CHAPTER XVIII
THE PENANCE
The course of our story requires us to return to the Capuchin convent,and to the struggles and trials of its Superior; for in his hands isthe irresistible authority which must direct the future life of Agnes.
From no guilty compliances, no heedless running into temptation, hadhe come to love her. The temptation had met him in the direct path ofduty; the poison had been breathed in with the perfume of sweetest andmost life-giving flowers: nor could he shun that temptation, nor ceaseto inhale that fatal sweetness, without confessing himself vanquishedin a point where, in his view, to yield was to be lost. The subtleand deceitful visit of Father Johannes to his cell had the effect ofthoroughly rousing him to a complete sense of his position, and makinghim feel the immediate, absolute necessity of bringing all the energyof his will, all the resources of his nature, to bear on its presentdifficulties. For he felt, by a fine intuition, that already he waswatched and suspected; any faltering step now, any wavering, any changein his mode of treating his female penitents, would be maliciouslynoted. The military education of his early days had still left in hismind a strong residuum of personal courage and honor, which made himregard it as dastardly to flee when he ought to conquer, and thereforehe set his face as a flint for victory.
But reviewing his interior world, and taking a survey of the workbefore him, he felt that sense of a divided personality which oftenbecomes so vivid in the history of individuals of strong will andpassion. It seemed to him that there were two men within him: theone turbulent, passionate, demented; the other vainly endeavoring byauthority, reason, and conscience to bring the rebel to subjection. Thediscipline of conventual life, the extraordinary austerities to whichhe had condemned himself, the monotonous solitude of his existence,all tended to exalt the vivacity of the nervous system, which, in theItalian constitution, is at all times disproportionately developed;and when those weird harp-strings of the nerves are once thoroughlyunstrung, the fury and tempest of the discord sometimes utterlybewilders the most practiced self-government.
But he felt that _something_ must be done with himself, and doneimmediately; for in a few days he must again meet Agnes at theconfessional. He must meet her, not with weak tremblings and passionatefears, but calm as Fate, inexorable as the Judgment-Day. He must hearher confession, not as man, but as God; he must pronounce his judgmentswith a divine dispassionateness. He must dive into the recesses of hersecret heart, and, following with subtile analysis all the fine coursesof those fibres which were feeling their blind way towards an earthlylove, must tear them remorselessly away. Well could he warn her ofthe insidiousness of earthly affections; better than any one else hecould show her how a name that was blended with her prayers and bornebefore the sacred shrine in her most retired and solemn hours might atlast come to fill all her heart with a presence too dangerously dear.He must direct her gaze up those mystical heights where an unearthlymarriage awaited her, its sealed and spiritual bride; he must hurry herfootsteps onward to the irrevocable issue.
All this was before him. But ere it could be done, he must subduehimself,--he must become calm and pulseless, in deadly resolve; andwhat prayer, what penance, might avail for this? If all that he hadalready tried had so miserably failed, what hope? He resolved to quitfor a season all human society, and enter upon one of those desolateperiods of retreat from earthly converse well known in the annals ofsaintship as most prolific in spiritual victories.
Accordingly, on the day after the conversation with Father Johannes,he startled the monks by announcing to them that he was going to leavethem for several days.
"My brothers," he said, "the weight of a fearful penance is laid uponme, which I must work out alone. I leave you to-day, and charge you notto seek to follow my footsteps; but, as you hope to escape hell, watchand wrestle for me and yourselves during the time I am gone. Beforemany days I hope to return to you with renewed spiritual strength."
That evening, while Agnes and her uncle were sitting together in theirorange-garden, mingling their parting prayers and hymns, scenes of avery different description surrounded the Father Francesco.
One who looks on the flowery fields and blue seas of this enchantingregion thinks that the Isles of the Blest could scarcely find on eartha more fitting image; nor can he realize, till experience proves it tohim, that he is in the immediate vicinity of a weird and dreary regionwhich might represent no less the goblin horrors of the damned.
Around the foot of Vesuvius lie fair villages and villas, garlandedwith roses and flushing with grapes, whose juice gains warmth fromthe breathing of its subterraneous fires, while just above themrises a region more awful than can be created by the action of anycommon causes of sterility. There, immense tracts sloping graduallyupward show a desolation so peculiar, so utterly unlike every commonsolitude of Nature, that one enters upon it with the shudder wegive at that which is wholly unnatural. On all sides are giganticserpent convolutions of black lava, their immense folds rolled intoevery conceivable contortion, as if, in their fiery agonies, they hadstruggled and wreathed and knotted together, and then grown cold andblack with the imperishable signs of those terrific convulsions uponthem. Not a blade of grass, not a flower, not even the hardiest lichen,springs up to relieve the utter deathliness of the scene. The eyewanders from one black, shapeless mass to another, and there is everthe same suggestion of hideous monster life, of goblin convulsions andstrange fiend-like agonies in some age gone by. One's very footstepshave an unnatural, metallic clink, and one's garments brushing over therough surface are torn and fretted by its sharp, remorseless touch,as if its very nature were so pitiless and acrid that the slightestcontact revealed it.
