Agnes of Sorrento

"It would be my duty, I suppose," said Father Johannes, with a sigh; "but, sinner that I am, I never could bring my mind to such proceedings with the vigor of our blessed father. Had I been Superior of the convent, as was talked of, how differently might things have proceeded! I should have erred by a sinful laxness. How fortunate that it was he, instead of such a miserable sinner as myself!"

"Well, tell me, then, Father Johannes, – for your eyes are shrewd as a lynx's, —is our good Superior so perfect as he seems? or does he have his little private comforts sometimes, like the rest of us? Nobody, you know, can stand it to be always on the top round of the ladder to Paradise. For my part, between you and me, I never believed all that story they read to us so often about Saint Simeon Stylites, who passed so many years on the top of a pillar and never came down. Trust me, the old boy found his way down sometimes, when all the world was asleep, and got somebody to do duty for him meantime, while he took a little something comfortable. Is it not so?"

"I am told to believe, and I do believe," said Father Johannes, casting down his eyes, piously; "and, dear brother, it ill befits a sinner like me to reprove; but it seemeth to me as if you make too much use of the eyes of carnal inquiry. Touching the life of our holy father, I cannot believe the most scrupulous watch can detect anything in his walk or conversation other than appears in his profession. His food is next to nothing, – a little chopped spinach or some bitter herb cooked without salt for ordinary days, and on fast days he mingles this with ashes, according to a saintly rule. As for sleep, I believe he does without it; for at no time of the night, when I have knocked at the door of his cell, have I found him sleeping. He is always at his prayers or breviary. His cell hath only a rough, hard board for a bed, with a log of rough wood for a pillow; yet he complains of that as tempting to indolence."

Father Anselmo shrugged his fat shoulders, ruefully.

"It's all well enough," he said, "for those that want to take this hard road to Paradise; but why need they drive the flock up with them?"

"True enough, Brother Anselmo," said Father Johannes; "but the flock will rejoice in it in the end, doubtless. I understand he is purposing to draw yet stricter the reins of discipline. We ought to be thankful."

"Thankful? We can't wink but six times a week now," said Father Anselmo; "and by and by he won't let us wink at all."

"Hist! hush! here he comes," said Father Johannes. "What ails him? he looks wild, like a man distraught."

In a moment more, in fact, Father Francesco strode hastily through the corridor, with his deep-set eyes dilated and glittering, and a vivid hectic flush on his hollow cheeks. He paid no regard to the salutation of the obsequious monks; in fact, he seemed scarcely to see them, but hurried in a disordered manner through the passages and gained the room of his cell, which he shut and locked with a violent clang.

"What has come over him now?" said Father Anselmo.

Father Johannes stealthily followed some distance, and then stood with his lean neck outstretched and his head turned in the direction where the Superior had disappeared. The whole attitude of the man, with his acute glittering eye, might remind one of a serpent making an observation before darting after his prey.

"Something is working him," he said to himself; "what may it be?"

Meanwhile that heavy oaken door had closed on a narrow cell, bare of everything which could be supposed to be a matter of convenience in the abode of a human being. A table of the rudest and most primitive construction was garnished with a skull, whose empty eye-holes and grinning teeth were the most conspicuous objects in the room. Behind this stood a large crucifix, manifestly the work of no common master, and bearing evident traces in its workmanship of Florentine art: it was, perhaps, one of the relics of the former wealth of the nobleman who had buried his name and worldly possessions in this living sepulchre. A splendid manuscript breviary, richly illuminated, lay open on the table; and the fair fancy of its flowery letters, the lustre of gold and silver on its pages, formed a singular contrast to the squalid nakedness of everything else in the room. This book, too, had been a family heirloom; some lingering shred of human and domestic affection sheltered itself under the protection of religion in making it the companion of his self-imposed life of penance and renunciation.

