Crucial Instances — The Confessional, part 1

THE CONFESSIONAL

When I was a young man I thought a great deal of local color.

At that time it was still a pigment of recent discovery, and supposed to have a peculiarly stimulating effect on the mental eye.

As an aid to the imagination its value was perhaps overrated; but as an object of pursuit to that vagrant faculty, it had all the merits claimed for it.

I certainly never hunted any game better worth my powder; and to a young man with rare holidays and long working hours, its value was enhanced by the fact that one might bring it down at any turn, if only one kept one’s eye alert and one’s hand on the trigger.

Even the large manufacturing city where, for some years, my young enthusiasms were chained to an accountant’s desk, was not without its romantic opportunities.

Many of the mill-hands at Dunstable were Italians, and a foreign settlement had formed itself in that unsavory and unsanitary portion of the town known as the Point.

The Point, like more aristocratic communities, had its residential and commercial districts, its church, its theatre and its restaurant.

When the craving for local color was on me it was my habit to resort to the restaurant, a low-browed wooden building with the appetizing announcement: “_Aristiù di montone_” pasted in one of its fly-blown window-panes.

Here the consumption of tough macaroni or of an ambiguous _frittura_ sufficed to transport me to the Cappello d’Oro in Venice, while my cup of coffee and a wasp-waisted cigar with a straw in it turned my greasy table-cloth into the marble top of one of the little round tables under the arcade of the Caffè Pedrotti at Padua.

This feat of the imagination was materially aided by Agostino, the hollow-eyed and low-collared waiter, whose slimy napkin never lost its Latin flourish and whose zeal for my comfort was not infrequently displayed by his testing the warmth of my soup with his finger.

Through Agostino I became acquainted with the inner history of the colony, heard the details of its feuds and vendettas, and learned to know by sight the leading characters in these domestic dramas.

The restaurant was frequented by the chief personages of the community: the overseer of the Italian hands at the Meriton Mills, the doctor, his wife the _levatrice_ (a plump Neapolitan with greasy ringlets, a plush picture-hat, and a charm against the evil-eye hanging in a crease of her neck) and lastly by Don Egidio, the _parocco_ of the little church across the street.

The doctor and his wife came only on feast days, but the overseer and Don Egidio were regular patrons.

The former was a quiet saturnine-looking man, of accomplished manners but reluctant speech, and I depended for my diversion chiefly on Don Egidio, whose large loosely-hung lips were always ajar for conversation.

The remarks issuing from them were richly tinged by the gutturals of the Bergamasque dialect, and it needed but a slight acquaintance with Italian types to detect the Lombard peasant under the priest’s rusty cassock.

This inference was confirmed by Don Egidio’s telling me that he came from a village of Val Camonica, the radiant valley which extends northward from the lake of Iseo to the Adamello glaciers.

His step-father had been a laborer on one of the fruit-farms of a Milanese count who owned large estates in the Val Camonica; and that gentleman, taking a fancy to the lad, whom he had seen at work in his orchards, had removed him to his villa on the lake of Iseo and had subsequently educated him for the Church.

It was doubtless to this picturesque accident that Don Egidio owed the mingling of ease and simplicity that gave an inimitable charm to his stout shabby presence.

It was as though some wild mountain-fruit had been transplanted to the Count’s orchards and had mellowed under cultivation without losing its sylvan flavor.

I have never seen the social art carried farther without suggestion of artifice.

The fact that Don Egidio’s amenities were mainly exercised on the mill-hands composing his parish proved the genuineness of his gift.

It is easier to simulate gentility among gentlemen than among navvies; and the plain man is a touchstone who draws out all the alloy in the gold.

Among his parishioners Don Egidio ruled with the cheerful despotism of the good priest.

On cardinal points he was inflexible, but in minor matters he had that elasticity of judgment which enables the Catholic discipline to fit itself to every inequality of the human conscience.

There was no appeal from his verdict; but his judgment-seat was a revolving chair from which he could view the same act at various angles.

His influence was acknowledged not only by his flock, but by the policeman at the corner, the “bar-keep’” in the dive, the ward politician in the corner grocery.

The general verdict of Dunstable was that the Point would have been hell without the priest.

