Chapter XXVI: Part II: She Sang (6)

In no happy frame of mind we pushed on next day to Berne, half inclined to abandon the remainder of our Swiss tour—an inclination which had ripened to a determination by the time we met our friend in the hall of the Berner Hof on the following morning.

In Berne, as in other of the large Swiss towns, Catholicity has made itself both seen and felt of late years, and a handsome church has recently been built there, in place of the one which was formerly shared with the Lutherans in that extraordinary manner still in operation in one or two Protestant parts of Germany. Some friends of ours, who had passed through Berne about fifteen years ago, had been at Mass early one Sunday morning, and, returning at a later hour, found the same church in possession of the Protestants, the only difference observable being the “communion‐table,” then placed at the end opposite to the Catholic altar, and the chairs turned round in that direction. This anomalous state of things has now ceased, and the new Catholic church is both pretty and well served. But the week‐day congregation is very small, and the half‐past seven o’clock Mass we found but thinly attended. Still, there it is, even so, in striking contrast to the Protestant cathedral. In pleasing contrast, were more truly said; for this beautiful pre‐Reformation cathedral, with its splendid porch of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, its elaborately‐carved choir, and its old stained‐glass History of the Blessed Eucharist, is lifeless and colorless in its present aspect. Though we went there at an early hour, every door was closed, except one at the side, jealously guarded by a cross old woman, who hindered all entrance until we had each paid thirty centimes. Then we were handed on to another woman—between them they had charge of the church—who ran from one party of sight‐seers to another, showing off the different points in a loud voice, just as if it were a museum or any other secular building! Had it been an English cathedral church even, there would probably have been a daily service; but then such a pious practice seemed quite as unfamiliar as to the peasants of Grindelwald. The old guardian stared at us in blank surprise on our asking the question, and—seeming to imply that she detected we were “Papists”—proudly answered, “Certainly not! Only on Sundays, and then at nine o’clock.”

As usual, no communion‐table stood in the place of the high altar, but here, as in many other Swiss churches, a large black marble table which serves for this purpose stands right in front of the choir and pulpit, and the stalls immediately near were assigned to the “Guardian of the Holy Supper” and one or two other of the church functionaries. In the cathedral square outside, the town has recently placed the beautiful statue of Rudolf von Erlach, the great hero of Laupen, one of the starting‐points of its history, in 1339. It was impossible, as we passed it, not to remember that the most glorious victories of Berne were fought and won in those olden days of the true faith, when her sons knew how to unite the love of freedom with devotion to the church and obedience to her authority, and that one of the prominent causes of that great and victorious battle was their refusal to recognize the Emperor Louis of Germany, simply because the pope had recently excommunicated him. Those golden days of Bernese history! of which her Protestant historian, Zschokke, is constrained to say that “the town, which was threatened with entire destruction, became so victorious as henceforward to threaten destruction to all her enemies. Her citizens had fought with one thousand iron arms against ten thousand; all with one mind and one heart; no one for himself, but all for the good of the town. In this manner alone can wonders be effected.”

Full of sad thoughts on the degeneracy of her present children, who strive to use their powerful influence over the rest of their confederates for the persecution and suppression of their former faith, we turned to seek information at the railway station about the trains to Lyons or Mâcon, persuaded that a further stay on Swiss ground would only increase our discontent; and, truly, our wrath grew to fever heat when, passing by the book‐stall, we found it filled with the most shocking caricatures—and worse—of everything Catholic, nay, everything religious. Illustrated _Lives of the Saints_, _Of the Pious Helen_, and such like titles, got up in the most attractive form, first caught our eyes and rejoiced our hearts with the hope of better things; but anything more scandalous than the scenes there depicted, the low, disgraceful ideas put forward, in the coarsest style, by both pen and pencil, we never before beheld exposed in any civilized community. In England the police would at once have interfered and seized the whole establishment. Here they covered the book‐ stall; and the woman who presided showed us undisguisedly that they were written and printed in Germany, and sent here for sale. What hope is there for populations who, in the name of religion, can countenance such wickedness?

It was at this stage of our perambulations and in this condition of mind that, on returning to the hotel, we had encountered Mrs. C——. She was no Catholic, but, entering into all our feelings, she protested that we should find everything quite different in the Catholic cantons, if we only _would_ make the experiment. She had been there often, and knew that we should be delighted with them. To every objection we made she had a ready answer. Besides, what is more magical than the bright faces and kind looks of friends—above all, of old friends, when met abroad? As a natural consequence, therefore, it was not surprising to us to find ourselves, after all, seated with this pleasant party in the train which that afternoon was leaving for Lucerne. Our equanimity, it is true, was disturbed at the junction at Olten—by the sight of that manufacturing town full of the “free thought” and advanced liberals of modern society, the head‐quarters of Old‐Catholic meetings, and the only place where, at that date, the parish church had been given up to one of the few rebellious priests, whilst its true pastor was obliged to live in a small private house, where he still ministered to his old flock as in the days of early Christian persecution. But we soon reached Lucerne and a Catholic atmosphere, and what befell us in that quarter, what we saw and heard from its people, shall be related in the following chapters to our kind and indulgent readers.

