The Saint Part 2

"Flores? Who is he?" Noemi did not remember him, and Jeanne chided her sharply, as if such forgetfulness rendered her unworthy of her position of confidante. Don Giuseppe Flores was the old Venetian priest who had brought a last message from Piero Maironi to Villa Diedo. Jeanne had then believed that his counsels had decided her lover to renounce the world, and, not satisfied with giving him an icy reception, had wounded him with ironical allusions to his supposed att.i.tude, which she p.r.o.nounced truly worthy of a servant of the Father of infinite mercy.

The old man had answered with such clear understanding, in language so solemn and gentle and so full of spiritual wisdom--his fine face glowing with a radiance from above--that she had ended by begging him not only to forgive her, but to visit her from time to time. He had, in fact, come twice, but on neither occasion had she been at home. She had then sought him out In his solitary villa, and of this visit, of this conversation with the old man so lofty of soul, so humble in heart, so ardent in spirit, so modest and reticent, she had retained an ineffaceable memory. He was dead, they wrote. He had pa.s.sed away, bowing gently and humbly to the Divine Will. Shortly before his death he had dreamed continually during a long night, of the words addressed to the faithful servant in the parable of the talents: _"Ecce superlucratus sum alia quinque,"_ and his last words had been: _"Non fiat voluntas mea sed tua."_ Her correspondent was unaware that, in spite of many misgivings, of certain yearning towards religion, Jeanne, stubborn ever, still denied G.o.d and immortality as eternal illusions, and if from time to time she went to Ma.s.s, it was only to avoid acquiring the undesirable reputation of being a free-thinker.

She did not relate the particulars of Don Giuseppe's death to Noemi, but pondered them herself with a vague, deeply bitter consciousness of how different her destiny might have been, had she been able to believe; for at the bottom of Piero Maironi's soul there had always lurked a hereditary tendency to religion, and to-day she was convinced that when, on the night of the eclipse, she had confessed her unbelief, she had written her own condemnation in the book of destiny. Then her thoughts dwelt on another painful pa.s.sage in the letter from Italy which she had not mentioned. But, in spite of her silence, her misery was evident.

Noemi pressed her lips to Jeanne's forehead, and letting them rest there in silence, touched by the secret sorrow which accepted her sympathy.

Then she slowly drew away from the long embrace as if fearful of severing some delicate thread which bound their two souls together.

"Perhaps that good old man knew where--Do you think he was in communication with ----" she murmured.

Jeanne shook her head in denial. During the September following that sad July, Jeanne's unfortunate husband had died in Venice of delirium tremens. She had gone to the Villa Flores in October, and there in that same garden where the Marchesa Scremin had once laid bare her poor, suffering old heart to Don Giuseppe, had expressed a desire that Piero should be told of her husband's death, should realise that he might henceforth think of her without a shadow of guilt, if indeed he still wished to think of her at all. Don Giuseppe first gently urged her not to abandon herself to this dream, and then avowed to her in all sincerity that no tidings of Piero had reached him since the day of his disappearance.

Fearing other questions, and unwilling any longer to expose her wound to the touch of unskilled fingers, Jeanne sought to change the subject.

"Tell me about your monk," she said. But just at that moment Carlino's voice was heard in the hall.

"Not now," replied Noemi. "To-night."

Carlino came in, a white silk m.u.f.fler round his neck, grumbling at the Lac d'Armour, which he p.r.o.nounced a huge fraud, which only filled the air with odious, poisonous, little creatures. "To be sure." said he, "love itself is no better." Noemi would not allow him to talk of love.

Why should he discuss a subject which he did not understand? Carlino thanked her. He had been on the point of falling in love with her; had greatly feared such a catastrophe. Her words, coming as they did so soon after her appearance in a certain offensive hat, with an ungraceful feather, and after some rather bourgeois expressions of admiration for that poor, tiresome devil Mendelssohn, had saved him _a jamais._ The two sparred gaily for some time, and, in spite of his poisoned tonsils, Carlino was in such high spirits that Noemi congratulated him on the subject of his novel. "It must be making rapid progress," she said.