It was perhaps not precisely heaven with him; but such light of the upper sky as pierced its murky atmosphere was reflected from Don Egidio’s countenance.

It is hardly possible for any one to exercise such influence without taking pleasure in it; and on the whole the priest was probably a contented man; though it does not follow that he was a happy one.

On this point the first stages of our acquaintance yielded much food for conjecture.

At first sight Don Egidio was the image of cheerfulness.

He had all the physical indications of a mind at ease: the leisurely rolling gait, the ready laugh, the hospitable eye of the man whose sympathies are always on the latch.

It took me some time to discover under his surface garrulity the impenetrable reticence of his profession, and under his enjoyment of trifles a levelling melancholy which made all enjoyment trifling.

Don Egidio’s aspect and conversation were so unsuggestive of psychological complexities that I set down this trait to poverty or home-sickness.

There are few classes of men more frugal in tastes and habit than the village priest in Italy; but Don Egidio, by his own account, had been introduced, at an impressionable age, to a way of living that must have surpassed his wildest dreams of self-indulgence.

To whatever privations his parochial work had since accustomed him, the influences of that earlier life were too perceptible in his talk not to have made a profound impression on his tastes; and he remained, for all his apostolic simplicity, the image of the family priest who has his seat at the rich man’s table.

It chanced that I had used one of my short European holidays to explore afoot the romantic passes connecting the Valtelline with the lake of Iseo;

and my remembrance of that enchanting region made it seem impossible that Don Egidio should ever look without a reminiscent pang on the grimy perspective of his parochial streets.

The transition was too complete, too ironical, from those rich glades and Titianesque acclivities to the brick hovels and fissured sidewalks of the Point.

This impression was confirmed when Don Egidio, in response to my urgent invitation, paid his first visit to my modest lodgings.

He called one winter evening, when a wood-fire in its happiest humor was giving a factitious lustre to my book-shelves and bringing out the values of the one or two old prints and Chinese porcelains that accounted for the perennial shabbiness of my wardrobe.

“Ah,” said he with a murmur of satisfaction, as he laid aside his shiny hat and bulging umbrella, “it is a long time since I have been in a _casa signorile_.

” My remembrance of his own room (he lodged with the doctor and the _levatrice_) saved this epithet from the suggestion of irony and kept me silent while he sank into my arm-chair with the deliberation of a tired traveller lowering himself gently into a warm bath.

“Good!

good!

” he repeated, looking about him.

“Books, porcelains, objects of _virtù_--I am glad to see that there are still such things in the world!

” And he turned a genial eye on the glass of Marsala that I had poured out for him.

Don Egidio was the most temperate of men and never exceeded his one glass;

but he liked to sit by the hour puffing at my Cabañas, which I suspected him of preferring to the black weed of his native country.

Under the influence of my tobacco he became even more blandly garrulous, and I sometimes fancied that of all the obligations of his calling none could have placed such a strain on him as that of preserving the secrets of the confessional.

He often talked of his early life at the Count’s villa, where he had been educated with his patron’s two sons till he was of age to be sent to the seminary; and I could see that the years spent in simple and familiar intercourse with his benefactors had been the most vivid chapter in his experience.

The Italian peasant’s inarticulate tenderness for the beauty of his birthplace had been specialized in him by contact with cultivated tastes, and he could tell me not only that the Count had a “stupendous” collection of pictures, but that the chapel of the villa contained a sepulchral monument by Bambaja, and that the art-critics were divided as to the authenticity of the Leonardo in the family palace at Milan.

On all these subjects he was inexhaustibly voluble; but there was one point which he always avoided, and that was his reason for coming to America.

I

remember the round turn with which he brought me up when I questioned him.

“A priest,” said he, “is a soldier and must obey orders like a soldier.

” He set down his glass of Marsala and strolled across the room.

“I had not observed,” he went on, “that you have here a photograph of the Sposalizio of the Brera.

What a picture!

_È stupendo_!

” and he turned back to his seat and smilingly lit a fresh cigar.

I saw at once that I had hit on a point where his native garrulity was protected by the chain-mail of religious discipline that every Catholic priest wears beneath his cassock.

