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