But one there was who was still among these butterflies but no longer of them.
The sight of the Princess Clælia had torn open his wound.
Scarce three months ago he had declined the love of that peerless creature; a love illicit and insane; but at least refined. How much lower had he fallen now.
How happy he must have been, when the blandishments of Clælia, that might have melted an anchorite, could not tempt him from the path of loyalty!
Now what was he? He had blushed at her seeing him in such company. Yet it was his daily company.
He hung over the boat in moody silence.
And from that hour another phase of his misery began; and grew upon him.
Some wretched fools try to drown care in drink.
The fumes of intoxication vanish; the inevitable care remains, and must be faced at last—with an aching head, a disordered stomach, and spirits artificially depressed.
Gerard's conduct had been of a piece with these maniacs'. To survive his terrible blow he needed all his forces; his virtue, his health, his habits of labour, and the calm sleep that is labour's satellite; above all, his piety.
Yet all these balms to wounded hearts he flung away, and trusted to moral intoxication.
Its brief fumes fled; the bereaved heart lay still heavy as lead within his bosom; but now the dark vulture Remorse sat upon it rending it.
Broken health; means wasted; innocence fled; Margaret parted from him by another gulf wider than the grave!
The hot fit of despair passed away.
The cold fit of despair came on.
Then this miserable young man spurned his gay companions, and all the world.
He wandered alone. He drank wine alone to stupefy himself; and paralyze a moment the dark foes to man that preyed upon his soul. He wandered alone amidst the temples of old Rome, and lay stony-eyed, woe-begone, among their ruins, worse wrecked than they.
Last of all came the climax, to which solitude, that gloomy yet fascinating foe of minds diseased, pushes the hopeless.
He wandered alone at night by dark streams, and eyed them, and eyed them, with decreasing repugnance. There glided peace; perhaps annihilation.
What else was left him?
These dark spells have been broken by kind words, by loving and cheerful voices.
The humblest friend the afflicted one possesses may speak, orlook, or smile, a sunbeam between him and that worst madness Gerard now brooded.
Where was Teresa? Where his hearty, kind, old landlady?
They would see with their homely but swift intelligence; they would see and save.
No: they knew not where he was, or whither he was gliding.
And is there no mortal eye upon the poor wretch, and the dark road he is going?
Yes: one eye there is upon him; watching his every movement; following him abroad; tracking him home.
And that eye is the eye of an enemy.
An enemy to the death.
IN an apartment richly furnished, the floor covered with striped and spotted skins of animals, a lady sat with her arms extended before her, and her hands half clenched. The agitation of her face corresponded with this attitude: she was pale and red by turns; and her foot restless.
Presently the curtain was drawn by a domestic.
The lady's brow flushed.
The maid said, in an awe-struck whisper, "Altezza, the man is here."
The lady bade her admit him, and snatched up a little black mask and put it on; and in a moment her colour was gone, and the contrast between her black mask and her marble cheeks was strange and fearful.
A man entered bowing and scraping. It was such a figure as crowds seem made of; short hair, roundish head, plain, but decent clothes; features neither comely nor forbidding. Nothing to remark in him but a singularly restless eye.
After a profusion of bows he stood opposite the lady, and awaited her pleasure.
"They have told you for what you are wanted."
"Yes, signora."
"Did those who spoke to you agree as to what you are to receive?"
"Yes, signora. 'Tis the full price; and purchases the greatervendetta: unless of your benevolence you choose to content yourself with the lesser."
"I understand you not," said the lady.
"Ah; this is the signora's first. The lesser vendetta, lady, is the death of the body only. We watch our man come out of a church; or take him in an innocent hour; and so deal with him. In the greater vendetta we watch him, and catch him hot from some unrepented sin, and so slay his soul as well as his body. But this vendetta is not so run upon now as it was a few years ago."
"Man, silence me his tongue, and let his treasonable heart beat no more. But his soul I have no feud with."
