Agnes of Sorrento
by Harriet Beecher Stowe · English · Gutenberg #43076 · 684,617 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Agnes of Sorrento
Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe
Release date: July 1, 2013 [eBook #43076]
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AGNES OF SORRENTO ***
Riverside Edition
THE WRITINGS OF
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
_WITH BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTIONS,
PORTRAITS, AND OTHER
ILLUSTRATIONS_
IN SIXTEEN VOLUMES
VOLUME VII
[Illustration]
The Writings of
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Riverside Edition
[Illustration]
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
AGNES OF SORRENTO
BY
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1899
Copyright, 1862 and 1890,
BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.
Copyright, 1896,
BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
_All rights reserved._
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
INTRODUCTORY NOTE vii
I. THE OLD TOWN 1
II. THE DOVE-COT 8
III. THE GORGE 14
IV. WHO AND WHAT 19
V. IL PADRE FRANCESCO 29
VI. THE WALK TO THE CONVENT 42
VII. THE DAY AT THE CONVENT 57
VIII. THE CAVALIER 75
IX. THE ARTIST MONK 82
X. THE INTERVIEW 107
XI. THE CONFESSIONAL 125
XII. PERPLEXITIES 133
XIII. THE MONK AND THE CAVALIER 152
XIV. THE MONK'S STRUGGLE 165
XV. THE SERPENT'S EXPERIMENT 189
XVI. ELSIE PUSHES HER SCHEME 194
XVII. THE MONK'S DEPARTURE 213
XVIII. THE PENANCE 226
XIX. CLOUDS DEEPENING 238
XX. FLORENCE AND HER PROPHET 255
XXI. THE ATTACK ON SAN MARCO 264
XXII. THE CATHEDRAL 273
XXIII. THE PILGRIMAGE 290
XXIV. THE MOUNTAIN FORTRESS 301
XXV. THE CRISIS 313
XXVI. ROME 328
XXVII. THE SAINT'S REST 337
XXVIII. PALM SUNDAY 347
XXIX. THE NIGHT-RIDE 355
XXX. "LET US ALSO GO, THAT WE MAY DIE WITH HIM" 366
XXXI. MARTYRDOM 372
XXXII. CONCLUSION 375
The frontispiece ("The Cavalier stood in the moonlight before Agnes,"
page 92) and the vignette were drawn by Malcolm Fraser.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
In the summer of 1859, Mrs. Stowe made her third and last journey
to Europe. During the summer, the whole family was abroad, save the
youngest; but in the autumn Mr. Stowe and one of the daughters returned
to America, leaving Mrs. Stowe with two daughters and a son to spend
the winter in Italy. The residence there was mainly to establish the
health of the family; but Mrs. Stowe had entered into engagements
with the New York _Ledger_ and the New York _Independent_ to furnish
contributions, with a design ultimately of collecting the papers and
recasting them for a volume to be published in the spring of 1860 in
America and England, under the title of _Leaves from Foreign Books for
Home Reading_. She had indeed entered into an agreement with Sampson
Low & Co., the London publishers of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ and _Dred_, for
the publication of the volume, but a sudden change of plans brought her
home before she had perfected her book, and it was never published.
Meanwhile her dramatic instinct had begun to work upon the material
thus gathered. It was impossible for her, with her strong religious
nature and her active interest in structural Christianity to avoid
subjecting the great church so constantly in evidence to those tests of
personal religion which had been familiar to her from childhood. Her
stay in Florence brought vividly before her the figure of Savonarola,
and her imagination, in seeking to recover the life of his day,
instinctively invested it with the spiritual struggles so well known
to her and her circle. There was no conscious protestantizing of the
life, as one may say, but the story which she told naturally reflected
the color of her own religious training. _Agnes of Sorrento_ was begun
in this Italian winter, and had its immediate origin, as she herself
explains in the following note, in a friendly contest of story telling.
It was not completed until some time after the return to America,
finding its first publication in _The Atlantic Monthly_ in America and
_The Cornhill Magazine_ in England. In _The Atlantic_ it was begun in
May, 1861, and finished in April, 1862.
In the party with Mrs. Stowe were Mr. and Mrs. Howard of Brooklyn, and
their children. When the tale made its final appearance in book form,
it was accompanied by the following passages from a letter to the
publishers by Mrs. Stowe. The "Annie" referred to was Miss Annie Howard.
"The author was spending some weeks with a party of choice
and very dear friends, on an excursion to southern Italy.
Nothing could have been more fabulously and dreamily bright and
beautiful than the whole time thus employed. Naples, Sorrento,
Salerno, Pæstum, Pompeii, are names of enchantment which will
never fade from the remembrance of any of that party. At
Salerno, within a day's ride of Pæstum, the whole company were
detained by a storm for a day and a night. The talents of the
whole company were called in requisition to make the gloomy
evening pass pleasantly with song and jest and story. The first
chapters of this story were there written and read, to the
accompanying dash of the Mediterranean. The plan of the whole
future history was then sketched out. Whether it ever find much
favor in the eyes of the world or not, sure it is, the story
was a child of love in its infancy, and its flowery Italian
cradle rocked it with an indulgent welcome.
"The writer and the party were fresh from strolls and rambles
about charming Sorrento; they had explored the gloomy gorge,
and carried away golden boughs of fruits and blossoms from her
orange orchards. Under the shadow of the old arched gateway
they had seen, sitting at her orange stand, a beautiful young
girl, whose name became Agnes in the story; and in the shadows
of the gorge they met that woman straight and tall, with silver
hair, Roman nose, and dark eyes, whose name became Elsie. The
whole golden scene receded centuries back, and they saw them in
a vision as they might and must have been in other days.
"The author begs to say that this story is a mere dreamland,
that it neither assumes nor will have responsibility for
historical accuracy. It merely reproduces to the reader the
visionary region that appeared to the writer; and if some
critic says this date be wrong, or that incident out of place,
let us answer, 'Who criticises perspective and distances, that
looks down into a purple lake at eventide? All dates shall give
way to the fortunes of our story, and our lovers shall have the
benefit of fairy-land; and whoso wants history will not find it
here, except to our making, and as it suits our purpose.'
"The story is dedicated to the dear friends, wherever
scattered, who first listened to it at Salerno. Alas! in
writing this, a sorrow falls upon us,--the brightest, in youth
and beauty, and in promise of happy life, who listened to that
beginning, has passed to the land of silence.
"When our merry company left Sorrento, all the younger members
adorned themselves with profuse knots of roses, which grew
there so abundantly that it would seem no plucking could
exhaust them. A beautiful girl sat opposite the writer in the
carriage and said, 'Now I will count my roses; I have just
seven knots, and in each seven roses.' And in reply, another
remarked, 'Seven is the perfect number, and seven times seven
is perfection.' 'It is no emblem,' she said gayly, 'of what a
perfect time of enjoyment we have had.' One month later, and
this rose had faded and passed away.
"There be many who will understand and tenderly feel the
meaning, when we say that this little history is dedicated to
the memory of ANNIE."
AGNES OF SORRENTO
CHAPTER I
THE OLD TOWN
The setting sunbeams slant over the antique gateway of Sorrento,
fusing into a golden bronze the brown freestone vestments of old Saint
Antonio, who with his heavy stone mitre and upraised hands has for
centuries kept watch thereupon.
A quiet time he has of it up there in the golden Italian air, in
petrified act of blessing, while orange lichens and green mosses from
year to year embroider quaint patterns on the seams of his sacerdotal
vestments, and small tassels of grass volunteer to ornament the folds
of his priestly drapery, and golden showers of blossoms from some
more hardy plant fall from his ample sleeve-cuffs. Little birds perch
and chitter and wipe their beaks unconcernedly, now on the tip of his
nose and now on the point of his mitre, while the world below goes on
its way pretty much as it did when the good saint was alive, and, in
despair of the human brotherhood, took to preaching to the birds and
the fishes.
Whoever passed beneath this old arched gateway, thus saint-guarded, in
the year of our Lord's grace ----, might have seen under its shadow,
sitting opposite to a stand of golden oranges, the little Agnes.
A very pretty picture was she, reader,--with such a face as you
sometimes see painted in those wayside shrines of sunny Italy, where
the lamp burns pale at evening, and gillyflower and cyclamen are
renewed with every morning.
She might have been fifteen or thereabouts, but was so small of stature
that she seemed yet a child. Her black hair was parted in a white
unbroken seam down to the high forehead, whose serious arch, like that
of a cathedral door, spoke of thought and prayer. Beneath the shadows
of this brow lay brown, translucent eyes, into whose thoughtful depths
one might look as pilgrims gaze into the waters of some saintly well,
cool and pure down to the unblemished sand at the bottom. The small
lips had a gentle compression, which indicated a repressed strength
of feeling; while the straight line of the nose, and the flexible,
delicate nostril, were perfect as in those sculptured fragments of the
antique which the soil of Italy so often gives forth to the day from
the sepulchres of the past. The habitual pose of the head and face
had the shy uplooking grace of a violet; and yet there was a grave
tranquillity of expression, which gave a peculiar degree of character
to the whole figure.
At the moment at which we have called your attention, the fair head is
bent, the long eyelashes lie softly down on the pale, smooth cheek; for
the Ave Maria bell is sounding from the Cathedral of Sorrento, and the
child is busy with her beads.
By her side sits a woman of some threescore years, tall, stately, and
squarely formed, with ample breadth of back and size of chest, like the
robust dames of Sorrento. Her strong Roman nose, the firm, determined
outline of her mouth, and a certain energy in every motion, speak the
woman of will and purpose. There is a degree of vigor in the decision
with which she lays down her spindle and bows her head, as a good
Christian of those days would, at the swinging of the evening bell.
But while the soul of the child in its morning freshness, free from
pressure or conscience of earthly care, rose like an illuminated mist
to heaven, the words the white-haired woman repeated were twined with
threads of worldly prudence,--thoughts of how many oranges she had
sold, with a rough guess at the probable amount for the day,--and
her fingers wandered from her beads a moment to see if the last coin
had been swept from the stand into her capacious pocket, and her
eyes wandering after them suddenly made her aware of the fact that
a handsome cavalier was standing in the gate, regarding her pretty
grandchild with looks of undisguised admiration.
"Let him look!" she said to herself, with a grim clasp on her rosary;
"a fair face draws buyers, and our oranges must be turned into money;
but he who does more than look has an affair with me; so gaze away, my
master, and take it out in buying oranges!--_Ave Maria! ora pro nobis,
nunc et_," etc., etc.
A few moments, and the wave of prayer which had flowed down the quaint
old shadowy street, bowing all heads as the wind bowed the scarlet
tassels of neighboring clover-fields, was passed, and all the world
resumed the work of earth just where they left off when the bell began.
"Good even to you, pretty maiden!" said the cavalier, approaching the
stall of the orange-woman with the easy, confident air of one secure
of a ready welcome, and bending down on the yet prayerful maiden the
glances of a pair of piercing hazel eyes that looked out on each side
of his aquiline nose with the keenness of a falcon's.
"Good even to you, pretty one! We shall take you for a saint, and
worship you in right earnest, if you raise not those eyelashes soon."
"Sir! my lord!" said the girl,--a bright color flushing into her smooth
brown cheeks, and her large dreamy eyes suddenly upraised with a
flutter, as of a bird about to take flight.
"Agnes, bethink yourself!" said the white-haired dame; "the gentleman
asks the price of your oranges; be alive, child!"
"Ah, my lord," said the young girl, "here are a dozen fine ones."
"Well, you shall give them me, pretty one," said the young man,
throwing a gold piece down on the stand with a careless ring.
"Here, Agnes, run to the stall of Raphael the poulterer for change,"
said the adroit dame, picking up the gold.
"Nay, good mother, by your leave," said the unabashed cavalier; "I make
my change with youth and beauty thus!" And with the word he stooped
down and kissed the fair forehead between the eyes.
"For shame, sir!" said the elderly woman, raising her distaff,--her
great glittering eyes flashing beneath her silver hair like tongues of
lightning from a white cloud. "Have a care!--this child is named for
blessed Saint Agnes, and is under her protection."
"The saints must pray for us, when their beauty makes us forget
ourselves," said the young cavalier, with a smile. "Look me in the
face, little one," he added; "say, wilt thou pray for me?"
The maiden raised her large serious eyes, and surveyed the haughty,
handsome face with that look of sober inquiry which one sometimes sees
in young children, and the blush slowly faded from her cheek, as a
cloud fades after sunset.
"Yes, my lord," she answered, with a grave simplicity, "I will pray for
you."
"And hang this upon the shrine of Saint Agnes for my sake," he added,
drawing from his finger a diamond ring, which he dropped into her
hand; and before mother or daughter could add another word or recover
from their surprise, he had thrown the corner of his mantle over his
shoulder and was off down the narrow street, humming the refrain of a
gay song.
"You have struck a pretty dove with that bolt," said another cavalier,
who appeared to have been observing the proceeding, and now, stepping
forward, joined him.
"Like enough," said the first, carelessly.
"The old woman keeps her mewed up like a singing-bird," said the
second; "and if a fellow wants speech of her, it's as much as his crown
is worth; for Dame Elsie has a strong arm, and her distaff is known to
be heavy."
"Upon my word," said the first cavalier, stopping and throwing a glance
backward, "where do they keep her?"
"Oh, in a sort of pigeon's nest up above the Gorge; but one never sees
her, except under the fire of her grandmother's eyes. The little one
is brought up for a saint, they say, and goes nowhere but to mass,
confession, and the sacrament."
"Humph!" said the other, "she looks like some choice old picture of Our
Lady,--not a drop of human blood in her. When I kissed her forehead,
she looked into my face as grave and innocent as a babe. One is tempted
to try what one can do in such a case."
"Beware the grandmother's distaff!" said the other, laughing.
"I've seen old women before," said the cavalier, as they turned down
the street and were lost to view.
Meanwhile the grandmother and grand-daughter were roused from the
mute astonishment in which they were gazing after the young cavalier
by a tittering behind them; and a pair of bright eyes looked out upon
them from beneath a bundle of long, crimson-headed clover, whose rich
carmine tints were touched to brighter life by setting sunbeams.
There stood Giulietta, the head coquette of the Sorrento girls, with
her broad shoulders, full chest, and great black eyes, rich and
heavy as those of the silver-haired ox for whose benefit she had been
cutting clover. Her bronzed cheek was smooth as that of any statue,
and showed a color like that of an open pomegranate; and the opulent,
lazy abundance of her ample form, with her leisurely movements, spoke
an easy and comfortable nature,--that is to say, when Giulietta was
pleased; for it is to be remarked that there lurked certain sparkles
deep down in her great eyes, which might, on occasion, blaze out into
sheet-lightning, like her own beautiful skies, which, lovely as they
are, can thunder and sulk with terrible earnestness when the fit takes
them. At present, however, her face was running over with mischievous
merriment, as she slyly pinched little Agnes by the ear.
"So you know not yon gay cavalier, little sister?" she said, looking
askance at her from under her long lashes.
"No, indeed! What has an honest girl to do with knowing gay cavaliers?"
said Dame Elsie, bestirring herself with packing the remaining oranges
into a basket, which she covered trimly with a heavy linen towel of her
own weaving. "Girls never come to good who let their eyes go walking
through the earth, and have the names of all the wild gallants on
their tongues. Agnes knows no such nonsense,--blessed be her gracious
patroness, with Our Lady and Saint Michael!"
"I hope there is no harm in knowing what is right before one's eyes,"
said Giulietta. "Anybody must be blind and deaf not to know the Lord
Adrian. All the girls in Sorrento know him. They say he is even greater
than he appears,--that he is brother to the King himself; at any rate,
a handsomer and more gallant gentleman never wore spurs."
"Let him keep to his own kind," said Elsie. "Eagles make bad work in
dove-cots. No good comes of such gallants for us."
"Nor any harm, that I ever heard of," said Giulietta. "But let me see,
pretty one,--what did he give you? Holy Mother! what a handsome ring!"
"It is to hang on the shrine of Saint Agnes," said the younger girl,
looking up with simplicity.
A loud laugh was the first answer to this communication. The scarlet
clover-tops shook and quivered with the merriment.
"To hang on the shrine of Saint Agnes!" Giulietta repeated. "That is a
little too good!"
"Go, go, you baggage!" said Elsie, wrathfully brandishing her spindle.
"If ever you get a husband, I hope he'll give you a good beating! You
need it, I warrant! Always stopping on the bridge there, to have cracks
with the young men! Little enough you know of saints, I dare say! So
keep away from _my_ child! Come, Agnes," she said, as she lifted the
orange-basket on to her head; and, straightening her tall form, she
seized the girl by the hand to lead her away.
CHAPTER II
THE DOVE-COT
The old town of Sorrento is situated on an elevated plateau, which
stretches into the sunny waters of the Mediterranean, guarded on all
sides by a barrier of mountains which defend it from bleak winds and
serve to it the purpose of walls to a garden. Here, groves of oranges
and lemons, with their almost fabulous coincidence of fruitage with
flowers, fill the air with perfume, which blends with that of roses and
jessamines; and the fields are so starred and enameled with flowers
that they might have served as the type for those Elysian realms sung
by ancient poets. The fervid air is fanned by continual sea-breezes,
which give a delightful elasticity to the otherwise languid climate.
Under all these cherishing influences, the human being develops a
wealth and luxuriance of physical beauty unknown in less favored
regions. In the region about Sorrento one may be said to have found the
land where beauty is the rule and not the exception. The singularity
there is not to see handsome points of physical proportion, but rather
to see those who are without them. Scarce a man, woman, or child you
meet who has not some personal advantage to be commended, while even
striking beauty is common. Also, under these kindly skies, a native
courtesy and gentleness of manner make themselves felt. It would seem
as if humanity, rocked in this flowery cradle, and soothed by so many
daily caresses and appliances of nursing Nature, grew up with all that
is kindliest on the outward,--not repressed and beat in, as under the
inclement atmosphere and stormy skies of the North.
The town of Sorrento itself overhangs the sea, skirting along rocky
shores, which, hollowed here and there into picturesque grottoes, and
fledged with a wild plumage of brilliant flowers and trailing vines,
descend in steep precipices to the water. Along the shelly beach, at
the bottom, one can wander to look out on the loveliest prospect in the
world. Vesuvius rises with its two peaks softly clouded in blue and
purple mists, which blend with its ascending vapors,--Naples and the
adjoining villages at its base gleaming in the distance like a fringe
of pearls on a regal mantle. Nearer by, the picturesque rocky shores of
the island of Capri seem to pulsate through the dreamy, shifting mists
that veil its sides; and the sea shimmers and glitters like the neck
of a peacock with an iridescent mingling of colors: the whole air is a
glorifying medium, rich in prismatic hues of enchantment.
The town on three sides is severed from the main land by a gorge two
hundred feet in depth and forty or fifty in breadth, crossed by a
bridge resting on double arches, the construction of which dates back
to the time of the ancient Romans. This bridge affords a favorite
lounging-place for the inhabitants, and at evening a motley assemblage
may be seen lolling over its moss-grown sides,--men with their
picturesque knit caps of scarlet or brown falling gracefully on one
shoulder, and women with their shining black hair and the enormous
pearl ear-rings which are the pride and heirlooms of every family. The
present traveler at Sorrento may remember standing on this bridge and
looking down the gloomy depths of the gorge, to where a fair villa,
with its groves of orange-trees and gardens, overhangs the tremendous
depths below.
Hundreds of years since, where this villa now stands was the simple
dwelling of the two women whose history we have begun to tell you.