Father Francesco had just returned from the scene in the confessional we have already described. That day had brought to him one of those pungent and vivid inward revelations which sometimes overset in a moment some delusion that has been the cherished growth of years. Henceforth the reign of self-deception was past, – there was no more self-concealment, no more evasion. He loved Agnes, – he knew it; he said it over and over again to himself with a stormy intensity of energy; and in this hour the whole of his nature seemed to rise in rebellion against the awful barriers which hemmed in and threatened this passion. He now saw clearly that all that he had been calling fatherly tenderness, pastoral zeal, Christian unity, and a thousand other evangelical names, was nothing more nor less than a passion that had gone to the roots of existence and absorbed into itself all that there was of him. Where was he to look for refuge? What hymn, what prayer, had he not blent with her image? It was this that he had given to her as a holy lesson, – it was that that she had spoken of to him as the best expression of her feelings. This prayer he had explained to her; he remembered just the beautiful light in her eyes, which were fixed on his so trustingly. How dear to him had been that unquestioning devotion, that tender, innocent humility! – how dear, and how dangerous!

We have read of flowing rivulets, wandering peacefully without ripple or commotion, so long as no barrier stayed their course, suddenly chafing in angry fury when an impassable dam was thrown across their waters. So any affection, however genial and gentle in its own nature, may become an ungovernable, ferocious passion, by the intervention of fatal obstacles in its course. In the case of Father Francesco, the sense of guilt and degradation fell like a blight over all the past that had been so ignorantly happy. He thought he had been living on manna, but found it poison. Satan had been fooling him, leading him on blindfold, and laughing at his simplicity, and now mocked at his captivity. And how nearly had he been hurried by a sudden and overwhelming influence to the very brink of disgrace! He felt himself shiver and grow cold to think of it. A moment more, and he had blasted that pure ear with forbidden words of passion; and even now he remembered, with horror, the look of grave and troubled surprise in those confiding eyes, that had always looked up to him trustingly, as to God. A moment more, and he had betrayed the faith he taught her, shattered her trust in the holy ministry, and perhaps imperiled her salvation. He breathed a sigh of relief when he thought of it, – he had not betrayed himself, he had not fallen in her esteem, he still stood on that sacred vantage-ground where his power over her was so great, and where at least he possessed her confidence and veneration. There was still time for recollection, for self-control, for a vehement struggle which should set all right again: but, alas! how shall a man struggle who finds his whole inner nature boiling in furious rebellion against the dictates of his conscience, – self against self?

It is true, also, that no passions are deeper in their hold, more pervading and more vital to the whole human being, than those that make their first entrance through the higher nature, and, beginning with a religious and poetic ideality, gradually work their way through the whole fabric of the human existence. From grosser passions, whose roots lie in the senses, there is always a refuge in man's loftier nature. He can cast them aside with contempt, and leave them as one whose lower story is flooded can remove to a higher loft, and live serenely with a purer air and wider prospect. But to love that is born of ideality, of intellectual sympathy, of harmonies of the spiritual and immortal natures, of the very poetry and purity of the soul, if it be placed where reason and religion forbid its exercise and expression, what refuge but the grave, – what hope but that wide eternity where all human barriers fall, all human relations end, and love ceases to be a crime? A man of the world may struggle by change of scene, place, and employment. He may put oceans between himself and the things that speak of what he desires to forget. He may fill the void in his life with the stirring excitement of the battle-field, or the whirl of travel from city to city, or the press of business and care. But what help is there for him whose life is tied down to the narrow sphere of the convent, – to the monotony of a bare cell, to the endless repetition of the same prayers, the same chants, the same prostrations, especially when all that ever redeemed it from monotony has been that image and that sympathy which conscience now bids him forget?