Epigram on Abraham Lincoln.

Scivit in extremis statuum defendere fœdus: Reddidit optatam collecto milite pacem.

Grapes And Thorns. Chapter XII. A Taper Lighted, And A Taper Blown Out.

By The Author Of “The House Of Yorke.”

Our two travellers did not know how far removed they were from the common ways of life till they were again on land. The strangeness of a sea‐voyage had made their own strangeness less apparent; but when they saw homes, and all the daily interests of life moving on as once they had moved for them, familiar things assumed in their eyes a certain grotesque appearance, and they scarcely knew themselves or each other. How hollow sounded the careless laugh they heard, how terrible the jest! How impossible they found it to comprehend how business and pleasure could absorb men’s souls! To them this gay and busy world was wandering recklessly on the brink of an unseen precipice which they alone could see.

Annette Gerald had adopted her husband’s inner, as well as his outer, life—had, as it were, stepped inside his guilt, and wrapped it round her, and his world was henceforth her world. With his eyes she saw a leafless and flowerless England sweep behind her as they sped onward to London; and she shrank, even as he did, when the thick fog of the great city took them in and shut them as if in walls of stone.

“We cannot stay here,” her husband said. “I should lose my senses in twenty‐four hours. This fog makes me feel like a smoky house. Are you too tired to go on? Do let us have sunshine, at least.”

No, she was never too tired to go on with him.

They had a compartment to themselves, and, weary as they were, started on again, a little relieved in mind. No one had accosted them in either of the great cities, and there seemed to be no immediate danger. Overcome with fatigue and loss of sleep, they both leaned back in the soft cushions, and slept soundly till some sound or a slackening of their speed awakened them.

The London fog was far away, and they found themselves passing slowly and smoothly through a cloud‐world of blue and silver. There was no land in sight. The window at one side showed them a cliff that might be alabaster, and might be an illuminated cloud. At the other side, a deep‐blue sea, foam‐flecked, and a deep blue sky half‐veiled in silvery mists, were so entangled with each other that only where the full moon rode could they be sure that it was sky, and only where the wave ran up and curled over in foam almost within their reach could they be sure that it was water.

“The fairies have taken possession of Dover,” Annette said. “I hope they have not whisked the steamer away. No; here it is. We will stay on deck, Lawrence. It is not cold.”

As they steamed out into the channel, another scene of enchantment took the place of the ordinary view. As they withdrew from the town, it showed only a crescent of lights; lights clustered all over the foamy water, and stars clustered in openings of the fleecy clouds above, so that they moved as if swimming through constellations.

“I hardly know which is up and which is down,” Lawrence said. “Is Europe made of clay and rock, like America?”

His wife was leaning on his arm, and they stood looking over the rail of the little steamer. “We might come this way a hundred times, and not see such a sight,” she replied. “But there is land beyond. That is France—that low, dark line. In a few hours we shall be in Paris. I shall be glad to rest when we get there.”

But when they reached it, Paris was as much too light as London had been too dark. In the one city a foe might stumble upon them at any moment; in the other, he might see them from afar. They went to a dingy little hotel in the old part of Paris, and stayed there one day, trying to find rest, but in vain. Every sound made their hearts beat more quickly; every glance and sudden step near them sent the blood to their faces. Besides, the quiet of the place afforded them no distraction from their thoughts. The noises in the narrow street on which the hotel was built were all shut out by the heavy portal, and the quadrangle was as still as a forest solitude. Ivy climbed about the windows, a tiny fountain overflowed and ran in a stream across the pavement, and the only persons who appeared were the clergymen who were the chief patrons of the house, and now and then the universal waiter and servant of servants, François, who shuffled across the view, a napkin over his arm, and his heavy head dropped forward, so that only a great ball of frowzy dark hair was visible.

“We cannot stay here,” Annette said, as they stood by the window the first evening after their arrival. “It is too much like a prison.” She felt her husband start, and made haste to add: “It is stupid, and I fancy the air is not good. Besides, Paris is too gay, if we go out into the city. We do not want gaiety, Lawrence. We want some earnest employment for our time.”

“We will go to Rome,” he said.

“Rome!” she hesitated. “One meets everybody there,” she said; “and there are so many idlers, too, who have nothing to do but talk of other people’s affairs. Are you sure you wish to go to Rome, dear?”

“I must go! I have an object in going there,” he exclaimed, excited by the first show of even slight opposition. “I stake all on Rome. Whatever happens to me, let it happen there.”

“We will go, then,” she answered soothingly. “And we may as well set out to‐night. Nothing is unpacked, and we have three hours before the train starts.”

He walked to and fro over the stone floor of their little sitting‐room, which allowed only half a dozen paces, so narrow was it. “Three hours!” he muttered. “It is too much! Cannot we go out? There must be a church near.”

“Yes; in France and in Italy there is always a church near.”