There you might have seen a small stone cottage with a two-arched
arcade in front, gleaming brilliantly white out of the dusky foliage
of an orange-orchard. The dwelling was wedged like a bird-box between
two fragments of rock, and behind it the land rose rocky, high, and
steep, so as to form a natural wall. A small ledge or terrace of
cultivated land here hung in air,--below it, a precipice of two hundred
feet down into the Gorge of Sorrento. A couple of dozen orange-trees,
straight and tall, with healthy, shining bark, here shot up from the
fine black volcanic soil, and made with their foliage a twilight shadow
on the ground, so deep that no vegetation, save a fine velvet moss,
could dispute their claim to its entire nutritious offices. These
trees were the sole wealth of the women and the sole ornament of the
garden; but, as they stood there, not only laden with golden fruit,
but fragrant with pearly blossoms, they made the little rocky platform
seem a perfect Garden of the Hesperides. The stone cottage, as we have
said, had an open, whitewashed arcade in front, from which one could
look down into the gloomy depths of the gorge, as into some mysterious
underworld. Strange and weird it seemed, with its fathomless shadows
and its wild grottoes, over which hung, silently waving, long pendants
of ivy, while dusky gray aloes uplifted their horned heads from great
rock-rifts, like elfin spirits struggling upward out of the shade. Nor
was wanting the usual gentle poetry of flowers; for white iris leaned
its fairy pavilion over the black void like a pale-cheeked princess
from the window of some dark enchanted castle, and scarlet geranium and
golden broom and crimson gladiolus waved and glowed in the shifting
beams of the sunlight. Also there was in this little spot what forms
the charm of Italian gardens always,--the sweet song and prattle of
waters. A clear mountain-spring burst through the rock on one side
of the little cottage, and fell with a lulling noise into a quaint
moss-grown water-trough, which had been in former times the sarcophagus
of some old Roman sepulchre. Its sides were richly sculptured with
figures and leafy scrolls and arabesques, into which the sly-footed
lichens with quiet growth had so insinuated themselves as in some
places almost to obliterate the original design; while, round the
place where the water fell, a veil of ferns and maiden's-hair, studded
with tremulous silver drops, vibrated to its soothing murmur. The
superfluous waters, drained off by a little channel on one side, were
conducted through the rocky parapet of the garden, whence they trickled
and tinkled from rock to rock, falling with a continual drip among the
swaying ferns and pendent ivy wreaths, till they reached the little
stream at the bottom of the gorge. This parapet or garden-wall was
formed of blocks or fragments of what had once been white marble, the
probable remains of the ancient tomb from which the sarcophagus was
taken. Here and there a marble acanthus-leaf, or the capital of an old
column, or a fragment of sculpture jutted from under the mosses, ferns,
and grasses with which prodigal Nature had filled every interstice and
carpeted the whole. These sculptured fragments everywhere in Italy seem
to whisper, from the dust, of past life and death, of a cycle of human
existence forever gone, over whose tomb the life of to-day is built.
"Sit down and rest, my dove," said Dame Elsie to her little charge, as
they entered their little enclosure.
Here she saw for the first time, what she had not noticed in the heat
and hurry of her ascent, that the girl was panting and her gentle bosom
rising and falling in thick heartbeats, occasioned by the haste with
which she had drawn her onward.
"Sit down, dearie, and I will get you a bit of supper."
"Yes, grandmother, I will. I must tell my beads once for the soul of
the handsome gentleman that kissed my forehead to-night."
"How did you know that he was handsome, child?" said the old dame, with
some sharpness in her voice.
"He bade me look on him, grandmother, and I saw it."
"You must put such thoughts away, child," said the old dame.
"Why must I?" said the girl, looking up with an eye as clear and
unconscious as that of a three-year-old child.
"If she does not think, why should I tell her?" said Dame Elsie, as she
turned to go into the house, and left the child sitting on the mossy
parapet that overlooked the gorge. Thence she could see far off, not
only down the dim, sombre abyss, but out to the blue Mediterranean
beyond, now calmly lying in swathing-bands of purple, gold, and orange,
while the smoky cloud that overhung Vesuvius became silver and rose in
the evening light.
There is always something of elevation and purity that seems to come
over one from being in an elevated region. One feels morally as well
as physically above the world, and from that clearer air able to look
down on it calmly with disengaged freedom. Our little maiden sat for
a few moments gazing, her large brown eyes dilating with a tremulous
lustre, as if tears were half of a mind to start in them, and her
lips apart with a delicate earnestness, like one who is pursuing some
pleasing inner thought. Suddenly rousing herself, she began by breaking
the freshest orange-blossoms from the golden-fruited trees, and,
kissing and pressing them to her bosom, she proceeded to remove the
faded flowers of the morning from before a little rude shrine in the
rock, where, in a sculptured niche, was a picture of the Madonna and
Child, with a locked glass door in front of it. The picture was a happy
transcript of one of the fairest creations of the religious school of
Florence, done by one of those rustic copyists of whom Italy is full,
who appear to possess the instinct of painting, and to whom we owe many
of those sweet faces which sometimes look down on us by the wayside
from rudest and homeliest shrines.
The poor fellow by whom it had been painted was one to whom years
before Dame Elsie had given food and shelter for many months during a
lingering illness; and he had painted so much of his dying heart and
hopes into it that it had a peculiar and vital vividness in its power
of affecting the feelings. Agnes had been familiar with this picture
from early infancy. No day of her life had the flowers failed to be
freshly placed before it. It had seemed to smile down sympathy on her
childish joys, and to cloud over with her childish sorrows. It was
less a picture to her than a presence; and the whole air of the little
orange-garden seemed to be made sacred by it. When she had arranged her
flowers, she kneeled down and began to say prayers for the soul of the
young gallant.
"Holy Jesus," she said, "he is young, rich, handsome, and a king's
brother; and for all these things the Fiend may tempt him to forget his
God and throw away his soul. Holy Mother, give him good counsel!"
"Come, child, to your supper," said Dame Elsie. "I have milked the
goats, and everything is ready."
CHAPTER III
THE GORGE
After her light supper was over, Agnes took her distaff, wound with
shining white flax, and went and seated herself in her favorite place,
on the low parapet that overlooked the gorge.
This ravine, with its dizzy depths, its waving foliage, its dripping
springs and the low murmur of the little stream that pursued its way
far down at the bottom, was one of those things which stimulated
her impressible imagination, and filled her with a solemn and vague
delight. The ancient Italian tradition made it the home of fauns and
dryads, wild woodland creatures, intermediate links between vegetable
life and that of sentiment and reasoning humanity. The more earnest
faith that came in with Christianity, if it had its brighter lights
in an immortality of blessedness, had also its deeper shadows in the
intenser perceptions it awakened of sin and evil, and of the mortal
struggle by which the human spirit must avoid endless woe and rise to
endless felicity. The myths with which the colored Italian air was
filled in mediæval ages no longer resembled those graceful, floating,
cloud-like figures one sees in the ancient chambers of Pompeii,--the
bubbles and rainbows of human fancy, rising aimless and buoyant,
with a mere freshness of animal life, against a black background of
utter and hopeless ignorance as to man's past or future. They were
rather expressed by solemn images of mournful, majestic angels and
of triumphant saints, or fearful, warning presentations of loathsome
fiends. Each lonesome gorge and sombre dell had tales no more of
tricky fauns and dryads, but of those restless, wandering demons
who, having lost their own immortality of blessedness, constantly
lie in wait to betray frail humanity, and cheat it of that glorious
inheritance bought by the Great Redemption.
The education of Agnes had been one which rendered her whole
system peculiarly sensitive and impressible to all influences from
the invisible and unseen. Of this education we shall speak more
particularly hereafter. At present we see her sitting in the twilight
on the moss-grown marble parapet, her distaff, with its silvery flax,
lying idly in her hands, and her widening dark eyes gazing intently
into the gloomy gorge below, from which arose the far-off complaining
babble of the brook at the bottom and the shiver and sigh of evening
winds through the trailing ivy. The white mist was slowly rising,
wavering, undulating, and creeping its slow way up the sides of the
gorge. Now it hid a tuft of foliage, and now it wreathed itself
around a horned clump of aloes, and, streaming far down below it
in the dimness, made it seem like the goblin robe of some strange,
supernatural being.
The evening light had almost burned out in the sky; only a band of
vivid red lay low in the horizon out to sea, and the round full moon
was just rising like a great silver lamp, while Vesuvius with its smoky
top began in the obscurity to show its faintly flickering fires. A
vague agitation seemed to oppress the child; for she sighed deeply, and
often repeated with fervor the Ave Maria.
At this moment there began to rise from the very depths of the gorge
below her the sound of a rich tenor voice, with a slow, sad modulation,
and seeming to pulsate upward through the filmy, shifting mists. It was
one of those voices which seem fit to be the outpouring of some spirit
denied all other gifts of expression, and rushing with passionate
fervor through this one gate of utterance. So distinctly were the
words spoken, that they seemed each one to rise as with a separate
intelligence out of the mist, and to knock at the door of the heart.
Sad is my life, and lonely!
No hope for me,
Save thou, my love, my only,
I see!
Where art thou, O my fairest?
Where art thou gone?
Dove of the rock, I languish
Alone!
They say thou art so saintly,
Who dare love thee?
Yet bend thine eyelids holy
On me!
Though heaven alone possess thee,
Thou dwell'st above,
Yet heaven, didst thou but know it,
Is love.
There was such an intense earnestness in these sounds, that large tears
gathered in the wide dark eyes, and fell one after another upon the
sweet alyssum and maiden's-hair that grew in the crevices of the marble
wall. She shivered and drew away from the parapet, and thought of
stories she had heard the nuns tell of wandering spirits who sometimes
in lonesome places pour forth such entrancing music as bewilders the
brain of the unwary listener, and leads him to some fearful destruction.
"Agnes!" said the sharp voice of old Elsie, appearing at the door,
"here! where are you?"
"Here, grandmamma."
"Who's that singing this time o' night?"
"I don't know, grandmamma."
Somehow the child felt as if that singing were strangely sacred to
her,--a _rapport_ between her and something vague and invisible which
might yet become dear.
"Is't down in the gorge?" said the old woman, coming with her heavy,
decided step to the parapet, and looking over, her keen black eyes
gleaming like dagger-blades into the mist. "If there's anybody there,"
she said, "let them go away, and not be troubling honest women with
any of their caterwauling. Come, Agnes," she said, pulling the girl by
the sleeve, "you must be tired, my lamb! and your evening prayers are
always so long, best be about them, girl, so that old grandmamma may
put you to bed. What ails the girl? Been crying! Your hand is cold as a
stone."
"Grandmamma, what if that might be a spirit?" she said. "Sister Rosa
told me stories of singing spirits that have been in this very gorge."
"Likely enough," said Dame Elsie; "but what's that to us? Let 'em
sing!--so long as we don't listen, where's the harm done? We will
sprinkle holy water all round the parapet, and say the office of Saint
Agnes, and let them sing till they are hoarse."
Such was the triumphant view which this energetic good woman took of
the power of the means of grace which her church placed at her disposal.
Nevertheless, while Agnes was kneeling at her evening prayers, the old
dame consoled herself with a soliloquy, as with a brush she vigorously
besprinkled the premises with holy water.
"Now, here's the plague of a girl! If she's handsome,--and nobody wants
one that isn't,--why, then, it's a purgatory to look after her. This
one is good enough,--none of your hussies, like Giulietta: but the
better they are, the more sure to have fellows after them. A murrain
on that cavalier,--king's brother, or what not!--it was he serenading,
I'll be bound. I must tell Antonio, and have the girl married, for
aught I see: and I don't want to give her to him either; he didn't
bring her up. There's no peace for us mothers. Maybe I'll tell Father
Francesco about it. That's the way poor little Isella was carried away.
Singing is of the Devil, I believe; it always bewitches girls. I'd like
to have poured some hot oil down the rocks: I'd have made him squeak in
another tone, I reckon. Well, well! I hope I shall come in for a good
seat in paradise for all the trouble I've had with her mother, and am
like to have with her,--that's all!"
In an hour more, the large, round, sober moon was shining fixedly on
the little mansion in the rocks, silvering the glossy darkness of the
orange-leaves, while the scent of the blossoms arose like clouds about
the cottage. The moonlight streamed through the unglazed casement, and
made a square of light on the little bed where Agnes was sleeping,
in which square her delicate face was framed, with its tremulous and
spiritual expression most resembling in its sweet plaintive purity some
of the Madonna faces of Fra Angelico,--those tender wild flowers of
Italian religion and poetry.
By her side lay her grandmother, with those sharp, hard, clearly cut
features, so worn and bronzed by time, so lined with labor and care, as
to resemble one of the Fates in the picture of Michel Angelo; and even
in her sleep she held the delicate lily hand of the child in her own
hard, brown one, with a strong and determined clasp.
While they sleep, we must tell something more of the story of the
little Agnes,--of what she is, and what are the causes which have made
her such.
CHAPTER IV
WHO AND WHAT
Old Elsie was not born a peasant. Originally she was the wife of
a steward in one of those great families of Rome whose estate and
traditions were princely. Elsie, as her figure and profile and all her
words and movements indicated, was of a strong, shrewd, ambitious, and
courageous character, and well disposed to turn to advantage every gift
with which Nature had endowed her.
Providence made her a present of a daughter whose beauty was wonderful,
even in a country where beauty is no uncommon accident. In addition to
her beauty, the little Isella had quick intelligence, wit, grace, and
spirit. As a child she became the pet and plaything of the Princess
whom Elsie served. This noble lady, pressed by the _ennui_ which is
always the moth and rust on the purple and gold of rank and wealth,
had, as other noble ladies had in those days, and have now, sundry
pets: greyhounds, white and delicate, that looked as if they were made
of Sèvres china; spaniels with long silky ears and fringy paws; apes
and monkeys, that made at times sad devastations in her wardrobe; and
a most charming little dwarf, that was ugly enough to frighten the
very owls, and spiteful as he was ugly. She had, moreover, peacocks,
and macaws, and parrots, and all sorts of singing-birds, and falcons
of every breed, and horses, and hounds,--in short, there is no saying
what she did _not_ have. One day she took it into her head to add the
little Isella to the number of her acquisitions. With the easy grace
of aristocracy, she reached out her jeweled hand and took Elsie's one
flower to add to her conservatory,--and Elsie was only too proud to
have it so.
Her daughter was kept constantly about the person of the Princess, and
instructed in all the wisdom which would have been allowed her, had
she been the Princess's own daughter, which, to speak the truth, was
in those days nothing very profound,--consisting of a little singing
and instrumentation, a little embroidery and dancing, with the power of
writing her own name and of reading a love letter.
All the world knows that the very idea of a pet is something to be
spoiled for the amusement of the pet-owner; and Isella was spoiled in
the most particular and circumstantial manner. She had suits of apparel
for every day in the year, and jewels without end,--for the Princess
was never weary of trying the effect of her beauty in this and that
costume; so that she sported through the great grand halls and down the
long aisles of the garden much like a bright-winged humming-bird, or a
damsel-fly all green and gold. She was a genuine child of Italy,--full
of feeling, spirit, and genius,--alive in every nerve to the
finger-tips; and under the tropical sunshine of her mistress's favor
she grew as an Italian rosebush does, throwing its branches freakishly
over everything in a wild labyrinth of perfume, brightness, and thorns.
For a while her life was a triumph, and her mother triumphed with her
at an humble distance. The Princess was devoted to her with the blind
fatuity with which ladies of rank at times will invest themselves in
a caprice. She arrogated to herself all the praises of her beauty and
wit, allowed her to flirt and make conquests to her heart's content,
and engaged to marry her to some handsome young officer of her train,
when she had done being amused with her.
Now we must not wonder that a young head of fifteen should have
been turned by this giddy elevation, nor that an old head of fifty
should have thought all things were possible in the fortune of such
a favorite. Nor must we wonder that the young coquette, rich in the
laurels of a hundred conquests, should have turned her bright eyes on
the son and heir, when he came home from the University of Bologna.
Nor is it to be wondered at, that this same son and heir, being a
man as well as a Prince, should have done as other men did,--fallen
desperately in love with this dazzling, sparkling, piquant mixture
of matter and spirit, which no university can prepare a young man to
comprehend,--which always seemed to run from him, and yet always threw
a Parthian shot behind her as she fled. Nor is it to be wondered at,
if this same Prince, after a week or two, did not know whether he was
on his head or his heels, or whether the sun rose in the east or the
south, or where he stood, or whither he was going.
In fact, the youthful pair very soon came into that dreamland where
are no more any points of the compass, no more division of time, no
more latitude and longitude, no more up and down, but only a general
wandering among enchanted groves and singing nightingales.
It was entirely owing to old Elsie's watchful shrewdness and address
that the lovers came into this paradise by the gate of marriage; for
the young man was ready to offer anything at the feet of his divinity,
as the old mother was not slow to perceive.
So they stood at the altar for the time being a pair of as true lovers
as Romeo and Juliet: but then, what has true love to do with the son of
a hundred generations and heir to a Roman principality?
Of course, the rose of love, having gone through all its stages of bud
and blossom into full flower, must next begin to drop its leaves. Of
course. Who ever heard of an immortal rose?
The time of discovery came. Isella was found to be a mother; and then
the storm burst upon her and drabbled her in the dust as fearlessly as
the summer wind sweeps down and besmirches the lily it has all summer
been wooing and flattering.
The Princess was a very pious and moral lady, and of course threw her
favorite out into the street as a vile weed, and virtuously ground her
down under her jeweled high-heeled shoes.
She could have forgiven her any common frailty; of course it was
natural that the girl should have been seduced by the all-conquering
charms of her son,--but aspire to marriage with their house!--pretend
to be her son's wife! Since the time of Judas had such treachery ever
been heard of?
Something was said of the propriety of walling up the culprit alive,--a
mode of disposing of small family matters somewhat _à la mode_ in those
times. But the Princess acknowledged herself foolishly tender, and
unable quite to allow this very obvious propriety in the case.
She contented herself with turning mother and daughter into the streets
with every mark of ignominy, which was reduplicated by every one of her
servants, lackeys, and court-companions, who, of course, had always
known just how the thing must end.
As to the young Prince, he acted as a well-instructed young nobleman
should, who understands the great difference there is between the tears
of a duchess and those of low-born women. No sooner did he behold his
conduct in the light of his mother's countenance than he turned his
back on his low marriage with edifying penitence. He did not think it
necessary to convince his mother of the real existence of a union whose
very supposition made her so unhappy, and occasioned such an uncommonly
disagreeable and tempestuous state of things in the well-bred circle
where his birth called him to move. Being, however, a religious youth,
he opened his mind to his family-confessor, by whose advice he sent a
messenger with a large sum of money to Elsie, piously commending her
and her daughter to the Divine protection. He also gave orders for an
entire new suit of raiment for the Virgin Mary in the family chapel,
including a splendid set of diamonds, and promised unlimited candles to
the altar of a neighboring convent. If all this could not atone for a
youthful error, it was a pity. So he thought, as he drew on his riding
gloves and went off on a hunting party, like a gallant and religious
young nobleman.
Elsie, meanwhile, with her forlorn and disgraced daughter, found a
temporary asylum in a neighboring mountain village, where the poor,
bedrabbled, broken-winged song-bird soon panted and fluttered her
little life away.
When the once beautiful and gay Isella had been hidden in the grave,
cold and lonely, there remained a little wailing infant, which Elsie
gathered to her bosom.
Grim, dauntless, and resolute, she resolved, for the sake of this
hapless one, to look life in the face once more, and try the battle
under other skies.
Taking the infant in her arms, she traveled with her far from the scene
of her birth, and set all her energies at work to make for her a better
destiny than that which had fallen to the lot of her unfortunate mother.
She set about to create her nature and order her fortunes with that
sort of downright energy with which resolute people always attack the
problem of a new human existence. This child should be happy: the rocks
on which her mother was wrecked she should never strike upon,--they
were all marked on Elsie's chart. Love had been the root of all poor
Isella's troubles,--and Agnes never should know love, till taught it
safely by a husband of Elsie's own choosing.
The first step of security was in naming her for the chaste Saint
Agnes, and placing her girlhood under her special protection. Secondly,
which was quite as much to the point, she brought her up laboriously
in habits of incessant industry,--never suffering her to be out of her
sight, or to have any connection or friendship, except such as could
be carried on under the immediate supervision of her piercing black
eyes. Every night she put her to bed as if she had been an infant, and,
wakening her again in the morning, took her with her in all her daily
toils,--of which, to do her justice, she performed all the hardest
portion, leaving to the girl just enough to keep her hands employed and
her head steady.
The peculiar circumstance which had led her to choose the old town
of Sorrento for her residence, in preference to any of the beautiful
villages which impearl that fertile plain, was the existence there of
a flourishing convent dedicated to Saint Agnes, under whose protecting
shadow her young charge might more securely spend the earlier years of
her life.
With this view, having hired the domicile we have already described,
she lost no time in making the favorable acquaintance of the
sisterhood,--never coming to them empty-handed. The finest oranges of
her garden, the whitest flax of her spinning, were always reserved as
offerings at the shrine of the patroness whom she sought to propitiate
for her grandchild.
In her earliest childhood the little Agnes was led toddling to the
shrine by her zealous relative, and at the sight of her fair, sweet,
awestruck face, with its viny mantle of encircling curls, the torpid
bosoms of the sisterhood throbbed with a strange, new pleasure, which
they humbly hoped was not sinful,--as agreeable things, they found,
generally were. They loved the echoes of her little feet down the damp,
silent aisles of their chapel, and her small, sweet, slender voice, as
she asked strange baby-questions, which, as usual with baby-questions,
hit all the insoluble points of philosophy and theology exactly on the
head.
