Agnes of Sorrento

And now the time was come, Agostino thought, to break the spell under which Agnes was held, – to show her the true character of the men whom she was beholding through a mist of veneration arising entirely from the dewy freshness of ignorant innocence. All the way home from Florence he had urged his horse onward, burning to meet her, to tell her all that he knew and felt, to claim her as his own, and to take her into the sphere of light and liberty in which he himself moved. He did not doubt his power, when she should once be where he could speak with her freely, without fear of interruption. Hers was a soul too good and pure, he said, to be kept in chains of slavish ignorance any longer. When she ceased singing, he spoke from the outer apartment, "Agnes!"

The name was uttered in the softest tone, but it sent the blood to her heart, as if it were the summons of doom. Everything seemed to swim before her, and grow dark for a moment; but by a strong effort she lifted her heart in prayer, and, rising, came towards him.

Agostino had figured her to himself in all that soft and sacred innocence and freshness of bloom in which he had left her, a fair angel child, looking through sad, innocent eyes on a life whose sins and sorrows, and deeper loves and hates, she scarcely comprehended, – one that he might fold in his arms with protecting tenderness, while he gently reasoned with her fears and prejudices; but the figure that stood there in the curtained arch, with its solemn, calm, transparent paleness of face, its large, intense dark eyes, now vivid with some mysterious and concentrated resolve, struck a strange chill over him. Was it Agnes or a disembodied spirit that stood before him? For a few moments there fell such a pause between them as the intensity of some unexpressed feeling often brings with it, and which seems like a spell.

"Agnes! Agnes! is it you?" at last said the knight, in a low, hesitating tone. "Oh, my love, what has changed you so? Speak! – do speak! Are you angry with me? Are you angry that I brought you here?"

"My Lord, I am not angry," said Agnes, speaking in a cold, sad tone; "but you have committed a great sin in turning aside those vowed to a holy pilgrimage, and you tempt me to sin by this conversation, which ought not to be between us."

"Why not?" said Agostino. "You would not see me at Sorrento. I sought to warn you of the dangers of this pilgrimage, – to tell you that Rome is not what you think it is, – that it is not the seat of Christ, but a foul cage of unclean birds, a den of wickedness, – that he they call Pope is a vile impostor" —

"My Lord," said Agnes, speaking with a touch of something even commanding in her tone, "you have me at advantage, it is true, but you ought not to use it in trying to ruin my soul by blaspheming holy things." And then she added, in a tone of indescribable sadness, "Alas, that so noble and beautiful a soul should be in rebellion against the only True Church! Have you forgotten that good mother you spoke of? What must she feel to know that her son is an infidel!"

"I am not an infidel, Agnes; I am a true knight of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and a believer in the One True, Holy Church."

"How can that be?" said Agnes. "Ah, seek not to deceive me! My Lord, such a poor little girl as I am is not worth the pains."

"By the Holy Mother, Agnes, by the Holy Cross, I do not seek to deceive you! I speak on my honor as a knight and gentleman. I love you truly and honorably, and seek you among all women as my spotless wife, and would I lie to you?"

"My Lord, you have spoken words which it is a sin for me to hear, a peril to your soul to say; and if you had not, you must not seek me as a wife. Holy vows are upon me. I must be the wife of no man here; it is a sin even to think of it."

"Impossible, Agnes!" said Agostino, with a start. "You have not taken the veil already? If you had" —

"No, my Lord, I have not. I have only promised and vowed in my heart to do so when the Lord shall open the way."

"But such vows, dear Agnes, are often dispensed; they may be loosed by the priest. Now hear me, – only hear me. I believe as your uncle believes, – your good, pious uncle, whom you love so much. I have taken the sacrament from his hand; he has blessed me as a son. I believe as Jerome Savonarola believes. He it is, that holy prophet, who has proclaimed this Pope and his crew to be vile usurpers, reigning in the name of Christ."

"My Lord! my Lord! I must not hear more! I must not, – I cannot, – I will not!" said Agnes, becoming violently agitated, as she found herself listening with interest to the pleadings of her lover.

"Oh, Agnes, what has turned your heart against me? I thought you promised to love me a little?"

