The Master-Christian Part 50

Another heavy pause ensued. An invisible something was in the air,--a sense of that vast supernatural which is deeply centered at the core of the natural universe,--a grave mystery which seemed to envelop all visible things with a sudden shadow of premonitory fear. The silence prevailing was painful--almost terrible. A great ormolu clock in the room, one of the Holy Father's "Jubilee" gifts, ticked the minutes slowly away with a jewel-studded pendulum, which in its regular movements to and fro sounded insolently obtrusive in such a stillness.

Gherardi abstractedly raised his eyes to a great ivory crucifix which was displayed upon the wall against a background of rich purple velvet,--Manuel was standing immediately in front of it, and the tortured head of the carven Christ drooped over him as though in a sorrow-stricken benediction. A dull anger began to irritate Gherardi's usually well-tempered nerves, and he was searching in his mind for some scathing sentence wherewith to overwhelm and reprove the confident ease of the boy, when the door leading to the Pope's apartments was slowly pushed open to admit the entrance of Monsignor Moretti. Cardinal Bonpre had not seen him since the day of the Vergniaud scandal in Paris,--and a faint colour came into his pale cheeks as he noted the air of overbearing condescension and authority with which Moretti, here on his own ground, as one of the favorites of the Pope, greeted him.

"The Holy Father is ready to receive you," he said, "But I regret to inform your Eminence that His Holiness can see no way to excuse or condone the grave offence of the Abbe Vergniaud,--moreover, the fact of the sin-begotten son being known to the world as Gys Grandit, makes it more than ever necessary that the ban of excommunication should be pa.s.sed upon him. Especially, as those uninstructed in the Faith, are under the delusion that the penalty of excommunication has become more or less obsolete, and we have now an opportunity for making publicly known the truth that it still exists, and may be used by the Church in extreme situations, when judged politic and fitting."

"Then in this case the Church must excommunicate the dead!" said the Cardinal quietly.

Moretti's face turned livid.

"Dead?" he exclaimed, "I do not believe it!"

Silently Bonpre handed him the telegram received that morning. Moretti read it, his eyes sparkling with rage.

"How do I know this is not a trick?" he said, "The accursed atheist of a son may have telegraphed a lie!"

"I hardly think he would condescend to that!" returned the Cardinal calmly, "It would not be worth his while. You must remember, that to one of his particular views, Church excommunication, either for his father or himself, would mean nothing. He makes himself responsible for his conduct to G.o.d only. And whatever his faults he certainly believes in G.o.d!"

Moretti read through the telegram again.

"We must place this before His Holiness," he said, "And it will very seriously annoy him! I fear your Eminence," here he gave a quick meaning look at Bonpre, "will be all the more severely censured for having pardoned the Abbe's sins."

"Is it wrong to forgive sinners?" asked Manuel, his clear young voice breaking through the air like a silver bell rung suddenly,--"And when one cannot reach the guilty, should one punish the innocent?"

Moretti scowled fiercely at the fair candid face turned enquiringly near his own.

"You are too young to ask questions!" he said roughly--"Wait to be questioned yourself--and think twice--aye three times before you answer!"

The bright expression of the boy's countenance seemed to become intensified as he heard.

"'Take no thought how or what ye shall speak, for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak!'" he said softly--"'For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you!'"

Moretti flushed angrily, and his hand involuntarily clenched.

"Those words were addressed by our Lord to His Apostles," he retorted--"Apostles, of whom our Holy Father the Pope is the one infallible representative. They were not spoken to an ignorant lad who barely knows his catechism!"

"Yet were not the Apostles themselves told," went on Manuel steadily, "to be humble as ignorant children if they would enter the Kingdom of Heaven? And did not Christ say, 'Whoso offendeth one of these little ones which believe in Me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea!' I am sure there are many such little ones who believe in Christ,--perhaps too, without knowing any catechism,--and even Apostles must beware of offending them!"

"Does this boy follow your teaching in the quoting of Scripture with so glib a tongue?" asked Moretti, turning sharply round upon the Cardinal.

Bonpre returned his angry look with one of undisturbed serenity.

"My son, I have taught him nothing!" he replied, "I have no time as yet--and I may add--no inclination, to become his instructor. He speaks from his own nature."

"It is a nature that needs training!" said Gherardi, smiling blandly, and silencing by a gesture Moretti's threatening outburst of wrath, "To quote Scripture rashly, without due consideration for the purpose to which it is to be applied, does not actually const.i.tute an offence, but it displays a reprehensible disregard and ignorance of theology.