"So be it, signora. He who spoke to me knew not the man, nor his name, nor his abode. From whom shall I learn these?"
"From myself."
At this the man, with the first symptoms of anxiety he had shown, entreated her to be cautious, and particular in this part of the business.
"Fear me not," said she. "Listen. It is a young man, tall of stature, and auburn hair, and dark-blue eyes, and an honest face, would deceive a saint. He lives in the Via Claudia, at the corner house; the glover's. In that house there lodge but three males: he, and a painter short of stature and dark visaged, and a young, slim boy. He that hath betrayed me is a stranger, fair; and taller than thou art."
The bravo listened with all his ears. "It is enough," said he. "Stay, signora, haunteth he any secret place where I may deal with him?"
"My spy doth report me he hath of late frequented the banks of Tiber after dusk; doubtless to meet his light o' love, who calls me her rival; even there slay him! and let my rival come and find him; the smooth, heartless, insolent traitor."
"Be calm, signora. He will betray no more ladies."
"I know not that. He weareth a sword, and can use it. He is young and resolute."
"Neither will avail him."
"Are ye so sure of your hand? What are your weapons?"
The bravo showed her a steel gauntlet. "We strike with such force we needs must guard our hand. This is our mallet." He then undid his doublet, and gave her a glimpse of a coat of mailbeneath, and finally laid his glittering stiletto on the table with a flourish.
The lady shuddered at first, but presently took it up in her white hand and tried its point against her finger.
"Beware, madam," said the bravo.
"What, is it poisoned?"
"Saints forbid! We steal no lives. We take them with steel point, not drugs. But 'tis newly ground, and I feared for the signora's white skin."
"His skin is as white as mine," said she, with a sudden gleam of pity. It lasted but a moment. "But his heart is black as soot. Say, do I not well to remove a traitor that slanders me?"
"The signora will settle that with her confessor. I am but a tool in noble hands; like my stiletto."
The princess appeared not to hear the speaker. "Oh, how I could have loved him; to the death; as now I hate him. Fool! he will learn to trifle with princes; to spurn them and fawn on them and prefer the scum of the town to them, and make them a by-word." She looked up; "why loiter'st thou here? haste thee, revenge me."
"It is customary to pay half the price beforehand, signora."
"Ah I forgot; thy revenge is bought. Here is more than half," and she pushed a bag across the table to him. "When the blow is struck, come for the rest."
"You will soon see me again, signora."
And he retired bowing and scraping.
The princess, burning with jealousy, mortified pride, and dread of exposure (for till she knew Gerard no public stain had fallen on her), sat where he left her, masked, with her arms straight out before her, and the nails of her clenched hand nipping the table.
So sat the fabled sphynx: so sits a tigress.
Yet there crept a chill upon her now that the assassin was gone. And moody misgivings heaved within her, precursors of vain remorse. Gerard and Margaret were before their age. This was your true mediæval. Proud, amorous, vindictive, generous, foolish, cunning, impulsive, unprincipled: and ignorant as dirt.
Power is the curse of such a creature.
Forced to do her own crimes, the weakness of her nerves would have balanced the violence of her passions, and her bark been worse than her bite. But power gives a feeble, furious, woman,male instruments. And the effect is as terrible as the combination is unnatural.
In this instance it whetted an assassin's dagger for a poor forlorn wretch just meditating suicide.
IT happened, two days after the scene I have endeavoured to describe, that Gerard, wandering through one of the meanest streets of Rome, was overtaken by a thunderstorm, and entered a low hostelry. He called for wine, and, the rain continuing, soon drank himself into a half-stupid condition, and dozed with his head on his hands and his hands upon the table.
In course of time the room began to fill and the noise of the rude guests to wake him.
Then it was he became conscious of two figures near him conversing in a low voice.