"Oh, hush! hush! don't plead with me!" she said, with a wild, affrighted look.

He sought to come towards her, and she sprang forward and threw herself at his feet.

"Oh, my Lord, for mercy's sake let me go! Let us go on our way! We will pray for you always, – yes, always!" And she looked up at him in an agony of earnestness.

"Am I so hateful to you, then, Agnes?"

"Hateful? Oh, no, no! God knows you are – I – I – yes, I love you too well, and you have too much power over me; but, oh, do not use it! If I hear you talk I shall yield, – I surely shall, and we shall be lost, both of us! Oh, my God! I shall be the means of your damnation!"

"Agnes!"

"It is true! it is true! Oh, do not talk to me, but promise me, promise me, or I shall die! Have pity on me! have pity on yourself!"

In the agony of her feelings her voice became almost a shriek, and her wild, affrighted face had a deadly pallor; she looked like one in a death-agony. Agostino was alarmed, and hastened to soothe her, by promising whatever she required:

"Agnes, dear Agnes, I submit; only be calm. I promise anything, – anything in the wide world you can ask."

"Will you let me go?"

"Yes."

"And will you let my poor grandmamma go with me?"

"Yes."

"And you will not talk with me any more?"

"Not if you do not wish it. And now," he said, "that I have submitted to all these hard conditions, will you suffer me to raise you?"

He took her hands and lifted her up; they were cold, and she was trembling and shivering. He held them a moment; she tried to withdraw them, and he let them go.

"Farewell, Agnes!" he said. "I am going."

She raised both her hands and pressed the sharp cross to her bosom, but made no answer.

"I yield to your will," he continued. "Immediately when I leave you your grandmother will come to you, and the attendants who brought you here will conduct you to the high-road. For me, since it is your will, I part here. Farewell, Agnes!"

He held out his hand, but she stood as before, pale and silent, with her hands clasped on her breast.

"Do your vows forbid even a farewell to a poor, humble friend?" said the knight, in a low tone.

"I cannot," said Agnes, speaking at broken intervals, in a suffocating voice, – "for your sake I cannot! I bear this pain for you, – for you! Oh, repent, and meet me in heaven!"

She gave him her hand; he kneeled and kissed it, pressed it to his forehead, then rose and left the room.

For a moment after the departure of the cavalier, Agnes felt a bitter pang, – the pain which one feels on first realizing that a dear friend is lost forever; and then, rousing herself with a start and a sigh, she hurried into the inner room and threw herself on her knees, giving thanks that the dreadful trial was past, and that she had not been left to fail.

In a few moments she heard the voice of her grandmother in the outer apartment, and the old wrinkled creature clasped her grandchild in her arms, and wept with a passionate abandonment of fondness, calling her by every tender and endearing name which mothers give to their infants.

"After all," said Elsie, "these are not such bad people, and I have been right well entertained among them. They are of ourselves, – they do not prey on the poor, but only on our enemies, the princes and nobles, who look on us as sheep to be shorn and slaughtered for their wearing and eating. These men are none such, but pitiful to poor peasants and old widows, whom they feed and clothe out of the spoils of the rich. As to their captain, – would you believe it? – he is the same handsome gentleman who once gave you a ring, – you may have forgotten him, as you never think of such things, but I knew him in a moment, – and such a religious man, that no sooner did he find that we were pilgrims on a holy errand, than he gave orders to have us set free with all honor, and a band of the best of them to escort us through the mountains; and the people of the town are all moved to do us reverence, and coming with garlands and flowers to wish us well and ask our prayers. So let us set forth immediately."

Agnes followed her grandmother through the long passages and down the dark, mouldy stairway to the court-yard, where two horses were standing caparisoned for them. A troop of men in high peaked hats, cloaked and plumed, were preparing also to mount, while a throng of women and children stood pressing around. When Agnes appeared, enthusiastic cries were heard: "Viva Jesù!" "Viva Maria!" "Viva! viva Jesù! nostro Re!" and showers of myrtle-branches and garlands fell around. "Pray for us!" "Pray for us, holy pilgrims!" was uttered eagerly by one and another. Mothers held up their children; and beggars and cripples, aged and sick, – never absent in an Italian town, – joined with loud cries in the general enthusiasm. Agnes stood amid it all, pale and serene, with that elevated expression of heavenly calm on her features which is often the clear shining of the soul after the wrench and torture of some great interior conflict. She felt that the last earthly chain was broken, and that now she belonged to Heaven alone. She scarcely saw or heard what was around her, wrapt in the calm of inward prayer.

