Stories by American Authors Volume II Part 13

As she wept and heard unconsciously the nightingales, she grew conscious of another song that mingled with theirs. It was a human voice, clear and sweet as an angel's, and it sang a melody she knew in little s.n.a.t.c.hes that seemed to begin and end in a sigh. The voice came nearer and paused beneath a fig tree, and the words grew distinct.

"Pieta, signore, di me dolente," it sang.

Silvia leaned out of the window and looked down at the singer. His face was lifted to the white moonlight, and seemed in its pallid beauty a concentration of the moonlight. Only his face was visible, for the shadow of the tree hid all his figure. One might almost have expected to catch a glimmer of two motionless wings bearing up that face, so fair it was.

To Silvia it was as if another self, who grieved also, but who could speak, were uttering all her pain, and lightening it so. She recognized Claudio's voice. He was the chief singer in the cathedral, and sang like an angel. She was afraid that Claudio had done very wrong in not being a priest, but, for all that, she had often found her devotion increased by his singing. The Christmas night would not have been half so joyful lacking his _Adeste Fideles_; the _Stabat Mater_ sung by him in Holy Week made her tears of religious sorrow burst forth afresh; and when on Easter morning he sang the _Gloria_ it had seemed to her that the heavens were opening.

For all that, however, he had been to her not a person, but a voice.

That he should come here and express her sorrow made him seem different. For the first time she looked at his face. By daylight it was thin and finely featured, and of a clear darkness like shaded water, through which the faintest tinge of color is visible. In this transfigurating moonlight it became of a luminous whiteness.

The song ended, the singer turned his head slightly and looked up at Silvia's window. She did not draw back. There was no recognition of any human sympathy with him, and no slightest consciousness of that airy and silent friendship which had long been weaving itself over the tops of the mountains that separated them. How could she know that Claudio had sung for her, and that it had been the measure of his success to see her head droop or lift as he sang of sorrow and pain or of joy and triumph? The choir had their post over the door; and, besides, she never glanced up even in going out. Therefore she gazed down into his uplifted face with a sweet and sorrowful tranquillity, her soul pure and candid to its uttermost depths.

For Claudio, who had sung to express his sympathy for her, but had not dreamed of seeing her, it was as if the dark-blue sky above had opened and an angel had looked out when he saw her face. He could only stretch his clasped hands toward her.

The gesture made her weep anew, for it was like human kindness. She hid her face in her handkerchief, and he saw her wipe the tears away again and again.

Claudio remembered a note he carried. It had been written the night before--not with any hope of her ever seeing it, but, as he had written her hundreds of notes before, pouring out his heart into them because it was too full to bear without that relief. He took the note out, but how should he give it to her? The window was too far above for him to toss so light a thing unless it should be weighted with a stone; and he could not throw a stone at Silvia's window. He held it up, and, that she might see it more clearly, tore up a handful of red poppies and laid it white on the blossoms that were a deep red by night.

Silvia understood, and after a moment's study dropped him down the ball of her knitting; and soon the note came swaying up through the still air resting on its cushion of poppies, for Claudio had wound the thread about both flowers and letter.

He smiled with an almost incredulous delight as he saw the package arrive safely at its destination, and caught afterward the faint red light of the lamp that Silvia had taken down from before her Madonna to read the note by. Since she was a little thing only five or six years old his heart had turned toward her, and her small white face had been to him the one star in a dim life. He still kept two or three tiny flowers she had given him years before when his family and hers were coming together down from Monte San Silvestro at the other side of Monte Compatri. The two children, with others, had stopped to stick fresh flowers through the wire screen before the great crucifix half-way up the mountain, and Silvia had given Claudio these blossoms.

He had laid them away with his treasures and relics--the bit of muslin from the veil of Our Lady of Loretto, the almost invisible speck from the cord of St. Francis of a.s.sisi and the little paper of the ashes of Blessed Joseph Labre. In those days he was the little priest and she the little nun, and their companions stood respectfully back for them.

Now he was no more the priest, and she was up there in her window against the sky reading the note he had written her.

This is what the note said:

"My heart is breaking for your sorrow. Why should such eyes as yours be permitted to weep? Who is there to wipe those tears away? Oh that I might catch them as they fall! Drop me down a handkerchief that has been wet with them, that I may keep it as a relic. Tell me of some way in which I can console you and spend my life to serve you."

She read with a mingling of consolation and astonishment. Why, this was more than her mother cared for her! But perhaps men were really more strongly loving than women. It would seem so, since G.o.d, who knows all, when He wanted to express His love to mankind, took the form of a man, not of a woman. Then she considered whether, and how, she should answer this note, and the result of her considering was this, written hastily on a bit of paper in which some Agnus Dei had been wrapped:

"I do not know what I ought to write to you, but I thank you for your kindness. It comforts me, and I have need of comfort. I think, though, that it may be wrong for you to speak of my handkerchief as if it were a relic. Relics are things which have belonged to the saints, and I am not a saint at all, though I hope to become one. I frequently do wrong. Spend your life in serving G.o.d, and pray for me. You pray in singing, and your singing is very sweet.

"SILVIA."

It seemed to her a simple and merely polite note. To him it was as the spark to a magazine of powder. All the possibilities of his life, only half hoped or half dreamed of, burst at once into a flame of certainty. She had need of comfort, and he comforted her! His voice was sweet to her, and his singing was a prayer!

Silvia should not be a nun. She should break the bond imposed by her mother, as he had broken that imposed by his parents. She should be his wife, and they would live in Rome. He knew that his voice would find bread for them.