One was a pardoner. The other by his dress, clean but modest, might have passed for a decent tradesman: but the way he had slouched his hat over his brows so as to hide all his face except his beard, showed he was one of those who shun the eye of honest men, and of the law. The pair were driving a bargain in the sin market. And by an arrangement not uncommon at that date, the crime to be forgiven was yet to be committed—under the celestial contract.
He of the slouched hat was complaining of the price pardons had reached. "If they go up any higher we poor fellows shall be shut out of heaven altogether."
The pardoner denied the charge flatly. "Indulgences were never cheaper to good husbandmen."
The other inquired "Who were they?"
"Why such as sin by the market, like reasonable creatures. But if your will be so perverse as go and pick out a crime the Pope hath set his face against, blame yourself, not me?"
Then, to prove that crime of one sort or another was within the means of all, but the very scum of society, he read out the scale from a written parchment.
It was a curious list: but not one that could be printed in thisbook. And to mutilate it would be to misrepresent it. It is to be found in any great library. Suffice it to say, that murder of a layman was much cheaper than many crimes my lay readers would deem light by comparison.
This told; and by a little trifling concession on each side, the bargain was closed, the money handed over, and the aspirant to heaven's favour forgiven beforehand for removing 1 layman. The price for disposing of a clerk bore no proportion.
The word assassination was never once uttered by either merchant.
All this buzzed in Gerard's ear. But he never lifted his head from the table; only listened stupidly.
However, when the parties rose and separated, he half raised his head and eyed with a scowl the retiring figure of the purchaser.
"If Margaret was alive," muttered he, "I'd take thee by the throat and throttle thee, thou cowardly stabber. But she is dead; dead; dead. Die all the world; 'tis nought to me: so that I die among the first."
When he got home there was a man in a slouched hat walking briskly to and fro on the opposite side of the way.
"Why there is that cur again," thought Gerard.
But in his state of mind, the circumstance made no impression whatever on him.
TWO nights after this Pietro Vanucci and Andrea sat waiting supper for Gerard.
The former grew peevish. It was past nine o'clock. At last he sent Andrea to Gerard's room on the desperate chance of his having come in unobserved. Andrea shrugged his shoulders and went.
He returned without Gerard, but with a slip of paper. Andrea could not read, as scholars in his day and charity boys in ours understand the art; but he had a quick eye, and had learned how the words Pietro Vanucci looked on paper.
"That is for you, I trow," said he, proud of his intelligence.
Pietro snatched it, and read it to Andrea, with his satirical comments.
"'Dear Pietro, dear Andrea, life is too great a burden.'
"So 'tis, my lad; but that is no reason for being abroad at supper-time. Supper is not a burden.
"'Wear my habits!'
"Said the poplar to the juniper bush.
"'And thou, Andrea, mine amethyst ring; and me in both your hearts, a month or two.'
"Why, Andrea?
"'For my body, ere this ye read, it will lie in Tiber. Trouble not to look for it. 'Tis not worth the pains. Oh unhappy day that it was born; oh happy night that rids me of it.
"'Adieu! adieu!"'The broken-hearted Gerard.'
"Here is a sorry jest of the peevish rogue," said Pietro. But his pale cheek and chattering teeth belied his words. Andrea filled the house with his cries.
"Oh, miserable day! O, calamity of calamities! Gerard, my friend, my sweet patron! Help! help! He is killing himself! Oh, good people, help me save him!" And after alarming all the house he ran into the street, bareheaded, imploring all good Christians to help him save his friend.
A number of persons soon collected.
But poor Andrea could not animate their sluggishness. Go down to the river? No. It was not their business. What part of the river? It was a wild goose chase.
It was not lucky to go down to the river after sunset. Too many ghosts walked those banks all night.
A lacquey, however, who had been standing some time opposite the house, said he would go with Andrea; and this turned three or four of the younger ones.
The little band took the way to the river.
The lacquey questioned Andrea.
Andrea, sobbing, told him about the letter, and Gerard's moody ways of late.
That lacquey was a spy of the Princess Clælia.
