Professor Mora was buried in the cemetery of San Michele, with the rites
of the Roman Church, though he had not received the last sacraments.
That he had not, was supposed to have been the fault of the nurse. It
was known, however, that he had made his Easter Communion; and those who
had seen him before the altar at San Giorgio on that occasion spoke of
his conduct as very edifying.
Many of them would doubtless have been puzzled, and even scandalized,
could they have read his mind. That he was, in soul, prostrate at the
feet of his Creator, there could be no doubt. He had often, of late
years, spent an hour in some church, kneeling, or sitting in deep
thought. He found it easier to recollect himself in the quiet of such a
place, surrounded by religious images.
On this last Easter he had questioned:—
“Shall I confess my sins to a priest? Why not? It can do me no harm, and
it may do me good. I will declare what I know of my own wrong-doing,
addressing God in the hearing of this man. He uses many instruments.
Perhaps the forgiveness of God may be spoken to me by the lips of this
man. Shall I tell this man that I do not know whether he has any
authority, or not? No. I am doing the best that I can; and his claim
that he has authority will have no weight with me.”
It was the same with his communion.
“Is it true that the Blessed Christ, the Son of God, is mystically
concentrated and hidden in the wafer which will be placed upon my
tongue, and that he will pervade my being, as the souls of a thousand
roses are concentrated in a vial of attar, and scent all the house with
their sweetness? I do not know. Nothing that God wills is impossible. If
I cry out to him, O my Father, I search, and grope, and cannot find my
Saviour! Send him, therefore, to meet my soul in this wafer, that I may
live! At this point let me touch him, and receive help, as the sick
woman received it from his garment’s hem!—he could meet me there, if it
were his will, and pour all heaven into my soul through that channel.
Does he will it? I do not know. But since it is not impossible, I will
bow myself as if he were here. Is there a place where God is not?”
Such was Professor Mora’s Easter Communion; and many a formal
communicant was less devout.
It is true that he had bent in heathen temples with an almost equal
devotion; but it was always to the same God.
“Show me the path by which the instinct of worship in any people, or
individual, climbs to what it can best conceive of the Divine,” he said,
“and there I will find the footsteps of God coming to meet that soul. A
sunbeam falls on limpid water and a lily, and they shine like jewels.
The same beam, turning, falls unshrinkingly on the muddy pool, that
brightens also after its manner, and as well as it can.”
To him the Indian praying-wheel, so often denounced as the height of
material superstition, might be made to indicate a fuller conception of
the infinity of God than was to be found in much of the worship that
calls itself intelligent and spiritual. Written over and over on the
parchment wound about this wheel is the one brief prayer, “O Jewel in
the Lotos, Amen!” Their Divine One was as the light of the morning
embodied and seated on a lotos-flower. Their prayer confesses nothing
and asks nothing; yet it confesses and asks all. It is a dull longing in
the dull, and a lark song in the spiritual. It expresses their despair
of being able to tell his greatness, or their need of him. It repeats
itself as the flutterings of a bird’s wings repeat themselves when it
soars. The soul says, “As many times as it is here inscribed, multiplied
by as many times as the wheel revolves when I touch it, and yet a
million times more, do I praise thee, do I implore thee, do I love thee,
O thou Divine Light of the world! Even as the planets whirl ceaselessly
wrapped about in the hieroglyphs of obedience to thy laws, so does this
wheel, encircled by the aspirations of our worship, speak to thee for
us.”
He entered one of their temples with respect, and kneeling there,
remembered what their Hindu teachers had said to him:
“Owing to the greatness of the Deity, the One Soul is lauded in many
ways. The different Gods are the members of the One Soul.”
And also: “One cannot attain to the Divine Sun through the word, through
the mind, or through the eye. It is only reached by him who says, ‘It
is! It is!’”
As he meditated then with the door of his soul wide open, it had seemed
to him that all the gods and all the worships of men had gathered
themselves before him, and mingled, as mists gather into a cloud, and
that from turbulent they had grown still, and from dark they had
gathered to themselves light, growing more golden in the centre, as
though their divers elements were purifying themselves to form some new
unity, till the crude and useless all melted away, parting to disclose
an infant seated on a lotos-flower, and shining like the morning sun.
And the lotos-flower was the figure of a pure woman.
“It is! It is!” he had said then. And that wide essential faith had
survived, though for details of dogma he had gone out of the world with
the same word with which he had begun his studies: “I do not know!”
A funeral gondola came and took his body away, several gentlemen, Don
Claudio among them, accompanying.
Tacita, wrapped in the window curtain, watched them till the gondola
disappeared under the Rialto bridge, then threw herself, sobbing, into
her companion’s arms.
The nurse persuaded her to seek some occupation. “Come and help me make
out the list of books that Don Claudio is to have,” she said.
Professor Mora had given a large part of his choice library to Don
Claudio.
This woman, Elena, had an interesting face. There was something noble in
the calm, direct look of her eyes, and in her healthy matronly figure.
It would be difficult to describe her manners, except by saying that
there was nothing lacking, and nothing superfluous.
One sees occasionally a great lady whose character is equal to her
social position, who has that manner without mannerism. A certain
transparency of action follows the outlines of the intention. When this
woman spoke, she had something to say, not often anything brilliant, or
profound, but something which the moment required.
Tacita at once busied herself with the list, and found comfort in it.
She needed comforting; for she was of a tenderly loving nature, and her
almost cloistered life had confined her interests to that home circle
now quite broken up. Her father had died in her infancy. Her mother, not
much older than herself, had been her constant companion, friend and
confidant. The loss of her had been a crushing one; and the wound still
bled. But she and her grandfather had consoled each other; and while he
lived the mother had seemed near. Now he, too, was gone!