I had too much respect for my friend to wish to penetrate his armor, and now and then I almost fancied he was grateful to me for not putting his reticence to the test.

Don Egidio must have been past sixty when I made his acquaintance; but it was not till the close of an exceptionally harsh winter, some five or six years after our first meeting, that I began to think of him as an old man.

It was as though the long-continued cold had cracked and shrivelled him.

He had grown bent and hollow-chested and his lower lip shook like an unhinged door.

The summer heat did little to revive him, and in September, when I came home from my vacation, I found him just recovering from an attack of pneumonia.

That autumn he did not care to venture often into the night air, and now and then I used to go and sit with him in his little room, to which I had contributed the unheard-of luxuries of an easy-chair and a gas-stove.

My engagements, however, made these visits infrequent, and several weeks had elapsed without my seeing the _parocco_ when, one snowy November morning, I ran across him in the railway-station.

I was on my way to New York for the day and had just time to wave a greeting to him as I jumped into the railway-carriage; but a moment later, to my surprise, I saw him stiffly clambering into the same train.

I found him seated in the common car, with his umbrella between his knees and a bundle done up in a red cotton handkerchief on the seat at his side.

The caution with which, at my approach, he transferred this bundle to his arms caused me to glance at it in surprise; and he answered my look by saying with a smile: “They are flowers for the dead--the most exquisite flowers--from the greenhouses of Mr. Meriton--_si figuri_!

” And he waved a descriptive hand.

“One of my lads, Gianpietro, is employed by the gardener there, and every year on this day he brings me a beautiful bunch of flowers--for such a purpose it is no sin,” he added, with the charming Italian pliancy of judgment.

“And why are you travelling in this snowy weather, _signor parocco_?

” I asked, as he ended with a cough.

He fixed me gravely with his simple shallow eye.

“Because it is the day of the dead, my son,” he said, “and I go to place these on the grave of the noblest man that ever lived.

” “You are going to New York?

” “To Brooklyn--“ I hesitated a moment, wishing to question him, yet uncertain whether his replies were curtailed by the persistency of his cough or by the desire to avoid interrogation.

“This is no weather to be travelling with such a cough,” I said at length.

He made a deprecating gesture.

“I have never missed the day--not once in eighteen years.

But for me he would have no one!

” He folded his hands on his umbrella and looked away from me to hide the trembling of his lip.

I resolved on a last attempt to storm his confidence.

“Your friend is buried in Calvary cemetery?

” He signed an assent.

“That is a long way for you to go alone, _signor parocco_.

The streets are sure to be slippery and there is an icy wind blowing.

Give me your flowers and let me send them to the cemetery by a messenger.

I give you my word they shall reach their destination safely.

” He turned a quiet look on me.

“My son, you are young,” he said, “and you don’t know how the dead need us.

” He drew his breviary from his pocket and opened it with a smile.

“_Mi scusi?

_” he murmured.

The business which had called me to town obliged me to part from him as soon as the train entered the station, and in my dash for the street I left his unwieldy figure laboring far behind me through the crowd on the platform.

Before we separated, however, I had learned that he was returning to Dunstable by the four o’clock train, and had resolved to despatch my business in time to travel home with him.

When I reached Wall Street I was received with the news that the man I had appointed to meet was ill and detained in the country.

My business was “off” and I found myself with the rest of the day at my disposal.

I had no difficulty in deciding how to employ my time.

I was at an age when, in such contingencies, there is always a feminine alternative; and even now I don’t know how it was that, on my way to a certain hospitable luncheon-table, I suddenly found myself in a cab which was carrying me at full-speed to the Twenty-third Street ferry.

It was not till I had bought my ticket and seated myself in the varnished tunnel of the ferry-boat that I was aware of having been diverted from my purpose by an overmastering anxiety for Don Egidio.

I rapidly calculated that he had not more than an hour’s advance on me, and that, allowing for my greater agility and for the fact that I had a cab at my call, I was likely to reach the cemetery in time to see him under shelter before the gusts of sleet that were already sweeping across the river had thickened to a snow-storm.

At the gates of the cemetery I began to take a less sanguine view of my attempt.