They went into the fading sunset, and soon found themselves entering the old church of S. Etienne du Mont. Inside, the pale gloaming was changed to a richly‐tinted gloom that grew every moment deeper. Here and there a lamp marked some picture or shrine held in special veneration, and far away in the apse of the church, where the shadows stretched off till they seemed reaching out to eternity, burned a single point of light, as small as a star.

Annette clasped her hands over her husband’s arm, and leaned her cheek close to his shoulder, as they stood near the door and looked at this little beacon. “O Lawrence!” she whispered, “it is like the light the mother sets in the window to guide her children home at night. O me! O me!” she cried pitifully. “What is to become of us!”

A crown of tapers burned about the shrine where the body of S. Geneviève had once lain, and an old woman sat near by with her prayer‐book, presiding over a table piled with tapers of different lengths, her white cap showing like a little heap of snow in the place.

“People buy tapers for a sou or two, and set them by the shrine to honor S. Geneviève and remind her of their needs,” Annette said softly as they approached this illuminated space. “Would you like to offer one?”

Lawrence Gerald had been wont to mock somewhat at such observances in the old time before life had been shattered about him and shown eternity between its gaps. Now he went eagerly forward, selected a taper, lighted it, and placed it, whispering a prayer while his fingers lingered on it. Annette followed his example, placing her offering beside his, and making her request also.

As they were turning away, a sacristan approached them from the next chapel, and asked if they had any article they would like to have touched to the inside of the shrine. Annette immediately gave him her rosary, which he laid an instant where the saint’s body had lain.

“Ask him if I can put my hands in,” Lawrence whispered.

“Certainly you can!” she answered with dignity, seeing the man look rather curiously at him.

She held the lid open, and her husband put both his hands in, and instantly drew them back, his eyes dilating and his color rising, as if he had put them into fire.

They walked on past the grand altar, and knelt in a nook by a confessional. The daylight faded, and the smouldering fires of the windows went out in black and ashen gray. But when no outer brightness was left to enter and show the glories of that house of God, the lamps and tapers inside burned with a clearer flame. They shed a faint illumination through the vast twilight; they spread a soft gilding up the height of the clustered pillars, and made tender the gloom brooding in the roof that arched over their capitals; they sparkled on the crowns of the saints, and touched marble faces with such a holy radiance that a soul seemed to shine through them.

A slight stir in the confessional near them showed that a priest was there. “Lawrence,” said Annette suddenly, “may I go to confession?”

“Wait a minute,” he answered. “I will go first, and then you will only need to say that you are my wife.”

His tone revealed a bitter pain; for unconsciously her question had shown that there was no weight on her conscience save that which he had placed there, and that she was more in need of consolation than of forgiveness.

She sank on to her knees again. “O my God!” she murmured, “has it come to this, that I must enter thy house without being able to find comfort there?”

It was nearly half an hour before Lawrence joined her, and they went out together. “I have no wish to go now,” she said when he offered to wait while she went to confession. “Besides, there is no time, if we are to start to‐night.”

“Do you know, Annette, what I prayed for when I put the taper up in honor of S. Geneviève?” her husband asked when they were again in the street. “I asked that my mother may die in peace before the month is out. That will be in less than two weeks.”

“My poor Lawrence!” she sighed.

“And can you guess the reason why I wish, above all things, to go to Rome, and don’t much care what may happen after?” he went on. “Of course you cannot. Well, I want to receive absolution from the Pope. I go to confession, and pour out my story there, and I feel no better for it; or, if I feel better than I should without confession, I am still not at peace. I don’t feel absolved. Yet I want to go to confession every hour of the day. I am like the Ancient Mariner, who had to tell his story to every one he met. I want to tell mine to every priest in the world.”

“But, dear Lawrence,” she said, “that will not be so easy to compass. Don’t expect such a privilege too confidently. You know we cannot have an audience, because we cannot go to him under false names. If we could, his blessing would satisfy you, would it not? But I see no way, dear, though I would not discourage you.”

For once her objections did not irritate him. “I have been thinking of it ever since we left America,” he said; “and in one way or another I shall succeed. Yes, his blessing would be enough; and if there were no other way, I could tell him my real name. Now, we must make haste. We have just time to reach the station.”

How many hearts have quickened in their beating as they travelled that road, drawing near to Italy! How many eyes have gazed eagerly at that first cross, set aloft on the mountain side, at the first shrine of the Virgin Mother! And then come the armies of poplars and solemn cypresses.

“They look as if the dead warriors, and prelates, and poets had risen from their graves, and were staring out over Italy to see what their degenerate sons were doing,” Annette said. “See how tightly they hold their cold green robes about them!”