The child became a special favorite with the Abbess, Sister Theresa,
a tall, thin, bloodless, sad-eyed woman, who looked as if she might
have been cut out of one of the glaciers of Monte Rosa, but in whose
heart the little fair one had made herself a niche, pushing her way up
through, as you may have seen a lovely blue-fringed gentian standing in
a snowdrift of the Alps with its little ring of melted snow around it.
Sister Theresa offered to take care of the child at any time when the
grandmother wished to be about her labors; and so, during her early
years, the little one was often domesticated for days together at the
Convent. A perfect mythology of wonderful stories encircled her, which
the good sisters were never tired of repeating to each other. They were
the simplest sayings and doings of childhood,--handfuls of such wild
flowers as bespread the green turf of nursery-life everywhere, but
miraculous blossoms in the eyes of these good women, whom Saint Agnes
had unwittingly deprived of any power of making comparisons or ever
having Christ's sweetest parable of the heavenly kingdom enacted in
homes of their own.
Old Jocunda, the portress, never failed to make a sensation with her
one stock-story of how she found the child standing on her head and
crying,--having been put into this reversed position in consequence of
climbing up on a high stool to get her little fat hand into the vase of
holy water, failing in which Christian attempt, her heels went up and
her head down, greatly to her dismay.
"Nevertheless," said old Jocunda, gravely, "it showed an edifying turn
in the child; and when I lifted the little thing up, it stopped crying
the minute its little fingers touched the water, and it made a cross on
its forehead as sensible as the oldest among us. Ah, sisters, there's
grace there, or I'm mistaken."
All the signs of an incipient saint were, indeed, manifested in the
little one. She never played the wild and noisy plays of common
children, but busied herself in making altars and shrines, which she
adorned with the prettiest flowers of the gardens, and at which she
worked hour after hour in the quietest and happiest earnestness.
Her dreams were a constant source of wonder and edification in the
Convent, for they were all of angels and saints; and many a time, after
hearing one, the sisterhood crossed themselves, and the Abbess said,
"_Ex oribus parvulorum_." Always sweet, dutiful, submissive, cradling
herself every night with a lulling of sweet hymns and infant murmur of
prayers, and found sleeping in her little white bed with her crucifix
clasped to her bosom, it was no wonder that the Abbess thought her the
special favorite of her divine patroness, and like her the subject of
an early vocation to be the celestial bride of One fairer than the
children of men, who should snatch her away from all earthly things, to
be united to Him in a celestial paradise.
As the child grew older, she often sat at evening with wide, wondering
eyes, listening over and over again to the story of the fair Saint
Agnes,--how she was a princess, living in her father's palace, of such
exceeding beauty and grace that none saw her but to love her, yet of
such sweetness and humility as passed all comparison; and how, when
a heathen prince would have espoused her to his son, she said, "Away
from me, tempter! for I am betrothed to a lover who is greater and
fairer than any earthly suitor,--he is so fair that the sun and moon
are ravished by his beauty, so mighty that the angels of heaven are his
servants;" how she bore meekly with persecutions and threatenings and
death for the sake of this unearthly love; and when she had poured out
her blood, how she came to her mourning friends in ecstatic vision,
all white and glistening, with a fair lamb by her side, and bade them
weep not for her, because she was reigning with Him whom on earth she
had preferred to all other lovers. There was also the legend of the
fair Cecilia, the lovely musician whom angels had rapt away to their
choirs; the story of that queenly saint, Catharine, who passed through
the courts of heaven, and saw the angels crowned with roses and lilies,
and the Virgin on her throne, who gave her the wedding ring that
espoused her to be the bride of the King Eternal.
Fed with such legends, it could not be but that a child with a
sensitive, nervous organization and vivid imagination, should have
grown up with an unworldly and spiritual character, and that a poetic
mist should have enveloped all her outward perceptions similar to that
palpitating veil of blue and lilac vapor that enshrouds the Italian
landscape.
Nor is it to be marveled at, if the results of this system of education
went far beyond what the good old grandmother intended. For, though a
stanch good Christian, after the manner of those times, yet she had not
the slightest mind to see her grand-daughter a nun; on the contrary,
she was working day and night to add to her dowry, and had in her eye
a reputable middle-aged blacksmith, who was a man of substance and
prudence, to be the husband and keeper of her precious treasure. In a
home thus established she hoped to enthrone herself, and provide for
the rearing of a generation of stout-limbed girls and boys who should
grow up to make a flourishing household in the land. This subject she
had not yet broached to her grand-daughter, though daily preparing to
do so,--deferring it, it must be told, from a sort of jealous, yearning
craving to have wholly to herself the child for whom she had lived so
many years.
Antonio, the blacksmith to whom this honor was destined, was one of
those broad-backed, full-chested, long-limbed fellows one shall often
see around Sorrento, with great, kind, black eyes like those of an ox,
and all the attributes of a healthy, kindly, animal nature. Contentedly
he hammered away at his business; and certainly, had not Dame Elsie
of her own providence elected him to be the husband of her fair
grand-daughter, he would never have thought of the matter himself; but,
opening the black eyes aforenamed upon the girl, he perceived that she
was fair, and also received an inner light through Dame Elsie as to the
amount of her dowry; and, putting these matters together, conceived a
kindness for the maiden, and awaited with tranquillity the time when he
should be allowed to commence his wooing.
CHAPTER V
IL PADRE FRANCESCO
The next morning Elsie awoke, as was her custom, when the very faintest
hue of dawn streaked the horizon. A hen who has seen a hawk balancing
his wings and cawing in mid-air over her downy family could not
have awakened with her feathers, metaphorically speaking, in a more
bristling state of caution.
"Spirits in the gorge, quotha?" said she to herself, as she vigorously
adjusted her dress. "I believe so,--spirits in good sound bodies,
I believe; and next we shall hear, there will be rope-ladders, and
climbings, and the Lord knows what. I shall go to confession this very
morning, and tell Father Francesco the danger; and instead of taking
her down to sell oranges, suppose I send her to the sisters to carry
the ring and a basket of oranges?"
"Ah, ah!" she said, pausing, after she was dressed, and addressing a
coarse print of Saint Agnes pasted against the wall,--"you look very
meek there, and it was a great thing, no doubt, to die as you did; but
if you'd lived to be married and bring up a family of girls, you'd
have known something greater. Please, don't take offense with a poor
old woman who has got into the way of speaking her mind freely! I'm
foolish, and don't know much,--so, dear lady, pray for me!" And old
Elsie bent her knee and crossed herself reverently, and then went out,
leaving her young charge still sleeping.
It was yet dusky dawn when she might have been seen kneeling, with her
sharp, clear-cut profile, at the grate of a confession-box in a church
in Sorrento. Within was seated a personage who will have some influence
on our story, and who must therefore be somewhat minutely introduced to
the reader.
Il Padre Francesco had only within the last year arrived in the
neighborhood, having been sent as superior of a brotherhood of
Capuchins, whose convent was perched on a crag in the vicinity. With
this situation came a pastoral care of the district; and Elsie and her
grand-daughter found in him a spiritual pastor very different from
the fat, jolly, easy Brother Girolamo, to whose place he had been
appointed. The latter had been one of those numerous priests taken from
the peasantry, who never rise above the average level of thought of
the body from which they are drawn. Easy, gossipy, fond of good living
and good stories, sympathetic in troubles and in joys, he had been a
general favorite in the neighborhood, without exerting any particularly
spiritualizing influence.
It required but a glance at Father Francesco to see that he was in all
respects the opposite of this. It was evident that he came from one of
the higher classes, by that indefinable air of birth and breeding which
makes itself felt under every change of costume. Who he might be, what
might have been his past history, what rank he might have borne, what
part played in the great warfare of life, was all of course sunk in the
oblivion of his religious profession, where, as at the grave, a man
laid down name and fame and past history and worldly goods, and took up
a coarse garb and a name chosen from the roll of the saints, in sign
that the world that had known him should know him no more.
Imagine a man between thirty and forty, with that round, full, evenly
developed head, and those chiseled features, which one sees on ancient
busts and coins no less than in the streets of modern Rome. The
cheeks were sunken and sallow; the large, black, melancholy eyes had
a wistful, anxious, penetrative expression, that spoke a stringent,
earnest spirit, which, however deep might be the grave in which it
lay buried, had not yet found repose. The long, thin, delicately
formed hands were emaciated and bloodless; they clasped with a nervous
eagerness a rosary and crucifix of ebony and silver,--the only mark of
luxury that could be discerned in a costume unusually threadbare and
squalid. The whole picture of the man, as he sat there, had it been
painted and hung in a gallery, was such as must have stopped every
person of a certain amount of sensibility before it with the conviction
that behind that strong, melancholy, earnest figure and face lay one
of those hidden histories of human passion in which the vivid life of
mediæval Italy was so fertile.
He was listening to Elsie, as she kneeled, with that easy air of
superiority which marks a practiced man of the world, yet with a grave
attention which showed that her communication had awakened the deepest
interest in his mind. Every few moments he moved slightly in his seat,
and interrupted the flow of the narrative by an inquiry concisely put,
in tones which, clear and low, had a solemn and severe distinctness,
producing, in the still, dusky twilight of the church, an almost
ghostly effect.
When the communication was over, he stepped out of the confessional
and said to Elsie in parting, "My daughter, you have done well to take
this in time. The devices of Satan in our corrupt times are numerous
and artful, and they who keep the Lord's sheep must not sleep. Before
many days I will call and examine the child; meanwhile I approve your
course."
It was curious to see the awestruck, trembling manner in which old
Elsie, generally so intrepid and commanding, stood before this man
in his brown rough woolen gown with his corded waist; but she had an
instinctive perception of the presence of the man of superior birth no
less than a reverence for the man of religion.
After she had departed from the church, the Capuchin stood lost in
thought; and to explain his revery, we must throw some further light on
his history.
Il Padre Francesco, as his appearance and manner intimated, was in
truth from one of the most distinguished families of Florence. He was
one of those whom an ancient writer characterizes as "men of longing
desire." Born with a nature of restless stringency that seemed to doom
him never to know repose, excessive in all things, he had made early
trial of ambition, of war, and of what the gallants of his time called
love,--plunging into all the dissipated excesses of a most dissolute
age, and outdoing in luxury and extravagance the foremost of his
companions.
The wave of a great religious impulse--which in our times would have
been called a revival--swept over the city of Florence, and bore him,
with multitudes of others, to listen to the fervid preaching of the
Dominican monk, Jerome Savonarola; and amid the crowd that trembled,
wept, and beat their breasts under his awful denunciations, he, too,
felt within himself a heavenly call,--the death of an old life, and the
uprising of a new purpose.
The colder manners and more repressed habits of modern times can give
no idea of the wild fervor of a religious revival among a people so
passionate and susceptible to impressions as the Italians. It swept
society like a spring torrent from the sides of the Apennines, bearing
all before it. Houses were sacked with religious fervor by penitent
owners, and licentious pictures and statuary and books, and all the
thousand temptations and appliances of a luxurious age, were burned in
the great public square. Artists convicted of impure and licentious
designs threw their palettes and brushes into the expiatory flames, and
retired to convents, till called forth by the voice of the preacher,
and bid to turn their art into higher channels. Since the days of
Saint Francis no such profound religious impulse had agitated the
Italian community.
In our times a conversion is signalized by few outward changes, however
deep the inner life; but the life of the Middle Ages was profoundly
symbolical, and always required the help of material images in its
expression.
The gay and dissolute young Lorenzo Sforza took leave of the world with
rites of awful solemnity. He made his will and disposed of all his
worldly property, and assembling his friends, bade them the farewell
of a dying man. Arrayed as for the grave, he was laid in his coffin,
and thus carried from his stately dwelling by the brethren of the
Misericordia, who, in their ghostly costume, with mournful chants and
lighted candles, bore him to the tomb of his ancestors, where the
coffin was deposited in the vault, and its occupant passed the awful
hours of the night in darkness and solitude. Thence he was carried, the
next day, almost in a state of insensibility, to a neighboring convent
of the severest order, where, for some weeks, he observed a penitential
retreat of silence and prayer, neither seeing nor hearing any living
being but his spiritual director.
The effect of all this on an ardent and sensitive temperament can
scarcely be conceived; and it is not to be wondered at that the once
gay and luxurious Lorenzo Sforza, when emerging from this tremendous
discipline, was so wholly lost in the worn and weary Padre Francesco
that it seemed as if in fact he had died and another had stepped into
his place. The face was ploughed deep with haggard furrows, and the
eyes were as those of a man who has seen the fearful secrets of another
life. He voluntarily sought a post as far removed as possible from the
scenes of his early days, so as more completely to destroy his identity
with the past; and he devoted himself with enthusiasm to the task of
awakening to a higher spiritual life the indolent, self-indulgent monks
of his order, and the ignorant peasantry of the vicinity.
But he soon discovered, what every earnest soul learns who has been
baptized into a sense of things invisible, how utterly powerless and
inert any mortal man is to inspire others with his own insights and
convictions. With bitter discouragement and chagrin, he saw that the
spiritual man must forever lift the dead weight of all the indolence
and indifference and animal sensuality that surround him,--that the
curse of Cassandra is upon him, forever to burn and writhe under
awful visions of truths which no one around him will regard. In early
life the associate only of the cultivated and the refined, Father
Francesco could not but experience at times an insupportable _ennui_
in listening to the confessions of people who had never learned
either to think or to feel with any degree of distinctness, and whom
his most fervent exhortations could not lift above the most trivial
interests of a mere animal life. He was weary of the childish quarrels
and bickerings of the monks, of their puerility, of their selfishness
and self-indulgence, of their hopeless vulgarity of mind, and utterly
discouraged with their inextricable labyrinths of deception. A
melancholy deep as the grave seized on him, and he redoubled his
austerities, in the hope that by making life painful he might make it
also short.
But the first time that the clear, sweet tones of Agnes rang in his
ears at the confessional, and her words, so full of unconscious poetry
and repressed genius, came like a strain of sweet music through the
grate, he felt at his heart a thrill to which it had long been a
stranger, and which seemed to lift the weary, aching load from off his
soul, as if some invisible angel had borne it up on his wings.
In his worldly days he had known women as the gallants in Boccaccio's
romances knew them, and among them one enchantress whose sorceries
had kindled in his heart one of those fatal passions which burn out
the whole of a man's nature, and leave it, like a sacked city, only
a smouldering heap of ashes. Deepest, therefore, among his vows of
renunciation had been those which divided him from all womankind. The
gulf that parted him and them was in his mind deep as hell, and he
thought of the sex only in the light of temptation and danger. For
the first time in his life, an influence serene, natural, healthy,
and sweet breathed over him from the mind of a woman,--an influence
so heavenly and peaceful that he did not challenge or suspect it,
but rather opened his worn heart insensibly to it, as one in a fetid
chamber naturally breathes freer when the fresh air is admitted.
How charming it was to find his most spiritual exhortations seized upon
with the eager comprehension of a nature innately poetic and ideal!
Nay, it sometimes seemed to him as if the suggestions which he gave
her dry and leafless she brought again to him in miraculous clusters
of flowers, like the barren rod of Joseph, which broke into blossoms
when he was betrothed to the spotless Mary; and yet, withal, she was
so humbly unconscious, so absolutely ignorant of the beauty of all she
said and thought, that she impressed him less as a mortal woman than as
one of those divine miracles in feminine form of which he had heard in
the legends of the saints.
Thenceforward his barren, discouraged life began to blossom with
wayside flowers,--and he mistrusted not the miracle, because the
flowers were all heavenly. The pious thought or holy admonition that he
saw trodden under the swinish feet of the monks he gathered up again in
hope,--_she_ would understand it; and gradually all his thoughts became
like carrier-doves, which, having once learned the way to a favorite
haunt, are ever fluttering to return thither.
Such is the wonderful power of human sympathy, that the discovery
even of the existence of a soul capable of understanding our inner
life often operates as a perfect charm; every thought, and feeling,
and aspiration carries with it a new value, from the interwoven
consciousness that attends it of the worth it would bear to that other
mind; so that, while that person lives, our existence is doubled in
value, even though oceans divide us.
The cloud of hopeless melancholy which had brooded over the mind of
Father Francesco lifted and sailed away, he knew not why, he knew not
when. A secret joyfulness and alacrity possessed his spirits; his
prayers became more fervent and his praises more frequent. Until now,
his meditations had been most frequently those of fear and wrath,--the
awful majesty of God, the terrible punishment of sinners, which he
conceived with all that haggard, dreadful sincerity of vigor which
characterized the modern Etruscan phase of religion of which the
"Inferno" of Dante was the exponent and the outcome. His preachings
and his exhortations had dwelt on that lurid world seen by the severe
Florentine, at whose threshold hope forever departs, and around whose
eternal circles of living torture the shivering spirit wanders dismayed
and blasted by terror.
He had been shocked and discouraged to find how utterly vain had been
his most intense efforts to stem the course of sin by presenting these
images of terror: how hard natures had listened to them with only a
coarse and cruel appetite, which seemed to increase their hardness and
brutality; and how timid ones had been withered by them, like flowers
scorched by the blast of a furnace; how, in fact, as in the case of
those cruel executions and bloody tortures then universal in the
jurisprudence of Europe, these pictures of eternal torture seemed to
exert a morbid demoralizing influence which hurried on the growth of
iniquity.
But since his acquaintance with Agnes, without his knowing exactly
why, thoughts of the Divine Love had floated into his soul, filling it
with a golden cloud like that which of old rested over the mercy-seat
in that sacred inner temple where the priest was admitted alone. He
became more affable and tender, more tolerant to the erring, more fond
of little children; would stop sometimes to lay his hand on the head
of a child, or to raise up one who lay overthrown in the street. The
song of little birds and the voices of animal life became to him full
of tenderness; and his prayers by the sick and dying seemed to have a
melting power, such as he had never known before. It was spring in his
soul,--soft, Italian spring,--such as brings out the musky breath of
the cyclamen, and the faint, tender perfume of the primrose, in every
moist dell of the Apennines.
A year passed in this way, perhaps the best and happiest of his
troubled life,--a year in which, insensibly to himself, the weekly
interviews with Agnes at the confessional became the rallying points
around which the whole of his life was formed, and she the unsuspected
spring of his inner being.
It was his duty, he said to himself, to give more than usual time and
thought to the working and polishing of this wondrous jewel which had
so unexpectedly been intrusted to him for the adorning of his Master's
crown; and so long as he conducted with the strictest circumspection
of his office, what had he to fear in the way of so delightful a duty?
He had never touched her hand; never had even the folds of her passing
drapery brushed against his garments of mortification and renunciation;
never, even in pastoral benediction, had he dared lay his hand on that
beautiful head. It is true, he had not forbidden himself to raise his
glance sometimes when he saw her coming in at the church door and
gliding up the aisle with downcast eyes, and thoughts evidently so far
above earth that she seemed, like one of Fra Angelico's angels, to be
moving on a cloud, so encompassed with stillness and sanctity that he
held his breath as she passed.
But in the confession of Dame Elsie that morning he had received a
shock which threw his whole interior being into a passionate agitation
which dismayed and astonished him.
The thought of Agnes, his spotless lamb, exposed to lawless and
licentious pursuit, of whose nature and probabilities his past life
gave him only too clear an idea, was of itself a very natural source of
anxiety. But Elsie had unveiled to him her plans for her marriage, and
consulted him on the propriety of placing Agnes immediately under the
protection of the husband she had chosen for her; and it was this part
of her communication which had awakened the severest internal recoil,
and raised a tumult of passions which the priest vainly sought either
to assuage or understand.
As soon as his morning duties were over, he repaired to his convent,
sought his cell, and, prostrate on his face before the crucifix, began
his internal reckoning with himself. The day passed in fasting and
solitude.
It is now golden evening, and on the square, flat roof of the convent,
which, high-perched on a crag, overlooks the bay, one might observe a
dark figure slowly pacing backward and forward. It is Father Francesco;
and as he walks up and down, one could see by his large, bright,
dilated eye, by the vivid red spot on either sunken cheek, and by the
nervous energy of his movements, that he is in the very height of some
mental crisis,--in that state of placid _extase_ in which the subject
supposes himself perfectly calm, because every nerve is screwed to the
highest point of tension and can vibrate no more.
What oceans had that day rolled over him and swept him, as one may see
a little boat rocked on the capricious surges of the Mediterranean!
Were, then, all his strivings and agonies in vain? Did he love this
woman with any earthly love? Was he jealous of the thought of a future
husband? Was it a tempting demon that said to him, "Lorenzo Sforza
might have shielded this treasure from the profanation of lawless
violence, from the brute grasp of an inappreciative peasant, but Father
Francesco cannot"? There was a moment when his whole being vibrated
with a perception of what a marriage bond might have been that was
indeed a sacrament, and that bound together two pure and loyal souls
who gave life and courage to each other in all holy purposes and heroic
deeds; and he almost feared that he had cursed his vows,--those awful
vows, at whose remembrance his inmost soul shivered through every nerve.