The commemorative anniversary had filled the silent avenues with visitors, and I felt the futility of my quest as I tried to fix the gatekeeper’s attention on my delineation of a stout Italian priest with a bad cough and a bunch of flowers tied up in a red cotton handkerchief.

The gate-keeper showed that delusive desire to oblige that is certain to send its victims in the wrong direction; but I had the presence of mind to go exactly contrary to his indication, and thanks to this precaution I came, after half an hour’s search, on the figure of my poor _parocco_, kneeling on the wet ground in one of the humblest by-ways of the great necropolis.

The mound before which he knelt was strewn with the spoils of Mr. Meriton’s conservatories, and on the weather-worn tablet at its head I read the inscription: IL CONTE SIVIANO

DA MILANO.

_Super flumina Babylonis, illic sedimus et flevimus.

_ So engrossed was Don Egidio that for some moments I stood behind him unobserved; and when he rose and faced me, grief had left so little room for any minor emotion that he looked at me almost without surprise.

“Don Egidio,” I said, “I have a carriage waiting for you at the gate.

You must come home with me.

” He nodded quietly and I drew his hand through my arm.

He turned back to the grave.

“One moment, my son,” he said.

“It may be for the last time.

” He stood motionless, his eyes on the heaped-up flowers which were already bruised and blackened by the cold.

“To leave him alone--after sixty years!

But God is everywhere--“ he murmured as I led him away.

On the journey home he did not care to talk, and my chief concern was to keep him wrapped in my greatcoat and to see that his bed was made ready as soon as I had restored him to his lodgings.

The _levatrice_ brought a quilted coverlet from her own room and hovered over him as gently as though he had been of the sex to require her services; while Agostino, at my summons, appeared with a bowl of hot soup that was heralded down the street by a reviving waft of garlic.

To these ministrations I left the _parocco_, intending to call for news of him the next evening; but an unexpected pressure of work kept me late at my desk, and the following day some fresh obstacle delayed me.

On the third afternoon, as I was leaving the office, an agate-eyed infant from the Point hailed me with a message from the doctor.

The _parocco_ was worse and had asked for me.

I jumped into the nearest car and ten minutes later was running up the doctor’s greasy stairs.

To my dismay I found Don Egidio’s room cold and untenanted; but I was reassured a moment later by the appearance of the _levatrice_, who announced that she had transferred the blessed man to her own apartment, where he could have the sunlight and a good bed to lie in.

There in fact he lay, weak but smiling, in a setting which contrasted oddly enough with his own monastic surroundings: a cheerful grimy room, hung with anecdotic chromos, photographs of lady-patients proudly presenting their offspring to the camera, and innumerable Neapolitan _santolini_ decked out with shrivelled palm-leaves.

The _levatrice_ whispered that the good man had the pleurisy, and that, as she phrased it, he was nearing his last mile-stone.

I saw that he was in fact in a bad way, but his condition did not indicate any pressing danger, and I had the presentiment that he would still, as the saying is, put up a good fight.

It was clear, however, that he knew what turn the conflict must take, and the solemnity with which he welcomed me showed that my summons was a part of that spiritual strategy with which the Catholic opposes the surprise of death.

“My son,” he said, when the _levatrice_ had left us, “I have a favor to ask you.

You found me yesterday bidding good-bye to my best friend.

” His cough interrupted him.

“I have never told you,” he went on, “the name of the family in which I was brought up.

It was Siviano, and that was the grave of the Count’s eldest son, with whom I grew up as a brother.

For eighteen years he has lain in that strange ground--_in terra aliena_--and when I die, there will be no one to care for his grave.

” I saw what he waited for.

“I will care for it, _signor parocco_.

” “I knew I should have your promise, my child; and what you promise you keep.

But my friend is a stranger to you--you are young and at your age life is a mistress who kisses away sad memories.

Why should you remember the grave of a stranger?

I cannot lay such a claim on you.

But I will tell you his story--and then I think that neither joy nor grief will let you forget him; for when you rejoice you will remember how he sorrowed; and when you sorrow the thought of him will be like a friend’s hand in yours.

” II

You tell me (Don Egidio began) that you know our little lake; and if you have seen it you will understand why it always used to remind me of the “garden enclosed” of the Canticles.

