sent to Rome by the Queen, where he made great mischief, and offended
the Pope by his insolence. He has sided with the Parliament in England,
and is engaged on a scheme to persuade Cromwell to recall the King, and
seat him on the throne as an elective monarch. The Queen does not wish
to break with him altogether, both because he has great influence with
some powerful Catholics, and because, if nothing better can be done, she
would perforce accept the elective monarchy for her son. But the scheme
is chimerical, and will come to nothing. Cromwell intends the crown for
himself. You see, Johnny," continued St. Clare with a smile, "all our
plans have failed. The English Church is destroyed, and those Catholics
who always opposed it are thought much of at Rome now, and carry all
before them. I have not altered my opinion, however, and I shall die in
the same. But we must wait. I do not wish to influence you any more,
nor to involve you any longer in any schemes of mine, but the Queen
wants you to go as an agent to Rome on her behalf; and it would be of
great service to me, and to any plans which I may in future have, if I
had such a friend and correspondent as yourself in that city. If you
have no other plans, I do not see that you could do much better than go.
You shall have such introductions to my friends there--cardinals and
great men--that you may live during your stay in the best company and
luxury, and without expense. One of my friends is the Cardinal
Renuccinni, brother of the Legate the Bishop of Fermo, whom you met in
Ireland, and who, by the by, was much impressed with you. You cannot
fail to make friends with many who will have it in their power to be of
great use to you; and you may establish yourself in some lucrative post,
either as a layman, or, if you choose to take orders, as a priest. You
will believe me, also, when I say,--what I say to very few,--that I am
under obligations to you which I can never repay, and nothing will give
me greater pleasure than to see you rich and prosperous, and admired and
powerful in the Roman Court. You have the qualities and the experience
to command success. You will be backed by the whole power of my
friends, with whom to make your fortune will be the work of an
after-dinner's talk. You will see Italy, and delight yourself in the
sight of all those places and antiquities of which we have so often
talked; and with your cultivated and religious tastes you will enter,
with the most perfect advantage, into that magic world of sight and
sound which the churches and sacred services in Rome present to the
devout. I cannot see that you can do better than go."
Inglesant sat looking at the Jesuit with a singular expression in his
eyes, which the latter did not understand. Yes, surely it was a very
different offer from that of Serenus de Cressy, yet Inglesant did not
delay to answer from any indecision; from the moment the Jesuit began to
speak he knew that he should go. But he took a kind of melancholy
pleasure in contrasting the two paths, the two men, the different choice
they offered him, and in reading a half sad, half sarcastic commentary
on himself.
After a minute or two, he said,--
"I thank you much for your good-will and quite undeserved patronage. It
is by far too good an offer to be refused, and I gladly accept it. You
know, doubtless, what has happened to me, especially within these last
few days, and that I have no friend left on earth save yourself; such a
journey as that which you propose to me will, at the least, distract my
thoughts from such a melancholy fate as mine."
"I knew of your brother's murder," said the Jesuit; "I have heard of the
man before--one of those utterly lost and villanous natures which no
country but Italy ever produced. Do you wish to seek him?"
Inglesant told him that one of his principal objects in staying in Paris
was to seek his assistance for that purpose; and that he felt it a
sacred duty, which he owed to his brother, that his murderer should not
escape unpunished.
"I have no doubt I can learn where he is," said the other; "but I do not
well see what you can do when you have found him, unless it happens to
be in a place where you have powerful friends. It is true that he is so
generally known and hated in Italy, that you might easily get help in
punishing him should you meet him there; but he is hardly likely to
return to his native country, except for some powerful reason."
"If I can do nothing else," said Inglesant bitterly, "I can tell him who
I am and shoot him dead, or run him through the body. He murdered my
brother, just as he had come back to me--to me in prison and alone, and
was a loving friend and brother to me, and would have been through life.
Do you suppose that I should spare him, or that any moment will be so
delightful to me as the one in which I see him bleed to death at my
feet, as I saw my poor brother, struck by his hand, as he shall be by
mine?"
The Jesuit looked at Inglesant with surprise. The terrible earnestness
of his manner, and the unrelenting and grim pleasure he seemed to take
at the prospect of revenge, seemed so inconsistent with the refined and
religious tone of his ordinary character, approaching almost to
weakness; but the next moment he thought, "Why should I wonder at it?
The man who has gone through what he did without flinching must have a
strength of purpose about him far other than some might think."
He said aloud,--
"Well, I doubt not I can find him; he is well known in France, in Spain,
and in Italy, and if he goes to Germany he can be traced. But what was
the other sad misfortune you spoke of?--something within the last few
days, you said."
Inglesant had been looking fixedly before him since he had last spoken,
with a steady blank expression, which, since his imprisonment, his face
sometimes wore,--part of a certain wildness in his look which bespoke a
mind ill at ease and a confused brain. He was following up his prey to
the death.
He started at the Jesuit's question, and seemed to recollect with an
effort; then he said,--
"Mary Collet died at the convent of the Nuns of the ---- last week. I
only found her out the night before;" and as he spoke, the contrast
arose in his mind of the deathbed of the saint-like girl, and the
Italian's bleeding body struck down by his revenge. The footsteps of
the Saviour he had promised his friend to follow, surely could not lead
him to such a scene as that. If this were the first-fruits of his
refusal to follow Serenus de Cressy, surely he must also have turned his
back on Christ Himself.
He covered his face with his hands, and the Jesuit saw that he wept. He
supposed it was simply from grief at the death of his friend, and he was
surprised at the strength of his attachment. Like others, he had
thought Inglesant's love a rather cool and Platonic passion.
"I always thought him one of those nice and coy lovers," he said to
himself, "who always observe some defect in the thing they love, which
weakens their passion, and shows them that the reality is so much
inferior to their idea, that they easily desist from their enterprize,
and vanish as if they had not so much intention to love as to vanish,
and had more shame to have begun their courtship than purpose to
continue it. He must be much shaken by his suffering and by his
brother's death."
He waited a few moments, and then spoke to Inglesant about his health,
of his brother's death, and of his imprisonment. He spoke to him of the
late King, and of his distress at the necessity under which he lay of
denying Inglesant's commission; and he said many other things calculated
to cheer his friend and please his self-regard.
Inglesant listened to him not without pleasure, but he said little. An
idea had taken possession of his mind, which he carried with him into
Italy and for long afterwards. He was more than half convinced that, in
rejecting Cressy's advice, he had turned his back on Christ; and he was
the more confirmed in this belief because never had the image of the
Italian, nor the desire of revenge, taken so strong a hold upon his
imagination as now. It occurred to his excited imagination that Christ
had deserted him, and the Fiend taken possession, and that the course
and intention of the latter would be to lure him on, by such images, to
some terrible and lonely place, where the Italian and he together should
be involved in one common ghastly deed of crime, one common and eternal
ruin. The sense of having had a great act of self-denial placed before
him and having refused it, no doubt weighed down and blunted his
conscience; and once placed, as he half thought, upon the downward path,
nothing seemed before him but the gradual descent, adorned at first by
some poor show of gaudy flowers, but ending speedily--for there was no
self-delusion to such a nature as his, which had tasted of the heavenly
food--in miserable and filthy mire, where, loathing himself and despised
by others, nothing awaited him but eternal death. He answered the Jesuit
almost mechanically, and on parting from him at night promised
indifferently to accompany him on the morrow to an audience with the
Queen.
END OF VOL. I.
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, _Edinburgh_.