But after hours of prayer and struggle, and wave after wave of
agonizing convulsion, he gained one of those high points in human
possibility where souls can stand a little while at a time, and where
all things seem so transfigured and pure that they fancy themselves
thenceforward forever victorious over evil.
As he walks up and down in the gold-and-purple evening twilight, his
mind seems to him calm as that glowing sea that reflects the purple
shores of Ischia, and the quaint, fantastic grottoes and cliffs of
Capri. All is golden and glowing; he sees all clear; he is delivered
from his spiritual enemies; he treads them under his feet.
Yes, he says to himself, he loves Agnes,--loves her all-sacredly as
her guardian angel does, who ever beholdeth the face of her Father in
Heaven. Why, then, does he shrink from her marriage? Is it not evident?
Has that tender soul, that poetic nature, that aspiring genius,
anything in common with the vulgar coarse details of a peasant's life?
Will not her beauty always draw the eye of the licentious, expose her
artless innocence to solicitation which will annoy her and bring upon
her head the inconsiderate jealousy of her husband? Think of Agnes made
subject to the rude authority, to the stripes and correction, which men
of the lower class, under the promptings of jealousy, do not scruple
to inflict on their wives! What career did society, as then organized,
present to such a nature, so perilously gifted in body and mind? He has
the answer. The Church has opened a career to woman which all the world
denies her.
He remembers the story of the dyer's daughter of Siena, the fair
Saint Catharine. In his youth he had often visited the convent where
one of the first artists of Italy has immortalized her conflicts and
her victories, and knelt with his mother at the altar where she now
communes with the faithful. He remembered how, by her sanctity, her
humility, and her holy inspirations of soul, she had risen to the
courts of princes, whither she had been sent as ambassadress to arrange
for the interests of the Church; and then rose before his mind's eye
the gorgeous picture of Pinturicchio, where, borne in celestial repose
and purity amid all the powers and dignitaries of the Church, she is
canonized as one of those that shall reign and intercede with Christ in
heaven.
Was it wrong, therefore, in him, though severed from all womankind
by a gulf of irrevocable vows, that he should feel a kind of jealous
property in this gifted and beautiful creature? and though he might
not, even in thought, dream of possessing her himself, was there sin in
the vehement energy with which his whole nature rose up in him to say
that no other man should,--that she should be the bride of Heaven alone?
Certainly, if there were, it lurked far out of sight, and the priest
had a case that might have satisfied a conscience even more fastidious;
and he felt a sort of triumph in the results of his mental scrutiny.
Yes, she should ascend from glory to glory,--but his should be the hand
that should lead her upward. He would lead her within the consecrated
grate,--he would pronounce the awful words that should make it
sacrilege for all other men to approach her; and yet through life he
should be the guardian and director of her soul, the one being to whom
she should render an obedience as unlimited as that which belongs to
Christ alone.
Such were the thoughts of this victorious hour, which, alas! were
destined to fade as those purple skies and golden fires gradually went
out, leaving, in place of their light and glory, only the lurid glow of
Vesuvius.
CHAPTER VI
THE WALK TO THE CONVENT
Elsie returned from the confessional a little after sunrise, much
relieved and satisfied. Padre Francesco had shown such a deep interest
in her narrative that she was highly gratified. Then he had given her
advice which exactly accorded with her own views; and such advice is
always regarded as an eminent proof of sagacity in the giver.
On the point of the marriage he had recommended delay,--a course quite
in accordance with Elsie's desire, who, curiously enough, ever since
her treaty of marriage with Antonio had been commenced, had cherished
the most whimsical, jealous dislike of him, as if he were about to get
away her grandchild from her; and this rose at times so high that she
could scarcely speak peaceably to him,--a course of things which caused
Antonio to open wide his great soft ox-eyes, and wonder at the ways of
womankind; but he waited the event in philosophic tranquillity.
The morning sunbeams were shooting many a golden shaft among the
orange-trees when Elsie returned and found Agnes yet kneeling at her
prayers.
"Now, my little heart," said the old woman, when their morning meal was
done, "I am going to give you a holiday to-day. I will go with you to
the Convent, and you shall spend the day with the sisters, and so carry
Saint Agnes her ring."
"Oh, thank you, grandmamma! how good you are! May I stop a little on
the way, and pick some cyclamen and myrtles and daisies for her shrine?"
"Just as you like, child; but if you are going to do that, we must be
off soon, for I must be at my stand betimes to sell oranges: I had them
all picked this morning while my little darling was asleep."
"You always do everything, grandmamma, and leave me nothing to do: it
is not fair. But, grandmamma, if we are going to get flowers by the
way, let us follow down the stream, through the gorge, out upon the
sea-beach, and so walk along the sands, and go by the back path up the
rocks to the Convent: that walk is so shady and lovely at this time in
the morning, and it is so fresh along by the seaside!"
"As you please, dearie; but first fill a little basket with our best
oranges for the sisters."
"Trust me for that!" And the girl ran eagerly to the house, and drew
from her treasures a little white wicker basket, which she proceeded
to line curiously with orange-leaves, sticking sprays of blossoms in a
wreath round the border.
"Now for some of our best blood-oranges!" she said; "old Jocunda says
they put her in mind of pomegranates. And here are some of these little
ones,--see here, grandmamma!" she exclaimed as she turned and held up a
branch just broken, where five small golden balls grew together with a
pearly spray of white buds just beyond them.
The exercise of springing up for the branch had sent a vivid glow
into her clear brown cheek, and her eyes were dilated with excitement
and pleasure; and as she stood joyously holding the branch, while the
flickering shadows fell on her beautiful face, she seemed more like a
painter's dream than a reality.
Her grandmother stood a moment admiring her.
"She's too good and too pretty for Antonio or any other man: she
ought to be kept to look at," she said to herself. "If I could keep
her always, no man should have her; but death will come, and youth and
beauty go, and so somebody must care for her."
When the basket was filled and trimmed, Agnes took it on her arm. Elsie
raised and poised on her head the great square basket that contained
her merchandise, and began walking erect and straight down the narrow
rocky stairs that led into the gorge, holding her distaff with its
white flax in her hands, and stepping as easily as if she bore no
burden.
Agnes followed her with light, irregular movements, glancing aside
from time to time, as a tuft of flowers or a feathery spray of leaves
attracted her fancy. In a few moments her hands were too full, and
her woolen apron of many-colored stripes was raised over one arm to
hold her treasures, while a hymn to Saint Agnes, which she constantly
murmured to herself, came in little ripples of sound, now from behind
a rock, and now out of a tuft of bushes, to show where the wanderer
was hid. The song, like many Italian ones, would be nothing in
English,--only a musical repetition of sweet words to a very simple
and childlike idea, the _bella_, _bella_, _bella_ ringing out in every
verse with a tender joyousness that seemed in harmony with the waving
ferns and pendent flowers and long ivy-wreaths from among which its
notes issued. "Beautiful and sweet Agnes," it said, in a thousand
tender repetitions, "make me like thy little white lamb! Beautiful
Agnes, take me to the green fields where Christ's lambs are feeding!
Sweeter than the rose, fairer than the lily, take me where thou art!"
At the bottom of the ravine a little stream tinkles its way among
stones so mossy in their deep, cool shadow as to appear all verdure;
for seldom the light of the sun can reach the darkness where they lie.
A little bridge, hewn from solid rock, throws across the shrunken
stream an arch much wider than its waters seem to demand; for in spring
and autumn, when the torrents wash down from the mountains, its volume
is often suddenly increased.
This bridge was so entirely and evenly grown over with short thick moss
that it might seem cut of some strange kind of living green velvet, and
here and there it was quaintly embroidered with small blossoming tufts
of white alyssum, or feathers of ferns and maiden's-hair which shook
and trembled to every breeze. Nothing could be lovelier than this mossy
bridge, when some stray sunbeam, slanting up the gorge, took a fancy
to light it up with golden hues, and give transparent greenness to the
tremulous thin leaves that waved upon it.
On this spot Elsie paused a moment, and called back after Agnes, who
had disappeared into one of those deep grottoes with which the sides of
the gorge are perforated, and which are almost entirely veiled by the
pendent ivy-wreaths.
"Agnes! Agnes! wild girl! come quick!"
Only the sound of "_Bella, bella Agnella_" came out of the ivy-leaves
to answer her; but it sounded so happy and innocent that Elsie could
not forbear a smile, and in a moment Agnes came springing down with a
quantity of the feathery lycopodium in her hands, which grows nowhere
so well as in moist and dripping places.
Out of her apron were hanging festoons of golden broom, crimson
gladiolus, and long, trailing sprays of ivy; while she held aloft in
triumph a handful of the most superb cyclamen, whose rosy crowns rise
so beautifully above their dark quaint leaves in moist and shady places.
"See, see, grandmother, what an offering I have! Saint Agnes will be
pleased with me to-day; for I believe in her heart she loves flowers
better than gems."
"Well, well, wild one,--time flies, we must hurry." And crossing the
bridge quickly, the grandmother struck into a mossy footpath that led
them, after some walking, under the old Roman bridge at the gateway of
Sorrento. Two hundred feet above their heads rose the mighty arches,
enameled with moss and feathered with ferns all the way; and below this
bridge the gorge grew somewhat wider, its sides gradually receding
and leaving a beautiful flat tract of land, which was laid out as an
orange-orchard. The golden fruit was shut in by rocky walls on either
side which here formed a perfect hotbed, and no oranges were earlier or
finer.
Through this beautiful orchard the two at length emerged from the gorge
upon the sea-sands, where lay the blue Mediterranean swathed in bands
of morning mist, its many-colored waters shimmering with a thousand
reflected lights, and old Capri panting through sultry blue mists, and
Vesuvius with his cloud-spotted sides and smoke-wreathed top burst
into view. At a little distance a boat-load of bronzed fishermen had
just drawn in a net, from which they were throwing out a quantity of
sardines, which flapped and fluttered in the sunshine like scales of
silver. The wind blowing freshly bore thousands of little purple waves
to break one after another at the foamy line which lay on the sand.
Agnes ran gayly along the beach with her flowers and vines fluttering
from her gay striped apron, and her cheeks flushed with exercise
and pleasure,--sometimes stopping and turning with animation to
her grandmother to point out the various floral treasures that
enameled every crevice and rift of the steep wall of rock which rose
perpendicularly above their heads in that whole line of the shore which
is crowned with the old city of Sorrento: and surely never did rocky
wall show to the open sea a face more picturesque and flowery. The deep
red cliff was hollowed here and there into fanciful grottoes, draped
with every varied hue and form of vegetable beauty. Here a crevice
high in air was all abloom with purple gillyflower, and depending in
festoons above it the golden blossoms of the broom; here a cleft seemed
to be a nestling-place for a colony of gladiolus, with its crimson
flowers and blade-like leaves; here the silver-frosted foliage of
the miller-geranium, or of the wormwood, toned down the extravagant
brightness of other blooms by its cooler tints. In some places it
seemed as if a sort of floral cascade were tumbling confusedly over the
rocks, mingling all hues and all forms in a tangled mass of beauty.
"Well, well," said old Elsie, as Agnes pointed to some superb
gillyflowers which grew nearly half-way up the precipice, "is the child
possessed? You have all the gorge in your apron already. Stop looking,
and let us hurry on."
After a half-hour's walk, they came to a winding staircase cut in the
rock, which led them a zigzag course up through galleries and grottoes
looking out through curious windows and loop-holes upon the sea, till
finally they emerged at the old sculptured portal of a shady garden
which was surrounded by the cloistered arcades of the Convent of Saint
Agnes.
The Convent of Saint Agnes was one of those monuments in which the
piety of the Middle Ages delighted to commemorate the triumphs of the
new Christianity over the old Heathenism.
The balmy climate and paradisiacal charms of Sorrento and the adjacent
shores of Naples had made them favorite resorts during the latter
period of the Roman Empire,--a period when the whole civilized world
seemed to human view about to be dissolved in the corruption of
universal sensuality. The shores of Baiæ were witnesses of the orgies
and cruelties of Nero and a court made in his likeness, and the
palpitating loveliness of Capri became the hotbed of the unnatural
vices of Tiberius. The whole of Southern Italy was sunk in a
debasement of animalism and ferocity which seemed irrecoverable, and
would have been so, had it not been for the handful of salt which a
Galilean peasant had about that time cast into the putrid, fermenting
mass of human society.
We must not wonder at the zeal which caused the artistic Italian nature
to love to celebrate the passing away of an era of unnatural vice and
demoniac cruelty by visible images of the purity, the tenderness, the
universal benevolence which Jesus had brought into the world.
Sometime about the middle of the thirteenth century, it had been a
favorite enterprise of a princess of a royal family in Naples to erect
a convent to Saint Agnes, the guardian of female purity, out of the
wrecks and remains of an ancient temple of Venus, whose white pillars
and graceful acanthus-leaves once crowned a portion of the precipice
on which the town was built, and were reflected from the glassy blue
of the sea at its feet. It was said that this princess was the first
lady abbess. Be that as it may, it proved to be a favorite retreat for
many ladies of rank and religious aspiration, whom ill-fortune in some
of its varying forms led to seek its quiet shades, and it was well and
richly endowed by its royal patrons.
It was built after the manner of conventual buildings generally,--in a
hollow square, with a cloistered walk around the inside looking upon a
garden.
The portal at which Agnes and her grandmother knocked, after ascending
the winding staircase cut in the precipice, opened through an arched
passage into this garden.
As the ponderous door swung open, it was pleasant to hear the lulling
sound of a fountain, which came forth with a gentle patter, like that
of soft summer rain, and to see the waving of rose-bushes and golden
jessamines, and smell the perfumes of orange-blossoms mingling with
those of a thousand other flowers.
The door was opened by an odd-looking portress. She might be
seventy-five or eighty; her cheeks were of the color of very yellow
parchment drawn in dry wrinkles; her eyes were those large, dark,
lustrous ones so common in her country, but seemed, in the general
decay and shrinking of every other part of her face, to have acquired
a wild, unnatural appearance; while the falling away of her teeth left
nothing to impede the meeting of her hooked nose with her chin. Add to
this, she was humpbacked, and twisted in her figure; and one needs all
the force of her very good-natured, kindly smile to redeem the image
of poor old Jocunda from association with that of some Thracian witch,
and cause one to see in her the appropriate portress of a Christian
institution.
Nevertheless, Agnes fell upon her neck and imprinted a very fervent
kiss upon what was left of her withered cheek, and was repaid by a
shower of those epithets of endearment which in the language of Italy
fly thick and fast as the petals of the orange blossom from her groves.
"Well, well," said old Elsie, "I'm going to leave her here to-day.
You've no objections, I suppose?"
"Bless the sweet lamb, no! She belongs here of good right. I believe
blessed Saint Agnes has adopted her; for I've seen her smile, plain as
could be, when the little one brought her flowers."
"Well, Agnes," said the old woman, "I shall come for you after the Ave
Maria." Saying which, she lifted her basket and departed.
The garden where the two were left was one of the most peaceful
retreats that the imagination of a poet could create.
Around it ran on all sides the Byzantine arches of a cloistered walk,
which, according to the quaint, rich fashion of that style, had been
painted with vermilion, blue, and gold. The vaulted roof was spangled
with gold stars on a blue ground, and along the sides was a series of
fresco pictures representing the various scenes in the life of Saint
Agnes; and as the foundress of the Convent was royal in her means,
there was no lack either of gold or gems or of gorgeous painting.
Full justice was done in the first picture to the princely wealth
and estate of the fair Agnes, who was represented as a pure-looking,
pensive child, standing in a thoughtful attitude, with long ripples of
golden hair flowing down over a simple white tunic, and her small hands
clasping a cross on her bosom, while, kneeling at her feet, obsequious
slaves and tire-women were offering the richest gems and the most
gorgeous robes to her serious and abstracted gaze.
In another, she was represented as walking modestly to school, and
winning the admiration of the son of the Roman Prætor, who fell
sick--so says the legend--for the love of her.
Then there was the demand of her hand in marriage by the princely
father of the young man, and her calm rejection of the gorgeous gifts
and splendid gems which he had brought to purchase her consent.
Then followed in order her accusation before the tribunals as a
Christian, her trial, and the various scenes of her martyrdom.
Although the drawing of the figures and the treatment of the subjects
had the quaint stiffness of the thirteenth century, their general
effect, as seen from the shady bowers of the garden, was of a solemn
brightness, a strange and fanciful richness, which was poetical and
impressive.
In the centre of the garden was a fountain of white marble, which
evidently was the wreck of something that had belonged to the old Greek
temple. The statue of a nymph sat on a green mossy pedestal in the
midst of a sculptured basin, and from a partially reversed urn on which
she was leaning, a clear stream of water dashed down from one mossy
fragment to another, till it lost itself in the placid pool.
The figure and face of this nymph, in their classic finish of outline,
formed a striking contrast to the drawing of the Byzantine paintings
within the cloisters, and their juxtaposition in the same enclosure
seemed a presentation of the spirit of a past and present era: the past
so graceful in line, so perfect and airy in conception, so utterly
without spiritual aspiration or life; the present limited in artistic
power, but so earnest, so intense, seeming to struggle and burn, amid
its stiff and restricted boundaries, for the expression of some diviner
phase of humanity.
Nevertheless, the nymph of the fountain, different in style and
execution as it was, was so fair a creature, that it was thought best,
after the spirit of those days, to purge her from all heathen and
improper histories by baptizing her in the waters of her own fountain,
and bestowing on her the name of the saint to whose convent she was
devoted. The simple sisterhood, little conversant in nice points of
antiquity, regarded her as Saint Agnes dispensing the waters of purity
to her convent; and marvelous and sacred properties were ascribed to
the water, when taken fasting with a sufficient number of prayers and
other religious exercises. All around the neighborhood of this fountain
the ground was one bed of blue and white violets, whose fragrance
filled the air, and which were deemed by the nuns to have come up there
in especial token of the favor with which Saint Agnes regarded the
conversion of this heathen relic to pious and Christian uses.
This nymph had been an especial favorite of the childhood of Agnes, and
she had always had a pleasure which she could not exactly account for
in gazing upon it. It is seldom that one sees in the antique conception
of the immortals any trace of human feeling. Passionless perfection
and repose seem to be their uniform character. But now and then from
the ruins of Southern Italy fragments have been dug, not only pure in
outline, but invested with a strange pathetic charm, as if the calm,
inviolable circle of divinity had been touched by some sorrowing sense
of that unexplained anguish with which the whole lower creation groans.
One sees this mystery of expression in the face of that strange and
beautiful Psyche which still enchants the Museum of Naples. Something
of this charm of mournful pathos lingered on the beautiful features
of this nymph,--an expression so delicate and shadowy that it seemed
to address itself only to finer natures. It was as if all the silent,
patient woe and discouragement of a dumb antiquity had been congealed
into this memorial. Agnes was often conscious, when a child, of being
saddened by it, and yet drawn towards it with a mysterious attraction.
About this fountain, under the shadow of bending rose trees and yellow
jessamines, was a circle of garden seats, adopted also from the ruins
of the past. Here a graceful Corinthian capital, with every white
acanthus-leaf perfect, stood in a mat of acanthus-leaves of Nature's
own making, glossy green and sharply cut; and there was a long portion
of a frieze sculptured with graceful dancing figures; and in another
place a fragment of a fluted column, with lycopodium and colosseum vine
hanging from its fissures in graceful draping. On these seats Agnes
had dreamed away many a tranquil hour, making garlands of violets, and
listening to the marvelous legends of old Jocunda.
In order to understand anything of the true idea of conventual life in
those days, we must consider that books were as yet unknown, except
as literary rarities, and reading and writing were among the rare
accomplishments of the higher classes; and that Italy, from the time
that the great Roman Empire fell and broke into a thousand shivers,
had been subject to a continual series of conflicts and struggles,
which took from life all security. Norman, Dane, Sicilian, Spaniard,
Frenchman, and German mingled and struggled, now up and now down;
and every struggle was attended by the little ceremonies of sacking
towns, burning villages, and routing out entire populations to utter
misery and wretchedness. During these tumultuous ages, those buildings
consecrated by a religion recognized alike by all parties afforded to
misfortune the only inviolable asylum, and to feeble and discouraged
spirits the only home safe from the prospect of reverses.
If the destiny of woman is a problem that calls for grave attention
even in our enlightened times, and if she is too often a sufferer from
the inevitable movements of society, what must have been her position
and needs in those ruder ages, unless the genius of Christianity had
opened refuges for her weakness, made inviolable by the awful sanctions
of religion?