_Hortus inclusus; columba mea in foraminibus petræ_: the words used to come back to me whenever I returned from a day’s journey across the mountains, and looking down saw the blue lake far below, hidden in its hills like a happy secret in a stern heart.

We were never envious of the glory of the great lakes.

They are like the show pictures that some nobleman hangs in his public gallery; but our Iseo is the treasure that he hides in his inner chamber.

You tell me you saw it in summer, when it looks up like a saint’s eye, reflecting the whole of heaven.

It was then too that I first saw it.

My future friend, the old Count, had found me at work on one of his fruit-farms up the valley, and hearing that I was ill-treated by my step-father--a drunken pedlar from the Val Mastellone, whom my poor mother a year or two earlier had come across at the fair of Lovere--he had taken me home with him to Iseo.

I used to serve mass in our hill-village of Cerveno, and the village children called me “the little priest” because when my work was done I often crept back to the church to get away from my step-father’s blows and curses.

“I will make a real priest of him,” the Count declared; and that afternoon, perched on the box of his travelling-carriage, I was whirled away from the dark scenes of my childhood into a world, where, as it seemed to me, every one was as happy as an angel on a _presepio_.

I wonder if you remember the Count’s villa?

It lies on the shore of the lake, facing the green knoll of Monte Isola, and overlooked by the village of Siviano and by the old parish-church where I said mass for fifteen happy years.

The village hangs on a ledge of the mountain; but the villa dips its foot in the lake, smiling at its reflection like a bather lingering on the brink.

What Paradise it seemed to me that day!

In our church up the valley there hung an old brown picture, with a Saint Sabastian in the foreground;

and behind him the most wonderful palace, with terraced gardens adorned with statues and fountains, where fine folk in resplendent dresses walked up and down without heeding the blessed martyr’s pangs.

The Count’s villa, with its terraces, its roses, its marble steps descending to the lake, reminded me of that palace; only instead of being inhabited by wicked people engrossed in their selfish pleasures it was the home of the kindest friends that ever took a poor lad by the hand.

The old Count was a widower when I first knew him.

He had been twice married, and his first wife had left him two children, a son and a daughter.

The eldest, Donna Marianna, was then a girl of twenty, who kept her father’s house and was a mother to the two lads.

She was not handsome or learned, and had no taste for the world; but she was like the lavender-plant in a poor man’s window--just a little gray flower, but a sweetness that fills the whole house.

Her brother, Count Roberto, had been ailing from his birth, and was a studious lad with a melancholy musing face such as you may see in some of Titian’s portraits of young men.

He looked like an exiled prince dressed in mourning.

There was one child by the second marriage, Count Andrea, a boy of my own age, handsome as a Saint George, but not as kind as the others.

No doubt, being younger, he was less able to understand why an uncouth peasant lad should have been brought to his father’s table; and the others were so fearful of hurting my feelings that, but for his teasing, I might never have mended my clumsy manners or learned how to behave in the presence of my betters.

Count Andrea was not sparing in such lessons, and Count Roberto, in spite of his weak arms, chastised his brother roundly when he thought the discipline had been too severe; but for my part it seemed to me natural enough that such a godlike being should lord it over a poor clodhopper like myself.

Well--I will not linger over the beginning of my new life for my story has to do with its close.

Only I should like to make you understand what the change meant to me--an ignorant peasant lad, coming from hard words and blows and a smoke-blackened hut in the hills to that great house full of rare and beautiful things, and of beings who seemed to me even more rare and beautiful.

Do you wonder I was ready to kiss the ground they trod, and would have given the last drop of my blood to serve them?

In due course I was sent to the seminary at Lodi; and on holidays I used to visit the family in Milan.

Count Andrea was growing up to be one of the handsomest young men imaginable, but a trifle wild; and the old Count married him in haste to the daughter of a Venetian noble, who brought as her dower a great estate in Istria.

The Countess Gemma, as this lady was called, was as light as thistledown and had an eye like a baby’s; but while she was cooing for the moon her pretty white hands were always stealing toward something within reach that she had not been meant to have.

The old Count was not alert enough to follow these manoeuvres; and the Countess hid her designs under a torrent of guileless chatter, as pick-pockets wear long sleeves to conceal their movements.