"Nonsense," answered the author. "It is not progressing at all." He was making no headway, but was, in fact, floundering hopelessly in the shallows of a desperate situation. Two personages had stuck in the author's throat, and could move neither up nor down; one fat and good-natured, the other thin and sarcastic, like Mademoiselle d'Arxel.

He felt like a certain unfortunate Tuscan peasant, who had lately swallowed a fig with a bee upon it, and had died in consequence. The "bee" understood that he really wanted to talk of his book; she stung him again and again to such a degree that he actually did talk about it.

His story was founded on a curious case of spiritual infection. The hero was a French priest, an octogenarian, pious, pure, and learned. French?

Why French? Simply because the character must be possessed of a certain tinge of poetic fancy, a certain elasticity of sentiment, and according to Carlino, not one Italian priest in a thousand was likely to possess these exalted attributes. It happened one day that this priest received the confession of a man of great intellect whose faith was a.s.sailed by terrible doubts. His confession over, the penitent went his way completely rea.s.sured, leaving the confessor shaken in his own faith.

Here would follow a long and minute a.n.a.lysis of the different phases through which the old man's conscience pa.s.sed. He lived in daily expectation of death with a feeling of dismay akin to that of the schoolboy who waits his turn for examination in the ante-room, conscious only of his empty head. The priest comes to Bruges. At this point the hostile critic exclaimed:

"To Bruges? Why?"

"Because," answered Carlino, "I send him wherever I wish. Because at Bruges there is the silence of the ante-chamber of Eternity, and that _carillon_ (which honestly is beginning to exasperate me) may pa.s.s for the voices of summoning angels. Finally, because at Bruges there is a dark young lady slight, tall, and whom we may also call intelligent, although she speaks Italian badly, and does not understand music."

Noemi pursed her lips and wrinkled her nose.

"What nonsense," she said.

Carlino continued, saying he did not yet know how, but in some way or another the brunette would become the penitent of the old priest. Noemi protested, laughing. How? The girl could not be herself. A heretic go to Confession? Carlino shrugged his shoulders, One Comedy of Errors more or less, what did it matter? Protestantism and Roman Catholicism were, after all, much the same thing. The priest would then regain his old faith through contact with the simple, steadfast belief of the girl.

Here Carlino interrupted his story, avowing, in parenthesis, that he really did not know what kind of belief Noemi held. She flushed, and replied that she was a Protestant. Protestant, certainly; but a Protestant pure and simple? Noemi lost her patience. "I am a Protestant, that is enough," she exclaimed; "and you need not trouble yourself about my faith."

Noemi was, in fact, true to her own faith, not so much from conviction as from her reverent affection for the memory of her parents; and in her heart she had disapproved of her sister's conversion.

Carlino continued. A mystic, s.e.xual influence induced the old man to seek for a union of souls with the girl. "What rubbish!" said Noemi, with her familiar pout. Carlino went on unmoved. The most subtle, the most exquisite part of his book was the a.n.a.lysis of this recondite influence of s.e.x operating alike on the old priest and the girl.

"Carlino," exclaimed Jeanne, "what are you thinking of? An old man of eighty!" Carlino looked up as though he would exclaim to some superior, invisible friend, "How dense they are!"