All this flashed through his mind as he read, and pressed to his lips the handkerchief which she had dropped down to him, though it was not a relic. He lifted his arms upward toward her window with a rapturous joy, as if to embrace her, but she did not look out again. A little scruple for having deprived the Madonna for a moment of her lamp had made her resolve to say at once a decade of the rosary in expiation.

He waited till the sound of closing doors and wandering voices told that the inhabitants gathered for the evening in the Lungara were separating to their homes, then went reluctantly away. Matteo would be at home, and Matteo's face might look down at him from that other window beside Silvia's. So he also went home, with the moonlight between his feet and the ground and stars sparkling in his brain. He felt as if his head were the sky.

This was an August night. One day in October, Matteo told his sister that she was to go to Rome with him the next morning to pa.s.s a month with a family they knew there, and afterward begin her novitiate in the convent of the Sacramentarians at Monte Cavallo. He had received a letter from the Signora Fantini, who would receive her and do everything for her. He and Pepina had no time, now that the vintage had begun, to attend to such affairs, even if they knew how.

Silvia grew pale. She had not expected to go before the spring, and now all was arranged without a word being said to her, and she was to go without saying good-bye to any one.

Matteo's sharp eyes were watching her. "You will be ready to start at seven o'clock," he said; "I must be back to-morrow night."

"Yes, Matteo," she faltered, hesitated a moment, then ventured to add, "I did not expect to go to soon."

"And what of that?" he demanded roughly. "You were to go at the proper time, and the proper time is to-morrow."

She trembled, but ventured another word: "I should like to see my confessor first."

"He will come here this evening to see you," her brother replied: "I have already talked with him. You have nothing else to do. Pepina will pack your trunk while you are talking with the priest."

Silvia had no more to say. She was bound hand and foot. Besides, she was willing to go, she a.s.sured herself. It was her duty to obey her parents, or the ones who stood in their place and had authority over her. Matteo said she must go; therefore it was her duty to go, and she was willing.

But the willing girl looked very pale and walked about with a very feeble step, and it was hard work to keep the tears that were every moment rising to her eyes from falling over her cheeks. It was such a pitiful face, indeed, that Father Teodoli, when he came just before Ave Maria, asked if Silvia were ill.

"She has had a toothache," Matteo said quickly, and gave his sister a glance.

"And what have you done for it, my child?" the priest asked kindly.

"Nothing," Silvia faltered out.

"I will leave you to give Silvia all the advice she needs," Matteo said after the compliments of welcome were over. "I have to go down the Lungara for men to work in the vineyard to-morrow. Silvia, come and shut the door after me: there is too much draught here."

Silvia followed her brother to the door, trembling for what he might say or do. Well she knew that his command was given only that he might have a chance to speak with her alone.

"Mind what you say to your confessor," he whispered, grasping her arm and speaking in her ear. "You are to be a nun: you wish to be, and you are willing to set out to-morrow. Tell him no nonsense--do you hear?--or it will be worse for you. I shall know every word you say.

If he asks if you had a toothache, say Yes. Do you hear?"

"Yes, Matteo."

She went back half fainting, and did as she had been commanded. If there had been any little lurking impulse to beg for another week or month, it died of fear. If she had any confession to make of other wishes than those chosen for her, she postponed it. Matteo might be behind the door listening, or in the next room or at the window. It seemed to her that he could make himself invisible in order to keep guard over her.

So the priest talked a little, learned nothing, gave some advice, recommended himself to her prayers, gave her his benediction, and went. Then Pepina called her to see the trunk all packed with linen that had been laid by for her for years, and Matteo, who had really been lurking about the house, told her to go to bed, and himself really went off this time to the Lungara. Pepina's lover came for her to sit out on the doorstep with him, and Silvia was left alone. n.o.body cared for her. All had other interests, and they forgot her the moment she was out of their sight. Worse, even: they wanted her to be for ever out of their sight, that they might never have to think of her.

But no: there was one who did not forget her--who would perhaps now have heard that she was going away, and be waiting in the mountain-path for her. She hastened to her room, locked the door and went to the window. He made a gesture of haste, and she dropped the ball down to him. This was not the second time that their conversation had been held by means of a thread. Indeed, they had come to talk so every night. At first it had been a few words only, and Silvia's unconsciousness and her sincerity in her intention to follow her mother's will had imposed silence on the young man. But little by little he had ventured, and she had understood; and within the last week there had been no concealments between them, though Silvia still resisted all his prayers to change her resolution and brave her brother.

His first note was in her hands in a moment:

"Is it possible that what I hear is true? I will not believe it: I will not let you go."

"Yes, and I must go," she wrote back. "I have to start at seven in the morning. Dear Claudio, be resigned: there is no help for it."

"Silvia, why will you persist in ruining your life and mine? It is a sin. Say that you are too sick to go to-morrow. Stay in bed all day, and by night I will have a rope-ladder for you to come down to me. We can run away and hide somewhere."

"I cannot. We could never hide from Matteo: he would find us out and kill us both."

"I will go to the Holy Father and tell him all. We could be in Rome early in the morning if we should walk all night."

"Matteo would hear us: he hears everything. We should never reach Rome. He would find us wherever we might be hidden. If we were dead and buried he would pull us out of the ground to stab us. I must go.

I have sinned in having so much intercourse with you. Be resigned, Claudio. Be a good man, and we shall meet in heaven. The earth is a terrible place: I am afraid of it. I want to shut myself up in the convent and be at peace. I fear so much that I tremble all the time.

Say addio."

"I cannot. Will you stay in bed to-morrow, and let me try if I cannot go to Rome?"