Her only fault, he used to say, was that one of her aunts had married an Austrian; and this event having taken place before she was born he laughingly acquitted her of any direct share in it.

She confirmed his good opinion of her by giving her husband two sons; and Roberto showing no inclination to marry, these boys naturally came to be looked on as the heirs of the house.

Meanwhile I had finished my course of studies, and the old Count, on my twenty-first birthday, had appointed me priest of the parish of Siviano.

It was the year of Count Andrea’s marriage and there were great festivities at the villa.

Three years later the old Count died, to the sorrow of his two eldest children.

Donna Marianna and Count Roberto closed their apartments in the palace at Milan and withdrew for a year to Siviano.

It was then that I first began to know my friend.

Before that I had loved him without understanding him; now I learned of what metal he was made.

His bookish tastes inclined him to a secluded way of living; and his younger brother perhaps fancied that he would not care to assume the charge of the estate.

But if Andrea thought this he was disappointed.

Roberto resolutely took up the tradition of his father’s rule, and, as if conscious of lacking the old Count’s easy way with the peasants, made up for it by a redoubled zeal for their welfare.

I have seen him toil for days to adjust some trifling difficulty that his father would have set right with a ready word; like the sainted bishop who, when a beggar asked him for a penny, cried out: “Alas, my brother, I have not a penny in my purse; but here are two gold pieces, if they can be made to serve you instead!

” We had many conferences over the condition of his people, and he often sent me up the valley to look into the needs of the peasantry on the fruit-farms.

No grievance was too trifling for him to consider it, no abuse too deep-seated for him to root it out; and many an hour that other men of his rank would have given to books or pleasure was devoted to adjusting a quarrel about boundary-lines or to weighing the merits of a complaint against the tax-collector.

I

often said that he was as much his people’s priest as I; and he smiled and answered that every landowner was a king and that in old days the king was always a priest.

Donna Marianna was urgent with him to marry, but he always declared that he had a family in his tenantry, and that, as for a wife, she had never let him feel the want of one.

He had that musing temper which gives a man a name for coldness; though in fact he may all the while be storing fuel for a great conflagration.

But to me he whispered another reason for not marrying.

A man, he said, does not take wife and rejoice while his mother is on her death-bed; and Italy, his mother, lay dying, with the foreign vultures waiting to tear her apart.

You are too young to know anything of those days, my son; and how can any one understand them who did not live through them?

Italy lay dying indeed;

but Lombardy was her heart, and the heart still beat, and sent the faint blood creeping to her cold extremities.

Her torturers, weary of their work, had allowed her to fall into a painless stupor; but just as she was sinking from sleep to death, heaven sent Radetsky to scourge her back to consciousness; and at the first sting of his lash she sprang maimed and bleeding to her feet.

Ah, those days, those days, my son!

Italy--Italy--was the word on our lips; but the thought in our hearts was just _Austria_.

We clamored for liberty, unity, the franchise; but under our breath we prayed only to smite the white-coats.

Remove the beam from our eye, we cried, and we shall see our salvation clearly enough!

We priests in the north were all liberals and worked with the nobles and the men of letters.

Gioberti was our breviary and his Holiness the new Pope was soon to be the Tancred of our crusade.

But meanwhile, mind you, all this went on in silence, underground as it were, while on the surface Lombardy still danced, feasted, married, and took office under the Austrian.

In the iron-mines up our valley there used to be certain miners who stayed below ground for months at a time;

and, like one of these, Roberto remained buried in his purpose, while life went its way overhead.

Though I was not in his confidence I knew well enough where his thoughts were, for he went among us with the eye of a lover, the visionary look of one who hears a Voice.

We all heard that Voice, to be sure, mingling faintly with the other noises of life; but to Roberto it was already as the roar of mighty waters, drowning every other sound with its thunder.

On the surface, as I have said, things looked smooth enough.

An Austrian cardinal throned in Milan and an Austrian-hearted Pope ruled in Rome.

In Lombardy, Austria couched like a beast of prey, ready to spring at our throats if we stirred or struggled.