When Father Francesco precipitated himself into his cell and locked the door, it was with the desperation of a man who flies from a mortal enemy. It seemed to him that all eyes saw just what was boiling within him, – that the wild thoughts that seemed to scream their turbulent importunities in his ears were speaking so loud that all the world would hear. He should disgrace himself before the brethren whom he had so long been striving to bring to order and to teach the lessons of holy self-control. He saw himself pointed at, hissed at, degraded, by the very men who had quailed before his own reproofs; and scarcely, when he had bolted the door behind him, did he feel himself safe. Panting and breathless, he fell on his knees before the crucifix, and, bowing his head in his hands, fell forward upon the floor. As a spent wave melts at the foot of a rock, so all his strength passed away, and he lay awhile in a kind of insensibility, – a state in which, though consciously existing, he had no further control over his thoughts and feelings. In that state of dreamy exhaustion his mind seemed like a mirror, which, without vitality or will of its own, simply lies still and reflects the objects that may pass over it. As clouds sailing in the heavens cast their images, one after another, on the glassy floor of a waveless sea, so the scenes of his former life drifted in vivid pictures athwart his memory. He saw his father's palace, – the wide, cool, marble halls, – the gardens resounding with the voices of falling waters. He saw the fair face of his mother, and played with the jewels upon her hands. He saw again the picture of himself, in all the flush of youth and health, clattering on horseback through the streets of Florence with troops of gay young friends, now dead to him as he to them. He saw himself in the bowers of gay ladies, whose golden hair, lustrous eyes, and siren wiles came back shivering and trembling in the waters of memory in a thousand undulating reflections. There were wild revels, – orgies such as Florence remembers with shame to this day. There was intermingled the turbulent din of arms, – the haughty passion, the sudden provocation, the swift revenge. And then came the awful hour of conviction, the face of that wonderful man whose preaching had stirred all souls; and then those fearful days of penance, – that darkness of the tomb, – that dying to the world, – those solemn vows, and the fearful struggles by which they had been followed.

"Oh, my God!" he cried, "is it all in vain? – so many prayers? so many struggles? – and shall I fail of salvation at last?"

He seemed to himself as a swimmer, who, having exhausted his last gasp of strength in reaching the shore, is suddenly lifted up on a cruel wave and drawn back into the deep. There seemed nothing for him but to fold his arms and sink.

For he felt no strength now to resist, he felt no wish to conquer; he only prayed that he might lie there and die. It seemed to him that the love which possessed him and tyrannized over his very being was a doom, – a curse sent upon him by some malignant fate with whose power it was vain to struggle. He detested his work, – he detested his duties, – he loathed his vows; and there was not a thing in his whole future to which he looked forward otherwise than with the extreme of aversion, except one, to which he clung with a bitter and defiant tenacity, – the spiritual guidance of Agnes. Guidance! – he laughed aloud, in the bitterness of his soul, as he thought of this. He was her guide, her confessor; to him she was bound to reveal every change of feeling; and this love that he too well perceived rising in her heart for another, – he would wring from her own confessions the means to repress and circumvent it. If she could not be his, he might at least prevent her from belonging to any other, – he might at least keep her always within the sphere of his spiritual authority. Had he not a right to do this? had he not a right to cherish an evident vocation, – a right to reclaim her from the embrace of an excommunicated infidel, and present her as a chaste bride at the altar of the Lord? Perhaps, when that was done, when an irrevocable barrier should separate her from all possibility of earthly love, when the awful marriage-vow should have been spoken which should seal her heart for heaven alone, he might recover some of the blessed calm which her influence once brought over him, and these wild desires might cease, and these feverish pulses be still.

Such were the vague images and dreams of the past and future that floated over his mind, as he lay in a heavy sort of lethargy on the floor of his cell, and hour after hour passed away. It grew afternoon, and the radiance of evening came on. The window of the cell overlooked the broad Mediterranean, all one blue glitter of smiles and sparkles. The white-winged boats were flitting lightly to and fro, like gauzy-winged insects in the summer air; the song of the fishermen drawing their nets on the beach floated cheerily upward. Capri lay like a half-dissolved opal in shimmering clouds of mist, and Naples gleamed out pearly clear in the purple distance. Vesuvius, with its cloud-spotted sides, its garlanded villas and villages, its silvery crown of vapor, seemed a warm-hearted and genial old giant lying down in his gorgeous repose, and holding all things on his heaving bosom in a kindly embrace.