And there was yet another pain. Some little tendrils of habit and
affection had wound themselves about her grandfather’s favorite pupil,
and they bled in the breaking. For they were to separate at once. Nor
had she any wish to remain in Venice. She well knew that she would not
be allowed to see Don Claudio, except at her peril, and that jealous
eyes were already fixed upon them.
Yet how slight, how innocent their intercourse had been! She went over
it all again in fancy as she took down book after book.
She and Don Claudio had always saluted each other when he came; at
first, with a ceremonious bow, later, with a smile. They seldom spoke.
The table, piled with books, at which the professor and his pupil sat,
was placed before the lagoon window, where, later, the old man’s
deathbed had been drawn. Her place was at a little casement window on
the _rio_ that ran beside the house. They spoke in languages which she
did not understand, and she had often dropped her work to listen.
Sometimes, in going, his eyes had looked a wish to linger; but she did
not know how he had longed to stay, nor how many glances had strayed
from the piles of books to her face. The graceful contours of her form,
her delicate whiteness, her modesty, her violet eyes, the golden lights
in her hair—he had learned them all by heart.
“Tacita. Yes,” he had thought, “that is the right name for her. She
stays there in that flickering light and shade as silent as any lily!”
Their world had been the world of a Claude landscape, all floating in a
golden haze.
Once they had all gone out into the balcony to watch a steamship from
Cairo move up the lagoon that was all radiant and red with the setting
sun. Another time a thunder-storm had darkened about them, so that they
could scarcely see each other, and Don Claudio, coming to her table, had
asked softly,—
“Are you afraid, Tacita?”
Another time he had brought her some roses from his mother’s garden.
And now, everything was ended!
“He will come to-morrow for his books,” she thought; “and, after that,
we shall never see each other again. But we shall be alone together
once, and speak a word of the past, and say farewell, like friends.”
It was all that she expected, or consciously wished for, a friendly and
sympathizing word, a clasp of the hand, the first and the last, and a
“God be with you!” It would have sweetened her sorrow and loneliness.
After the visit of the Marchesa Loredan, Tacita’s grandfather had talked
with her; and the girl had assured him that there was nothing between
her and Don Claudio but the calmest good-will. Her naturally quiet
disposition had not been disturbed in his regard. But the thought that
this was to be their last meeting, and that for the first time they
would be alone, could not fail to agitate her somewhat; and when morning
came, her expectation became a fluttering.
The books were all sorted, the house all ready for their departure. She
and Elena would leave Venice the next morning. She was alone in the room
where her grandfather had studied, taught, and died.
There was a sound of oars that came nearer. She listened, but would not
look. “What can it mean?” she thought. “There are double oars; and he
has but one gondolier.”
Gian, the man-servant, entered and announced the Marchesa Loredan and
Don Claudio; and at the same instant Elena slipped hastily into the
room, that her charge might not be found alone.
Tacita’s heart sank heavily. She greeted her visitors with an equal
coldness, though Don Claudio’s face implored her pardon.
“Your books are all ready, Don Claudio,” she said, when she could speak.
“Professor Mora said that you were to have those that are marked with a
white star. Gian will take them down. Here is the list.”
She gave him the paper, and he received it, blushing with shame. He
could not utter a word. But the Marchesa’s voluble condolences and
compliments covered all defects in the conversation.
She was glad that the signorina was going to travel for a time. Nothing
distracted one from sorrow like traveling. Was there anything that the
Marchesa could do for her? She would send her maid to the railway
station the next morning with a basket of luncheon for the travelers. If
she could help them in any other way, the signorina might speak freely.
Tacita recollected the reply of Diogenes when Alexander asked: “Is there
anything that I can do for you?”
“Only stand a little out of my sunshine,” said Diogenes.
The Marchesa was most grateful for Professor Mora’s gift to her son; and
with the signorina’s approval, Don Claudio proposed to erect a memorial
tablet in St. Michael’s to his honored preceptor.
The proposal pleased and touched the desolate girl, and she tearfully
thanked Don Claudio.
From her own point of view the Marchesa Loredan had been very kind. Her
visit would put a stop to any serious gossip about her son and Tacita;
and she had shown a gracious regard and respect for the dead _savant_
and his family.
She had a very comfortable sense of having done her duty, and been
prudent in her own affairs at the same time. That both Tacita and her
grandfather would have regarded such gossip with loathing and contempt,
and that they set no very high value on her approval, she did not dream.
“Don Claudio should have been the one to tell me this,” Tacita thought.
The books were carried down, the laborious visit came to an end, the
orphan was alone again, her sweet, sad hope crushed like a fragile
flower.
“Elena, take me away from here!” she exclaimed. “No one has any heart.
Take me away!”
“Don’t cry, dear! We will go in the morning,” her friend said
soothingly. “Don Claudio will come to take leave of you at the station.
He found a chance to tell me so. He said that he could not get away
alone this morning.”
“She is cruel, and he is weak,” said Tacita. “I like not a weak man.”
Elena shook her head. “Ah! my dear, a man is usually weak before a
strong-willed woman who loves herself better than she does him.”
Don Claudio was, in fact, waiting at the station when they arrived there
the next morning.
“I could not let you go without a word,” he said in an agitated murmur.
“I shall always remember, and regret. Oh! the sweet old days! Tacita, do
not you see that my heart is breaking?”
“Dear friend,” she answered gently, “we will remember each other with a
tender friendship. Your heart will not break. It must not. A loving wife
will console you. _Addio!_”
“To God!” There could be no more perfect parting word. They clasped
hands for one trembling moment, then bowed their heads, and turned away.