Gerald Fitzgerald, the Chevalier: A Novel

CHAPTER XIII. THE PÈRE MASSONI’S MISGIVINGS

It was late at night, and all quiet and still in the Eternal City, as the Père Massoni sat in his little study intent upon a large map which occupied the whole table before him. Strange blotches of colour marked in various places, patches of blue and deep red, with outlines the most irregular appeared here and there, leaving very little of the surface without some tint. It was a map of Ireland, on which the successive confiscations were marked, and the various changes of proprietorship indicated by different colours; a curious document, carefully drawn up, and which had cost the labour of some years. Massoni studied it with such deep intensity that he had not noticed the entrance of a servant, who now stood waiting to deliver a letter which he held in his hand. At last he perceived the man, and, hastily snatching the note, read to himself the following few lines —

‘She will come to-morrow at noon. Give orders to admit her at once to him; but do not yourself be there.’

This was signed ‘D’ and carefully folded and sealed.

‘That will do; you need not wait, said the Père, and again he was alone. For several minutes he continued to ponder over the scenes before him, and then, throwing them on the table, exclaimed aloud, ‘And this is the boasted science of medicine! Here is the most learned physician of all Rome – the trusted of Popes and Cardinals – confessing that there are phases of human malady to which, while his art gives no clue – a certain mysterious agency – a something compounded of imposture and fanaticism, can read and decipher. What an ignoble avowal is this, and what a sarcasm upon all intellect and its labours! And what will be said of me,’ cried he, in a louder voice, ‘if it be known that I have lent my credence to such a doctrine; that I, the head and leader of a great association, should stoop to take counsel from those who, if they be not cheats and impostors, must needs be worse! And, if worse, what then?’ muttered he, as he drew his hand across his brow as though to clear away some difficult and distressing thought. ‘Ay, what then? Are there really diabolic agencies at work in those ministrations? Are these miraculous revelations that we hear of ascribable to evil influences? What if it were not trick and legerdemain? What if Satan had really seized upon these passers of base money to mingle his own coinage with theirs? If every imposture be his work, why should he not act through those who have contrived it? Oh, if we could but know what are the truthful suggestions of inspirations, and what the crafty devices of an erring brain! If, for instance, I could now see how far the great cause to which my life is devoted should be served or thwarted by the enterprise.’

He walked the room for nigh an hour in deep and silent meditation.

‘I will see her myself,’ cried he at length. ‘All her stage tricks and cunning will avail her little with me; and if she really have high powers, why should they not be turned to our use? When Satan piled evil upon evil to show his strength, St. Francis made of the mass an altar? Well, now, Giacomo, what is it?’ asked he suddenly, as his servant entered.

‘He has fallen asleep at last, reverend father,’ answered he, ‘and is breathing softly as a child. He cannot fail to be better for this repose, for it is now five days and nights since he has closed an eye.’

‘Never since the night of the reception at Cardinal Abbezi’s.’

‘That was a fatal experiment, I much fear,’ muttered Giacomo.

‘It may have been so. Who knows – who ever did or could know with certainty the one true path out of difficulty?’

‘When he came back on that night,’ continued Giacomo, ‘he would not suffer me to undress him, but threw himself down on the bed as he was, saying, “Leave me to myself; I would be alone.”

‘I offered to take off his sword and the golden collar of his order, but he bade me angrily to desist, and said —

‘"These are all that remind me of what I am, and you would rob me of them.’”

‘True enough; the pageantry was a brief dream! And what said he next?’

‘He talked wildly about his cruel fortunes, and the false friends who had misguided him in his youth, saying —

‘"These things never came of blind chance; the destinies of princes are written in letters of gold, and not traced in the sands of the sea. They who betrayed my father have misled me.”’

‘How like his house,’ exclaimed the Père; ‘arrogant in the very hour of their destitution!’

‘He then went on to rave about the Scottish wars, speaking of places and people I had never before heard of. After lamenting the duplicity of Spain, and declaring that French treachery had been their ruin, “and now,” cried he, “the game is to be played over again, as though it were in the day of general demolition men would struggle to restore a worn-out dynasty.”’

‘Did he speak thus?’ cried Massoni eagerly.

‘Yes, he said the words over and over, adding, “I am but the ‘figurino,’ to be laid aside when the procession is over,” and he wept bitterly.’

‘The Stuarts could always find comfort in tears; they could draw upon their own sympathies unfailingly. What said he of me?’ asked he, with sudden eagerness.

Giacomo was silent, and folding his arms within his robe of serge, cast his eyes downward.

‘Speak out, and frankly – what said he?’ repeated the Père.

‘That you were ambitious – one whose heart yearned after worldly elevation and power.’