Their Italian tongues went fast till they neared the Tiber.
But the moment they felt the air from the river, and the smell of the stream in the calm spring night, they were dead silent.
The moon shone calm and clear in a cloudless sky. Their feet sounded loud and ominous. Their tongues were hushed.
Presently hurrying round a corner they met a man. He stopped irresolute at sight of them.
The man was bareheaded, and his dripping hair glistened in the moonlight: and at the next step they saw his clothes were drenched with water.
"Here he is," cried one of the young men, unacquainted with Gerard's face and figure.
The stranger turned instantly and fled.
They ran after him might and main, Andrea leading, and the princess's lacquey next.
Andrea gained on him: but in a moment he twisted up a narrow alley. Andrea shot by, unable to check himself; and the pursuers soon found themselves in a labyrinth in which it was vain to pursue a quick-footed fugitive who knew every inch of it, and could now only be followed by the ear.
They returned to their companions, and found them standing on the spot where the man had stood, and utterly confounded. For Pietro had assured them that the fugitive had neither the features nor the stature of Gerard.
"Are ye verily sure?" said they. "He had been in the river. Why, in the saints' names, fled he at our approach?"
Then said Vanucci, "Friends, methinks this has nought to do with him we seek. What shall we do, Andrea?"
Here the lacquey put in his word. "Let us track him to the water's side, to make sure. See, he hath come dripping all the way."
This advice was approved, and with very little difficulty they tracked the man's course.
But soon they encountered a new enigma.
They had gone scarcely fifty yards ere the drops turned away from the river, and took them to the gate of a large gloomy building. It was a monastery.
They stood irresolute before it, and gazed at the dark pile. It seemed to them to hide some horrible mystery.
But presently Andrea gave a shout. "Here be the drops again," cried he. "And this road leadeth to the river."
They resumed the chase; and soon it became clear the drops were now leading them home. The track became wetter and wetter, andtook them to the Tiber's edge. And there on the bank a bucketful appeared to have been discharged from the stream.
At first they shouted, and thought they had made a discovery; but reflection showed them it amounted to nothing. Certainly a man had been in the water, and had got out of it in safety: but that man was not Gerard. One said he knew a fisherman hard by that had nets and drags. They found the fisher and paid him liberally to sink nets in the river below the place, and to drag it above and below; and promised him gold should he find the body. Then they ran vainly up and down the river, which flowed so calm and voiceless, holding this and a thousand more strange secrets. Suddenly Andrea, with a cry of hope, ran back to the house.
He returned in less than half an hour.
"No," he groaned, and wrung his hands.
"What is the hour?" asked the lacquey.
"Four hours past midnight."
"My pretty lad," said the lacquey, solemnly, "say a mass for thy friend's soul: for he is not among living men."
The morning broke. Worn out with fatigue, Andrea and Pietro went home, heart sick.
The days rolled on, mute as the Tiber as to Gerard's fate.
IT would indeed have been strange if with such barren data as they possessed, those men could have read the handwriting on the river's bank.
For there on that spot an event had just occurred, which, take it altogether, was perhaps without a parallel in the history of mankind, and may remain so to the end of time.
But it shall be told in a very few words, partly by me, partly by an actor in the scene.
Gerard, then, after writing his brief adieu to Pietro and Andrea, had stolen down to the river at nightfall.
He had taken his measures with a dogged resolution not uncommon in those who are bent on self-destruction. He filled his pockets with all the silver and copper he possessed, that he might sink the surer; and, so provided, hurried to a part of the stream that he had seen was little frequented.
There are some, especially women, who look about to make sure there is somebody at hand.
But this resolute wretch looked about him to make sure there was nobody.
And, to his annoyance, he observed a single figure leaning against the corner of an alley. So he affected to stroll carelessly away; but returned to the spot.
Lo! the same figure emerged from a side street and loitered about.
"Can he be watching me? Can he know what I am here for?" thought Gerard. "Impossible."