So was the earth flooded with light and glory, that the tide poured into the cell, giving the richness of an old Venetian painting to its bare and squalid furniture. The crucifix glowed along all its sculptured lines with rich golden hues. The breviary, whose many-colored leaves fluttered as the wind from the sea drew inward, was yet brighter in its gorgeous tints. It seemed a sort of devotional butterfly perched before the grinning skull, which was bronzed by the enchanted light into warmer tones of color, as if some remembrance of what once it saw and felt came back upon it. So, also, the bare, miserable board which served for the bed, and its rude pillow, were glorified. A stray sunbeam, too, fluttered down on the floor like a pitying spirit, to light up that pale, thin face, whose classic outlines had now a sharp, yellow setness, like that of swooning or death; it seemed to linger compassionately on the sunken, wasted cheeks, on the long black lashes that fell over the deep hollows beneath the eyes like a funereal veil. Poor man! lying crushed and torn, like a piece of rockweed wrenched from its rock by a storm, and thrown up withered upon the beach!

From the leaves of the breviary there depends, by a fragment of gold braid, a sparkling something that wavers and glitters in the evening light. It is a cross of the cheapest and simplest material, that once belonged to Agnes. She lost it from her rosary at the confessional, and Father Francesco saw it fall, yet would not warn her of the loss, for he longed to possess something that had belonged to her. He made it a mark to one of her favorite hymns; but she never knew where it had gone. Little could she dream, in her simplicity, what a power she held over the man who seemed to her an object of such awful veneration. Little did she dream that the poor little tinsel cross had such a mighty charm with it, and that she herself, in her childlike simplicity, her ignorant innocence, her peaceful tenderness and trust, was raising such a turbulent storm of passion in the heart which she supposed to be above the reach of all human changes.

And now, through the golden air, the Ave Maria is sounding from the convent-bells, and answered by a thousand tones and echoes from the churches of the old town, and all Christendom gives a moment's adoring pause to celebrate the moment when an angel addressed to a mortal maiden words that had been wept and prayed for during thousands of years. Dimly they sounded through his ear, in that half-deadly trance, – not with plaintive sweetness and motherly tenderness, but like notes of doom and vengeance. He felt rebellious impulses within, which rose up in hatred against them, and all that recalled to his mind the faith which seemed a tyranny, and the vows which appeared to him such a hopeless and miserable failure.

But now there came other sounds nearer and more earthly. His quickened senses perceive a busy patter of sandaled feet outside his cell, and a whispering of consultation, – and then the silvery, snaky tones of Father Johannes, which had that oily, penetrative quality which passes through all substances with such distinctness.

"Brethren," he said, "I feel bound in conscience to knock. Our blessed Superior carries his mortifications altogether too far. His faithful sons must beset him with filial inquiries."

The condition in which Father Francesco was lying, like many abnormal states of extreme exhaustion, seemed to be attended with a mysterious quickening of the magnetic forces and intuitive perceptions. He felt the hypocrisy of those tones, and they sounded in his ear like the suppressed hiss of a deadly serpent. He had always suspected that this man hated him to the death; and he felt now that he was come with his stealthy tread and his almost supernatural power of prying observation, to read the very inmost secrets of his heart. He knew that he longed for nothing so much as the power to hurl him from his place and to reign in his stead; and the instinct of self-defense roused him. He started up as one starts from a dream, waked by a whisper in the ear, and, raising himself on his elbow, looked towards the door.

A cautious rap was heard, and then a pause. Father Francesco smiled with a peculiar and bitter expression. The rap became louder, more energetic, stormy at last, intermingled with vehement calls on his name.

Father Francesco rose at length, settled his garments, passed his hands over his brow, and then, composing himself to an expression of deliberate gravity, opened the door and stood before them.

"Holy father," said Father Johannes, "the hearts of your sons have been saddened. A whole day have you withdrawn your presence from our devotions. We feared you might have fainted, your pious austerities so often transcend the powers of Nature."

"I grieve to have saddened the hearts of such affectionate sons," said the Superior, fixing his eye keenly on Father Johannes; "but I have been performing a peculiar office of prayer to-day for a soul in deadly peril, and have been so absorbed therein that I have known nothing that passed. There is a soul among us, brethren," he added, "that stands at this moment so near to damnation that even the most blessed Mother of God is in doubt for its salvation, and whether it can be saved at all, God only knows."

These words, rising up from a tremendous groundswell of repressed feeling, had a fearful, almost supernatural earnestness that made the body of the monks tremble. Most of them were conscious of living but a shabby, shambling, dissembling life, evading in every possible way the efforts of their Superior to bring them up to the requirements of their profession; and therefore, when these words were bolted out among them with such a glowing intensity, every one of them began mentally feeling for the key of his own private and interior skeleton-closet, and wondering which of their ghastly occupants was coming to light now.

