The Master-Christian Part 66

"My lord Cardinal," he said without further preface, "you must leave Rome to-night!"

The Cardinal raised his gentle blue eyes in wondering protest.

"By whose order?"

"Surely by your own Master's will," said Aubrey with deep earnestness.

"For he would not have you be a victim to treachery!"

"Treachery!" And the Cardinal smiled. "My son, traitors harm themselves more than those they would betray. Treachery cannot touch me!"

Aubrey came a step nearer.

"Monsignor, if you do not care for yourself you will care for the boy,"

he said in a lower tone, with a glance at Manuel, who had withdrawn, and was now standing at one of the windows, the light of the sunset appearing to brighten itself in his fair hair. "He will be separated from you!"

At this the Cardinal rose up, his whole form instinct with resolution and dignity.

"They cannot separate us against the boy's will or mine," he said.

"Manuel!"

Manuel came to his call, and the Cardinal placed one hand on his shoulder.

"Child," he said softly, "they threaten to part me from you, if we stay longer here. Therefore we must leave Rome!"

Manuel looked up with a bright flashing glance of tenderness.

"Yes, dear friend, we must leave Rome!" he said. "Rome is no place for you--or for me!"

There was a moment's silence. Something in the att.i.tude of the old man and the young boy standing side by side, moved Aubrey deeply; a sense of awe as well as love overwhelmed him at the sight of these two beings, so pure in mind, so gentle of heart, and so widely removed in years and in life,--the one a priest of the Church, the other a waif of the streets, yet drawn together as it seemed, by the simple spirit of Christ's teaching, in an almost supernatural bond of union. Recovering himself presently he said,

"To-night then, Monsignor?"

The Cardinal looked at Manuel, who answered for him.

"Yes, to-night! We will be ready! For the days are close upon the time when the birth of Christ was announced to a world that does not yet believe in Him! It will be well to leave Rome before then! For the riches of the Pope's palace have nothing to do with the poor babe born in a manger,--and the curse of the Vatican would be a discord in the angels' singing--'Glory to G.o.d in the highest, and on earth PEACE, GOODWILL TOWARDS MEN'!"

His young voice rang out, silver clear and sweet, and Aubrey gazed at him in wondering silence.

"To-night!" repeated Manuel, smiling and stretching out his hand with a gentle authoritative gesture. "To-night the Cardinal will leave Rome, and _I_ will leave it too--perchance for ever!"

x.x.xV.

During these various changes in the lives of those with whom he had been more or less connected, Florian Varillo lay between life and death in the shelter of a Trappist monastery on the Campagna. When he had been seized by the delirium and fever which had flung him, first convulsed and quivering, and then totally insensible, at the foot of the grim, world-forgotten men who pa.s.sed the midnight hours in digging their own graves, he had been judged by them as dying or dead, and had been carried into a sort of mortuary chapel, cold and bare, and lit only by the silver moonbeams and the flicker of a torch one of the monks carried. Waking in this ghastly place, too weak to struggle, he fell a-moaning like a tortured child, and was, on showing this sign of life, straight-way removed to one of the cells. Here, after hours of horrible suffering, of visions more hideous than Dante's h.e.l.l, of stupors and struggles, of fits of strong shrieking, followed by weak tears, he woke one afternoon calm and coherent,--to find himself lying on a straight pallet bed in a narrow stone chamber, dimly lighted by a small slit of window, through which a beam of the sun fell aslant, illumining the blood-stained features of a ghastly Christ stretched on a black crucifix directly opposite him. He shuddered as he saw this, and half-closed his eyes with a deep sigh.

"Tired--tired!" said a thin clear voice beside him. "Always tired! It is only G.o.d who is never weary!"

Varillo opened his eyes again languidly, and turned them on a monk sitting beside him,--a monk whose face was neither old nor young, but which presented a singular combination of both qualities. His high forehead, white as marble, had no furrows to mar its smoothness, and from under deep brows a pair of wondering wistful brown eyes peered like the eyes of a lost and starving child. The cheeks were gaunt and livid, the flesh hanging in loose hollows from the high and prominent bones, yet the mouth was that of a youth, firm, well-outlined and sweet in expression, and when he smiled as he did now, he showed an even row of small pearly teeth which might have been envied by many a fair woman.