‘Power – yes!’ muttered the Père.

‘That once engaged in a cause, your energies would be wholly with it, so long as you directed and guided it; that he had known men of your stamp in France during the Revolution, and that the strength of their convictions was more often a source of weakness than of power.’

‘It was from Gabriel Riquetti that he stole the remark. It was even thus Mirabeau spoke of our order.’

‘You must be right, reverend father, for he continued to talk much of this same Riquetti, saying that he alone, of all Europe, could have restored the Stuarts to England. “Had we one such man as that,” said he, “I now had been lying in Holy rood Palace.”’

‘He was mistaken there,’ muttered Massoni half aloud. ‘The men who are without faith raise no lasting edifices. How strange,’ added he aloud, ‘that the Prince should have spoken in this wise. When I have been with him he was ever wandering, uncertain, incoherent.’

‘And into this state he gradually lapsed, singing snatches of peasant songs to himself, and mingling Scottish rhymes with Alfieri’s verses; sometimes fancying himself in all the wild conflict of a street-fight in Paris, and then thinking that he was strolling along a river’s bank with some one that he loved.’

‘Has he then loved?’ asked Massoni in a low, distinct voice.

‘From chance words that have escaped him in his wanderings I have gathered as much, though who she was and whence, or what her station in life, I cannot guess.’

‘She will tell us this,’ muttered the Père to himself; and then turning to Giacomo said, ‘To-morrow, at noon, that woman they call the Egyptian Princess is to be here; she is to come in secret to see him. The Prince of Piombino has arranged it all, and says that her marvellous gift is never in fault, all hearts being open to her as a printed page, and men’s inmost thoughts as legible as their features.’

‘Is it an evil possession?’ asked Giacomo tremblingly.

‘Who can dare to say so? Let us wait and watch. Take care that the small door that opens from the garden upon the Pincian be left ajar, as she will come by that way; and let there be none to observe or note her coming. You will yourself meet her at the gate, and conduct her to his chamber – where leave her.’

‘If Rome should hear that we have accepted such aid – ’

A gesture of haughty contempt from the Père interrupted the speech, and Massoni said —

‘Are not they with troubled consciences frequent visitors at our shrines? Might not this woman come, as thousands have come, to have a doubt removed; a case of conscience satisfied; a heresy arrested? Besides, she is a Pagan,’ added he suddenly; ‘may she not be one eager to seek the truth?’ The cold derision of his look, as he spoke, awed the simple servitor, who, meekly bending his head, retired.

CHAPTER XIV. THE EGYPTIAN

Our reader is already fully aware of the reasons which influenced the Père Massoni to adopt the cause of young Fitzgerald. It was not any romantic attachment to an ancient and illustrious house; as little was it any conviction of a right. It was simply an expedient which seemed to promise largely for the one cause which the Jesuit father deemed worthy of a man’s life-long devotion – the Church. To impart to the terrible struggle which in turn ravaged every country in Europe a royalist feature, seemed, to his thoughtful mind, the one sole issue of present calamity. His theory was: after the homage to the throne will come back reverence to the altar.

For a while the Père suffered himself to indulge in the most sanguine hopes of success. Throughout Europe generally men were wearied of that chaotic condition which the French Revolution had introduced, and already longed for the reconstruction of society in some shape or other. By the influence of able agents, the Church had contrived to make her interest in the cause of order perceptible, and artfully suggested the pleasant contrast of a society based on peace and harmony, with the violence and excess of a revolutionary struggle.

Had the personal character of young Gerald been equal, in Massoni’s estimation, to the emergency, the enterprise might have been deemed most hopeful. If the youth had been daring, venturous, and enthusiastic, heedless of consequences and an implicit follower of the Church, much might have been made of him; out of his sentiment of religious devotion would have sprung a deference and a trustfulness which would have rendered him manageable. But, though he was all these, at times, he was fifty other things as well.

There was not a mood of the human mind that did not visit him in turns, and while one day would see him grave, earnest, and thoughtful, dignified in manner, and graceful in address, on the next he would appear reckless and indifferent, a scoffer, and a sceptic. The old poisons of his life at the Tana still lingered in his system and corrupted his blood; and if, for a moment, some high-hearted ambition would move him – some chivalrous desire for great things – so surely would come back the terrible lesson of Mirabeau to his mind, and distrust darken, with its ill-omened frown, all that had seemed bright and glorious.

After the first burst of proud elation on discovering his birth and lineage, he became thoughtful and serious, and at times sad. He dwelt frequently and painfully upon the injustice with which his early youth was treated, and seemed fully to feel that, if some political necessity – of what kind he could not guess – had not rendered the acknowledgment convenient, his claims might still have slept on, unrecognised and unknown. Among his first lessons in life Mirabeau had instilled into him a haughty defiance of all who would endeavour to use him as a tool.

