My Friend Prospero Part 17

"Laugh if you will," he said, "though it seems to me as far as possible from a laughing matter, and I think Annunziata chose the better part when she cried."

"I beg your pardon," said Maria Dolores, perhaps a trifle stiffly. "I was only laughing at the coincidence of my having supposed him to be a priest, and then learning that, though he isn't, he is going to become one. I was not laughing at the fact itself. Nor was it," she added, her stiffness leaving her, and a little glimmer of amus.e.m.e.nt taking its place, "that fact which made Annunziata cry."

"I dare say not," responded John, "seeing that she couldn't possibly have known it. But it might well have done so. It's enough to bring tears to the eyes of a brazen image." He angrily jerked his shoulders.

"What?" cried Maria Dolores, surprised, rebukeful. "That a man is to become a holy priest?"

"Oh, no," said John. "That fact alone, detached from special circ.u.mstances, might be a subject for rejoicing. But the fact that this particular man, _in_ his special circ.u.mstances, is to become a priest--well, I simply have no words to express my feeling." He threw out his arms, in a gesture of despair. "I'm simply sick with rage and pity. I could gnash my teeth and rend my garments."

"Mercy!" cried Maria Dolores, stirring. "What are the special circ.u.mstances?"

"Oh, it's a grisly history," said John. "It's a tale of the wanton, ruthless, needless, purposeless sacrifice of two lives. It's his old black icy Puritan blood. Winthorpe--that's his name--had for years been a freethinker, far too intellectual and enlightened, and that sort of thing, you know, to believe any such old wives' tale as the Christian Religion. He and I used to have arguments, tremendous ones, in which, of course, neither in the least shook the other. Darwin and Spencer, with a dash of his native Emerson, were religion enough for him. Then this morning he arrived here, and said, 'Congratulate me. A month ago I was received into the Church.'"

Maria Dolores looked up, animated, her dark eyes sparkling.

"How splendid!" she said.

"Yes," agreed John, "so I thought. 'Congratulate me,' he said. I should think I did congratulate him,--with all my heart and soul. But then, naturally, I asked him how it had happened, what had brought it to pa.s.s."

"Yes--?" prompted Maria Dolores, as he paused.

"Well," said John, his face hardening, "he thereupon proceeded to tell me in his quiet way, with his cool voice (it's like smooth-flowing cold water), absolutely the most inhuman story I have ever had to keep my patience and listen to."

"What was the story?" asked Maria Dolores.

"If you can credit such inhumanity, it was this," answered John. "It seems that he fell in love--with a girl in Boston, where he lives. And what's more, and worse, the girl fell in love with him. So there they were, engaged. But she was a Catholic, and his state of unbelief was a cause of great grief to her. So she pleaded with him, and persuaded, till, merely to comfort her, and without the faintest suspicion that his scepticism could be weakened, he promised to give the Catholic position a thorough reconsideration, to read certain books, and to put himself under instruction with a priest: which he did. Which he did, if you please, with the result, to his own unutterable surprise, that one fine day he woke up and discovered that he'd been convinced, that he _believed_."

"Yes?" said Maria Dolores, eagerly. "Yes--? And then? And the girl?"

"Ah," said John, with a groan, "the girl That's the pity of it. That's where his black old Puritan blood comes in. Blood? It isn't blood--it's some fluid form of stone--it's flint dissolved in vinegar. The girl!

Mind you, she loved him, they were engaged to be married. Well, he went to her, and said, 'I have been converted. I believe in the Christian religion--your religion. But I can't believe a thing like that, and go on living as I lived when I didn't believe it,--go on living as if it weren't true, or didn't matter. It does matter--it matters supremely--it's the only thing in the world that matters. I can't believe it, and _marry_--marry, and live in tranquil indifference to it.

No, I must put aside the thought of marriage, the thought of personal happiness. I must sell all I have and give it to the poor, take up my cross and follow Him. I am going to Rome to study for the priesthood.'

Imagine," groaned John, stretching out his hands, "_imagine_ talking like that to a woman you are supposed to love, to a woman who loves you." And he wrathfully ground his heel into the earth.

Maria Dolores looked serious.

"After all, he had to obey his conscience," she said. "After all, he was logical, he was consistent."

"Oh, his conscience! Oh, consistency!" cried John, with an intolerant fling of the body. "At bottom it's nothing better than common self-indulgence, as I took the liberty of telling him to his face. It's the ardour of the convert, acting upon that acid solution of flint which takes the place of blood in his veins, and causing sour puritanical impulses, which (like any other voluptuary) he immediately gives way to.

It's nothing better than unbridled pa.s.sion. Conscience, indeed! Where was his conscience when it came to _her_? Think of that poor girl--that poor pale girl--who _loved_ him. Oh, Mother of Mercy!"

He moved impatiently three steps to the left, three steps to the right, beating the palm of one hand with the back of the other.

"What did she do? How did she take it?" asked Maria Dolores.

"What she ought to have done," said John, between his teeth, "was to scratch his eyes out. What she did do, as he informed me with a seraphic countenance, was not merely to approve of everything he said, but to determine to do likewise. So, while he's on his way to Rome, to get himself tonsured and beca.s.socked, she's scrubbing the floors of an Ursuline convent, as a novice. And there are two lives spoiled." He shrugged his shoulders.

"Oh, no, no," contended Maria Dolores, earnestly, shaking her head, "not spoiled. On the contrary. It is sad, in a way, if you like, but it is very beautiful, it is heroic. Their love must have been a very beautiful love, that could lead them to such self-sacrifice. Two lives given to G.o.d."