"Only G.o.d who is never weary!" he said, nodding his head slowly, "but we--you and I--we are soon tired!"

Varillo looked at him dubiously; and a moment's thought decided him to a.s.sume a certain amount of meekness and docility with this evident brother of some religious order, so that he might obtain both sympathy and confidence from him, and from all whom he might be bound to serve.

Ill and weak as he was, the natural tendency of his brain to scheme for his own advantage, was not as yet impaired.

"Ah, yes!" he sighed, "I am very tired!--very ill! I do not know what has happened to me--nor even where I am. What place is this?"

"It is a place where the dead come!" responded the monk. "The dead in heart! the dead in soul--the dead in sin! They come to bury themselves, lest G.o.d should find them and crush them into dust before they have time to say a prayer! Like Adam and his wife, they hide themselves 'from the presence of the Lord among the trees of the garden.'"

Varillo raised himself on one elbow, and stared at the pale face and smiling mouth of the speaker in fear and wonder.

"'A place where the dead come!'" he echoed. "But you are alive--and so am I!"

"You may be--I am not," said the monk quietly. "I died long ago! People who are alive say we are men, though we know ourselves to be ghosts merely. This place is called by the world a Trappist monastery,--you will go out of it if indeed you are alive--you must prove that first!

But we shall never come out, because we are dead. One never comes out of the grave!"

With an effort Varillo tried to control the tremor of his nerves, and to understand and reason out these enigmatical sentences of his companion. He began to think--and then to remember,--and by and by was able to conjure up the picture of himself as he had last been conscious of existence,--himself standing outside the gates of a great building on the Campagna, and shaking the iron bars to and fro. It was a Trappist monastery then?--and he was being taken charge of by the Trappist Order? This fact might possibly be turned to his account if he were careful. He lay down once more on his pillow and closed his eyes, and under this pretence of sleep, pondered his position. What were they saying of him in Rome? Was Angela buried? And her great picture? What had become of it?

"How long have I been here?" he asked suddenly.

The monk gave a curious deprecatory gesture with his hands.

"Since you died! So long have you been dead!"

Varillo surveyed him with a touch of scorn.

"You talk in parables--like your Master!" he said with a feeble attempt at a laugh. "I am not strong enough to understand you! And if you are a Trappist monk, why do you talk at all? I thought one of your rules was perpetual silence?"

"Silence? Yes--everyone is silent but me!" said the monk--"I may talk--because I am only Ambrosio,--mad Ambrosio!--something wrong here!" And he touched his forehead. "A little teasing demon lives always behind my eyes, piercing my brain with darts of fire. And he obliges me to talk; he makes me say things I should not--and for all the mischief he works upon me I wear this--see!"--And springing up suddenly he threw aside the folds of his garment, and displayed his bare chest, over which a coa.r.s.e rope was crossed and knotted so tightly, that the blood was oozing from the broken flesh on either side of it. "For every word I say, I bleed!"

Varillo gave a nervous cry and covered his eyes.

"Do not be afraid!" said Ambrosio, drawing his robe together again, "It is only flesh--not spirit--that is wounded! Flesh is our great snare,--it persuades us to eat, to sleep, to laugh, to love--the spirit commands none of these things. The spirit is of G.o.d--it wants neither food nor rest,--it is pure and calm,--it would escape to Heaven if the flesh did not cramp its wings!"

Varillo took his hand from his eyes and tossed himself back on his pillow with a petulant moan.

"Can they do nothing better for me than this?" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "To place me here in this wretched cell alone with a madman!"

Ambrosio stood by the pallet bed looking down upon him with a sort of child-like curiosity.

"No better than this?" he echoed. "Would you have anything better?

Safe--safe from the world,--no one can find you or follow you--no one can discover your sin--"

"Sin! What sin!" demanded Varillo fiercely. "You talk like a fool--as you own yourself to be! I have committed no sin!"

"Good--good!" said Ambrosio. "Then you must be canonized with all the rest of the saints! And St. Peter's shall be illuminated, and the Pope shall be carried in to see you and to lay his hands upon you, and they shall shout to him, 'Tu es Petrus!' and no one will remember what kind of a bruised, bleeding, tortured, broken-down Head of the Church stood before the mult.i.tude when Pilate cried 'Ecce h.o.m.o!'"