"Look at her! she is beautiful as the Madonna!" said one and another. "She is divine as Santa Catarina!" said others. "She might have been the wife of our chief, who is a nobleman of the oldest blood, but she chose to be the bride of the Lord," said others: for Giulietta, with a woman's love of romancing, had not failed to make the most among her companions of the love-adventures of Agnes.

Agnes meanwhile was seated on her palfrey, and the whole train passed out of the court-yard into the dim, narrow street, – men, women, and children following. On reaching the public square, they halted a moment by the side of the antique fountain to water their horses. The groups that surrounded it at this time were such as a painter would have delighted to copy. The women and girls of this obscure mountain-town had all that peculiar beauty of form and attitude which appears in the studies of the antique; and as they poised on their heads their copper water-jars of the old Etruscan pattern, they seemed as if they might be statues of golden bronze, had not the warm tints of their complexion, the brilliancy of their large eyes, and the bright picturesque colors of their attire given the richness of painting to their classic outlines. Then, too, the men, with their finely-moulded limbs, their figures so straight and strong and elastic, their graceful attitudes, and their well-fitting, showy costumes, formed a no less imposing feature in the scene. Among them all sat Agnes waiting on her palfrey, seeming scarcely conscious of the enthusiasm which surrounded her. Some admiring friend had placed in her hand a large bough of blossoming hawthorn, which she held unconsciously, as, with a sort of childlike simplicity, she turned from right to left, to make reply to the request for prayers, or to return thanks for the offered benediction of some one in the crowd.

When all the preparations were at last finished, the procession of mounted horsemen, with a confused gathering of the population, passed down the streets to the gates of the city, and as they passed they sang the words of the Crusaders' Hymn, which had fluttered back into the traditionary memory of Europe from the knights going to redeem the Holy Sepulchre.

"Fairest Lord Jesus,Ruler of all Nature,O Thou of God and man the Son!Thee will I honor,Thee will I cherish,Thou, my soul's glory, joy, and crown!"Fair are the meadows,Fairer still the woodlands,Robed in the pleasing garb of spring:Jesus shines fairer,Jesus is purerWho makes the woful heart to sing!"Fair is the sunshine,Fairer still the moonlight,And all the twinkling starry host:Jesus shines fairer,Jesus is purer,Than all the angels heaven can boast!"

They were singing the second verse, as, emerging from the dark old gateway of the town, all the distant landscape of silvery olive-orchards, crimson clover-fields, blossoming almond-trees, fig-trees, and grapevines, just in the tender green of spring, burst upon their view. Agnes felt a kind of inspiration. From the high mountain elevation she could discern the far-off brightness of the sea, – all between one vision of beauty, – and the religious enthusiasm which possessed all around her had in her eye all the value of the most solid and reasonable faith. With us, who may look on it from a colder and more distant point of view, doubts may be suggested whether this naïve impressibility to religious influences, this simple, whole-hearted abandonment to their expression, had any real practical value. The fact that any or all of the actors might before night rob or stab or lie quite as freely as if it had not occurred may well give reason for such a question. Be this as it may, the phenomenon is not confined to Italy or the religion of the Middle Ages, but exhibits itself in many a prayer-meeting and camp-meeting of modern days. For our own part, we hold it better to have even transient upliftings of the nobler and more devout element of man's nature than never to have any at all, and that he who goes on in worldly and sordid courses, without ever a spark of religious enthusiasm or a throb of aspiration, is less of a man than he who sometimes soars heavenward, though his wings be weak and he fall again.

In all this scene Agostino Sarelli took no part. He had simply given orders for the safe-conduct of Agnes, and then retired to his own room. From a window, however, he watched the procession as it passed through the gates of the city, and his resolution was immediately taken to proceed at once by a secret path to the place where the pilgrims should emerge upon the high-road.