However, theology," here he smiled still more broadly, "is a hard word for the comprehension of the young! This poor little lad cannot be expected to grasp its meaning."

Manuel raised his bright eyes and fixed them steadily on the priest's countenance.

"Oh, yes!" he said quietly, "I understand it perfectly! Originally it meant the Word or Discourse of G.o.d,--it has now come to mean the words or discourses, or quarrels and differences of men on the things of G.o.d!

But G.o.d's Word remains G.o.d's Word--eternally, invincibly! No man can alter it, and Christ preached it so plainly that the most simple child cannot fail to understand it!"

Moretti was about to speak when again Gherardi interrupted him.

"Patience! Patience!" he said soothingly, "Perchance we must say"--this with a flash of derision from his dark crafty eyes, "that a prophet hath arisen in Israel! Listen to me, boy! If Christ spoke as plainly as you say, and if all He preached could be understood by the people, why should He have founded a Church to teach His doctrine?"

"He did not found a Church," answered Manuel, "He tried to make a Human Brotherhood. He trusted twelve men. They all forsook Him in His hour of need, and one betrayed Him! When He died and arose again from the dead, they sought to give themselves a Divine standing on His Divinity. They preached His Word to the world--true!--but they preached their own as well! Hence the Church!"

Moretti's angry eyes rolled in his head with an excess of wrath and amazement.

"Surely some evil spirit possesses this boy!" he exclaimed irately, "Retro me Sathanas! He is a rank heretic--a heathen! And yet he lives in the companions.h.i.+p of Cardinal Felix Bonpre!"

Both priests looked at the Cardinal in angry astonishment, but he stood silent, one wrinkled hand holding up the trailing folds of his scarlet robe,--his head slightly bent, and his whole att.i.tude expressive of profound patience and resignation. Manuel turned his eyes upon him and smiled tenderly.

"It is not the fault of Cardinal Bonpre that I think my own thoughts,"

he said, "or that I speak as I have spoken from the beginning. He found me lost and alone in the world,--and he sheltered me, knowing not whom he sheltered! Let what blame there is in me therefore be mine alone, and not his or another's!"

His young voice, so full of sweetness, seemed to melt the cold and heavy silence into vibrations of warm feeling, and a sudden sense of confusion and shame swept over the callous and calculating minds of the two men, miscalled priests, as they listened. But before they could determine or contrive an answer, the door was thrown open, and the lean man in black entered, and pausing on the threshold bowed slightly,--then raising his hand with a gesture which invited all to follow him, turned again and walked on in front,--then crossing a small antechamber, he drew aside a long curtain of purple damask heavily fringed with gold, and opened a farther door. Here he stood back, and allowed Cardinal Bonpre to pa.s.s in first, attended by Manuel,--Monsignori Gherardi and Moretti followed. And then the valet, closing the door behind them, and pulling the rich curtain across, sat down himself close outside it to be within call when the Holy Father should summon his attendance by means of a bell which hung immediately over his head. And to while away the time he pulled from his pocket that day's issue of a well-known Republican paper,--one of the most anti-Papal tendency, thereby showing that his constant humble attendance upon the Head of the Church had not made him otherwise than purely human, or eradicated from his nature that peculiar quality with which most of us are endowed, namely, the perversity of spirit which leads us often to say and do things which are least expected of us. The Pope's confidential valet was not exempt from this failing. He like the Monsignori, enjoyed the exciting rush and secret risk of money speculation,--he also had his little schemes of self-advancement; and, as is natural to all who are engaged in a certain kind of service, he took care to read everything that could be said by outsiders against the person or persons whom he served. Thus, despite the important capacity he filled, he was not a grade higher than the ordinary butler, who makes it his business to know all the peccadilloes and failings of his master. "No man is a hero to his valet" is a very true axiom,--and even the Head of the Church, the Manifestation of the Divine, the "Infallible in Council," was a mere Nothing to the little man in black who had the power to insist on His Holiness changing a soiled ca.s.sock for a clean one.

XXVIII.

There are certain moments in life which seem weighted with the history of ages--when all the past, present and future merge into the one omnipresent Now,--moments, which if we are able to live through them with courage, may decide a very eternity of after-glory--but which, if we fail to comprehend their mission, pa.s.s, taking with them the last opportunity of all good that shall ever be granted to us in this life.