"Can't people give their lives to G.o.d without ceasing to _live_?" cried John. "If marriage is a sacrament, how can they better give their lives to G.o.d than by living sanely and sweetly in Christian marriage? But these people withdraw from life, renounce life, s.h.i.+rk and evade the life that G.o.d had prepared for them and was demanding of them. It's as bad as suicide. Besides, it implies such a totally perverted view of religion.

Religion surely is given to us to help us to _live_, to show us _how_ to live, to enable us to meet the difficulties, emergencies, responsibilities of life. But these people look upon their religion as a mandate to turn their backs on the responsibilities of life, and scuttle away. And as for _love_! Well, she no doubt did love, poor lady.

But Winthorpe! No. When a man loves he doesn't send his love into a convent, and go to Rome to get himself beca.s.socked." He gave his head a nod of finality.

"That, I fancy, is a question of temperament," said Maria Dolores. "Your friend has the ascetic temperament. And it does not by any means follow that he loves less because he resigns his love. What you call an inhuman story seems to me a wonderfully n.o.ble one. I saw your friend this morning, when he and you were walking together, and I said to myself, 'That man looks as if he had listened to the Counsels of Perfection. His vocation s.h.i.+nes through him.' I think you should reconcile yourself to his accepting it."

"Well," said John, on the tone of a man ready to change the subject, "I owe him at least one good mark. His account of his 'heart-state' led me to examine my own, and I discovered that I am in love myself,--which is a useful thing to know."

"Oh?" said Maria Dolores, with a little effect of reserve.

"Yes," said John, nothing daunted, "though unlike his, mine is an unreciprocated flame, and unavowed."

"Ah?" said Maria Dolores, reserved indeed, but not without an undertone of sympathy.

"Yes," said John, playing with fire, and finding therein a heady mixture of fearfulness and joy. "The woman I love doesn't dream I love her, and dreams still less of loving me,--for which blessed circ.u.mstance may Heaven make me truly thankful."

The sentiment sounding unlikely, Maria Dolores raised doubtful eyes.

They shone into John's; his drank their light; and something violent happened in his bosom.

"Oh--?" she said.

"Yes," said he, thinking what adorable little hands she had, as they lay loosely clasped in her lap, thinking how warm they would be, and fragrant; thinking too what fun it was, this playing with fire, how perilous and exciting, and how egotistical he must seem to her, and how nothing on earth should prevent him from continuing the play. "Yes," he said, "it's a circ.u.mstance to be thankful for, because, like Winthorpe himself, though for different reasons, I'm unable to contemplate marriage." His voice sank sorrowfully, and he made a sorrowful movement.

"Oh--?" said Maria Dolores, her sympathy becoming more explicit.

"Winthorpe's too beastly puritanical--and I'm too beastly poor," said he.

"Oh," she murmured. Her eyes softened; her sympathy deepened to compa.s.sion.

"She must certainly put me down as the most complacent egotist in two hemispheres, so to regale her with unsolicited information about myself," thought John; "but surely it would need six hemispheres to produce another pair of eyes as beautiful as hers."--"Yes," he said, "I should be 'looking up' if I asked even a beggar-maid to marry me."

Maria Dolores' beautiful eyes became thoughtful as well as compa.s.sionate.

"But men who are poor work and earn money," she said, on the tone that young women adopt when the spirit moves them to preach to young men. And when the spirit does move them to that, things may be looked upon as having advanced an appreciable distance, the ball may be looked upon as rolling.

"So I've heard," said John, his head in the clouds. "It must be dull business."

Maria Dolores dimly smiled. "Do _you_ do no work?" she asked.

"I've never had time," said John. "I've been too busy enjoying life."

"Oh," said Maria Dolores, with the intonation of reproach.

"Yes," said he, "enjoying the Humour, the Romance, the Beauty of it,--and combine the three together, make a chord of 'em, you get the Divinity. Or, to take a lower plane, the world's a stage, and life's the drama. I could never leave off watching and listening long enough to do any work."

"But do you not wish to play a part in the drama, to be one of the actors?" asked his gentle homilist. "Have you no ambition?"

"Not an atom," he easily confessed. "The part of spectator seems to me by far the pleasantest. To sit in the stalls and watch the incredible jumble-show, the reason-defying topsy-turvydom of it, the gorgeous, squalid, tearful, and mirthful pageantry, the reckless inconsequences, the flagrant impossibilities; to watch the Devil ramping up and down like a hungry lion, and to hear the young-eyed cherubim choiring from the skies: what better entertainment could the heart of man desire?"

"But are we here merely to be entertained?" she sweetly preached, while John's blue eyes somewhat mischievously laughed, and he felt it hard that he couldn't stop her rose-red mouth with kisses. "Aren't we here to be, as the old-fas.h.i.+oned phrase goes, of use in the world? Besides, now that you are in love, surely you will never sit down weakly, and say, 'I am too poor to marry,' and so give up your love,--like your friend Winthorpe indeed, but for ign.o.ble instead of n.o.ble motives. Surely you will set to work with determination, and earn money, and make it possible to marry. Or else your love must be a very poor affair." And her adorable little hands, as they lay ("like white lilies," thought John) upon the pale-green fabric of her gown, unclasped themselves, opened wide for an instant, showing the faint pink of their palms, then lightly again interlaced their fingers.