He had been induced to allow the departure of Agnes from seeing the utter hopelessness by any argument or persuasion of removing a barrier that was so vitally interwoven with the most sensitive religious nerves of her being. He saw in her terrified looks, in the deadly paleness of her face, how real and unaffected was the anguish which his words gave her; he saw that the very consciousness of her own love to him produced a sense of weakness which made her shrink in utter terror from his arguments.

"There is no remedy," he said, "but to let her go to Rome and see with her own eyes how utterly false and vain is the vision which she draws from the purity of her own believing soul. What Christian would not wish that these fair dreams had any earthly reality? But this gentle dove must not be left unprotected to fly into that foul, unclean cage of vultures and harpies. Deadly as the peril may be to me to breathe the air of Rome, I will be around her invisibly to watch over her."

CHAPTER XXVI

ROME

A vision rises upon us from the land of shadows. We see a wide plain, miles and miles in extent, rolling in soft billows of green, and girded on all sides by blue mountains, whose silver crests gleaming in the setting sunlight tell that the winter yet lingers on their tops, though spring has decked all the plain. So silent, so lonely, so fair is this waving expanse with its guardian mountains, it might be some wild solitude, an American prairie or Asiatic steppe, but that in the midst thereof, on some billows of rolling land, we discern a city, sombre, quaint, and old, – a city of dreams and mysteries, – a city of the living and the dead. And this is Rome, – weird, wonderful, ancient, mighty Rome, – mighty once by physical force and grandeur, mightier now in physical decadence and weakness by the spell of a potent moral enchantment.

As the sun is moving westward, the whole air around becomes flooded with a luminousness which seems to transfuse itself with pervading presence through every part of the city, and make all its ruinous and mossy age bright and living. The air shivers with the silver vibrations of hundreds of bells, and the evening glory goes up and down, soft-footed and angelic, transfiguring all things. The broken columns of the Forum seem to swim in golden mist, and luminous floods fill the Coliseum as it stands with its thousand arches looking out into the city like so many sightless eye-holes in the skull of the past. The tender light pours up streets dank and ill-paved, – into noisome and cavernous dens called houses, where the peasantry of to-day vegetate in contented subservience. It illuminates many a dingy court-yard, where the moss is green on the walls, and gurgling fountains fall into quaint old sculptured basins. It lights up the gorgeous palaces of Rome's modern princes, built with stones wrenched from ancient ruins. It streams through a wilderness of churches, each with its tolling prayer-bell, and steals through painted windows into the dazzling confusion of pictured and gilded glories that glitter and gleam from roof and wall within. And it goes, too, across the Tiber, up the filthy and noisome Ghetto, where, hemmed in by ghostly superstition, the sons of Israel are growing up without vital day, like wan white plants in cellars; and the black mournful obelisks of the cypresses in the villas around, it touches with a solemn glory. The castle of St. Angelo looks like a great translucent, luminous orb, and the statues of saints and apostles on the top of St. John Lateran glow as if made of living fire, and seem to stretch out glorified hands of welcome to the pilgrims that are approaching the Holy City across the soft, palpitating sea of green that lies stretched like a misty veil around it.

Then, as now, Rome was an enchantress of mighty and wonderful power, with her damp, and mud, and mould, her ill-fed, ill-housed populace, her ruins of old glory rising dim and ghostly amid her palaces of to-day. With all her awful secrets of rapine, cruelty, ambition, injustice, – with her foul orgies of unnatural crime, – with the very corruption of the old buried Roman Empire steaming up as from a charnel-house, and permeating all modern life with its effluvium of deadly uncleanness, – still Rome had that strange, bewildering charm of melancholy grandeur and glory which made all hearts cleave to her, and eyes and feet turn longingly towards her from the ends of the earth. Great souls and pious yearned for her as for a mother, and could not be quieted till they had kissed the dust of her streets. There they fondly thought was rest to be found, – that rest which through all weary life ever recedes like the mirage of the desert; there sins were to be shriven which no common priest might forgive, and heavy burdens unbound from the conscience by an infallible wisdom; there was to be revealed to the praying soul the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Even the mighty spirit of Luther yearned for the breast of this great unknown mother, and came humbly thither to seek the repose which he found afterwards in Jesus.