Such a moment appeared, to the reflective mind of Cardinal Bonpre, to have presented itself to him, as for the second time in ten days, he found himself face to face with the Sovereign Pontiff, the pale and aged man with the deep dark eyes set in such cavernous sockets, that as they looked out on the world through that depth of shadow, seemed more like great jewels in the head of a galvanised skeleton than the eyes of a living human being. On this occasion the Pope was enthroned in a kind of semi-state, on a gilded chair covered with crimson velvet; and a rich canopy of the same material, embroidered and fringed with gold, drooped in heavy folds above him. Attired in the usual white,--white ca.s.sock, white skull cap, and white sash ornamented with the emblematic keys of St. Peter, embroidered in gold thread at the ends,--his unhandsome features, pallid as marble, and seemingly as cold,--bloodless everywhere, even to the lips,--suggested with dreadful exact.i.tude a corpse in burial clothes just lifted from its coffin and placed stiffly upright in a sitting position. Involuntarily Cardinal Bonpre, as he made the usual necessary genuflections, thought, with a shrinking interior sense of horror at the profanity of his own idea, that the Holy Father as he then appeared, might have posed to a painter of allegories, as the frail ghost of a dead Faith. For he looked so white and slender and fragile and transparent,--he sat so rigidly, so coldly, without a movement or a gesture, that it seemed as if the touch of a hand might break him into atoms, so brittle and delicate a figure of clay was he. When he spoke, his harsh voice, issuing from the long thin lips which scarcely moved, even in utterance, was startling in its unmelodious loudness, the more so when its intonation was querulous, as now.

"It is regrettable, my lord Cardinal," he said slowly, keeping his dark eyes immovably fixed on the venerable Felix,--"that I should be compelled to send for you so soon again on the same matters which, since your arrival in Rome, have caused me so much anxiety. This miracle,--of which you are declared to be the worker,--though for some inscrutable reason, you persist in denying your own act,--is not yet properly authenticated. And, to make the case worse, it seems that the unfortunate man, Claude Cazeau, whom we entrusted with our instructions to the Archbishop of Rouen, has suddenly disappeared, leaving no trace.

Naturally there are strong suspicions that he has met with a violent death,--perhaps at the hands of the Freemasons, who are ever at work conspiring against the Faith,--or else through the intrigues of the so-called 'Christian Democrats,' of whom 'Gys Grandit' is a leader. In any case, it is most reprehensible that you, a Cardinal-prince of the Church, should have permitted yourself to become involved in such a doubtful business. The miracle may have taken place,--but if so, you should have no cause to deny your share in it; and however much you may be gifted with the power of healing, I cannot reconcile your duty to us with the Vergniaud scandal! Since you were here last, I have investigated that matter thoroughly,--I have read a full report of the blasphemous address the Abbe preached from his pulpit in Paris, and I cannot, no I cannot"--here the Pope raised his thin white hand with a gesture of menace that was curiously powerful for one so seemingly frail--"I cannot forgive or forget the part you have taken in this deplorable affair!"

The Cardinal looked up with a touch of pain and protest.

"Holy Father, I strove to obey the command of Christ--'Forgive that ye may be forgiven'!--I cannot be sorry that I did so obey it;--for now the offender is beyond the reach of either punishment or absolution. He must answer for his deeds to G.o.d alone!"

The Pope turned his eyes slowly round in his waxenlike head to Gherardi--then to Moretti--and seeing confirmation of the news in their looks, fixed them again as immovably as before upon the Cardinal. The faint shadow of a cold smile flickered on his long slit-like mouth.

"Dead!" he murmured, and he nodded slowly, and beat with one finger on the back of the other hand, as though keeping time mechanically to some funeral march in his brain. "Dead! A fortunate thing for him! An escape from worse than death, so far as this life is concerned! But what of the next?--'where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched!'"

And here the representative of St. Peter smiled pallidly. "Dead!--but his works live after him; and his sin-begotten son also lives, to spread his pernicious writings through the world, and incite the already disobedient to further license. Therefore the Church must still publicly condemn his memory, as a warning to the faithful. And you, Cardinal Bonpre, must receive from us a necessary measure of correction, for having pardoned one who in his last discourse to humanity attacked the Church and slandered it. To one of your eminence and reputation, the lesson may seem hard, but a chastening reproof can but purify the spirit, and free it from that pride which apes humility!"

The Cardinal bent his head patiently and remained silent.

Monsignor Moretti advanced a step towards the Papal throne.

"The boy"--he began.

A slight animation warmed the chill lifelessness of the Pope's features. "True! I had almost forgotten!" he said. Then to the Cardinal, "Where is the boy you rescued from the streets, who lives with you, and who witnessed the miracle at Rouen?"

Manuel had till now stood aside, half hidden in the shadow of the crimson damask which, falling from ceiling to floor in rich luxurious folds, draped the corners of the room, but at these words he advanced at once.

"I am here!" he said.