Our travellers slept a few hours at Turin, and, resuming their journey before daylight, reached Florence in the evening. And here, having some time to wait, they wandered out, hoping to find a church open; but all were closed at this hour. Presently they found themselves standing on the bridge of the Holy Trinity, listening to a burst of wild music from many bugles, played by some unseen band. So loud and piercing was the strain, the very stars appeared to tremble as it went up. Then, as suddenly as it rose, it dropped again, and all was silent. The city was quiet, and the Arno gleamed across it like a jewelled cestus across a sleeping breast. Its waters seemed to have crystallized into a purple enamel about the golden reflections of the lights along its banks, not a ripple showing which way they flowed. Not far away, another bridge spanned the tide, its soft and dreamlike arches set roundly over the answering arches in the deeps below. A small boat, faintly seen, shot underneath this bridge, and disappeared. It was a vision of Florence as one sees it in history and poetry.

The two strangers leaned on the balustrade of the bridge, and, as they gazed, felt the curse upon them grow less sharp, as though they were ghosts, and their crime some old, old story, touched with a sad splendor by poet and painter, and half washed away by the tears of pitying generations.

Standing there, silent and half comforted, they became aware of a low, murmurous sound of many feet and voices; and then a long line of white‐ robed figures appeared, carrying torches. A bier was borne aloft in their midst, what it held covered with an embroidered pall that glistened with gold. These men recited prayers together as they went, and the river and bridge were for a moment bright with the glare of their torches. Then they disappeared, and a star‐lighted quiet reigned again over the city of flowers.

Annette touched her husband’s arm, and they reluctantly turned away from that spot where first they had experienced a feeling of peace.

And then, all night they plunged deeper and deeper into Italy, till morning and the Eternal City met their faces, and dazzled them.

“Thank God! I am in Rome at last,” exclaimed Lawrence. “Now nothing but death shall tear me away from it.”

Yes, there it was! the crumbling, stately city of the past, looking as if it had just risen from the bottom of the sea, after having been submerged for centuries. It was all a faded gold color, like autumn leaves, and its narrow streets were chilly, as though death had breathed through them. But its heights were warm and sunny, and its dusky trees and hedges were steeped in warmth, and over its magnificent decay the sky was fresh and blue, and the morning sunshine flowed bountifully.

“Now,” said Mrs. Gerald, becoming business‐like at once, “we must first engage an apartment, and get our luggage into it. I think I know Italian enough for that, thanks to the songs I have learned.”

“Do you propose singing an aria to call a cab?” her husband asked. “And will you engage an apartment to the tune of ‘Hear me, Norma’?”

He smiled, and for a breath looked like his old self. But the next instant his face changed. The thought of his mother was enough to banish the smile for ever.

That thought had taken full possession of him, filling him with a terror, sorrow, and longing that burned in his heart like consuming fire. His flight had been made with no feeling but fear for himself; but with the first breath of the air of the city of saints, he inhaled a penitence which was without taint of weakness.

While his wife, then, arranged their affairs, and attended to the preparation of their little _ménage_, he took in hand the one work possible for him—the study of his own soul. This anguish for his mother, whom he loved deeply, much as he had wronged her, was like a sword that cleft the selfish crust of his nature. His whole life came up before him with merciless distinctness—all its ingratitude, its pettishness, its littleness, its sinful waste, its many downward steps leading to the final plunge to ruin. He saw, as if it were before him, his mother’s loving, patient face; he heard, as if she were speaking at his side, her sad and tremulous voice; and more pathetic even than her sorrow were the brief moments of happiness he had given her, her smile of pride in him, her delight when he showed her some mark of affection, her eager anticipation of his wishes. As he went back over this past, the self‐pity, the blindness, the false shame, were stripped away from him, and he saw himself as he was.

“Nothing but utter ruin could have brought me to my senses,” he said to his wife one day, when he had been sitting for a long while silent, gazing out at a little fountain that sprang into air in a vain effort to reach the laden orange‐tree that overshadowed it.

She made no reply, and he needed none. She had let him go his own ways, keeping watch, but never interfering. She had nothing to do for him now but wait and see what sort of call he would make on her.

He wandered from church to church, and knelt at every shrine in the city of shrines. Wherever the signal lamp told that there some troubled soul had found help, he sent up his petition. He glanced with indifferent eyes past the rich marbles and gilding; but when a face looked from marble or canvas with an expression that touched his heart, there he made his appeal. The luxuries of life grew loathsome to him; fashion and gaiety were to him like a taunt of the evil one, who had used them as lures for his destruction. He hated the fineness of his own clothes, the daintiness of his food. None of the people he saw seemed to him enviable, save the poor monks in their coarse brown robes, with their bare feet thrust into rough sandals. In his own house he lived like an ascetic.

Now and then he would rouse himself from this stern and prolonged examen to think of his wife. She had claims on him which, perhaps, he was forgetting.

“You poor child!” he said, “we are not in India, that you should immolate yourself over my dead hopes. What can I do for you. I would free you, if I could.”

“You are not to think of me,” she replied quietly. “It is God who now commands you to think of yourself.”

“Yes!” he exclaimed, “I have made my own instruments of torture. Having thought of myself when it was a sin, I am forced to think of myself when it is a torment. And I escape that thought only to remember my victims. Annette, but one day is left of the four weeks. O my mother! if space could be annihilated, and I could be with you till it is over! If I could but know what has happened, what will happen, to her!”