He had even thought of making his hero older still--say ninety; of creating a sort of intermediary being between man and spirit, who should have in his eyes the nebulous depths of the fast approaching things of eternity. And the girl should have in her blood that mysterious inclination towards old men, not unusual in her s.e.x, which is the truest mark of real feminine n.o.bility, and by which the woman is differentiated from the female. Carlino had in his mind some inspired thoughts to which he would give utterance, concerning this mystic sense which attracts the girl of four and twenty to the man of ninety; a priest, on the verge of the grave, but upheld by an indomitable spirit--unconquered as often happens by the ravages of time. But how is all this to end? Neither Noemi nor Jeanne could imagine. Well, Carlino had said from the first that the fig and the bee could neither get up nor down. One consolation, however, there was--the idea that a book must have a fitting end was a mere vulgar prejudice. What is there in the world that really has an end? That is all very well, said the girls, but the book must certainly have some ending. The last scene, one of ineffable beauty, should describe a walk at night and by moonlight through the streets of Bruges, when the souls of the priest and the maiden should be revealed to one another, and they should commune half as lovers, half dreaming like prophets. The two should find themselves at midnight beside the sleeping waters of the Lac d'Amour, listening in silence to the weird notes of the _carillon_ under the clouds, and then should come to them the vague revelation of a s.e.xuality of their souls, of a future of love in the star Fomalhaut.

"But why especially in Fomalhaut?" exclaimed Noemi.

"You are really intolerable," answered Carlino. "Because the name is so delightful, it has the ring of a word congealed by German frost and then melted by the Eastern sun."

"Nonsense! You are talking chemistry! I prefer Algol."

"You and your pastor may go to Algol."

Noemi laughed, and Carlino appealed to Jeanne. Which star would she prefer? Jeanne did not know; she had not been listening. Carlino was greatly annoyed; he seemed to want to reprove her, not so much for her inattention, as for the hidden thoughts which had caused it; and then, fearing to say too much, he sent her away to meditate, to dream, to write the philosophy of smoke and clouds. But when she, not in the least annoyed, was about to leave the room, he called her back to inquire whether she had heard how his novel was to end. Yes! she had heard; a moonlight walk of the hero and heroine through the streets of Bruges.

"Well," said Carlino, "as there will be a moon to-night, I should like to walk with you and Noemi from ten to twelve and take some notes."

"Shall I dress myself as a priest?" asked Jeanne as she went out. Noemi wished to follow her, but Jeanne herself begged her to remain. She stayed behind to tell Carlino that he was unworthy of such a sister.

Carlino went to the music portfolio to search for a small volume of Bach, grumbling the while that she knew nothing--absolutely nothing.

They kept up their skirmish for some time, Bach himself failing to soothe their ruffled feelings, and even while playing they continued joking, first concerning Jeanne, and then about one another's false notes. At last, however, the clear stream of sound, which had been ruffled by the eddies of their angry outbursts, conquered their ill-humour, and flowed on smoothly, reflecting the heavens and idyllic banks. Jeanne carried _"l'Intruse"_ to her room, but did not continue her reading. The room looked out on the Lac d'Amour. She sat down by the window. Beyond the bridge, beyond the rolling hilltops--dest.i.tute of trees--which loomed between intervening houses, she could see the summit of a lofty tower, shrouded fantastically in azure mists. She heard the continuous peaceful flow of Bach, and thought of Don Giuseppe with that feeling of melancholy which we experience when we catch a last glimpse of some beloved home, turning at every step to look back until at length some bend in the road hides the last corner, the last window from sight.

There was an element of anxiety in Jeanne's grief. The letter told her that among the papers of the dead man, a sealed packet had been found with the following superscription In Don Giuseppe's hand: "To be consigned by my executor to Monsignor the Bishop." The order had been executed, and according to a rumour coming straight from the Episcopal Palace, the packet contained a letter from Don Giuseppe to the Bishop, and a sealed envelope bearing in another hand the words: "To be opened after Piero Maironi's death." The Bishop was reported to have said: "Let us hope that Piero Malroni, of whose abode we are ignorant, may reappear to let us know of his death."