He went briskly off, walked along a street or two, made a detour, and came back.
The man had vanished. But, lo! on Gerard looking all round, to make sure, there he was a few yards behind, apparently fastening his shoe.
Gerard saw he was watched, and at this moment observed in the moonlight a steel gauntlet in his sentinel's hand.
Then he knew it was an assassin.
Strange to say, it never occurred to him that his was the life aimed at. To be sure he was not aware he had an enemy in the world.
He turned and walked up to the bravo. "My good friend," said he, eagerly, "sell me thine arm! a single stroke! See, here is all I have:" and he forced his money into the bravo's hands. "Oh, prithee! prithee! do one good deed, and rid me of my hateful life!" and even while speaking he undid his doublet, and bared his bosom.
The man stared in his face.
"Why do ye hesitate?" shrieked Gerard. "Have ye no bowels? Is it so much pains to lift your arm and fall it? Is it because I am poor, and can't give ye gold? Useless wretch, canst only strike a man behind; not look one in the face. There, then, do but turn thy head and hold thy tongue!"
And with a snarl of contempt he ran from him, and flung himself into the water.
"Margaret!"
At the heavy plunge of his body in the stream the bravo seemed to recover from a stupor. He ran to the bank, and with a strange cry the assassin plunged in after the self-destroyer.
What followed will be related by the assassin.
A WOMAN has her own troubles, as a man has his.
And we male writers seldom do more than indicate the griefs of the other sex. The intelligence of the female reader must come to our aid, and fill up our cold outlines. So have I indicated, rather than described, what Margaret Brandt went through up to that eventful day, when she entered Eli's house an enemy, read her sweetheart's letter, and remained a friend.
And now a woman's greatest trial drew near, and Gerard far away.
She availed herself but little of Eli's sudden favour: for this reserve she had always a plausible reason ready; and never hinted at the true one, which was this; there were two men in that house at sight of whom she shuddered with instinctive antipathy and dread. She had read wickedness and hatred in their faces, and mysterious signals of secret intelligence. She preferred to receive Catherine and her daughter at home. The former went to see her every day, and was wrapped up in the expected event.
Catherine was one of those females whose office is to multiply, and rear the multiplied: who, when at last they consent to leave off pelting one out of every room in the house with babies, hover about the fair scourges that are still in full swing, and do so cluck, they seem to multiply by proxy. It was in this spirit she entreated Eli to let her stay at Rotterdam while he went back to Tergou.
"The poor lass hath not a soul about her, that knows anything about anything. What avail a pair o' soldiers? Why that sort o' cattle should be putten out o' doors the first, at such an a time."
Need I say that this was a great comfort to Margaret.
Poor soul, she was full of anxiety as the time drew near.
She should die; and Gerard away.
But things balance themselves. Her poverty, and her father's helplessness, which had cost her such a struggle, stood her in good stead now.
Adversity's iron hand had forced her to battle the lassitude that overpowers the rich of her sex, and to be for ever on her feet, working. She kept this up to the last by Catherine's advice.
And so it was, that one fine evening just at sunset, she lay weak as water, but safe; with a little face by her side, and the heaven of maternity opening on her.
"Why dost weep, sweetheart? All of a sudden?"
"He is not here to see it."
"Ah, well, lass, he will be here ere 'tis weaned. Meantime, God hath been as good to thee as to e'er a woman born: and do but bethink thee it might have been a girl; didn't my very own Kate threaten me with one: and here we have got the bonniest boy in Holland, and a rare heavy one, the saints be praised for't."
"Ay, mother, I am but a sorry, ungrateful wretch to weep. If only Gerard were here to see it. 'Tis strange; I bore him well enow to be away from me in my sorrow; but, oh, it doth seem so hard he should not share my joy. Prithee, prithee, come to me, Gerard! dear, dear, Gerard!" And she stretched out her feeble arms.