The Moderates, to whose party Count Roberto belonged, talked of prudence, compromise, the education of the masses; but if their words were a velvet sheath their thought was a dagger.

For many years, as you know, the Milanese had maintained an outward show of friendliness with their rulers.

The nobles had accepted office under the vice-roy, and in the past there had been frequent intermarriage between the two aristocracies.

But now, one by one, the great houses had closed their doors against official society.

Though some of the younger and more careless, those who must dance and dine at any cost, still went to the palace and sat beside the enemy at the opera, fashion was gradually taking sides against them, and those who had once been laughed at as old fogeys were now applauded as patriots.

Among these, of course, was Count Roberto, who for several years had refused to associate with the Austrians, and had silently resented his easy-going brother’s disregard of political distinctions.

Andrea and Gemma belonged to the moth tribe, who flock to the brightest light; and Gemma’s Istrian possessions, and her family’s connection with the Austrian nobility, gave them a pretext for fluttering about the vice-regal candle.

Roberto let them go their way, but his own course was a tacit protest against their conduct.

They were always welcome at the palazzo Siviano; but he and Donna Marianna withdrew from society in order to have an excuse for not showing themselves at the Countess Gemma’s entertainments.

If Andrea and Gemma were aware of his disapproval they were clever enough to ignore it; for the rich elder brother who paid their debts and never meant to marry was too important a person to be quarrelled with on political grounds.

They seemed to think that if he married it would be only to spite them; and they were persuaded that their future depended on their giving him no cause to take such reprisals.

I shall never be more than a plain peasant at heart and I have little natural skill in discerning hidden motives; but the experience of the confessional gives every priest a certain insight into the secret springs of action, and I often wondered that the worldly wisdom of Andrea and Gemma did not help them to a clearer reading of their brother’s character.

For my part I knew that, in Roberto’s heart, no great passion could spring from a mean motive; and I had always thought that if he ever loved any woman as he loved Italy, it must be from his country’s hand that he received his bride.

And so it came about.

Have you ever noticed, on one of those still autumn days before a storm, how here and there a yellow leaf will suddenly detach itself from the bough and whirl through the air as though some warning of the gale had reached it?

So it was then in Lombardy.

All round was the silence of decay; but now and then a word, a look, a trivial incident, fluttered ominously through the stillness.

It was in ’45. Only a year earlier the glorious death of the Bandiera brothers had sent a long shudder through Italy.

In the Romagna, Renzi and his comrades had tried to uphold by action the protest set forth in the “Manifesto of Rimini”; and their failure had sowed the seed which d’Azeglio and Cavour were to harvest.

Everywhere the forces were silently gathering; and nowhere was the hush more profound, the least reverberation more audible, than in the streets of Milan.

It was Count Roberto’s habit to attend early mass in the Cathedral; and one morning, as he was standing in the aisle, a young girl passed him with her father.

Roberto knew the father, a beggarly Milanese of the noble family of Intelvi, who had cut himself off from his class by accepting an appointment in one of the government offices.

As the two went by he saw a group of Austrian officers looking after the girl, and heard one of them say: “Such a choice morsel as that is too good for slaves;” and another answer with a laugh: “Yes, it’s a dish for the master’s table!

” The girl heard too.

She was as white as a wind-flower and he saw the words come out on her cheek like the red mark from a blow.

She whispered to her father, but he shook his head and drew her away without so much as a glance at the Austrians.

Roberto heard mass and then hastened out and placed himself in the porch of the Cathedral.

A moment later the officers appeared, and they too stationed themselves near the doorway.

Presently the girl came out on her father’s arm.

Her admirers stepped forward to greet Intelvi; and the cringing wretch stood there exchanging compliments with them, while their insolent stare devoured his daughter’s beauty.

She, poor thing, shook like a leaf, and her eyes, in avoiding theirs, suddenly encountered Roberto’s. Her look was a wounded bird that flew to him for shelter.

He carried it away in his breast and its live warmth beat against his heart.

He thought that Italy had looked at him through those eyes; for love is the wiliest of masqueraders and has a thousand disguises at his command.

Within a month Faustina Intelvi was his wife.

Donna Marianna and I rejoiced; for we knew he had chosen her because he loved her, and she seemed to us almost worthy of such a choice.