‘Remember,’ he would say, ‘that the men who achieve success in life the oftenest, are they who trade upon the faculties of others. Beware of these men; for their friendship is nothing less than a servitude.’

‘To what end, for what object, am I now withdrawn from obscurity?’ were his constant questions to himself. The priest and his craft were objects of his greatest suspicion, and the thought of being a mere instrument to their ends was a downright outrage. In this way, Massoni was regarded by him with intense distrust; nor could even his gratitude surmount the dread he felt for the Jesuit father. These sentiments deepened, as he lay, hours long, awake at night till, at length, a low fever seized him, and long intervals of dreary incoherency would break the tenor of his sounder thoughts. It had been deemed expedient by the Cardinal York and his other friends that young Gerald should continue to reside at the Jesuit College till some definite steps were taken to declare his rank to the world, and the very delay in this announcement was another reason of suspicion.

‘If I be the prince you call me, why am I detained in this imprisonment? Why am I not among my equals; why not confronted with some future that I can look boldly in the face? Would they make a priest of me, as they have done with my uncle? Where are the noble-hearted followers who rallied around my father? Where the brave adherents who never deserted even his exile? Are they all gone, or have they died, and, if so, is not the cause itself dead?’

These and suchlike were the harassing doubts that troubled him, until eventually his mind balanced between a morbid irritability and an intense apathy. The most learned physicians of Rome had been called to see him, but, though in a great measure agreeing in the nature of his case, none succeeded in suggesting any remedy for it. Some advised society, travelling, amusement, and so on. Others were disposed to recommend rest and quietude; others, again, deemed that he should be engaged in some scheme or enterprise likely to awaken his ambition; but all these plans had soon to give place to immediate cares for his condition, for his strength was perceived to be daily declining, and his energy of body as well as of mind giving way. For some days back the Père had debated with himself whether he would not unfold to him the grand enterprise which he meditated; point out to the youth the glorious opportunity of future distinction, and the splendid prize which should reward success. He would have revealed the whole plot long before had he not been under a pledge to the Cardinal Caraffa not to divulge it without his sanction, and in his presence; and now came the question of Gerald’s life, and whether he would survive till the return of his Eminence from Paris, whither he had gone to fetch back his niece. Such was the state of things when Doctor Danizetti declared that medicine had exhausted its resources in the youth’s behalf, and suggested, as a last resource, that a certain Egyptian lady, whose marvellous powers had attracted all the attention of Rome, should be called in to see him, and declare what she thought of his case.

This Egyptian Princess, as report called her, had taken up her abode at a small deserted convent near Albano, living a life of strict retirement, and known only to the peasants of the neighbourhood by the extraordinary cures she had performed, and the wonderful recoveries which her instrumentality had effected. The secrecy of her mode of life, and the impossibility of learning any details of her history, added to the fact that no one had yet seen her unveiled, gave a romantic interest to her which soon spread into a sort of fame. Besides these, the most astonishing tales were told of epileptic cases cured, deaf and dumb men restored to hearing and speech, even instances of insanity successfully treated, so that, at length, the little shrines of patron saints, once so devoutly sought after by worshipping believers, praying that St. Agatha or St. Nasala might intercede on their behalf, were now forsaken, and crowds gathered in the little court of the convent eagerly entreating the Princess to look favourably on their sufferings. These facts – at first only whispered – at length gained the ears of Rome, and priests and cardinals began to feel that out of this trifling incident grave consequences might arise, and counsel was held among them whether this dangerous foreigner should not be summarily sent out of the State.

The decision would, doubtless, have been quickly come to had it not been that at the very moment an infant child of the Prince Altieri owed its life to a suggestion made by the Egyptian, to whom a mere lock of the child’s hair was given. Sorcery or not, here was a service that could not be overlooked; and, as the Prince Altieri was one whose influence spread widely, the thought of banishment was abandoned.

The Père Massoni, who paid at first but little attention to the stories of her wondrous powers, was at length astonished on hearing from the Professor Danizetti some striking instances of her skill, which seemed, however, less that of a consummate physician than of one who had studied the mysterious influences of the moral oyer the material part of our nature. It was in estimating how far the mind swayed and controlled the nervous system, whether they acted in harmony or discordance, seemed her great gift; and to such a degree of perfection had she brought her powers in this respect, that the tones of a voice, the expression of an eye, and the texture of the hair, appeared often sufficient to intimate the fate of the sick man. Danizetti confessed, that, though long a sceptic as to her powers, he could no longer resist the force of what he witnessed, and owned that in her art were secrets unrevealed to science.