Catherine bustled about, but avoided Margaret's eyes; for she could not restrain her own tears at hearing her own absent child thus earnestly addressed.
Presently, turning round, she found Margaret looking at her with a singular expression. "Heard you nought?"
"No, my lamb. What?"
"I did cry on Gerard, but now."
"Ay, ay, sure I heard that."
"Well, he answered me."
"Tush, girl: say not that."
"Mother, as sure as I lie here, with his boy by my side, his voice came back to me, 'Margaret!' So. Yet methought 'twas not hishappyvoice. But that might be the distance. All voices go off sad like at a distance. Why art not happy, sweetheart? and I so happy this night? Mother, I seem never to have felt a pain or known a care." And her sweet eyes turned and gloated on the little face in silence.
That very night Gerard flung himself into the Tiber. And, that very hour she heard him speak her name, he cried aloud in death's jaws and despair's.
"Margaret!"
Account for it those who can. I cannot.
IN the guest chamber of a Dominican convent lay a single stranger, exhausted by successive and violent fits of nausea, which had at last subsided, leaving him almost as weak as Margaret lay that night in Holland.
A huge wood fire burned on the hearth, and beside it hung the patient's clothes.
A gigantic friar sat by his bedside reading pious collects aloud from his breviary.
The patient at times eyed him, and seemed to listen: at others closed his eyes and moaned.
The monk kneeled down with his face touching the ground and prayed for him: then rose and bade him farewell. "Day breaks," said he, "I must prepare for matins."
"Good Father Jerome, before you go, how came I hither?"
"By the hand of heaven. You flung away God's gift. He bestowed it on you again. Think on it! Hast tried the world, and found its gall. Now try the church! The church is peace. Pax vobiscum."
He was gone. Gerard lay back, meditating and wondering, till weak and wearied he fell into a doze.
When he awoke again he found a new nurse seated beside him. It was a layman, with an eye as small and restless as Friar Jerome's was calm and majestic.
The man inquired earnestly how he felt.
"Very, very weak. Where have I seen you before, Messer?"
"None the worse for my gauntlet?" inquired the other with considerable anxiety; "I was fain to strike you withal, or both you and I should be at the bottom of Tiber."
Gerard stared at him. "What, 'twas you saved me? How?"
"Well, signor, I was by the banks of Tiber on—on—an errand, no matter what. You came to me and begged hard for a dagger stroke. But ere I could oblige you, ay, even as you spoke to me, I knew you for the signor that saved my wife and child upon the sea."
SOON GERARD WAS AT FATHER ANSELM'S KNEESSOON GERARD WAS AT FATHER ANSELM'S KNEES
"ItisTeresa's husband. And an assassin?!!?"
"At your service. Well, Ser Gerard, the next thing was, you flung yourself into Tiber, and bade me hold aloof."
"I remember that."
"Had it been any but you, believe me I had obeyed you, and not wagged a finger. Men are my foes. They may all hang on one rope, or drown in one river for me. But when thou, sinking in Tiber, didst cry 'Margaret!'"
"Ah!"
"My heart it cried 'Teresa!' How could I go home and look her in the face, did I let thee die, and by the very death thou savedst her from? So in I went; and luckily for us both I swim like a duck. You, seeing me near, and being bent on destruction, tried to grip me, and so end us both. But I swam round thee, and (receive my excuses) so buffeted thee on the nape of the neck with my steel glove; that thou lost sense, and I with much ado, the stream being strong, did draw thy body to land, but insensible and full of water. Then I took thee on my back and made for my own home. 'Teresa will nurse him, and be pleased with me,' thought I. But, hard by this monastery, a holy friar, the biggest e'er I saw, met us and asked the matter. So I told him. He looked hard at thee. 'I know the face,' quoth he. ''Tis one Gerard, a fair youth from Holland.' 'The same,' quo' I. Then said his reverence, 'He hath friends among our brethren. Leave him with us! Charity, it is our office.'