Father Johannes alone was unmoved, because he had long since ceased to have a conscience. A throb of moral pulsation had for years been an impossibility to the dried and hardened fibre of his inner nature. He was one of those real, genuine, thorough unbelievers in all religion and all faith and all spirituality, whose unbelief grows only more callous by the constant handling of sacred things. Ambition was the ruling motive of his life, and every faculty was sharpened into such acuteness under its action that his penetration seemed at times almost preternatural.

While he stood with downcast eyes and hands crossed upon his breast, listening to the burning words which remorse and despair wrung from his Superior, he was calmly and warily studying to see what could be made of the evident interior conflict that convulsed him. Was there some secret sin? Had that sanctity at last found the temptation that was more than a match for it? And what could it be?

To a nature with any strong combative force there is no tonic like the presence of a secret and powerful enemy, and the stealthy glances of Father Johannes's serpent eye did more towards restoring Father Francesco to self-mastery than the most conscientious struggles could have done. He grew calm, resolved, determined. Self-respect was dear to him, – and dear to him no less that reflection of self-respect which a man reads in other eyes. He would not forfeit his conventual honor, or bring a stain on his order, or, least of all, expose himself to the scoffing eye of a triumphant enemy. Such were the motives that now came to his aid, while as yet the whole of his inner nature rebelled at the thought that he must tear up by the roots and wholly extirpate this love that seemed to have sent its fine fibres through every nerve of his being. "No!" he said to himself, with a fierce interior rebellion, "that I will not do! Right or wrong, come heaven, come hell, I will love her: and if lost I must be, lost I will be!" And while this determination lasted, prayer seemed to him a mockery. He dared not pray alone now, when most he needed prayer; but he moved forward with dignity towards the convent chapel to lead the vesper devotions of his brethren. Outwardly he was calm and rigid as a statue; but as he commenced the service, his utterance had a terrible meaning and earnestness that were felt even by the most drowsy and leaden of his flock. It is singular how the dumb, imprisoned soul, locked within the walls of the body, sometimes gives such a piercing power to the tones of the voice during the access of a great agony. The effect is entirely involuntary and often against the most strenuous opposition of the will, but one sometimes hears another reading or repeating words with an intense vitality, a living force, which tells of some inward anguish or conflict of which the language itself gives no expression.

Never were the long-drawn intonations of the chants and prayers of the Church pervaded by a more terrible, wild fervor than the Superior that night breathed into them. They seemed to wail, to supplicate, to combat, to menace, to sink in despairing pauses of helpless anguish, and anon to rise in stormy agonies of passionate importunity; and the monks quailed and trembled, they scarce knew why, with forebodings of coming wrath and judgment.

In the evening exhortation, which it had been the Superior's custom to add to the prayers of the vesper-hour, he dwelt with a terrible and ghastly eloquence on the loss of the soul.

"Brethren," he said, "believe me, the very first hour of a damned spirit in hell will outweigh all the prosperities of the most prosperous life. If you could gain the whole world, that one hour of hell would outweigh it all; how much more such miserable, pitiful scraps and fragments of the world as they gain who for the sake of a little fleshly ease neglect the duties of a holy profession! There is a broad way to hell through a convent, my brothers, where miserable wretches go who have neither the spirit to serve the Devil wholly, nor the patience to serve God; there be many shaven crowns that gnash their teeth in hell to-night, – many a monk's robe is burning on its owner in living fire, and the devils call him a fool for choosing to be damned in so hard a way. 'Could you not come here by some easier road than a cloister?' they ask. 'If you must sell your soul, why did you not get something for it?' Brethren, there be devils waiting for some of us; they are laughing at your paltry shifts and evasions, at your efforts to make things easy, – for they know how it will all end at last. Rouse yourselves! Awake! Salvation is no easy matter, – nothing to be got between sleeping and waking. Watch, pray, scourge the flesh, fast, weep, bow down in sackcloth, mingle your bread with ashes, if by any means ye may escape the everlasting fire!"