He had spent the whole day in a church near by, sometimes praying before an altar, sometimes gazing at the pictures, in search of a divine meaning that might be hidden in them; but oftener, withdrawn to a dusky nook where only a single lamp burned before a head crowned with thorns, he gave himself up to grief.

“It is useless to wish and repine,” his wife replied sadly. “That is one of the weaknesses we must cure ourselves of. Since it is only a torment to imagine what may be taking place at home, let us try to banish the thought, leaving all in the hands of God. And now, Lawrence, do you know that you have eaten nothing to‐day? When you stay so long again, I shall go after you. In Rome, at this season, it is dangerous to allow the strength to fail. You will soon be ill, if you go on fasting so.”

“And what matter if I should?” he asked.

The wife waited till the servant had placed the dinner on the table and gone out before she spoke, and the moment of consideration had made her resolve on a stern answer, however willingly she would have given a tender one. She had long since discovered that her husband was one of those whom the flatteries of affection enervate instead of stimulating, and she was not sure enough of a radical change having taken place in him to yield to her own impulse to soothe and persuade when reproof might be more effectual.

“Of all the gifts which God has bestowed on you,” she said, “you have cast away every one but life; but with that life you may yet atone, and become a blessing to the world. It is your duty to watch over the only means left you of making reparation.”

He did not show the slightest displeasure at her reproof. On the contrary, there seemed to be something in it almost pleasant to him. Perhaps the suggestion that he might yet be a blessing in the world, incredible as that appeared, inspired him with an undefined hope. He dwelt thoughtfully on her words in a way that was becoming habitual to him whenever she spoke with peculiar seriousness, and Annette, seeing his humility, was half sorry for having put it to the test. With a confused impulse to give him at least some pitiful and perilous comfort, she poured a glass of wine, and placed it by him, well aware that for weeks he had not drunk any.

He put it away decidedly. “I would as soon drink poison, Annette,” he said reproachfully. “I did not think that you would offer it to me.”

She withdrew the glass immediately, ashamed of her weakness, and making a hasty apology. “If I had known you had made any resolution on the subject, I would not have offered it,” she said. “Forgive me! I never will again.”

“Oh! there was no resolution needed,” he said. “If you had been burned almost to death once, would you need to resolve not to go into the fire again? I fancy the sight of it would be enough. But I think I may promise never again to take wine, unless I should be commanded to by some one who knows better than I.”

His wife did not reply. This was a degree of asceticism which she had not expected and was afraid to trust. She had expected him to refuse indulgences, but not consolations. Indeed, she did not now understand her husband, and her hope of his redemption was but a trembling one. This self‐denial might be only another illustration of that instability which rushes from one extreme to the other, only to return to its first excess.

We all know how to rely on that natural firmness, which the sad experience of mankind has shown to be never so strong but it may fail at any hour; but the supernatural strength of the naturally weak who have cast themselves on God often finds no doubting. We miss the firm lips, the steady eyes, the undaunted brow—those signs of a resolute soul which the pagan shares with the Christian—and we forget that the tremulous mouth we distrust has sighed out its prayer to Him who is mighty, the shrinking eyes have looked upon the hills whence help cometh, the timid brow has been hidden beneath the wing of an angel guardian, and that, faltering though the soul may have been, and may be again, the shield of God is before it, and it can be conquered by no human strength.

This soul had made such an advance as to be conscious of some such fortitude infused into it. Lawrence Gerald had no fear of falling into his former sins. He might have the misery of seeing the destruction he had brought on others, might be himself destroyed by a sorrow and remorse too great to bear; but he had an immovable conviction that he could never again return to his old ways nor commit any grave transgression. It was this conviction which had made him say that nothing but destruction could have brought him to his senses.

“I like that church you took me to this morning,” he said, walking slowly up and down the room. “The others, many of them, seem to me fit only for the happy. They are all display and confusion and sight‐seers, with scarcely a nook in them where a person in trouble can hide. They do not give me any impression of sacredness. But this one is so quiet and sober, and there are no people standing about with guide‐books, talking aloud while you are praying or trying to pray. Then there is a little place, half chapel, half vestibule, between the church and the sacristy, where a side door enters the church, with an Ecce Homo in a little shrine; and there you can be quite private, without any one staring at you. I shall go to that church altogether.”

The church he spoke of was Santa Maria della Pace.

“It is Our Lady of Peace,” his wife said, “and was built to commemorate the peace of Christendom. I thought it would please you. Surely some special consolation and tranquillity should linger about a temple built and cemented with such an intention. I like it, too, better than most others we have visited, though it is not so splendid as many.”

She did not tell him that, after having left his side, when the early Mass was over, she had lingered in the church till it was closed at noon, not to watch him, but to be near him. Requesting the sacristan to withdraw the curtain covering the Four Sibyls of Raphael, she had seated herself before the chapel opposite, and divided her attention between that matchless vision and the unquiet figure that moved about the church. Once he had come near, but without seeming aware of her presence, and, standing at her side, had gazed with her. And while he gazed, she had seen the trouble in his face grow still for a moment. The noble serenity of that composition, so soothing to eyes wearied by the sprawling magnificence of Michael Angelo and the ever‐present, dishevelled, wind‐tossed figures of Bernini, lifted his soul to a higher plane. Even when he sighed and turned away, as if not willing to allow himself the pleasure of looking at so much beauty, he carried something of that spirit of harmony with him.