Jeanne was unaware that previous to the night when he fled from home, leaving no trace, Piero had entrusted to Don Giuseppe a written account of a vision of his own life in the future and his death; a vision of which she was ignorant, and which had come to Piero in the little church adjoining the asylum where his wife lay dying. What did that sealed envelope contain? Surely something he himself had written; but what? A confession, probably of his sins. The conception of such an action, the manner in which it had been carried out, would be in harmony with his innate mysticism, with the predominance in him of imagination over reason, with his intellectual physiognomy. Three years had pa.s.sed since the day at Vena di Fonte Alta, when Jeanne in despair had sworn to herself to love Piero no longer, feeling that henceforward she could love nothing else in the world. Nevertheless she always loved him; still, as in the past, she judged him with her intellect independent of her heart, an independence dear to her pride. She judged him with severity in all his actions, all his att.i.tudes, from the moment when he had conquered her by sheer strength in the monastery of Praglia to the moment when their lips had met near the basin of the Acqua Barbarena.

He had shown himself incapable of loving, incapable of decisive action, irresolute, effeminate in the instability of his mind. Yes, he had been effeminate until the last; effeminate, unfit to form any virile judgment of his own hysterical mysticism. In this judgment there was perhaps an imperfect sincerity, an excess of bitterness, a futile act of rebellion against this all-powerful, invincible love.

If he had actually become a monk, Jeanne foresaw that he would regret it. He was too sensual. The first period of sorrow and fervour pa.s.sed, his sensuality would reawaken, and lead him to rebel against a faith that appeals rather to the sentiments and habits of youth than to the intellect. But had he really become a monk? Jeanne imagined that the colossal tower of Notre _Dame_, with its slender spire piercing the sky, the gloomy walls of the Beguinage, the poor stagnant Lac d'Amour, and even the solemn silence of the dead city, answered "Yes." But it would be superst.i.tious to hearken to their voices.

"Where are we going?" asked Jeanne, at ten o'clock, putting on her gloves, while Carlino, who had given Noemi an end of his interminable m.u.f.fler to hold, the other being fastened behind his neck, revolved like a spindle on its axis, until his neck was bigger in circ.u.mference than his head. "And am I really to be the priest of ninety?"

Carlino was annoyed because Noemi laughed, and did not hold the scarf tight enough.

"You or she, no matter which," he answered, when Noemi, having fastened the m.u.f.fler with a pin, at last set the swathed novelist at liberty. "Go wherever you like, provided you go towards the centre of the town, and return by the other side of the Lac d'Amour, and talk of something that interests you particularly."

"With you present?" said Noemi. "How can that be possible?"

Carlino explained that he would not walk with them, but would follow, note-book and pencil in hand. They would be obliged to halt from time to time according to his pleasure, and must be prepared to obey any other orders he might see fit to issue. "Very well," said Noemi, "first let us go to the Quai du Rosaire to see the swans."

They set forth in the direction of Notre Dame. Carlino twenty yards behind his sister and Noemi. At first a lively altercation was kept up through the deserted streets between the van and rearguard. The vanguard walked too fast, and Carlino shouted: "At ninety? at ninety?" or they laughed, and Carlino exclaimed: "What are you laughing at? Hush!" or stopped to gaze at an ancient church, its gables, and pinnacles looming weird in the moonlight, the cemetery nestling close by; Carlino, again interrupting, would beg them to talk, converse, gesticulate. "Don't stare into s.p.a.ce," said he. A mutiny broke out in the vanguard, Noemi being the more petulant. She turned on the _Dyver_, and stamping her foot, protested that she would go home if this most tiresome novelist in a m.u.f.fler did not cease ordering and complaining. Jeanne then whispered:

"Tell me about your monk." "The monk, oh yes," answered Noemi, and called to Carlino that they would try to satisfy him, but that he must keep farther off.

From the Quai du Rosaire the swans were no longer visible. Noemi had watched them in the morning, disporting themselves on the water, blurring with their stately movements the still reflection of that pile of houses and cottages that raise their long, big-eared faces out of the water, like weird, glutted beasts, staring stupidly, some in one direction, some in another, all herded together by the dominating tower of the Halles. The moon shone across the houses, throwing shadows on some glorifying roof-tree and pinnacle, the peaked cap of a Chaldean magician which crowned a little turret, and above it all, stood out the sublime octagonal diadem of the mighty tower. But no beam fell on the dark waters. Nevertheless Jeanne and Noerni leaned for some time against the parapet, gazing into the gloomy depths; Noemi talked incessantly.

