
so unexpectedly been intrusted to him for the adorning of his Master's
crown; and so long as he conducted with the strictest circumspection of
his office, what had he to fear in the way of so delightful a duty? He
had never touched her hand; never had even the folds of her passing
drapery brushed against his garments of mortification and renunciation;
never, even in pastoral benediction, had he dared lay his hand on that
beautiful head. It is true, he had not forbidden himself to raise his
glance sometimes when he saw her coming in at the church-door and
gliding up the aisle with downcast eyes, and thoughts evidently so far
above earth, that she seemed, like one of Frà Angelico's angels, to be
moving on a cloud, so encompassed with stillness and sanctity that he
held his breath as she passed.
But in the confession of Dame Elsie that morning he had received a shock
which threw his whole interior being into a passionate agitation which
dismayed and astonished him.
The thought of Agnes, his spotless lamb, exposed to lawless and
licentious pursuit, of whose nature and probabilities his past life
gave him only too clear an idea, was of itself a very natural source of
anxiety. But Elsie had unveiled to him her plans for her marriage, and
consulted him on the propriety of placing Agnes immediately under the
protection of the husband she had chosen for her; and it was this part
of her communication which had awakened the severest internal recoil,
and raised a tumult of passions which the priest vainly sought either to
assuage or understand.
As soon as his morning duties were over, he repaired to his convent,
sought his cell, and, prostrate on his face before the crucifix, began
his internal reckoning with himself. The day passed in fasting and
solitude.
It is now golden evening, and on the square, flat roof of the convent,
which, high-perched on a crag, overlooks the bay, one might observe a
dark figure slowly pacing backward and forward. It is Father Francesco;
and as he walks up and down, one could see by his large, bright, dilated
eye, by the vivid red spot on either sunken cheek, and by the nervous
energy of his movements, that he is in the very height of some mental
crisis,--in that state of placid _extase_ in which the subject supposes
himself perfectly calm, because every nerve is screwed to the highest
point of tension and can vibrate no more.
What oceans had that day rolled over him and swept him, as one may see a
little boat rocked on the capricious surges of the Mediterranean! Were,
then, all his strivings and agonies in vain? Did he love this woman with
any earthly love? Was he jealous of the thought of a future husband?
Was it a tempting demon that said to him, "Lorenzo Sforza might have
shielded this treasure from the profanation of lawless violence, from
the brute grasp of an inappreciative peasant, but Father Francesco
cannot"? There was a moment when his whole being vibrated with a
perception of what a marriage bond might have been that was indeed a
sacrament, and that bound together two pure and loyal souls who gave
life and courage to each other in all holy purposes and heroic deeds;
and he almost feared that he had cursed his vows,--those awful vows, at
whose remembrance his inmost soul shivered through every nerve.
But after hours of prayer and struggle, and wave after wave of agonizing
convulsion, he gained one of those high points in human possibility
where souls can stand a little while at a time, and where all things
seem so transfigured and pure that they fancy themselves thenceforward
forever victorious over evil.
As he walks up and down in the gold-and-purple evening twilight, his
mind seems to him calm as that glowing sea that reflects the purple
shores of Ischia, and the quaint, fantastic grottos and cliff's of
Capri. All is golden and glowing; he sees all clear; he is delivered
from his spiritual enemies; he treads them under his feet.
Yes, he says to himself, he loves Agnes,--loves her all-sacredly as
her guardian angel does, who ever beholdeth the face of her Father in
Heaven. Why, then, does he shrink from her marriage? Is it not evident?
Has that tender soul, that poetic nature, that aspiring genius, anything
in common with the vulgar, coarse details of a peasant's life? Will not
her beauty always draw the eye of the licentious, expose her artless
innocence to solicitation which will annoy her and bring upon her head
the inconsiderate jealousy of her husband? Think of Agnes made subject
to the rude authority, to the stripes and correction, which men of the
lower class, under the promptings of jealousy, do not scruple to inflict
on their wives! What career did society, as then organized, present to
such a nature, so perilously gifted in body and mind? He has the answer.
The Church has opened a career to woman which all the world denies her.
He remembers the story of the dyer's daughter of Siena, the fair Saint
Catharine. In his youth he had often visited the convent where one
of the first artists of Italy has immortalized her conflicts and her
victories, and knelt with his mother at the altar where she now communes
with the faithful. He remembered how, by her sanctity, her humility, and
her holy inspirations of soul, she had risen to the courts of princes,
whither she had been sent as ambassadress to arrange for the interests
of the Church; and then rose before his mind's eye the gorgeous picture
of Pinturicchio, where, borne in celestial repose and purity amid all
the powers and dignitaries of the Church, she is canonized as one of
those that shall reign and intercede with Christ in heaven.
Was it wrong, therefore, in him, though severed from all womankind by a
gulf of irrevocable vows, that he should feel a kind of jealous property
in this gifted and beautiful creature? and though he might not, even in
thought, dream of possessing her himself, was there sin in the vehement
energy with which his whole nature rose up in him to say that no other
man should,--that she should be the bride of Heaven alone?
Certainly, if there were, it lurked far out of sight; and the priest had
a case that might have satisfied a conscience even more fastidious;--and
he felt a sort of triumph in the results of his mental scrutiny.
Yes, she should ascend from glory to glory,--but _his_ should be the
hand that should lead her upward. _He_ would lead her within the
consecrated grate,--he would pronounce the awful words that should make
it sacrilege for all other men to approach her; and yet through life
_he_ should be the guardian and director of her soul, the one being to
whom she should render an obedience as unlimited as that which belongs
to Christ alone.
Such were the thoughts of this victorious hour,--which, alas! were
destined to fade as those purple skies and golden fires gradually went
out, leaving, in place of their light and glory, only the lurid glow of
Vesuvius.