As for Count Andrea and his wife, I leave you to guess what ingredients were mingled in the kiss with which they welcomed the bride.

They were all smiles at Roberto’s marriage, and had only words of praise for his wife.

Donna Marianna, who had sometimes taxed me with suspecting their motives, rejoiced in this fresh proof of their magnanimity; but for my part I could have wished to see them a little less kind.

All such twilight fears, however, vanished in the flush of my friend’s happiness.

Over some natures love steals gradually, as the morning light widens across a valley; but it had flashed on Roberto like the leap of dawn to a snow-peak.

He walked the world with the wondering step of a blind man suddenly restored to sight; and once he said to me with a laugh: “Love makes a Columbus of every one of us!

” And the Countess--?

The Countess, my son, was eighteen, and her husband was forty.

Count Roberto had the heart of a poet, but he walked with a limp and his skin was sallow.

Youth plucks the fruit for its color rather than its flavor; and first love does not serenade its mistress on a church-organ.

In Italy girls are married as land is sold; if two estates adjoin two lives are united.

As for the portionless girl, she is a knick-knack that goes to the highest bidder.

Faustina was handed over to her purchaser as if she had been a picture for his gallery; and the transaction doubtless seemed as natural to her as to her parents.

She walked to the altar like an Iphigenia; but pallor becomes a bride, and it looks well for a daughter to weep on leaving her mother.

Perhaps it would have been different if she had guessed that the threshold of her new home was carpeted with love and its four corners hung with tender thoughts of her; but her husband was a silent man, who never called attention to his treasures.

The great palace in Milan was a gloomy house for a girl to enter.

Roberto and his sister lived in it as if it had been a monastery, going nowhere and receiving only those who labored for the Cause.

To Faustina, accustomed to the easy Austrian society, the Sunday evening receptions at the palazzo Siviano must have seemed as dreary as a scientific congress.

It pleased Roberto to regard her as a victim of barbarian insolence, an embodiment of his country desecrated by the desire of the enemy; but though, like any handsome penniless girl, Faustina had now and then been exposed to a free look or a familiar word, I doubt if she connected such incidents with the political condition of Italy.

She knew, of course, that in marrying Siviano she was entering a house closed against the Austrian.

One of Siviano’s first cares had been to pension his father-in-law, with the stipulation that Intelvi should resign his appointment and give up all relations with the government; and the old hypocrite, only too glad to purchase idleness on such terms, embraced the liberal cause with a zeal which left his daughter no excuse for half-heartedness.

But he found it less easy than he had expected to recover a footing among his own people.

In spite of his patriotic bluster the Milanese held aloof from him; and being the kind of man who must always take his glass in company he gradually drifted back to his old associates.

It was impossible to forbid Faustina to visit her parents; and in their house she breathed an air that was at least tolerant of Austria.

But I must not let you think that the young Countess appeared ungrateful or unhappy.

She was silent and shy, and it needed a more enterprising temper than Roberto’s to break down the barrier between them.

They seemed to talk to one another through a convent-grating, rather than across a hearth; but if Roberto had asked more of her than she could give, outwardly she was a model wife.

She chose me at once as her confessor and I watched over the first steps of her new life.

Never was younger sister tenderer to her elder than she to Donna Marianna; never was young wife more mindful of her religious duties, kinder to her dependents, more charitable to the poor;

yet to be with her was like living in a room with shuttered windows.

She was always the caged bird, the transplanted flower: for all Roberto’s care she never bloomed or sang.

Donna Marianna was the first to speak of it.

“The child needs more light and air,” she said.

“Light?

Air?

” Roberto repeated.

“Does she not go to mass every morning?

Does she not drive on the Corso every evening?

” Donna Marianna was not called clever, but her heart was wiser than most women’s heads.

“At our age, brother,” said she, “the windows of the mind face north and look out on a landscape full of lengthening shadows.

Faustina needs another outlook.

She is as pale as a hyacinth grown in a cellar.

” Roberto himself turned pale and I saw that she had uttered his own thought.

“You want me to let her go to Gemma’s!

” he exclaimed.

“Let her go wherever there is a little careless laughter.

” “Laughter--now!