They lingered so long that Carlino had time to fill three or four pages of his note-book, and to sketch the frieze with which an ambitious Bruges merchant had adorned his house, even introducing the memorable date 1716, the year in which the sun, the moon, and the stars had first beheld it.

The monk, said Noemi, was a Benedictine, by name Don Clemente, belonging to the monastery of Santa Scolastica at Subiaco. He was an acquaintance of the Selvas, and Giovanni had first met him near some ruins on the path leading to Spello, and after having inquired the way, had entered into conversation with him. He looked little over thirty, and was of refined manner and bearing. They began to talk of the ruins; the conversation then drifted on to monasteries and monastic rules, and finally to religion. The very voice of the Benedictine seemed to breathe an odour of sanct.i.ty; nevertheless it was evident at the same time that his was a mind that hungered after knowledge and modern thought.

They had parted with a mutual desire for, and the promise of, another meeting. The atmosphere surrounding the youthful monk, whose face seemed illumined by the beauty of his soul, was a stimulus to Giovanni, and the Benedictine had felt the fascination of his companion's religious culture, and of the horizons of thought which this brief conversation had opened up to his faith, eager for rational light. Giovanni had heard them speak, at Subiaco, of a young man of n.o.ble birth who had taken the habit of the Benedictines at Santa Scolastica after the death of the woman he loved. He had no doubt that this was he. He had questioned other monks about him without gaining any information; but he and Don Clemente had since met repeatedly and had had long talks together.

Giovanni had lent the young man books, and Don Clemente had been to Selva's house and made Maria's acquaintance. He had shown himself a musician, and had once played a _Psalm of the Dawn_ to them, which he had composed for organ and voices after having heard Giovanni liken the sun in its slow progress from the first mist-enveloped gleam to the triumphal glory of noonday, to the manifestation of G.o.d, as displayed in the lightning-torn cloud on the rocky summit of Sinai, to the triumphal glory--not even yet perfectly developed--in the mind of man. On another occasion Giovanni propounded a question to him which he had already discussed with Noemi; whether, on leaving this world, human souls at once acquire knowledge of their future destiny, Don Clemente's answer had been, that after death--

At this point in Noemi's narrative, Carlino inquired whether he should set up three tents that they might pa.s.s the night on the spot? His sister and Noemi aroused themselves and started in the direction of the Rue des Laines. "The answer," continued Noemi, "was, that probably human souls found themselves in a state and in surroundings regulated, as in this life, by natural laws; where, as also in this life, the future can be divined only by indications, and without certainty."

A wayfarer, whom they met at the entrance of the narrow, dark street, turned back, and on pa.s.sing the ladies, scrutinised them closely. Jeanne pretended to be afraid of the man; she stopped, and calling Carlino, proposed to return home. Her voice really sounded different, but Carlino could not believe she was afraid. Afraid of what? Did she not see there before them only a few steps away, the lights of the Grande Place?

Moreover he knew the man, and was going to put him into his book. He was the brother of the swan-necked Edith, a spirit of darkness, condemned to wander at night in the streets of Bruges, as a penance for having attempted to seduce St. Gunhild, sister of King Harold. Each time that Carlino had ventured at night into the more lonely parts of Bruges he had seen this sinister figure, wandering, as it seemed, aimlessly.

"That is a nice way to rea.s.sure people," said Noemi.

Carlino shrugged his shoulders, and declared the meeting to have been most fortunate, since it had suggested the name of Gunhild for his heroine, Noemi being that of a mother-in-law.

In the black shadow of the enormous Halles, towering on the right of the street, the sinister-looking man, who had retraced his steps, almost brushed Jeanne's side in pa.s.sing, and this time she really shuddered.

At this moment, however, the innumerable bells rang out amid the clouds above her head.