"Also he told me they of the convent had better means to tend thee than I had. And that was true enow. So I just bargained to be let in to see thee once a day, and here thou art."
And the miscreant cast a strange look of affection and interest upon Gerard.
Gerard did not respond to it. He felt as if a snake were in the room. He closed his eyes.
"Ah thou wouldst sleep," said the miscreant eagerly. "I go."
And he retired on tiptoe with a promise to come every day.
Gerard lay with his eyes closed: not asleep, but deeply pondering.
Saved from death by an assassin!
Was not this the finger of Heaven?
Of that Heaven he had insulted, cursed, and defied.
He shuddered at his blasphemies. He tried to pray.
He found he could utter prayers. But he could not pray.
"I am doomed eternally," he cried, "doomed, doomed."
The organ of the convent church burst on his ear in rich and solemn harmony.
Then rose the voices of the choir chanting a full service.
Among them was one that seemed to hover above the others, and tower towards heaven; a sweet boy's voice, full, pure, angelic.
He closed his eyes and listened. The days of his own boyhood flowed back upon him in those sweet, pious harmonies. No earthly dross there, no foul, fierce, passions, rending and corrupting the soul.
Peace; peace; sweet, balmy, peace.
"Ay," he sighed, "the Church is peace of mind. Till I left her bosom I ne'er knew sorrow, nor sin."
And the poor torn, worn, creature, wept.
And, even as he wept, there beamed on him the sweet and reverend face of one he had never thought to see again. It was the face of Father Anselm.
The good father had only reached the convent the night before last. Gerard recognized him in a moment, and cried to him, "Oh Father Anselm, you cured my wounded body in Juliers; now cure my hurt soul in Rome! Alas, you cannot."
Anselm sat down by the bedside, and, putting a gentle hand on his head, first calmed him with a soothing word or two.
He then (for he had learned how Gerard came there) spoke to him kindly but solemnly, and made him feel his crime, and urged him to repentance, and gratitude to that Divine Power which had thwarted his will to save his soul.
"Come, my son," said he, "first purge thy bosom of its load."
"Ah, father," said Gerard, "in Juliers I could; then I was innocent; but now, impious monster that I am, I dare not confess to you."
"Why not, my son? Thinkest thou I have not sinned against Heaven in my time, and deeply? oh how deeply! Come, poor laden soul, pour forth thy grief, pour forth thy faults, hold back nought! Lie not oppressed and crushed by hidden sins."
And soon Gerard was at Father Anselm's knees confessing his every sin with sighs and groans of penitence.
"Thy sins are great," said Anselm. "Thy temptation also was great, terribly great. I must consult our good prior."
The good Anselm kissed his brow, and left him to consult the superior as to his penance.
And, lo! Gerard could pray now.
And he prayed with all his heart.
The phase, through which this remarkable mind now passed, may be summed in a word—Penitence.
He turned with terror and aversion from the world, and begged passionately to remain in the convent. To him, convent nurtured, it was like a bird returning wounded, wearied, to its gentle nest.
He passed his noviciate in prayer, and mortification, and pious reading, and meditation.
The Princess Clælia's spy went home and told her that Gerard was certainly dead, the manner of his death unknown at present.
She seemed literally stunned.
When, after a long time, she found breath to speak at all, it was to bemoan her lot, cursed with such ready tools. "So soon," she sighed; "see how swift these monsters are to do ill deeds. They come to us in our hot blood, and first tempt us with their venal daggers, then enact the mortal deeds we ne'er had thought on but for them."
Ere many hours had passed, her pity for Gerard and hatred of his murderer had risen to fever heat; which with this fool was blood heat.
"Poor soul! I cannot call thee back to life. But he shall never live that traitorously slew thee."
And she put armed men in ambush, and kept them on guard all day, ready, when Ludovico should come for his money, to fall on him in a certain antechamber and hack him to pieces.
"Strike at his head," said she, "for he weareth a privy coat of mail; and if he goes hence alive your own heads shall answer it."