What could they do, all these girls and women together, with the
twenty-four long hours of every day, without reading or writing, and
without the care of children? Enough; with their multiplied diurnal
prayer periods, with each its chants and ritual of observances,--with
the preparation for meals, and the clearing away thereafter,--with the
care of the chapel, shrine, sacred gifts, drapery, and ornaments,--with
embroidering altar-cloths and making sacred tapers,--with preparing
conserves of rose leaves and curious spiceries,--with mixing drugs for
the sick,--with all those mutual offices and services to each other
which their relations in one family gave rise to,--and with divers
feminine gossipries and harmless chatterings and cooings, one can
conceive that these dove-cots of the Church presented often some of the
most tranquil scenes of those convulsive and disturbed periods.
Human nature probably had its varieties there as otherwhere. There were
there the domineering and the weak, the ignorant and the vulgar, and
the patrician and the princess, and though professedly all brought on
the footing of sisterly equality, we are not to suppose any Utopian
degree of perfection among them. The way of pure spirituality was
probably, in the convent as well as out, that strait and narrow one
which there be few to find. There, as elsewhere, the devotee who
sought to progress faster toward heaven than suited the paces of her
fellow-travelers was reckoned a troublesome enthusiast, till she got
far enough in advance to be worshiped as a saint.
Sister Theresa, the abbess of this convent, was the youngest daughter
in a princely Neapolitan family, who from her cradle had been destined
to the cloister, in order that her brother and sister might inherit
more splendid fortunes and form more splendid connections. She had been
sent to this place too early to have much recollection of any other
mode of life; and when the time came to take the irrevocable step, she
renounced with composure a world she had never known.
Her brother had endowed her with a _livre des heures_, illuminated
with all the wealth of blue and gold and divers colors which the art
of those times afforded,--a work executed by a pupil of the celebrated
Fra Angelico; and the possession of this treasure was regarded by her
as a far richer inheritance than that princely state of which she knew
nothing. Her neat little cell had a window that looked down on the
sea,--on Capri, with its fantastic grottoes,--on Vesuvius, with its
weird daily and nightly changes. The light that came in from the joint
reflection of sea and sky gave a golden and picturesque coloring to the
simple and bare furniture, and in sunny weather she often sat there,
just as a lizard lies upon a wall, with the simple, warm, delightful
sense of living and being amid scenes of so much beauty. Of the life
that people lived in the outer world, the struggle, the hope, the
fear, the vivid joy, the bitter sorrow, Sister Theresa knew nothing.
She could form no judgment and give no advice founded on any such
experience.
The only life she knew was a certain ideal one, drawn from the legends
of the saints; and her piety was a calm, pure enthusiasm which had
never been disturbed by a temptation or a struggle. Her rule in the
Convent was even and serene; but those who came to her flock from the
real world, from the trials and temptations of a real experience, were
always enigmas to her, and she could scarcely comprehend or aid them.
In fact, since in the cloister, as everywhere else, character will
find its level, it was old Jocunda who was the real governess of the
Convent. Jocunda was originally a peasant woman, whose husband had been
drafted to some of the wars of his betters, and she had followed his
fortunes in the camp. In the sack of a fortress, she lost her husband
and four sons, all the children she had, and herself received an injury
which distorted her form, and so she took refuge in the Convent.
Here her energy and _savoir-faire_ rendered her indispensable in
every department. She made the bargains, bought the provisions (being
allowed to sally forth for these purposes), and formed the medium
by which the timid, abstract, defenseless nuns accomplished those
material relations with the world with which the utmost saintliness
cannot afford to dispense. Besides and above all this, Jocunda's wide
experience and endless capabilities of narrative made her an invaluable
resource for enlivening any dull hours that might be upon the hands of
the sisterhood; and all these recommendations, together with a strong
mother-wit and native sense, soon made her so much the leading spirit
in the Convent that Mother Theresa herself might be said to be under
her dominion.
"So, so," she said to Agnes, when she had closed the gate after
Elsie,--"you never come empty-handed. What lovely oranges!--worth
double any that one can buy of anybody else but your grandmother."
"Yes, and these flowers I brought to dress the altar."
"Ah, yes! Saint Agnes has given you a particular grace for that," said
Jocunda.
"And I have brought a ring for her treasury," said Agnes, taking out
the gift of the Cavalier.
"Holy Mother! here is something, to be sure!" said Jocunda, catching it
eagerly. "Why, Agnes, this is a diamond,--and as pretty a one as ever
I saw. How it shines!" she added, holding it up. "That's a prince's
present. How did you get it?"
"I want to tell our mother about it," said Agnes.
"You do?" said Jocunda. "You'd better tell me. I know fifty times as
much about such things as she."
"Dear Jocunda, I will tell you, too; but I love Mother Theresa, and I
ought to give it to her first."
"As you please, then," said Jocunda. "Well, put your flowers here by
the fountain, where the spray will keep them cool, and we will go to
her."
CHAPTER VII
THE DAY AT THE CONVENT
The Mother Theresa sat in a sort of withdrawing-room, the roof of which
rose in arches, starred with blue and gold like that of the cloister,
and the sides were frescoed with scenes from the life of the Virgin.
Over every door, and in convenient places between the paintings, texts
of Holy Writ were illuminated in blue and scarlet and gold, with a
richness and fancifulness of outline, as if every sacred letter had
blossomed into a mystical flower. The Abbess herself, with two of
her nuns, was busily embroidering a new altar-cloth, with a lavish
profusion of adornment; and, from time to time, their voices rose in
the musical tones of an ancient Latin hymn. The words were full of that
quaint and mystical pietism with which the fashion of the times clothed
the expression of devotional feeling:--
"Jesu, corona virginum,
Quem mater illa concepit,
Quæ sola virgo parturit,
Hæc vota clemens accipe.
"Qui pascis inter lilia
Septus choreis virginum,
Sponsus decoris gloria
Sponsisque reddens præmia.
"Quocunque pergis, virgines
Sequuntur atque laudibus
Post te canentes cursitant
Hymnosque dulces personant."[1]
[1] "Jesus, crown of virgin spirits,
Whom a virgin mother bore,
Graciously accept our praises
While thy footsteps we adore.
"Thee among the lilies feeding
Choirs of virgins walk beside,
Bridegroom crowned with glorious beauty
Giving beauty to thy bride.
"Where thou goest still they follow
Singing, singing as they move,
All those souls forever virgin
Wedded only to thy love."
This little canticle was, in truth, very different from the hymns
to Venus which used to resound in the temple which the convent had
displaced. The voices which sung were of a deep, plaintive contralto,
much resembling the richness of a tenor, and as they moved in modulated
waves of chanting sound, the effect was soothing and dreamy. Agnes
stopped at the door to listen.
"Stop, dear Jocunda," she said to the old woman, who was about to push
her way abruptly into the room, "wait till it is over."
Jocunda, who was quite matter-of-fact in her ideas of religion, made a
little movement of impatience, but was recalled to herself by observing
the devout absorption with which Agnes, with clasped hands and downcast
head, was mentally joining in the hymn with a solemn brightness in her
young face.
"If she hasn't got a vocation, nobody ever had one," said Jocunda,
mentally. "Deary me, I wish I had more of one myself!"
When the strain died away, and was succeeded by a conversation on the
respective merits of two kinds of gold embroidering thread, Agnes and
Jocunda entered the apartment. Agnes went forward and kissed the hand
of the Mother reverentially.
Sister Theresa we have before described as tall, pale, and sad-eyed,--a
moonlight style of person, wanting in all those elements of warm color
and physical solidity which give the impression of a real vital human
existence. The strongest affection she had ever known had been that
which had been excited by the childish beauty and graces of Agnes, and
she folded her in her arms and kissed her forehead with a warmth that
had in it the semblance of maternity.
"Grandmamma has given me a day to spend with you, dear mother," said
Agnes.
"Welcome, dear little child!" said Mother Theresa. "Your spiritual home
always stands open to you."
"I have something to speak to you of in particular, my mother," said
Agnes, blushing deeply.
"Indeed!" said the Mother Theresa, a slight movement of curiosity
arising in her mind as she signed to the two nuns to leave the
apartment.
"My mother," said Agnes, "yesterday evening, as grandmamma and I were
sitting at the gate, selling oranges, a young cavalier came up and
bought oranges of me, and he kissed my forehead and asked me to pray
for him, and gave me this ring for the shrine of Saint Agnes."
"Kissed your forehead!" said Jocunda, "here's a pretty go! it isn't
like you, Agnes, to let him."
"He did it before I knew," said Agnes. "Grandmamma reproved him, and
then he seemed to repent, and gave this ring for the shrine of Saint
Agnes."
"And a pretty one it is, too," said Jocunda. "We haven't a prettier in
all our treasury. Not even the great emerald the Queen gave is better
in its way than this."
"And he asked you to pray for him?" said Mother Theresa.
"Yes, mother dear; he looked right into my eyes and made me look into
his, and made me promise; and I knew that holy virgins never refused
their prayers to any one that asked, and so I followed their example."
"I'll warrant me he was only mocking at you for a poor little fool,"
said Jocunda; "the gallants of our day don't believe much in prayers."
"Perhaps so, Jocunda," said Agnes, gravely; "but if that be the case,
he needs prayers all the more."
"Yes," said Mother Theresa. "Remember the story of the blessed Saint
Dorothea,--how a wicked young nobleman mocked at her, when she was
going to execution, and said, 'Dorothea, Dorothea, I will believe, when
you shall send me down some of the fruits and flowers of Paradise;' and
she, full of faith, said, 'To-day I will send them;' and, wonderful
to tell, that very day, at evening, an angel came to the young man
with a basket of citrons and roses, and said, 'Dorothea sends thee
these, wherefore believe.' See what grace a pure maiden can bring to a
thoughtless young man,--for this young man was converted and became a
champion of the faith."
"That was in the old times," said Jocunda, skeptically. "I don't
believe setting the lamb to pray for the wolf will do much in our day.
Prithee, child, what manner of man was this gallant?"
"He was beautiful as an angel," said Agnes, "only it was not a good
beauty. He looked proud and sad, both,--like one who is not at ease in
his heart. Indeed, I feel very sorry for him; his eyes made a kind of
trouble in my mind that reminds me to pray for him often."
"And I will join my prayers to yours, dear daughter," said the Mother
Theresa; "I long to have you with us, that we may pray together every
day; say, do you think your grandmamma will spare you to us wholly
before long?"
"Grandmamma will not hear of it yet," said Agnes; "and she loves me
so, it would break her heart, if I should leave her, and she could not
be happy here; but, mother, you have told me we could carry an altar
always in our hearts, and adore in secret. When it is God's will I
should come to you, He will incline her heart."
"Between you and me, little one," said Jocunda, "I think there will
soon be a third person who will have something to say in the case."
"Whom do you mean?" said Agnes.
"A husband," said Jocunda; "I suppose your grandmother has one picked
out for you. You are neither humpbacked nor cross-eyed, that you
shouldn't have one as well as other girls."
"I don't want one, Jocunda; and I have promised to Saint Agnes to come
here, if she will only get grandmother to consent."
"Bless you, my daughter!" said Mother Theresa; "only persevere and the
way will be opened."
"Well, well," said Jocunda, "we'll see. Come, little one, if you
wouldn't have your flowers wilt, we must go back and look after them."
Reverently kissing the hand of the Abbess, Agnes withdrew with her old
friend, and crossed again to the garden to attend to her flowers.
"Well now, childie," said Jocunda, "you can sit here and weave your
garlands, while I go and look after the conserves of raisins and
citrons that Sister Cattarina is making. She is stupid at anything but
her prayers, is Cattarina. Our Lady be gracious to me! I think I got
my vocation from Saint Martha, and if it wasn't for me, I don't know
what would become of things in the Convent. Why, since I came here, our
conserves, done up in fig-leaf packages, have had quite a run at Court,
and our gracious Queen herself was good enough to send an order for
a hundred of them last week. I could have laughed to see how puzzled
the Mother Theresa looked; much she knows about conserves! I suppose
she thinks Gabriel brings them straight down from Paradise, done up
in leaves of the tree of life. Old Jocunda knows what goes to their
making up; she's good for something, if she is old and twisted; many a
scrubby old olive bears fat berries," said the old portress, chuckling.
"Oh, dear Jocunda," said Agnes, "why must you go this minute? I want to
talk with you about so many things!"
"Bless the sweet child! it does want its old Jocunda, does it?" said
the old woman, in the tone with which one caresses a baby. "Well, well,
it should then! Just wait a minute, till I go and see that our holy
Saint Cattarina hasn't fallen a-praying over the conserving-pan. I'll
be back in a moment."
So saying, she hobbled off briskly, and Agnes, sitting down on the
fragment sculptured with dancing nymphs, began abstractedly pulling her
flowers towards her, shaking from them the dew of the fountain.
Unconsciously to herself, as she sat there, her head drooped into
the attitude of the marble nymph, and her sweet features assumed the
same expression of plaintive and dreamy thoughtfulness; her heavy
dark lashes lay on her pure waxen cheeks like the dark fringe of some
tropical flower. Her form, in its drooping outlines, scarcely yet
showed the full development of womanhood, which after-years might
unfold into the ripe fullness of her country-women. Her whole attitude
and manner were those of an exquisitely sensitive and highly organized
being, just struggling into the life of some mysterious new inner
birth,--into the sense of powers of feeling and being hitherto unknown
even to herself.
"Ah," she softly sighed to herself, "how little I am! how little I can
do! Could I convert one soul! Ah, holy Dorothea, send down the roses of
heaven into his soul, that he also may believe!"
"Well, my little beauty, you have not finished even one garland," said
the voice of old Jocunda, bustling up behind her. "Praise to Saint
Martha, the conserves are doing well, and so I catch a minute for my
little heart."
So saying, she sat down with her spindle and flax by Agnes, for an
afternoon gossip.
"Dear Jocunda, I have heard you tell stories about spirits that haunt
lonesome places. Did you ever hear about any in the gorge?"
"Why, bless the child, yes,--spirits are always pacing up and down in
lonely places. Father Anselmo told me that; and he had seen a priest
once that had seen that in the Holy Scriptures themselves,--so it must
be true."
"Well, did you ever hear of their making the most beautiful music?"
"Haven't I?" said Jocunda,--"to be sure I have,--singing enough to draw
the very heart out of your body,--it's an old trick they have. Why, I
want to know if you never heard about the King of Amalfi's son coming
home from fighting for the Holy Sepulchre? Why, there's rocks not far
out from this very town where the Sirens live; and if the King's son
hadn't had a holy bishop on board, who slept every night with a piece
of the true cross under his pillow, the green ladies would have sung
him straight into perdition. They are very fair-spoken at first, and
sing so that a man gets perfectly drunk with their music, and longs to
fly to them; but they suck him down at last under water, and strangle
him, and that's the end of him."
"You never told me about this before, Jocunda."
"Haven't I, child? Well, I will now. You see, this good bishop, he
dreamed three times that they would sail past these rocks, and he was
told to give all the sailors holy wax from an altar-candle to stop
their ears, so that they shouldn't hear the music. Well, the King's son
said he wanted to hear the music, so he wouldn't have his ears stopped;
but he told 'em to tie him to the mast, so that he could hear it, but
not to mind a word he said, if he begged 'em ever so hard to untie him.
"Well, you see they did it; and the old bishop, he had his ears sealed
up tight, and so did all the men; but the young man stood tied to the
mast, and when they sailed past he was like a demented creature. He
called out that it was his lady who was singing, and he wanted to go to
her,--and his mother, who they all knew was a blessed saint in paradise
years before; and he commanded them to untie him, and pulled and
strained on his cords to get free; but they only tied him the tighter,
and so they got him past,--for, thanks to the holy wax, the sailors
never heard a word, and so they kept their senses. So they all got safe
home; but the young prince was so sick and pining that he had to be
exorcised and prayed for seven times seven days before they could get
the music out of his head."
"Why," said Agnes, "do those Sirens sing there yet?"
"Well, that was a hundred years ago. They say the old bishop, he prayed
'em down; for he went out a little after on purpose, and gave 'em a
precious lot of holy water; most likely he got 'em pretty well under,
though my husband's brother says he's heard 'em singing in a small way,
like frogs in springtime; but he gave 'em a pretty wide berth. You
see, these spirits are what's left of old heathen times, when, Lord
bless us! the earth was just as full of 'em as a bit of old cheese
is of mites. Now a Christian body, if they take reasonable care, can
walk quit of 'em; and if they have any haunts in lonesome and doleful
places, if one puts up a cross or a shrine, they know they have to go."
"I am thinking," said Agnes, "it would be a blessed work to put up some
shrines to Saint Agnes and our good Lord in the gorge, and I'll promise
to keep the lamps burning and the flowers in order."
"Bless the child!" said Jocunda, "that is a pious and Christian
thought."
"I have an uncle in Florence who is a father in the holy convent of San
Marco, who paints and works in stone,--not for money, but for the glory
of God; and when he comes this way I will speak to him about it," said
Agnes. "About this time in the spring he always visits us."
"That's mighty well thought of," said Jocunda. "And now, tell me,
little lamb, have you any idea who this grand cavalier may be that gave
you the ring?"
"No," said Agnes, pausing a moment over the garland of flowers she was
weaving,--"only Giulietta told me that he was brother to the King.
Giulietta said everybody knew him."
"I'm not so sure of that," said Jocunda. "Giulietta always thinks she
knows more than she does."
"Whatever he may be, his worldly state is nothing to me," said Agnes.
"I know him only in my prayers."
"Ay, ay," muttered the old woman to herself, looking obliquely out of
the corner of her eye at the girl, who was busily sorting her flowers;
"perhaps he will be seeking some other acquaintance."
"You haven't seen him since?" said Jocunda.
"Seen him? Why, dear Jocunda, it was only last evening"--
"True enough. Well, child, don't think too much of him. Men are
dreadful creatures,--in these times especially; they snap up a pretty
girl as a fox does a chicken, and no questions asked."
"I don't think he looked wicked, Jocunda; he had a proud, sorrowful
look. I don't know what could make a rich, handsome young man
sorrowful; but I feel in my heart that he is not happy. Mother Theresa
says that those who can do nothing but pray may convert princes without
knowing it."
"Maybe it is so," said Jocunda, in the same tone in which thrifty
professors of religion often assent to the same sort of truths in our
days. "I've seen a good deal of that sort of cattle in my day; and one
would think, by their actions, that praying souls must be scarce where
they came from."
Agnes abstractedly stooped and began plucking handfuls of lycopodium,
which was growing green and feathery on one side of the marble frieze
on which she was sitting; in so doing, a fragment of white marble,
which had been overgrown in the luxuriant green, appeared to view. It
was that frequent object in the Italian soil,--a portion of an old
Roman tombstone. Agnes bent over, intent on the mystic "_Dis Manibus_,"
in old Roman letters.
"Lord bless the child! I've seen thousands of them," said Jocunda;
"it's some old heathen's grave, that's been in hell these hundred
years."
"In hell?" said Agnes, with a distressful accent.
"Of course," said Jocunda. "Where should they be? Serves 'em right,
too; they were a vile old set."
"Oh, Jocunda, it's dreadful to think of, that they should have been in
hell all this time."
"And no nearer the end than when they began," said Jocunda.
Agnes gave a shivering sigh, and, looking up into the golden sky that
was pouring such floods of splendor through the orange trees and
jasmines, thought, How could it be that the world could possibly be
going on so sweet and fair over such an abyss?
"Oh, Jocunda!" she said, "it does seem too dreadful to believe! How
could they help being heathen,--being born so,--and never hearing of
the true Church?"
"Sure enough," said Jocunda, spinning away energetically, "but that's
no business of mine; my business is to save _my_ soul, and that's what
I came here for. The dear saints know I found it dull enough at first,
for I'd been used to jaunting round with my old man and the boy; but
what with marketing and preserving, and one thing and another, I get on
better now, praise to Saint Agnes!"
The large, dark eyes of Agnes were fixed abstractedly on the old woman
as she spoke, slowly dilating, with a sad, mysterious expression, which
sometimes came over them.
"Ah! how can the saints themselves be happy?" she said. "One might be
willing to wear sackcloth and sleep on the ground, one might suffer
ever so many years and years, if only one might save some of them."
"Well, it does seem hard," said Jocunda; "but what's the use of
thinking of it? Old Father Anselmo told us in one of his sermons that
the Lord wills that his saints should come to rejoice in the punishment
of all heathens and heretics; and he told us about a great saint once,
who took it into his head to be distressed because one of the old
heathen whose books he was fond of reading had gone to hell,--and he
fasted and prayed, and wouldn't take no for an answer, till he got him
out."
"He did, then?" said Agnes, clasping her hands in an ecstasy.