“Lawrence,” his wife said presently, when she had borne his restless promenade as long as she could, “I know that you did not sleep any last night. I wish that you would take a powder that I will give you, and try to sleep now. You look worn out. Lie down on the sofa here, and I will keep everything quiet.”

He shook his head. “I would rather not take anything to make me sleep, Ninon. And to‐night I would not sleep, if I could. But I will lie down here a little while; for I am tired, now I think of it.”

He threw himself on the sofa, and she placed a screen before him, and closed the window near his head, so that even the soft plashing of the fountain was shut out, and the small notes of birds that twittered in the great pine‐tree in the garden. And after a little while, finding him still restless, she went to the piano, and sang how God sent Elias to reassure and comfort a doubting and tempted soul. The notes flowed with a soothing murmur from under her fingers, and her voice, no longer the brilliant, ringing tones he had taken such pride in, was so low it might be a spirit singing:

“Tell him that his very longing
Is itself an answering cry;
That his prayer, ‘Come, gracious Alla!’
Is my answer, ‘Here am I!’
Every inmost aspiration
Is God’s angel undefiled;
And in every ’O my Father!’
Slumbers deep a ‘Here, my child!’ ”

Ending, she listened a moment, then stole across the room, and looked behind the screen. Lawrence was sleeping, with his head thrown back, his beautiful profile and moist, dark curls thrown out strongly by the garnet cushions and pillow.

She went to the window, and seated herself on a footstool near it, wrapping the long red curtains about her, and leaning against the wall. The sculptured marble of that stately _salon_ was cold against her cheek; a flock of doves wheeling about over the garden caught some last rays of the sun on their wings, and threw them down over her, so that little white wings seemed to be fluttering all around the room; the casement slipped open, and the sound of tossing waters and twittering birds again became audible; but the watcher there took no note of these things. She was looking at the figure stretched on the sofa, and thinking that in all Rome there was no ruin so mournful and so terrible. He was like some fair column stricken from out a temple and cast aside into the dust; not touched by the hand of time, that, with its slow to‐and‐fro of days and nights, and seasons and years, lulls all the pain of decay to sleep, but broken and scathed, as if by lightning.

While she looked, he stirred, and opened his eyes; and the sympathetic pain with which she saw how he came back to a consciousness of his position almost drew an outcry from her. The first tranquil, half‐ wondering glance which saw, instead of the familiar surroundings of his childhood and youth, that immense room, with its profuse hangings and painted ceiling, and the long windows opening like doors; then the brief flash of startled questioning; lastly, the anguish of full recollection.

“O my God! my God!” he exclaimed, and hid his face in the cushions again.

She was at his side in a moment.

“Let us go out for a long drive, Lawrence,” she said. “There will be a bright moonlight to‐night, and we can see so many places by it. Come! I will send for a carriage at once. There is nothing else for either of us to do.”

Nothing could have shown more clearly the change in Lawrence Gerald than his manner of receiving this proposal. Instead of expressing at once his aversion, and reproaching his wife that she could believe it possible for him to go sight‐seeing at such a time, he stopped to consider if what she thought best might not be best, however it should seem to him.

“You must think for me now, Annette,” he said with a sort of despair. “You know I do not wish to seek pleasure nor distraction; but I suppose I must live.”

She sent for a carriage at once, and they went out under the full moon that was beginning to replace, with its pearly southern lights and northern shadows, the fading cross‐lights of the sun. They drove to the Colosseum, not yet despoiled of its sacred emblems, and, kneeling there in the dust, made the stations in their own way. Annette named each one as they reached it, then left her husband to make his meditation, or to utter the ejaculation that started up from his tormented heart, as sharp as a blade from its sheath.

At last they stood together by the crucifix, with the moonlight falling on them and through the great arches in a silvery rain.

Annette saw her husband wipe his forehead, though the night was cool. He breathed heavily, and looked at the earth beneath his feet, as if he saw through it, and beheld the martyr lying where he fell centuries before.

“O my dear!” she said, “I know that there is no lion like remorse. But is it no comfort to you that you are not alone?”

“It is both a comfort and a pain,” he answered gently. “I should be desolate without you, and I should have done something desperate, perhaps, if I had been alone. You must understand my gratitude and my regret without expecting me to express them. I cannot speak. I know I have wronged you bitterly, and that you are an angel of goodness to me; but I can say no more about it. If I were at my mother’s feet this moment, I should be speechless. I cannot pray even. I acknowledge the justice of God, and will endure whatever he sends. That is all I can say.”

He had forced himself to speak, she perceived, with a great effort. The season of complaints and outcries had gone past, and he had entered on the way of silence.