At this golden twilight-hour along the Appian Way come the pilgrims of our story with prayers and tears of thankfulness. Agnes looks forward and sees the saintly forms on St. John Lateran standing in a cloud of golden light and stretching out protecting hands to bless her.

"See, see, grandmother!" she exclaimed, "yonder is our Father's house, and all the saints beckon us home! Glory be to God, who hath brought us hither!"

Within the church the evening-service is going on, and the soft glory streaming in reveals that dizzying confusion of riches and brightness with which the sensuous and color-loving Italian delights to encircle the shrine of the Heavenly Majesty. Pictured angels in cloudy wreaths smile down from the gold-fretted roofs and over the round, graceful arches; and the floor seems like a translucent sea of precious marbles and gems fused into solid brightness, and reflecting in long gleams and streaks dim intimations of the sculptured and gilded glories above. Altar and shrine are now veiled in that rich violet hue which the Church has chosen for its mourning color; and violet vestments, taking the place of the gorgeous robes of the ecclesiastics, tell the approach of that holy week of sadness when all Christendom falls in penitence at the feet of that Almighty Love once sorrowful and slain for her.

The long-drawn aisles are now full to overflowing with that weird chanting which one hears nowhere but in Rome at this solemn season. Those voices, neither of men nor women, have a wild, morbid energy which seems to search every fibre of the nervous system, and, instead of soothing or calming, to awaken strange yearning agonies of pain, ghostly unquiet longings, and endless feverish, unrestful cravings. The sounds now swell and flood the church as with a rushing torrent of wailing and clamorous supplication, – now recede and moan themselves away to silence in far-distant aisles, like the last faint sigh of discouragement and despair. Anon they burst out from the room, they drop from arches and pictures, they rise like steam from the glassy pavement, and, meeting, mingle in wavering clamors of lamentation and shrieks of anguish. One might fancy lost souls from out the infinite and dreary abysses of utter separation from God might thus wearily and aimlessly moan and wail, breaking into agonized tumults of desire, and trembling back into exhaustions of despair. Such music brings only throbbings and yearnings, but no peace; and yonder, on the glassy floor, at the foot of a crucifix, a poor mortal lies sobbing and quivering under its pitiless power, as if it had wrenched every tenderest nerve of memory, and torn open every half-healed wound of the soul.

When the chanting ceases, he rises slow and tottering, and we see in the wan face turning towards the dim light the well-remembered features of Father Francesco. Driven to despair by the wild, ungovernable force of his unfortunate love, weary of striving, overborne with a hopeless and continually accumulating load of guilt, he had come to Rome to lay down at the feet of heavenly wisdom the burden which he can no longer bear alone; and rising now, he totters to a confessional where sits a holy cardinal to whom has been deputed the office to hear and judge those sins which no subordinate power in the Church is competent to absolve.

Father Francesco kneels down with a despairing, confiding movement, such as one makes, when, after a long struggle of anguish, one has found a refuge; and the churchman within inclining his ear to the grating, the confession begins.

Could we only be clairvoyant, it would be worth our while to note the difference between the two faces, separated only by the thin grating of the confessional, but belonging to souls whom an abyss wide as eternity must forever divide from any common ground of understanding.

On the one side, with ear close to the grate, is a round, smoothly developed Italian head, with that rather tumid outline of features which one often sees in a Roman in middle life, when easy living and habits of sensual indulgence begin to reveal their signs in the countenance, and to broaden and confuse the clear-cut, statuesque lines of early youth. Evidently, that is the head of an easy-going, pleasure-loving man, who has waxed warm with good living, and performs the duties of his office with an unctuous grace as something becoming and decorous to be gone through with. Evidently he is puzzled and half-contemptuous at the revelations which come through the grating in hoarse whispers from those thin, trembling lips. The other man, who speaks with the sweat of anguish beaded on his brow, with a mortal pallor on his thin, worn cheeks, is putting questions to the celestial guide within which seem to that guide the ravings of a crazed lunatic; and yet there is a deadly, despairing earnestness in the appeal that makes an indistinct knocking at the door of his heart, for the man is born of woman, and can feel that somehow or other these are the words of a mighty agony.