"Yes; but the good Lord told him never to try it again,--and He struck
him dumb, as a kind of hint, you know. Why, Father Anselmo said that
even getting souls out of purgatory was no easy matter. He told us of
one holy nun who spent nine years fasting and praying for the soul of
her prince, who was killed in a duel, and then she saw in a vision
that he was only raised the least little bit out of the fire,--and she
offered up her life as a sacrifice to the Lord to deliver him, but,
after all, when she died he wasn't quite delivered. Such things made
me think that a poor old sinner like me would never get out at all, if
I didn't set about it in earnest,--though it ain't all nuns that save
their souls either. I remember in Pisa I saw a great picture of the
Judgment Day in the Campo Santo, and there were lots of abbesses, and
nuns, and monks, and bishops, too, that the devils were clearing off
into the fire."
"Oh, Jocunda, how dreadful that fire must be!"
"Yes," said Jocunda. "Father Anselmo said hell-fire wasn't like any
kind of fire we have here,--made to warm us and cook our food,--but
a kind made especially to torment body and soul, and not made for
anything else. I remember a story he told us about that. You see, there
was an old duchess that lived in a grand old castle,--and a proud,
wicked old thing enough; and her son brought home a handsome young
bride to the castle, and the old duchess was jealous of her,--'cause,
you see, she hated to give up her place in the house, and the old
family jewels, and all the splendid things,--and so one time, when the
poor young thing was all dressed up in a set of the old family lace,
what does the old hag do but set fire to it!"
"How horrible!" said Agnes.
"Yes; and when the young thing ran screaming in her agony, the old hag
stopped her and tore off a pearl rosary that she was wearing, for fear
it should be spoiled by the fire."
"Holy Mother! can such things be possible?" said Agnes.
"Well, you see, she got her pay for it. That rosary was of famous old
pearls that had been in the family a hundred years; but from that
moment the good Lord struck it with a curse, and filled it white-hot
with hell-fire, so that if anybody held it a few minutes in their hand,
it would burn to the bone. The old sinner made believe that she was
in great affliction for the death of her daughter-in-law, and that
it was all an accident, and the poor young man went raving mad,--but
that awful rosary the old hag couldn't get rid of. She couldn't give
it away,--she couldn't sell it,--but back it would come every night,
and lie right over her heart, all white-hot with the fire that burned
in it. She gave it to a convent, and she sold it to a merchant, but
back it came; and she locked it up in the heaviest chests, and she
buried it down in the lowest vaults, but it always came back in the
night, till she was worn to a skeleton; and at last the old thing died
without confession or sacrament, and went where she belonged. She was
found lying dead in her bed one morning, and the rosary was gone; but
when they came to lay her out, they found the marks of it burned to the
bone into her breast. Father Anselmo used to tell us this, to show us a
little what hell-fire was like."
"Oh, please, Jocunda, don't let us talk about it any more," said Agnes.
Old Jocunda, with her tough, vigorous organization and unceremonious
habits of expression, could not conceive the exquisite pain with which
this whole conversation had vibrated on the sensitive being at her
right hand,--that what merely awoke her hard-corded nerves to a dull
vibration of not unpleasant excitement was shivering and tearing the
tenderer chords of poor little Psyche beside her.
Ages before, beneath those very skies that smiled so sweetly over
her,--amid the bloom of lemon and citron, and the perfume of jasmine
and rose, the gentlest of old Italian souls had dreamed and wondered
what might be the unknown future of the dead, and, learning his lesson
from the glorious skies and gorgeous shores which witnessed how
magnificent a Being had given existence to man, had recorded his hopes
of man's future in the words--_Aut beatus, aut nihil_; but, singular
to tell, the religion which brought with it all human tenderness and
pities,--the hospital for the sick, the refuge for the orphan, the
enfranchisement of the slave,--this religion brought also the news
of the eternal, hopeless, living torture of the great majority of
mankind, past and present. Tender spirits, like those of Dante, carried
this awful mystery as a secret and unexplained anguish, saints wrestled
with God and wept over it; but still the awful fact remained, spite of
Church and sacrament, that the gospel was in effect, to the majority of
the human race, not the glad tidings of salvation, but the sentence of
unmitigable doom.
The present traveler in Italy sees with disgust the dim and faded
frescoes in which this doom is portrayed in all its varied refinements
of torture; and the vivid Italian mind ran riot in these lurid fields,
and every monk who wanted to move his audience was in his small way a
Dante. The poet and the artist give only the highest form of the ideas
of their day, and he who cannot read the "Inferno" with firm nerves may
ask what the same representations were likely to have been in the grasp
of coarse and common minds.
The first teachers of Christianity in Italy read the Gospels by the
light of those fiendish fires which consumed their fellows. Daily made
familiar with the scorching, the searing, the racking, the devilish
ingenuities of torture, they transferred them to the future hell of
the torturers. The sentiment within us which asserts eternal justice
and retribution was stimulated to a kind of madness by that first
baptism of fire and blood, and expanded the simple and grave warnings
of the gospel into a lurid poetry of physical torture. Hence, while
Christianity brought multiplied forms of mercy into the world, it
failed for many centuries to humanize the savage forms of justice; and
rack and wheel, fire and fagot were the modes by which human justice
aspired to a faint imitation of what divine justice was supposed to
extend through eternity.
But it is remarkable always to observe the power of individual minds
to draw out of the popular religious ideas of their country only those
elements which suit themselves, and to drop others from their thought.
As a bee can extract pure honey from the blossoms of some plants whose
leaves are poisonous, so some souls can nourish themselves only with
the holier and more ethereal parts of popular belief.
Agnes had hitherto dwelt only on the cheering and the joyous features
of her faith; her mind loved to muse on the legends of saints and
angels and the glories of paradise, which, with a secret buoyancy,
she hoped to be the lot of every one she saw. The mind of the Mother
Theresa was of the same elevated cast, and the terrors on which Jocunda
dwelt with such homely force of language seldom made a part of her
instructions.
Agnes tried to dismiss these gloomy images from her mind, and, after
arranging her garlands, went to decorate the shrine and altar,--a
cheerful labor of love, in which she delighted.
To the mind of the really spiritual Christian of those ages the air of
this lower world was not as it is to us, in spite of our nominal faith
in the Bible, a blank, empty space from which all spiritual sympathy
and life have fled, but, like the atmosphere with which Raphael has
surrounded the Sistine Madonna, it was full of sympathizing faces, a
great "cloud of witnesses." The holy dead were not gone from earth;
the Church visible and invisible were in close, loving, and constant
sympathy,--still loving, praying, and watching together, though with a
veil between.
It was at first with no idolatrous intention that the prayers of the
holy dead were invoked in acts of worship. Their prayers were asked
simply because they were felt to be as really present with their former
friends and as truly sympathetic as if no veil of silence had fallen
between. In time this simple belief had its intemperate and idolatrous
exaggerations,--the Italian soil always seeming to have a fiery
and volcanic forcing power, by which religious ideas overblossomed
themselves, and grew wild and ragged with too much enthusiasm; and,
as so often happens with friends on earth, these too much loved
and revered invisible friends became eclipsing screens instead of
transmitting mediums of God's light to the soul.
Yet we can see in the hymns of Savonarola, who perfectly represented
the attitude of the highest Christian of those times, how perfect
might be the love and veneration for departed saints without lapsing
into idolatry, and with what an atmosphere of warmth and glory the
true belief of the unity of the Church, visible and invisible, could
inspire an elevated soul amid the discouragements of an unbelieving and
gainsaying world.
Our little Agnes, therefore, when she had spread all her garlands out,
seemed really to feel as if the girlish figure that smiled in sacred
white from the altar-piece was a dear friend who smiled upon her, and
was watching to lead her up the path to heaven.
Pleasantly passed the hours of that day to the girl, and when at
evening old Elsie called for her, she wondered that the day had gone so
fast.
Old Elsie returned with no inconsiderable triumph from her stand. The
cavalier had been several times during the day past her stall, and
once, stopping in a careless way to buy fruit, commented on the absence
of her young charge. This gave Elsie the highest possible idea of her
own sagacity and shrewdness, and of the promptitude with which she
had taken her measures, so that she was in as good spirits as people
commonly are who think they have performed some stroke of generalship.
As the old woman and young girl emerged from the dark-vaulted passage
that led them down through the rocks on which the convent stood to the
sea at its base, the light of a most glorious sunset burst upon them,
in all those strange and magical mysteries of light which any one who
has walked that beach of Sorrento at evening will never forget.
Agnes ran along the shore, and amused herself with picking up little
morsels of red and black coral, and those fragments of mosaic
pavements, blue, red, and green, which the sea is never tired of
casting up from the thousands of ancient temples and palaces which have
gone to wreck all around these shores.
As she was busy doing this, she suddenly heard the voice of Giulietta
behind her.
"So ho, Agnes! where have you been all day?"
"At the Convent," said Agnes, raising herself from her work, and
smiling at Giulietta, in her frank, open way.
"Oh, then you really did take the ring to Saint Agnes?"
"To be sure I did," said Agnes.
"Simple child!" said Giulietta, laughing; "that wasn't what he meant
you to do with it. He meant it for you,--only your grandmother was by.
You never will have any lovers, if she keeps you so tight."
"I can do without," said Agnes.
"I could tell you something about this one," said Giulietta.
"You did tell me something yesterday," said Agnes.
"But I could tell you some more. I know he wants to see you again."
"What for?" said Agnes.
"Simpleton, he's in love with you. You never had a lover; it's time you
had."
"I don't want one, Giulietta. I hope I never shall see him again."
"Oh, nonsense, Agnes! Why, what a girl you are! Why, before I was as
old as you, I had half-a-dozen lovers."
"Agnes," said the sharp voice of Elsie, coming up from behind, "don't
run on ahead of me again; and you, Mistress Baggage, let my child
alone."
"Who's touching your child?" said Giulietta, scornfully. "Can't a body
say a civil word to her?"
"I know what you would be after," said Elsie, "filling her head with
talk of all the wild, loose gallants; but she is for no such market, I
promise you! Come, Agnes."
So saying, old Elsie drew Agnes rapidly along with her, leaving
Giulietta rolling her great black eyes after them with an air of
infinite contempt.
"The old kite!" she said; "I declare he shall get speech of the little
dove, if only to spite her. Let her try her best, and see if we don't
get round her before she knows it. Pietro says his master is certainly
wild after her, and I have promised to help him."
Meanwhile, just as old Elsie and Agnes were turning into the orange
orchard which led into the Gorge of Sorrento, they met the cavalier of
the evening before.
He stopped, and, removing his cap, saluted them with as much deference
as if they had been princesses. Old Elsie frowned, and Agnes blushed
deeply; both hurried forward. Looking back, the old woman saw that he
was walking slowly behind them, evidently watching them closely, yet
not in a way sufficiently obtrusive to warrant an open rebuff.
CHAPTER VIII
THE CAVALIER
Nothing can be more striking, in common Italian life, than the contrast
between out-doors and in-doors. Without, all is fragrant and radiant;
within, mouldy, dark, and damp. Except in the well-kept palaces of
the great, houses in Italy are more like dens than habitations, and a
sight of them is a sufficient reason to the mind of any inquirer, why
their vivacious and handsome inhabitants spend their life principally
in the open air. Nothing could be more perfectly paradisiacal than
this evening at Sorrento. The sun had sunk, but left the air full
of diffused radiance, which trembled and vibrated over the thousand
many-colored waves of the sea. The moon was riding in a broad zone of
purple, low in the horizon, her silver forehead somewhat flushed in the
general rosiness that seemed to penetrate and suffuse every object.
The fishermen, who were drawing in their nets, gayly singing, seemed
to be floating on a violet-and-gold-colored flooring that broke into
a thousand gems at every dash of the oar or motion of the boat. The
old stone statue of Saint Antonio looked down in the rosy air, itself
tinged and brightened by the magical colors which floated round it.
And the girls and men of Sorrento gathered in gossiping knots on the
old Roman bridge that spanned the gorge, looked idly down into its
dusky shadows, talking the while, and playing the time-honored game of
flirtation which has gone on in all climes and languages since man and
woman began.
Conspicuous among them all was Giulietta, her blue-black hair recently
braided and polished to a glossy radiance, and all her costume arranged
to show her comely proportions to the best advantage,--her great pearl
ear-rings shaking as she tossed her head, and showing the flash of
the emerald in the middle of them. An Italian peasant-woman may trust
Providence for her gown, but ear-rings she attends to herself,--for
what is life without them? The great pearl ear-rings of the Sorrento
women are accumulated, pearl by pearl, as the price of years of labor.
Giulietta, however, had come into the world, so to speak, with a gold
spoon in her mouth,--since her grandmother, a thriving, stirring,
energetic body, had got together a pair of ear-rings of unmatched size,
which had descended as heirlooms to her, leaving her nothing to do but
display them, which she did with the freest good-will. At present she
was busily occupied in coquetting with a tall and jauntily-dressed
fellow, wearing a plumed hat and a red sash, who seemed to be
mesmerized by the power of her charms, his large dark eyes following
every movement, as she now talked with him gayly and freely, and now
pretended errands to this and that and the other person on the bridge,
stationing herself here and there, that she might have the pleasure of
seeing herself followed.
"Giulietta," at last said the young man, earnestly, when he found her
accidentally standing alone by the parapet, "I must be going to-morrow."
"Well, what is that to me?" said Giulietta, looking wickedly from under
her eyelashes.
"Cruel girl! you know"--
"Nonsense, Pietro! I don't know anything about you;" but as Giulietta
said this, her great, soft, dark eyes looked out furtively, and said
just the contrary.
"You will go with me?"
"Did I ever hear anything like it? One can't be civil to a fellow
but he asks her to go to the world's end. Pray, how far is it to your
dreadful old den?"
"Only two days' journey, Giulietta."
"Two days!"
"Yes, my life; and you shall ride."
"Thank you, sir,--I wasn't thinking of walking. But seriously, Pietro,
I am afraid it's no place for an honest girl to be in."
"There are lots of honest women there,--all our men have wives; and our
captain has put his eye on one, too, or I'm mistaken."
"What! little Agnes?" said Giulietta. "He will be bright that gets her.
That old dragon of a grandmother is as tight to her as her skin."
"Our captain is used to helping himself," said Pietro. "We might carry
them both off some night, and no one the wiser; but he seems to want to
win the girl to come to him of her own accord. At any rate, we are to
be sent back to the mountains while he lingers a day or two more round
here."
"I declare, Pietro, I think you all little better than Turks or
heathens, to talk in that way about carrying off women; and what if one
should be sick and die among you? What is to become of one's soul, I
wonder?"
"Pshaw! don't we have priests? Why, Giulietta, we are all very pious,
and never think of going out without saying our prayers. The Madonna is
a kind Mother, and will wink very hard on the sins of such good sons as
we are. There isn't a place in all Italy where she is kept better in
candles, and in rings and bracelets, and everything a woman could want.
We never come home without bringing her something; and then we have
lots left to dress all our women like princesses; and they have nothing
to do from morning till night but play the lady. Come now?"
At the moment this conversation was going on in the balmy, seductive
evening air at the bridge, another was transpiring in the Albergo della
Torre, one of those dark, musty dens of which we have been speaking.
In a damp, dirty chamber, whose brick floor seemed to have been
unsuspicious of even the existence of brooms for centuries, was sitting
the cavalier whom we have so often named in connection with Agnes. His
easy, high-bred air, his graceful, flexible form and handsome face
formed a singular contrast to the dark and mouldy apartment, at whose
single unglazed window he was sitting. The sight of this splendid man
gave an impression of strangeness, in the general bareness, much as if
some marvelous jewel had been unaccountably found lying on that dusty
brick floor.
He sat deep in thought, with his elbow resting on a rickety table, his
large, piercing dark eyes seeming intently to study the pavement.
The door opened, and a gray-headed old man entered, who approached him
respectfully.
"Well, Paolo?" said the cavalier, suddenly starting.
"My Lord, the men are all going back to-night."
"Let them go, then," said the cavalier, with an impatient movement. "I
can follow in a day or two."
"Ah, my Lord, if I might make so bold, why should you expose your
person by staying longer? You may be recognized and"--
"No danger," said the other, hastily.
"My Lord, you must forgive me, but I promised my dear lady, your
mother, on her death-bed"--
"To be a constant plague to me," said the cavalier, with a vexed smile
and an impatient movement; "but speak on, Paolo,--for when you once get
anything on your mind, one may as well hear it first as last."
"Well, then, my Lord, this girl,--I have made inquiries, and every one
reports her most modest and pious,--the only grandchild of a poor old
woman. Is it worthy of a great lord of an ancient house to bring her to
shame?"
"Who thinks of bringing her to shame? 'Lord of an ancient house!'"
added the cavalier, laughing bitterly,--"a landless beggar, cast out of
everything,--titles, estates, all! Am I, then, fallen so low that my
wooing would disgrace a peasant-girl?"
"My Lord, you cannot mean to woo a peasant-girl in any other way than
one that would disgrace her,--one of the House of Sarelli, that goes
back to the days of the old Roman Empire!"
"And what of the 'House of Sarelli that goes back to the days of the
old Roman Empire'? It is lying like weeds' roots uppermost in the
burning sun. What is left to me but the mountains and my sword? No, I
tell you, Paolo, Agostino Sarelli, cavalier of fortune, is not thinking
of bringing disgrace on a pious and modest maiden, unless it would
disgrace her to be his wife."
"Now may the saints above help us! Why, my Lord, our house in days past
has been allied to royal blood. I could tell you how Joachim VI."--
"Come, come, my good Paolo, spare me one of your chapters of genealogy.
The fact is, my old boy, the world is all topsy-turvy, and the bottom
is the top, and it isn't much matter what comes next. Here are shoals
of noble families uprooted and lying round like those aloes that the
gardener used to throw over the wall in springtime; and there is that
great boar of a Cæsar Borgia turned in to batten and riot over our
pleasant places."
"Oh, my Lord," said the old serving-man, with a distressful movement,
"we have fallen on evil times, to be sure, and they say his Holiness
has excommunicated us. Anselmo heard that in Naples yesterday."
"Excommunicated!" said the young man,--every feature of his fine face,
and every nerve of his graceful form seeming to quiver with the effort
to express supreme contempt. "Excommunicated! I should hope so! One
would hope through Our Lady's grace to act so that Alexander, and his
adulterous, incestuous, filthy, false-swearing, perjured, murderous
crew, would excommunicate us! In these times, one's only hope of
paradise lies in being excommunicated."
"Oh, my dear master," said the old man, falling on his knees, "what is
to become of us? That I should live to hear you talk like an infidel
and unbeliever!"
"Why, hear you, poor old fool! Did you never hear in Dante of the Popes
that are burning in hell? Wasn't Dante a Christian, I beg to know?"
"Oh, my Lord, my Lord! a religion got out of poetry, books, and
romances won't do to die by. We have no business with the affairs of
the Head of the Church,--it's the Lord's appointment. We have only to
shut our eyes and obey. It may all do well enough to talk so when you
are young and fresh; but when sickness and death come, then we _must_
have religion,--and if we have gone out of the only true Roman Catholic
Apostolic Church, what becomes of our souls? Ah, I misdoubted about
your taking so much to poetry, though my poor mistress was so proud of
it; but these poets are all heretics, my Lord,--that's my firm belief.
But, my Lord, if you do go to hell, I'm going there with you; I'm sure
I never could show my face among the saints, and you not there."
"Well, come, then, my poor Paolo," said the cavalier, stretching out
his hand to his serving-man, "don't take it to heart so. Many a better
man than I has been excommunicated and cursed from toe to crown, and
been never a whit the worse for it. There's Jerome Savonarola there in
Florence--a most holy man, they say, who has had revelations straight
from heaven--has been excommunicated; but he preaches and gives the
sacraments all the same, and nobody minds it."
"Well, it's all a maze to me," said the old serving-man, shaking his
white head. "I can't see into it. I don't dare to open my eyes for fear
I should get to be a heretic; it seems to me that everything is getting
mixed up together. But one must hold on to one's religion; because,
after we have lost everything in this world, it would be too bad to
burn in hell forever at the end of that."
"Why, Paolo, I am a good Christian. I believe, with all my heart, in
the Christian religion, like the fellow in Boccaccio,--because I think
it must be from God, or else the Popes and Cardinals would have had it
out of the world long ago. Nothing but the Lord Himself could have kept
it against them."
"There you are, my dear master, with your romances. Well, well, well! I
don't know how it'll end. I say my prayers, and try not to inquire into
what's too high for me. But now, dear master, will you stay lingering
after this girl till some of our enemies hear where you are and pounce
down upon us? Besides, the troop are never so well affected when you
are away; there are quarrels and divisions."