They went out, and left the ruin to its solemn tenants—the gliding shadows, which might be the troubled ghosts of the slayers, and the floating lights, which might be the glorified souls of the slain, visiting the loved spot where they had seen the heavens open for them.

The streets were nearly deserted when the two returned to them, their horses walking. They stopped at the fountain of Trevi, leaned awhile on the stone rail, and watched the streams that burst in snowy foam all along the front.

“What a heap of coals and ashes Rome would be without her fountains!” Annette said. “It would be like a family of patriarchs where no children are seen. And yet the waters do not always seem to me so childish. Theirs is the youth and freshness of angels. See how triumphant they look! They have been a long while in the dark, till they may have despaired of ever seeing the sun again. It is the way of souls, Lawrence. They walk in darkness and pain, they cannot see their way, and they sometimes doubt if light any longer exists. And at last they burst from their prison, and find themselves in the city of God.”

“Yes,” he said, “but they have not sinned; they have only suffered. I have always thought, Annette, that the saints have the easier life. You know we are told that the way of the transgressor is hard.”

“But the saints did not choose that life because it was the easier,” she replied. “They gave no thought to such a reward, but it was bestowed on them; and probably, when they chose, the other way seemed the easier, in spite of what the preacher says. The person who chooses a good life because it is the easier will never persevere in it; for the devil will always persuade him that he has made a mistake, and, since he chose from a selfish motive, God will owe him no help. The saints took what was hard, and what seemed the hardest because it was right, and left the consequences with God; and they had their reward. The sinner takes what seems the easiest, and thinks only of himself; and he, too, has his reward. Do not the waters look lovely? They are so fresh and new! How beautiful an image it is to compare divine grace to a fountain!”

They drove on through the town, across the bridge of S. Angelo, and saw the angel sheathing his sword—or was he unsheathing it?—against the sky, and, leaving their carriage at the entrance of the piazza of S. Peter’s, walked across it to that majestic temple, which, more than any other, and at that hour more than ever, seemed worthy of the Spouse of the Spirit. Golden and white, the mystical flood of moonlight veiled it, rippling along its colonnades, glittering in its fountains, setting a pavement of chalcedony across the piazza and up the wide ascent, and trembling round the dome that swelled upward like a breast full with the divine milk and honey with which the church nourishes her children.

Lawrence stopped near the obelisk.

“The first question the church asked of me when I was brought before her, an infant,” he said, “was what I had come to ask of her, and my sponsors answered for me, Faith. Now once again she asks the same question.”

He was silent a moment, looking up at the church, but with eyes that saw only the sacred Mother. Tears rolled down his face, and his lips trembled; but there was no sign of that desperate passion which had so worn him. “I ask for forgiveness and perseverance,” he said.

She observed that he did not ask for peace.

He went forward to the steps, and knelt there; and as he wept and prayed, his wife heard ever the same petition that God would have mercy on his mother, that in some way he would spare her the blow that threatened to fall upon her, and that she might know how he loved her and mourned his ingratitude.

Annette withdrew from her husband, and paced to and fro not far away. She, too, had a mother who was about to be stricken with grief on her account, and whom she might never again see in life.

She had almost forgotten her husband and how time was flying, when she heard his voice at her side.

“My poor Annette, I am killing you,” he said. “Come home. See! the day is breaking.”

The east was, indeed, growing pale with the early dawn, and the western colonnade was throwing long shadows as the moon declined. It was time for them to return. Chilled and exhausted, they entered their carriage, and were driven home.

The dawn of that same day, when in its course the sun rose from the Atlantic, and brightened the New England shore, saw Mrs. Gerald and Honora Pembroke go to early Mass together.

F. Chevreuse had visited them the morning before, and requested them to go to communion that day, and pray for themselves, their friends, and for his intention.

“I have a difficult duty to perform,” he said, “and I want all the help I can get. So make yourselves as saintly as possible, my dear friends. Confess and prepare yourselves for holy communion as if it were to be your last, and pray with all your strength, and do not allow a single smallest venial sin to touch you all day.”

F. Chevreuse often asked them to pray for his intention, and all they observed in this was his unusual earnestness. It had the effect of making them also unusually earnest in their devotion. Mrs. Gerald was, indeed, so absorbed that she failed to notice that when Honora came from the priest’s house, where she had been just before evening, she did not look quite well. F. Chevreuse had requested her to come there from her school, before going home, and she had been with him nearly an hour.

“So you have been to confession,” Mrs. Gerald said, arranging the tray for their tea. “I thought we would go there together this evening.”

She spoke in a very gentle, almost absent way; for she had been saying, as she went about, all the short prayers she could remember to the Blessed Virgin, and would resume them presently.

“So we will go together,” Miss Pembroke replied. “But I wanted to see F. Chevreuse this afternoon.”