And so she sat weeping her victim, and pulling the strings of machines to shed the blood of a second for having been her machine to kill the first.
ONE of the novice Gerard's self-imposed penances was to receive Ludovico kindly, feeling secretly as to a slimy serpent.
Never was self-denial better bestowed: and, like most rational penances, it soon became no penance at all. At first the pride and complacency, with which the assassin gazed on the one life he had saved, was perhaps as ludicrous as pathetic; but it is a great thing to open a good door in a heart. One good thing follows another through the aperture. Finding it so sweet to save life, the miscreant went on to be averse to taking it; and from that to remorse; and from remorse to something very like penitence. And here Teresa co-operated by threatening, not for the first time, to leave him unless he would consent to lead an honest life. The good fathers of the convent lent their aid, and Ludovico and Teresa were sent by sea to Leghorn, where Teresa had friends, and the assassin settled down and became a porter.
He found it miserably dull work at first: and said so.
But methinks this dull life of plodding labour was better for him, than the brief excitement of being hewn in pieces by the Princess Clælia's myrmidons. His exile saved the unconscious penitent from that fate; and the princess, balked of her revenge, took to brooding, and fell into a profound melancholy; dismissed her confessor, and took a new one with a great reputation for piety, to whom she confided what she called her griefs. The new confessor was no other than Fra Jerome. She could not have fallen into better hands.
He heard her grimly out. Then took her and shook the delusions out of her as roughly as if she had been a kitchen-maid. For, to do this hard monk justice, on the path of duty he feared the anger of princes as little as he did the sea. He showed her in a few words, all thunder and lightning, that she was the criminal of criminals.
"Thou art the devil, that with thy money hath tempted one man to slay his fellow, and then, blinded with self-love, instead of blaming and punishing thyself, art thirsting for more blood of guilty men, but not so guilty as thou."
At first she resisted, and told him she was not used to be taken to task by her confessors. But he overpowered her, and so threatened her with the Church's curse here and hereafter, and so tore the scales off her eyes, and thundered at her, and crushed her, that she sank down and grovelled with remorse and terror at the feet of the gigantic Boanerges.
"Oh, holy father, have pity on a poor weak woman, and help me save my guilty soul. I was benighted for want of ghostly counsel like thine, good father. I waken as from a dream."
"Doff thy jewels," said Fra Jerome, sternly.
"I will. I will."
"Doff thy silk and velvet: and, in humbler garb than wears thy meanest servant, wend thou instant to Loretto."
"I will," said the princess, faintly.
"No shoes: but a bare sandal."
"No, father."
"Wash the feet of pilgrims both going and coming; and to such of them as be holy friars tell thy sin, and abide their admonition."
"Oh, holy father, let me wear my mask."
"Humph!"
"Oh, mercy! Bethink thee! My features are known through Italy."
"Ay. Beauty is a curse to most of ye. Well, thou mayst mask thine eyes; no more."
On this concession she seized his hand, and was about to kiss it; but he snatched it rudely from her.
"What would ye do? That hand handled the eucharist but an hour agone: is it fit for such as thou to touch it?"
"Ah, no. But oh, go not without giving your penitent daughter your blessing."
"Time enow to ask it when you come back from Loretto."
Thus that marvellous occurrence by Tiber's banks left its mark on all the actors, as prodigies are said to do. The assassin, softened by saving the life he was paid to take, turned from the stiletto to the porter's knot. The princess went barefoot to Loretto, weeping her crime and washing the feet of base born men.
And Gerard, carried from the Tiber into that convent a suicide, now passed for a young saint within its walls.
Loving but experienced eyes were on him.
Upon a shorter probation than usual he was admitted to priests' orders.
And soon after took the monastic vows, and became a friar of St. Dominic.
Dying to the world, the monk parted with the very name by which he had lived in it, and so broke the last link of association with earthly feelings.
Here Gerard ended, and Brother Clement began.