"Well, well," said the cavalier, with an impatient movement,--"one day
longer. I must get a chance to speak with her once more. I must see
her."
CHAPTER IX
THE ARTIST MONK
On the evening when Agnes and her grandmother returned from the
Convent, as they were standing after supper looking over the garden
parapet into the gorge, their attention was caught by a man in an
ecclesiastical habit, slowly climbing the rocky pathway towards them.
"Isn't that Brother Antonio?" said Dame Elsie, leaning forward to
observe more narrowly. "Yes, to be sure it is!"
"Oh, how glad I am!" exclaimed Agnes, springing up with vivacity, and
looking eagerly down the path by which the stranger was approaching.
A few moments more of clambering, and the stranger met the two women at
the gate with a gesture of benediction.
He was apparently a little past the middle point of life, and entering
on its shady afternoon. He was tall and well proportioned, and his
features had the spare delicacy of the Italian outline. The round brow,
fully developed in all the perceptive and æsthetic regions,--the keen
eye, shadowed by long, dark lashes,--the thin, flexible lips,--the
sunken cheek, where, on the slightest emotion, there fluttered a
brilliant flush of color,--all were signs telling of the enthusiast in
whom the nervous and spiritual predominated over the animal.
At times, his eye had a dilating brightness, as if from the flickering
of some inward fire which was slowly consuming the mortal part, and its
expression was brilliant even to the verge of insanity.
His dress was the simple, coarse, white stuff-gown of the Dominican
friars, over which he wore a darker traveling-garment of coarse cloth,
with a hood, from whose deep shadows his bright mysterious eyes looked
like jewels from a cavern. At his side dangled a great rosary and cross
of black wood, and under his arm he carried a portfolio secured with a
leathern strap, which seemed stuffed to bursting with papers.
Father Antonio, whom we have thus introduced to the reader, was an
itinerant preaching monk from the Convent of San Marco in Florence, on
a pastoral and artistic tour through Italy.
Convents in the Middle Ages were the retreats of multitudes of natures
who did not wish to live in a state of perpetual warfare and offense,
and all the elegant arts flourished under their protecting shadows.
Ornamental gardening, pharmacy, drawing, painting, carving in wood,
illumination, and calligraphy were not unfrequent occupations of the
holy fathers, and the convent has given to the illustrious roll of
Italian Art some of its most brilliant names. No institution in modern
Europe had a more established reputation in all these respects than the
Convent of San Marco in Florence. In its best days, it was as near an
approach to an ideal community, associated to unite religion, beauty,
and utility, as ever has existed on earth. It was a retreat from the
commonplace prose of life into an atmosphere at once devotional and
poetic; and prayers and sacred hymns consecrated the elegant labors of
the chisel and the pencil, no less than the more homely ones of the
still and the crucible. San Marco, far from being that kind of sluggish
lagoon often imagined in conventual life, was rather a sheltered hotbed
of ideas, fervid with intellectual and moral energy, and before the
age in every radical movement. At this period, Savonarola, the poet
and prophet of the Italian religious world of his day, was superior
of this convent, pouring through all the members of the order the fire
of his own impassioned nature, and seeking to lead them back to the
fervors of more primitive and evangelical ages, and in the reaction of
a worldly and corrupt Church was beginning to feel the power of that
current which at last drowned his eloquent voice in the cold waters of
martyrdom. Savonarola was an Italian Luther,--differing from the great
Northern Reformer as the more ethereally strung and nervous Italian
differs from the bluff and burly German; and like Luther, he became
in his time the centre of every living thing in society about him. He
inspired the pencils of artists, guided the counsels of statesmen, and,
a poet himself, was an inspiration to poets. Everywhere in Italy the
monks of his order were traveling, restoring the shrines, preaching
against the voluptuous and unworthy pictures with which sensual artists
had desecrated the churches, and calling the people back by their
exhortations to the purity of primitive Christianity.
Father Antonio was a younger brother of Elsie, and had early become
a member of the San Marco, enthusiastic not less in religion than in
Art. His intercourse with his sister had few points of sympathy, Elsie
being as decided a utilitarian as any old Yankee female born in the
granite hills of New Hampshire, and pursuing with a hard and sharp
energy her narrow plan of life for Agnes. She regarded her brother as
a very properly religious person, considering his calling, but was a
little bored with his exuberant devotion, and absolutely indifferent
to his artistic enthusiasm. Agnes, on the contrary, had from a child
attached herself to her uncle with all the energy of a sympathetic
nature, and his yearly visits had been looked forward to on her part
with intense expectation. To him she could say a thousand things which
she instinctively concealed from her grandmother; and Elsie was well
pleased with the confidence, because it relieved her a little from
the vigilant guardianship that she otherwise held over the girl. When
Father Antonio was near, she had leisure now and then for a little
private gossip of her own, without the constant care of supervising
Agnes.
"Dear uncle, how glad I am to see you once more!" was the eager
salutation with which the young girl received the monk, as he gained
the little garden. "And you have brought your pictures; oh, I know you
have so many pretty things to show me!"
"Well, well, child," said Elsie, "don't begin upon that now. A little
talk of bread and cheese will be more in point. Come in, brother, and
wash your feet, and let me beat the dust out of your cloak, and give
you something to stay Nature; for you must be fasting."
"Thank you, sister," said the monk; "and as for you, pretty one, never
mind what she says. Uncle Antonio will show his little Agnes everything
by-and-by. A good little thing it is, sister."
"Yes, yes,--good enough,--and too good," said Elsie, bustling about;
"roses can't help having thorns, I suppose."
"Only our ever-blessed Rose of Sharon, the dear mystical Rose of
Paradise, can boast of having no thorns," said the monk, bowing and
crossing himself devoutly.
Agnes clasped her hands on her bosom and bowed also, while Elsie
stopped with her knife in the middle of a loaf of black bread, and
crossed herself with somewhat of impatience,--like a worldly-minded
person of our day, who is interrupted in the midst of an observation by
a grace.
After the rites of hospitality had been duly observed, the old dame
seated herself contentedly in her door with her distaff, resigned Agnes
to the safe guardianship of her uncle, and had a feeling of security
in seeing them sitting together on the parapet of the garden, with the
portfolio spread out between them,--the warm twilight glow of the
evening sky lighting up their figures as they bent in ardent interest
over its contents. The portfolio showed a fluttering collection of
sketches,--fruits, flowers, animals, insects, faces, figures, shrines,
buildings, trees,--all, in short, that might strike the mind of a man
to whose eye nothing on the face of the earth is without beauty and
significance.
"Oh, how beautiful!" said the girl, taking up one sketch, in which a
bunch of rosy cyclamen was painted rising out of a bed of moss.
"Ah, that indeed, my dear!" said the artist. "Would you had seen the
place where I painted it! I stopped there to recite my prayers one
morning; 'twas by the side of a beautiful cascade, and all the ground
was covered with these lovely cyclamens, and the air was musky with
their fragrance. Ah, the bright rose-colored leaves! I can get no color
like them, unless some angel would bring me some from those sunset
clouds yonder."
"And oh, dear uncle, what lovely primroses!" pursued Agnes, taking up
another paper.
"Yes, child; but you should have seen them when I was coming down the
south side of the Apennines; these were everywhere so pale and sweet,
they seemed like the humility of our Most Blessed Mother in her lowly
mortal state. I am minded to make a border of primroses to the leaf in
the Breviary where is the 'Hail, Mary!'--for it seems as if that flower
doth ever say, 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord!'"
"And what will you do with the cyclamen, uncle? does not that mean
something?"
"Yes, daughter," replied the monk, readily entering into that
symbolical strain which permeated all the heart and mind of the
religious of his day, "I can see a meaning in it. For you see that the
cyclamen puts forth its leaves in early spring deeply engraven with
mystical characters, and loves cool shadows, and moist, dark places,
but comes at length to wear a royal crown of crimson; and it seems to
me like the saints who dwell in convents and other prayerful places,
and have the word of God graven in their hearts in youth, till these
blossom into fervent love, and they are crowned with royal graces."
"Ah!" sighed Agnes, "how beautiful and how blessed to be among such!"
"Thou sayest well, dear child. Blessed are the flowers of God that grow
in cool solitudes, and have never been profaned by the hot sun and dust
of this world!"
"I should like to be such a one," said Agnes. "I often think, when I
visit the sisters at the Convent, that I long to be one of them."
"A pretty story!" said Dame Elsie, who had heard the last words, "go
into a convent and leave your poor grandmother all alone, when she has
toiled night and day for so many years to get a dowry for you and find
you a worthy husband!"
"I don't want any husband in this world, grandmamma," said Agnes.
"What talk is this? Not want a good husband to take care of you when
your poor old grandmother is gone? Who will provide for you?"
"He who took care of the blessed Saint Agnes, grandmamma."
"Saint Agnes, to be sure! That was a great many years ago, and times
have altered since then; in these days girls must have husbands. Isn't
it so, Brother Antonio?"
"But if the darling hath a vocation?" said the artist, mildly.
"Vocation! I'll see to that! She sha'n't have a vocation! Suppose I'm
going to delve, and toil, and spin, and wear myself to the bone, and
have her slip through my fingers at last with a vocation? No, indeed!"
"Indeed, dear grandmother, don't be angry!" said Agnes. "I will do just
as you say,--only I don't want a husband."
"Well, well, my little heart,--one thing at a time; you shan't have him
till you say yes willingly," said Elsie, in a mollified tone.
Agnes turned again to the portfolio and busied herself with it, her
eyes dilating as she ran over the sketches.
"Ah! what pretty, pretty bird is this?" she asked.
"Knowest thou not that bird, with his little red beak?" said the
artist. "When our dear Lord hung bleeding, and no man pitied him, this
bird, filled with tender love, tried to draw out the nails with his
poor little beak,--so much better were the birds than we hard-hearted
sinners!--hence he hath honor in many pictures. See here,--I shall put
him into the office of the Sacred Heart, in a little nest curiously
built in a running vine of passion-flower. See here, daughter,--I have
a great commission to execute a Breviary for our house, and our holy
Father was pleased to say that the spirit of the blessed Angelico had
in some little humble measure descended on me, and now I am busy day
and night; for not a twig rustles, not a bird flies, nor a flower
blossoms, but I begin to see therein some hint of holy adornment to my
blessed work."
"Oh, Uncle Antonio, how happy you must be!" said Agnes, her large eyes
filling with tears.
"Happy!--child, am I not?" said the monk, looking up and crossing
himself. "Holy Mother, am I not? Do I not walk the earth in a dream
of bliss, and see the footsteps of my Most Blessed Lord and his dear
Mother on every rock and hill? I see the flowers rise up in clouds to
adore them. What am I, unworthy sinner, that such grace is granted me?
Often I fall on my face before the humblest flower where my dear Lord
hath written his name, and confess I am unworthy the honor of copying
his sweet handiwork."
The artist spoke these words with his hands clasped and his fervid eyes
upraised, like a man in an ecstasy; nor can our more prosaic English
give an idea of the fluent naturalness and grace with which such
images melt into that lovely tongue which seems made to be the natural
language of poetry and enthusiasm.
Agnes looked up to him with humble awe, as to some celestial being; but
there was a sympathetic glow in her face, and she put her hands on her
bosom, as her manner often was when much moved, and, drawing a deep
sigh, said,--
"Would that such gifts were mine!"
"They are thine, sweet one," said the monk. "In Christ's dear kingdom
is no mine or thine, but all that each hath is the property of others.
I never rejoice so much in my art as when I think of the communion of
saints, and that all that our Blessed Lord will work through me is the
property of the humblest soul in his kingdom. When I see one flower
rarer than another, or a bird singing on a twig, I take note of the
same, and say, 'This lovely work of God shall be for some shrine, or
the border of a missal, or the foreground of an altar-piece, and thus
shall his saints be comforted.'"
"But," said Agnes, fervently, "how little can a poor young maiden do!
Ah, I do so long to offer myself up in some way to the dear Lord, who
gave himself for us, and for his Most Blessed Church!"
As Agnes spoke these words, her cheek, usually so clear and pale,
became suffused with a tremulous color, and her dark eyes had a deep,
divine expression; a moment after, the color slowly faded, her head
drooped, and her long, dark lashes fell on her cheek, while her hands
were folded on her bosom. The eye of the monk was watching her with an
enkindled glance.
"Is she not the very presentment of our Blessed Lady in the
Annunciation?" said he to himself. "Surely, this grace is upon her for
this special purpose. My prayers are answered."
"Daughter," he began, in a gentle tone, "a glorious work has been done
of late in Florence under the preaching of our blessed Superior. Could
you believe it, daughter, in these times of backsliding and rebuke
there have been found painters base enough to paint the pictures of
vile, abandoned women in the character of our Blessed Lady; yea, and
princes have been found wicked enough to buy them and put them up
in churches, so that the people have had the Mother of all Purity
presented to them in the guise of a vile harlot. Is it not dreadful?"
"How horrible!" said Agnes.
"Ah, but you should have seen the great procession through Florence,
when all the little children were inspired by the heavenly preaching of
our dear Master. These dear little ones, carrying the blessed cross and
singing the hymns our Master had written for them, went from house to
house and church to church, demanding that everything that was vile and
base should be delivered up to the flames,--and the people, beholding,
thought that the angels had indeed come down, and brought forth all
their loose pictures and vile books, such as Boccaccio's romances and
other defilements, and the children made a splendid bonfire of them in
the Grand Piazza, and so thousands of vile things were consumed and
scattered. And then our blessed Master exhorted the artists to give
their pencils to Christ and his Mother, and to seek for her image among
pious and holy women living a veiled and secluded life, like that our
Lady lived before the blessed Annunciation. 'Think you,' he said, 'that
the blessed Angelico obtained the grace to set forth our Lady in such
heavenly wise by gazing about the streets on mincing women tricked
out in all the world's bravery?--or did he not find her image in holy
solitudes, among modest and prayerful saints?'"
"Ah," said Agnes, drawing in her breath with an expression of awe,
"what mortal would dare to sit for the image of our Lady!"
"Dear child, there be women whom the Lord crowns with beauty when they
know it not, and our dear Mother sheds so much of her spirit into their
hearts that it shines out in their faces; and among such must the
painter look. Dear little child, be not ignorant that our Lord hath
shed this great grace on thee. I have received a light that thou art to
be the model for the 'Hail Mary!' in my Breviary."
"Oh, no, no, no! it cannot be!" said Agnes, covering her face with her
hands.
"My daughter, thou art very beautiful, and this beauty was given thee
not for thyself, but to be laid like a sweet flower on the altar of thy
Lord. Think how blessed, if, through thee, the faithful be reminded of
the modesty and humility of Mary, so that their prayers become more
fervent,--would it not be a great grace?"
"Dear uncle," said Agnes, "I am Christ's child. If it be as you
say,--which I did not know,--give me some days to pray and prepare my
soul, that I may offer myself in all humility."
During this conversation Elsie had left the garden and gone a little
way down the gorge, to have a few moments of gossip with an old crony.
The light of the evening sky had gradually faded away, and the full
moon was pouring a shower of silver upon the orange-trees. As Agnes
sat on the parapet, with the moonlight streaming down on her young,
spiritual face, now tremulous with deep suppressed emotion, the painter
thought he had never seen any human creature that looked nearer to his
conception of a celestial being.
They both sat awhile in that kind of quietude which often falls between
two who have stirred some deep fountain of emotion. All was so still
around them, that the drip and trickle of the little stream which fell
from the garden wall into the dark abyss of the gorge could well be
heard as it pattered from one rocky point to another, with a slender,
lulling sound.
Suddenly the reveries of the two were disturbed by the shadow of a
figure which passed into the moonlight and seemed to rise from the
side of the gorge. A man enveloped in a dark cloak with a peaked
hood stepped across the moss-grown garden parapet, stood a moment
irresolute, then the cloak dropped suddenly from him, and the cavalier
stood in the moonlight before Agnes. He bore in his hand a tall stalk
of white lily, with open blossoms and buds and tender fluted green
leaves, such as one sees in a thousand pictures of the Annunciation.
The moonlight fell full upon his face, revealing his haughty yet
beautiful features, agitated by some profound emotion. The monk and the
girl were both too much surprised for a moment to utter a sound; and
when, after an instant, the monk made a half-movement as if to address
him, the cavalier raised his right hand with a sudden authoritative
gesture which silenced him. Then turning toward Agnes, he kneeled, and
kissing the hem of her robe, and laying the lily in her lap, "Holiest
and dearest," he said, "oh, forget not to pray for me!" He rose again
in a moment, and, throwing his cloak around him, sprang over the garden
wall, and was heard rapidly descending into the shadows of the gorge.
All this passed so quickly that it seemed to both the spectators like
a dream. The splendid man, with his jeweled weapons, his haughty
bearing, and air of easy command, bowing with such solemn humility
before the peasant-girl, reminded the monk of the barbaric princes in
the wonderful legends he had read, who had been drawn by some heavenly
inspiration to come and render themselves up to the teachings of holy
virgins, chosen of the Lord, in divine solitudes. In the poetical
world in which he lived all such marvels were possible. There were a
thousand precedents for them in that devout dreamland, "The Lives of
the Saints."
"My daughter," he said, after looking vainly down the dark shadows upon
the path of the stranger, "have you ever seen this man before?"
"Yes, uncle; yesterday evening I saw him for the first time, when
sitting at my stand at the gate of the city. It was at the Ave Maria;
he came up there and asked my prayers, and gave me a diamond ring for
the shrine of Saint Agnes, which I carried to the convent to-day."
"Behold, my dear daughter, the confirmation of what I have just said
to thee! It is evident that our Lady hath endowed thee with the great
grace of a beauty which draws the soul upward towards the angels,
instead of downward to sensual things, like the beauty of worldly
women. What saith the blessed poet Dante of the beauty of the holy
Beatrice?--that it said to every man who looked on her, '_Aspire!_'[2]
Great is the grace, and thou must give special praise therefor."
[2] I cannot forbear quoting Mr. Norton's beautiful translation
of this sonnet in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for February,
1859:--
"So gentle and so modest doth appear
My lady when she giveth her salute,
That every tongue becometh trembling mute,
Nor do the eyes to look upon her dare.
And though she hears her praises, she doth go
Benignly clothèd with humility,
And like a thing come down she seems to be
From heaven to earth, a miracle to show.
So pleaseth she whoever cometh nigh her,
She gives the heart a sweetness through the eyes
Which none can understand who doth not prove.
And from her lip there seems indeed to move
A spirit sweet and in Love's very guise,
Which goeth saying to the soul, 'Aspire!'"
"I would," said Agnes, thoughtfully, "that I knew who this stranger
is, and what is his great trouble and need,--his eyes are so full of
sorrow. Giulietta said he was the King's brother, and was called the
Lord Adrian. What sorrow can he have, or what need for the prayers of
a poor maid like me?"
"Perhaps the Lord hath pierced him with a longing after the celestial
beauty and heavenly purity of paradise, and wounded him with a divine
sorrow, as happened to Saint Francis and to the blessed Saint Dominic,"
said the monk. "Beauty is the Lord's arrow, wherewith he pierceth to
the inmost soul, with a divine longing and languishment which find
rest only in him. Hence thou seest the wounds of love in saints are
always painted by us with holy flames ascending from them. Have good
courage, sweet child, and pray with fervor for this youth; for there
be no prayers sweeter before the throne of God than those of spotless
maidens. The Scripture saith, 'My beloved feedeth among the lilies.'"
At this moment the sharp, decided tramp of Elsie was heard reëntering
the garden.
"Come, Agnes," she said, "it is time for you to begin your prayers, or,
the saints know, I shall not get you to bed till midnight. I suppose
prayers are a good thing," she added, seating herself wearily; "but if
one must have so many of them, one must get about them early. There's
reason in all things."
Agnes, who had been sitting abstractedly on the parapet, with her head
drooped over the lily-spray, now seemed to collect herself. She rose up
in a grave and thoughtful manner, and, going forward to the shrine of
the Madonna, removed the flowers of the morning, and holding the vase
under the spout of the fountain, all feathered with waving maiden-hair,
filled it with fresh water, the drops falling from it in a thousand
little silver rings in the moonlight.
"I have a thought," said the monk to himself, drawing from his girdle
a pencil and hastily sketching by the moonlight. What he drew was a
fragile maiden form, sitting with clasped hands on a mossy ruin, gazing
on a spray of white lilies which lay before her. He called it, The
Blessed Virgin pondering the Lily of the Annunciation.
"Hast thou ever reflected," he said to Agnes, "what that lily might
be like which the angel Gabriel brought to our Lady?--for, trust
me, it was no mortal flower, but grew by the river of life. I have
often meditated thereon, that it was like unto living silver with a
light in itself, like the moon,--even as our Lord's garments in the
Transfiguration, which glistened like the snow. I have cast about in
myself by what device a painter might represent so marvelous a flower."