She seated herself in a shady corner of the room, and opened her prayer‐ book; but it trembled so in her hand that she was forced to lay it aside, and pretend to be occupied with her rosary instead. Now and then she stole a glance at her companion, and saw with thankfulness that she was entirely occupied with her devotions. As she went about, preparing with dainty care their simple meal, her lips were moving; and sometimes she would pause a moment to bless herself, or to kiss the crucifix suspended from her neck, or to dwell on some sweet thought she had found hidden in a little prayer, like a blossom under a leaf.

And later in the evening, when the two returned from the priest’s house, there was nothing to attract attention in Miss Pembroke’s manner; for they sat reading and meditating till it was bed‐time. It was their custom, since they lived alone, to prepare thus strictly for the reception of the Holy Eucharist.

Mrs. Gerald stood a minute before the embers of the dying fire, when they were ready to go up‐stairs, the hand she had stretched for the bed‐candle resting on the edge of the mantel‐piece near it. “How peaceful we are here, Honora!” she said in her soft way, yet rather suddenly.

Miss Pembroke was bending to push the few remaining coals back, and her reply was indistinct, yet sounded like an affirmative.

“We have so much to be grateful for,” Mrs. Gerald went on. “I do not think that we could be more comfortable. I am sure that greater riches would disturb me. Indeed, I never wanted riches, except for Lawrence; and now he does not need them. I can truly say that I have all I desire.”

Miss Pembroke did not reply nor look up. She only stooped lower, and stretched her hands out over the coals, as if to warm them. Yet the two had always been so in harmony that her silence seemed to be assent.

“F. Chevreuse spoke beautifully to me to‐night,” Mrs. Gerald continued, still lingering. “He kept me some time talking after I had made my confession; and, what is unusual with him, he spoke of himself. He said that all the favors he has to ask of God are for others; but that when he comes to pray for himself, he can only say, ‘Amen.’ Now and then, he said, he thinks to ask some special favor; but when he lifts his eyes to heaven, only one word comes: ‘Amen! amen!’ I did not understand, while he spoke, how much it meant; but I have been thinking it over since I came home, and I see that the word may include all that a Christian need say.”

A murmured “Yes!” came from Honora, who turned her head aside that the candle might not shine in her face. “And now, dear Mrs. Gerald, since we are to rise early, we had better go to bed. Can I do anything for you? Is there anything to do to‐night?”

“Nothing, thank you, dear!”

They went up‐stairs together, and, when they parted, Miss Pembroke embraced her friend with unusual tenderness. “May you have a good night’s sleep!” she said; and, in the anguish of her heart, could almost have added, “And may you never wake!”

For F. Chevreuse had wisely judged it best to prepare her to sustain her friend when the hour of trial should come; and Honora, better than any other perhaps, understood what that shock would be.

“Go out in the morning and dismiss your school for the day,” the priest had said to her. “Then return home immediately, and make some excuse for it. You will easily be able to plead a headache, I fancy. Tell Mrs. Gerald that F. O’Donovan is coming to see her, so that she may not go out. And pray, my child, pray! What else is there for any of us to do in this terrible world but pray?”

Honora was obliged to make her excuses before going to school, for Mrs. Gerald at length noticed her altered looks, and almost insisted on dismissing the school for her. But she would not allow that.

“I shall feel better to go out than to sit in the house waiting,” she said, quite truly. “But I will come back at once. Pray do not be anxious about me. You know I am strong and healthy.”

When she returned, she found that Mrs. Gerald had, with motherly affection, made every preparation for her comfort. A deep sofa was pushed into a shady corner of the sitting‐room, pillows and a shawl were laid ready, and, as she entered the room, she perceived the pleasant odor of pennyroyal, their favorite remedy for colds and headaches.

Mrs. Gerald set down the steaming cup she held, and began to remove her young friend’s bonnet and shawl. “I thought you would rather lie down here than go up stairs by yourself,” she said. “I will keep everything quiet.”

Honora submitted to be made an invalid of, since this tender soul could have no greater pleasure than to relieve suffering; allowed herself to be assisted to the sofa; let Mrs. Gerald arrange the pillows under her head and cover her with the shawl; then drank obediently the remedy offered her. But all the while her heart was sinking with an agony of apprehension, and she listened breathlessly for a step which was to bring doom to this unconscious victim.

“Now what else can I do for you, dear?” her nurse asked, looking vainly to see what had not been done.

Honora answered, “Nothing”; but, recollecting that something might be needed, if not for her, added, “You might place a glass of water and the camphor‐bottle here where I can reach them.”

Mrs. Gerald brought them, from the mere pleasure of serving. “But you must not drink the water, for you are to be kept warm,” she said. “Your hands are quite cold now. And, you know, camphor never does you any good.”

She was about turning away when Honora took her hand, and detained her. She dared not look up, but she held the hand close to her cheek on the pillow. “Dear friend,” she said in a stifled voice, “it sometimes almost hurts me to remember how good and kind you have always been to me. I hope I have never seemed ungrateful; I have never felt so. But in future I want to be more than ever to you. Let me be your daughter, and live with you always. I do not want to go away with any one else.”

“My daughter!” said Mrs. Gerald, full of loving surprise and pleasure; and stooped to leave a kiss on the girl’s forehead.