"Now, brother Antonio," said Elsie, "if you begin to talk to the child
about such matters, our Lady alone knows when we shall get to bed. I am
sure I'm as good a Christian as anybody; but, as I said, there's reason
in all things, and one cannot always be wondering and inquiring into
heavenly matters,--as to every feather in Saint Michael's wings, and
as to our Lady's girdle and shoestrings and thimble and work-basket;
and when one gets through with our Lady, then one has it all to go
over about her mother, the blessed Saint Anne (may her name be ever
praised!). I mean no disrespect, but I am certain the saints are
reasonable folk and must see that poor folk must live, and, in order to
live, must think of something else now and then besides _them_. That's
my mind, brother."
"Well, well, sister," said the monk, placidly, "no doubt you are right.
There shall be no quarreling in the Lord's vineyard; every one hath his
manner and place, and you follow the lead of the blessed Saint Martha,
which is holy and honorable."
"Honorable! I should think it might be!" said Elsie. "I warrant me, if
everything had been left to Saint Mary's doings, our Blessed Lord and
the Twelve Apostles might have gone supperless. But it's Martha gets
all the work, and Mary all the praise."
"Quite right, quite right," said the monk, abstractedly, while he
stood out in the moonlight busily sketching the fountain. By just such
a fountain, he thought, our Lady might have washed the clothes of
the Blessed Babe. Doubtless there was some such in the court of her
dwelling, all mossy, and with sweet waters forever singing a song of
praise therein.
Elsie was heard within the house meanwhile making energetic commotion,
rattling pots and pans, and producing decided movements among the
simple furniture of the dwelling, probably with a view to preparing for
the night's repose of the guest.
Meanwhile Agnes, kneeling before the shrine, was going through with
great feeling and tenderness the various manuals and movements of
nightly devotion which her own religious fervor and the zeal of her
spiritual advisers had enjoined upon her. Christianity, when it
entered Italy, came among a people every act of whose life was colored
and consecrated by symbolic and ritual acts of heathenism. The only
possible way to uproot this was in supplanting it by Christian ritual
and symbolism equally minute and pervading. Besides, in those ages
when the Christian preacher was utterly destitute of all the help
which the press now gives in keeping under the eye of converts the
great inspiring truths of religion, it was one of the first offices
of every saint whose preaching stirred the heart of the people, to
devise symbolic forms, signs, and observances, by which the mobile and
fluid heart of the multitude might crystalize into habits of devout
remembrance. The rosary, the crucifix, the shrine, the banner, the
procession, were catechisms and tracts invented for those who could not
read, wherein the substance of pages was condensed and gave itself to
the eye and the touch. Let us not, from the height of our day, with the
better appliances which a universal press gives us, sneer at the homely
rounds of the ladder by which the first multitudes of the Lord's
followers climbed heavenward.
If there seemed somewhat mechanical in the number of times which Agnes
repeated the "Hail, Mary!"--in the prescribed number of times she rose
or bowed or crossed herself or laid her forehead in low humility on
the flags of the pavement, it was redeemed by the earnest fervor which
inspired each action. However foreign to the habits of a Northern mind
or education such a mode of prayer may be, these forms to her were
all helpful and significant, her soul was borne by them Godward,--and
often, as she prayed, it seemed to her that she could feel the
dissolving of all earthly things, and the pressing nearer and nearer of
the great cloud of witnesses who ever surround the humblest member of
Christ's mystical body.
"Sweet loving hearts around her beat,
Sweet helping hands are stirred,
And palpitates the veil between
With breathings almost heard."
Certain English writers, looking entirely from a worldly and
philosophical standpoint, are utterly at a loss to account for the
power which certain Italian women of obscure birth came to exercise
in the councils of nations merely by the force of a mystical piety;
but the Northern mind of Europe is entirely unfitted to read and
appreciate the psychological religious phenomena of Southern races. The
temperament which in our modern days has been called the mediïstic, and
which with us is only exceptional, is more or less a race-peculiarity
of Southern climates, and gives that objectiveness to the conception
of spiritual things from which grew up a whole ritual and a whole
world of religious Art. The Southern saints and religious artists
were seers,--men and women of that peculiar fineness and delicacy of
temperament which made them especially apt to receive and project
outward the truths of the spiritual life; they were in that state of
"divine madness" which is favorable to the most intense conception of
the poet and artist, and something of this influence descended through
all the channels of the people.
When Agnes rose from prayer, she had a serene, exalted expression,
like one who walks with some unseen excellence and meditates on some
untold joy. As she was crossing the court to come towards her uncle,
her eye was attracted by the sparkle of something on the ground, and,
stooping, she picked up a heart-shaped locket, curiously made of a
large amethyst, and fastened with a golden arrow. As she pressed upon
this, the locket opened and disclosed to her view a folded paper. Her
mood at this moment was so calm and elevated that she received the
incident with no start or shiver of the nerves. To her it seemed a
providential token, which would probably bring to her some further
knowledge of this mysterious being who had been so especially confided
to her intercessions.
Agnes had learned of the Superior of the Convent the art of reading
writing, which would never have been the birthright of the peasant-girl
in her times, and the moon had that dazzling clearness which revealed
every letter. She stood by the parapet, one hand lying in the white
blossoming alyssum which filled its marble crevices, while she read and
seriously pondered the contents of the paper.
TO AGNES
Sweet saint, sweet lady, may a sinful soul
Approach thee with an offering of love,
And lay at thy dear feet a weary heart
That loves thee, as it loveth God above?
If blessed Mary may without a stain
Receive the love of sinners most defiled,
If the fair saints that walk with her in white
Refuse not love from earth's most guilty child,
Shouldst thou, sweet lady, then that love deny
Which all-unworthy at thy feet is laid?
Ah, gentlest angel, be not more severe
Than the dear heavens unto a loving prayer!
Howe'er unworthily that prayer be said,
Let thine acceptance be like that on high!
There might have been times in Agnes's life when the reception of this
note would have astonished and perplexed her; but the whole strain of
thought and conversation this evening had been in exalted and poetical
regions, and the soft stillness of the hour, the wonderful calmness
and clearness of the moonlight, all seemed in unison with the strange
incident that had occurred, and with the still stranger tenor of the
paper. The soft melancholy, half-religious tone of it was in accordance
with the whole undercurrent of her life, and prevented that start of
alarm which any homage of a more worldly form might have excited.
It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that she read it many times
with pauses and intervals of deep thought, and then with a movement
of natural and girlish curiosity examined the rich jewel which had
enclosed it. At last, seeming to collect her thoughts, she folded the
paper and replaced it in its sparkling casket, and, unlocking the door
of the shrine, laid the gem with its enclosure beneath the lily-spray,
as another offering to the Madonna. "Dear Mother," she said, "if indeed
it be so, may he rise from loving me to loving thee and thy dear Son,
who is Lord of all! Amen!" Thus praying, she locked the door and turned
thoughtfully to her repose, leaving the monk pacing up and down in the
moonlit garden.
Meanwhile the cavalier was standing on the velvet mossy bridge which
spanned the stream at the bottom of the gorge, watching the play of
moonbeams on layer after layer of tremulous silver foliage in the
clefts of the black, rocky walls on either side. The moon rode so
high in the deep violet-colored sky, that her beams came down almost
vertically, making green and translucent the leaves through which they
passed, and throwing strongly marked shadows here and there on the
flower-embroidered moss of the old bridge. There was that solemn,
plaintive stillness in the air which makes the least sound--the hum
of an insect's wing, the cracking of a twig, the patter of falling
water--so distinct and impressive.
It needs not to be explained how the cavalier, following the steps of
Agnes and her grandmother at a distance, had threaded the path by which
they ascended to their little sheltered nook,--how he had lingered
within hearing of Agnes's voice, and, moving among the surrounding
rocks and trees, and drawing nearer and nearer as evening shadows drew
on, had listened to the conversation, hoping that some unexpected
chance might gain him a moment's speech with his enchantress.
The reader will have gathered from the preceding chapter that the
conception which Agnes had formed as to the real position of her
admirer from the reports of Giulietta was false, and that in reality
he was not Lord Adrian, the brother of the King, but an outcast and
landless representative of one branch of an ancient and noble Roman
family, whose estates had been confiscated and whose relations had
been murdered, to satisfy the boundless rapacity of Cæsar Borgia, the
infamous favorite of the notorious Alexander VI.
The natural temperament of Agostino Sarelli had been rather that of the
poet and artist than of the warrior. In the beautiful gardens of his
ancestral home it had been his delight to muse over the pages of Dante;
to sing to the lute, and to write, in the facile flowing rhyme of his
native Italian, the fancies of the dreamland of his youth.
He was the younger brother of the family,--the favorite son and
companion of his mother, who, being of a tender and religious nature,
had brought him up in habits of the most implicit reverence and
devotion for the institutions of his fathers.
The storm which swept over his house, and blasted all his worldly
prospects, blasted, too, and withered all those religious hopes and
beliefs by which alone sensitive and affectionate natures can be healed
of the wounds of adversity without leaving distortion or scar. For his
house had been overthrown, his elder brother cruelly and treacherously
murdered, himself and his retainers robbed and cast out, by a man
who had the entire sanction and support of the Head of the Christian
Church, the Vicar of Christ on Earth. So said the current belief of his
times,--the faith in which his sainted mother died; and the difficulty
with which a man breaks away from such ties is in exact proportion to
the refinement and elevation of his nature.
In the mind of our young nobleman there was a double current. He was a
Roman, and the traditions of his house went back to the time of Mutius
Scævola; and his old nurse had often told him that grand story of how
the young hero stood with his right hand in the fire rather than betray
his honor. If the legends of Rome's ancient heroes cause the pulses of
colder climes and alien races to throb with sympathetic heroism, what
must their power be to one who says, "These were my fathers"? Agostino
read Plutarch, and thought, "I, too, am a Roman!" and then he looked
on the power that held sway over the Tarpeian Rock and the halls of
the old "Sanctus Senatus," and asked himself, "By what right does it
hold these?" He knew full well that in the popular belief all those
hardy and virtuous old Romans whose deeds of heroism so transported him
were burning in hell for the crime of having been born before Christ;
and he asked himself, as he looked on the horrible and unnatural
luxury and vice which defiled the Papal chair and ran riot through
every ecclesiastical order, whether such men, without faith, without
conscience, and without even decency, were indeed the only authorized
successors of Christ and his Apostles?
To us, of course, from our modern standpoint, the question has an
easy solution,--but not so in those days, when the Christianity of the
known world was in the Romish church, and when the choice seemed to be
between that and infidelity. Not yet had Luther flared aloft the bold,
cheery torch which showed the faithful how to disentangle Christianity
from Ecclesiasticism. Luther in those days was a star lying low in the
gray horizon of a yet unawakened dawn.
All through Italy at this time there was the restless throbbing and
pulsating, the aimless outreach of the popular heart, which marks
the decline of one cycle of religious faith and calls for some great
awakening and renewal. Savonarola, the priest and prophet of this dumb
desire, was beginning to heave a great heart of conflict towards that
mighty struggle with the vices and immoralities of his time in which he
was yet to sink a martyr; and even now his course was beginning to be
obstructed by the full energy of the whole aroused serpent brood which
hissed and knotted in the holy places of Rome.
Here, then, was our Agostino, with a nature intensely fervent and
poetic, every fibre of whose soul and nervous system had been from
childhood skillfully woven and intertwined with the ritual and faith
of his fathers, yearning towards the grave of his mother, yearning
towards the legends of saints and angels with which she had lulled his
cradle slumbers and sanctified his childhood's pillow, and yet burning
with the indignation of a whole line of old Roman ancestors against
an injustice and oppression wrought under the full approbation of the
head of that religion. Half his nature was all the while battling
the other half. Would he be Roman, or would he be Christian? All the
Roman in him said "No!" when he thought of submission to the patent
and open injustice and fiendish tyranny which had disinherited him,
slain his kindred, and held its impure reign by torture and by blood.
He looked on the splendid snow-crowned mountains whose old silver
senate engirdles Rome with an eternal and silent majesty of presence,
and he thought how often in ancient times they had been a shelter to
free blood that would not endure oppression; and so gathering to his
banner the crushed and scattered retainers of his father's house, and
offering refuge and protection to multitudes of others whom the crimes
and rapacities of the Borgias had stripped of possessions and means
of support, he fled to a fastness in the mountains between Rome and
Naples, and became an independent chieftain, living by his sword.
The rapacity, cruelty, and misgovernment of the various regular
authorities of Italy at this time made brigandage a respectable and
honored institution in the eyes of the people, though it was ostensibly
banned both by Pope and Prince. Besides, in the multitude of contending
factions which were every day wrangling for supremacy, it soon became
apparent, even to the ruling authorities, that a band of fighting men
under a gallant leader, advantageously posted in the mountains and
understanding all their passes, was a power of no small importance
to be employed on one side or the other; and therefore it happened,
that, though nominally outlawed or excommunicated, they were secretly
protected on both sides, with a view to securing their assistance in
critical turns of affairs.
Among the common people of the towns and villages their relations were
of the most comfortable kind, their depredations being chiefly confined
to the rich and prosperous, who, as they wrung their wealth out of the
people, were not considered particular objects of compassion when the
same kind of high-handed treatment was extended toward themselves.
The most spirited and brave of the young peasantry, if they wished to
secure the smiles of the girls of their neighborhood, and win hearts
past redemption, found no surer avenue to favor than in joining the
brigands. The leaders of these bands sometimes piqued themselves on
elegant tastes and accomplishments; and one of them is said to have
sent to the poet Tasso, in his misfortunes and exile, an offer of
honorable asylum and protection in his mountain fortress.
Agostino Sarelli saw himself, in fact, a powerful chief, and there were
times when the splendid scenery of his mountain fastness, its inspiring
air, its wild eagle-like grandeur, independence, and security, gave
him a proud contentment, and he looked at his sword and loved it as
a bride. But then again there were moods in which he felt all that
yearning and disquiet of soul which the man of wide and tender moral
organization must feel who has had his faith shaken in the religion of
his fathers. To such a man the quarrel with his childhood's faith is a
never-ending anguish; especially is it so with a religion so objective,
so pictorial, and so interwoven with the whole physical and nervous
nature of man, as that which grew up and flowered in modern Italy.
Agostino was like a man who lives in an eternal struggle of
self-justification,--his reason forever going over and over with
its plea before his regretful and never-satisfied heart, which was
drawn every hour of the day by some chain of memory towards the
faith whose visible administrators he detested with the whole force
of his moral being. When the vesper-bell, with its plaintive call,
rose amid the purple shadows of the olive-silvered mountains,--when
the distant voices of chanting priest and choir reached him solemnly
from afar,--when he looked into a church with its cloudy pictures of
angels, and its window-panes flaming with venerable forms of saints
and martyrs,--it roused a yearning anguish, a pain and conflict, which
all the efforts of his reason could not subdue. How to be a Christian
and yet defy the authorized Head of the Christian Church, or how to
be a Christian and recognize foul men of obscene and rapacious deeds
as Christ's representatives, was the inextricable Gordian knot, which
his sword could not divide. He dared not approach the Sacrament, he
dared not pray, and sometimes he felt wild impulses to tread down in
riotous despair every fragment of a religious belief which seemed to
live in his heart only to torture him. He had heard priests scoff over
the wafer they consecrated,--he had known them to mingle poison for
rivals in the sacramental wine,--and yet God had kept silence and not
struck them dead; and like the Psalmist of old he said, "Verily, I have
cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency. Is there a
God that judgeth in the earth?"
The first time he saw Agnes bending like a flower in the slanting
evening sunbeams by the old gate of Sorrento, while he stood looking
down the kneeling street and striving to hold his own soul in the
sarcastic calm of utter indifference, he felt himself struck to the
heart by an influence he could not define. The sight of that young
face, with its clear, beautiful lines, and its tender fervor, recalled
a thousand influences of the happiest and purest hours of his life, and
drew him with an attraction he vainly strove to hide under an air of
mocking gallantry.
When she looked him in the face with such grave, surprised eyes of
innocent confidence, and promised to pray for him, he felt a remorseful
tenderness as if he had profaned a shrine. All that was passionate,
poetic, and romantic in his nature was awakened to blend itself in a
strange mingling of despairing sadness and of tender veneration about
this sweet image of perfect purity and faith. Never does love strike
so deep and immediate a root as in a sorrowful and desolated nature;
there it has nothing to dispute the soil, and soon fills it with its
interlacing fibres.
In this case it was not merely Agnes that he sighed for, but she stood
to him as the fair symbol of that life-peace, that rest of soul which
he had lost, it seemed to him, forever.
"Behold this pure, believing child," he said to himself,--"a true
member of that blessed Church to which thou art a rebel! How peacefully
this lamb walketh the old ways trodden by saints and martyrs, while
thou art an infidel and unbeliever!" And then a stern voice within him
answered, "What then? Is the Holy Ghost indeed alone dispensed through
the medium of Alexander and his scarlet crew of cardinals? Hath the
power to bind and loose in Christ's Church been indeed given to whoever
can buy it with the wages of robbery and oppression? Why does every
prayer and pious word of the faithful reproach me? Why is God silent?
Or is there any God? Oh, Agnes, Agnes! dear lily! fair lamb! lead a
sinner into the green pastures where thou restest!"
So wrestled the strong nature, tempest-tossed in its strength,--so
slept the trustful, blessed in its trust,--then in Italy, as now in all
lands.
CHAPTER X
THE INTERVIEW
The dreams of Agnes, on the night after her conversation with the monk
and her singular momentary interview with the cavalier, were a strange
mixture of images, indicating the peculiarities of her education and
habits of daily thought.
She dreamed that she was sitting alone in the moonlight, and heard some
one rustling in the distant foliage of the orange groves, and from
them came a young man dressed in white of a dazzling clearness like
sunlight; large pearly wings fell from his shoulders and seemed to
shimmer with a phosphoric radiance; his forehead was broad and grave,
and above it floated a thin, tremulous tongue of flame; his eyes had
that deep, mysterious gravity which is so well expressed in all the
Florentine paintings of celestial beings; and yet, singularly enough,
this white-robed, glorified form seemed to have the features and
lineaments of the mysterious cavalier of the evening before,--the same
deep, mournful dark eyes, only that in them the light of earthly pride
had given place to the calm, strong gravity of an assured peace,--the
same broad forehead,--the same delicately chiseled features, but
elevated and etherealized, glowing with a kind of interior ecstasy.
He seemed to move from the shadow of the orange trees with a backward
floating of his lustrous garments, as if borne on a cloud just along
the surface of the ground; and in his hand he held the lily spray, all
radiant with a silvery, living light, just as the monk had suggested
to her a divine flower might be. Agnes seemed to herself to hold her
breath and marvel with a secret awe, and as often happens in dreams,
she wondered to herself, "Was this stranger, then, indeed, not even
mortal, not even a king's brother, but an angel? How strange," she said
to herself, "that I should never have seen it in his eyes!" Nearer
and nearer the vision drew, and touched her forehead with the lily,
which seemed dewy and icy cool; and with the contact it seemed to her
that a delicious tranquillity, a calm ecstasy, possessed her soul, and
the words were impressed in her mind, as if spoken in her ear, "The
Lord hath sealed thee for his own!"--and then, with the wild fantasy
of dreams, she saw the cavalier in his wonted form and garments, just
as he had kneeled to her the night before, and he said, "Oh, Agnes!
Agnes! little lamb of Christ, love me and lead me!"--and in her sleep
it seemed to her that her heart stirred and throbbed with a strange,
new movement in answer to those sad, pleading eyes, and thereafter her
dream became more troubled.
The sea was beginning now to brighten with the reflection of the coming
dawn in the sky, and the flickering fire of Vesuvius was waxing sickly
and pale; and while all the high points of rocks were turning of a rosy
purple, in the weird depths of the gorge were yet the unbroken shadows
and stillness of night. But at the earliest peep of dawn the monk had
risen, and now, as he paced up and down the little garden, his morning
hymn mingled with Agnes's dreams,--words strong with all the nerve of
the old Latin, which, when they were written, had scarcely ceased to be
the spoken tongue of Italy.
"Splendor paternæ gloriæ,
De luce lucem proferens,
Lux lucis et fons luminis,
Dies diem illuminans!
"Votis vocemus et Patrem,
Patrem potentis gratiæ,
Patrem perennis gloriæ:
Culpam releget lubricam!
"Confirmet actus strenuos,
Dentes retundat invidi,
Casus secundet asperos,
Donet gerendi gratiam!
"Christus nobis sit cibus,
Potusque noster sit fides:
Læti bibamus sobriam
Ebrietatem spiritus!
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