The sun was just setting over the beautiful Bay of Naples,--with itsenchanted islands, its jeweled city, its flowery villages, all bedeckedand bedropped with strange shiftings and flushes of prismatic light andshade, as if they belonged to some fairy-land of perpetual festivityand singing,--when Father Francesco stopped in his toilsome ascent upthe mountain, and seating himself on ropy ridges of black lava, lookeddown on the peaceful landscape.
Above his head, behind him, rose the black cone of the mountain, overwhose top the lazy clouds of thin white smoke were floating, tingedwith the evening light; around him, the desolate convulsed waste,so arid, so supernaturally dreary; and below, like a soft enchanteddream, the beautiful bay, the gleaming white villas and towers, thepicturesque islands, the gliding sails, flecked and streaked and dyedwith the violet and pink and purple of the evening sky. The thin newmoon and one glittering star trembled through the rosy air.
The monk wiped from his brow the sweat that had been caused by the toilof his hurried journey, and listened to the bells of the Ave Mariapealing from the different churches of Naples, filling the atmospherewith a soft tremble of solemn dropping sound, as if spirits in theair took up and repeated over and over the angelic salutation whicha thousand earthly lips were just then uttering. Mechanically hejoined in the invocation which at that moment united the hearts of allChristians, and as the words passed his lips, he thought, with a sad,desolate longing, of the hour of death of which they spake.
"It must come at last," he said. "Life is but a moment. Why am I socowardly? why so unwilling to suffer and to struggle? Am I a warriorof the Lord, and do I shrink from the toils of the camp, and long forthe ease of the court before I have earned it? Why do we clamor forhappiness? Why should we sinners be happy? And yet, O God, why is theworld made so lovely as it lies there, why so rejoicing, and so girtwith splendor and beauty, if we are never to enjoy it? If penance andtoil were all we were sent here for, why not make a world grim anddesolate as this around me?--then there would be nothing to seduce us.But our path is a constant fight; Nature is made only to be resisted;we must walk the sharp blade of the sword over the fiery chasm toParadise. Come, then!--no shrinking!--let me turn my back on everythingdear and beautiful, as now on this landscape!"
He rose and commenced the perpendicular ascent of the cone, stumbling
and climbing over the huge sliding blocks of broken lava, which gratedand crunched beneath his feet with a harsh metallic ring. Sometimes abroken fragment or two would go tinkling down the rough path behindhim, and sometimes it seemed as if the whole loose black mass fromabove were about to slide, like an avalanche, down upon his head;--healmost hoped it would. Sometimes he would stop, overcome by the toilof the ascent, and seat himself for a moment on a black fragment, andthen his eye would wander over the wide and peaceful panorama below.He seemed to himself like a fly perched upon some little roughness ofa perpendicular wall, and felt a strange airy sense of pleasure inbeing thus between earth and heaven. A sense of relief, of beauty,and peacefulness would steal over him, as if he were indeed somethingdisfranchised and disembodied, a part of the harmonious and beautifulworld that lay stretched out beneath him; in a moment more he wouldwaken himself with a start, and resume his toilsome journey with asullen and dogged perseverance.
At last he gained the top of the mountain,--that weird, strangeregion where the loose, hot soil, crumbling beneath his feet, was nohonest foodful mother-earth, but an acrid mass of ashes and corrosiveminerals. Arsenic, sulphur, and many a sharp and bitter salt were inall he touched, every rift in the ground hissed with stifling steam,while rolling clouds of dun sullen smoke, and a deep hollow booming,like the roar of an immense furnace, told his nearness to the greatcrater. He penetrated the sombre tabernacle, and stood on the verybrink of a huge basin, formed by a wall of rocks around a sunken plain,in the midst of which rose the black cone of the subterraneous furnace,which crackled and roared, and from time to time spit up burning stonesand cinders, or oozed out slow ropy streams of liquid fire.
The sulphurous cliffs were dyed in many a brilliant shade of brown andorange by the admixture of various ores, but their brightness seemedstrange and unnatural, and the dizzying whirls of vapor, now envelopingthe whole scene in gloom, now lifting in this spot and now in that,seemed to magnify the dismal pit to an indefinite size. Now and thenthere would come up from the very entrails of the mountain a sort ofconvulsed sob of hollow sound, and the earth would quiver beneath hisfeet, and fragments from the surrounding rocks would scale off andfall with crashing reverberations into the depth beneath; at suchmoments it would seem as if the very mountain were about to crush inand bear him down in its ruins.
Father Francesco, though blinded by the smoke and choked by the vapor,could not be content without descending into the abyss and exploringthe very _penetralia_ of its mysteries. Steadying his way by means ofa cord which he fastened to a firm projecting rock, he began slowlyand painfully clambering downward. The wind was sweeping across thechasm from behind, bearing the noxious vapors away from him, or he mustinevitably have been stifled. It took him some little time, however, toeffect his descent; but at length he found himself fairly landed on thedark floor of the gloomy enclosure.
The ropy, pitch-black undulations of lava yawned here and there inred-hot cracks and seams, making it appear to be only a crust over somefathomless depth of molten fire, whose moanings and boilings could beheard below. These dark congealed billows creaked and bent as the monkstepped upon them, and burned his feet through his coarse sandals; yethe stumbled on. Now and then his foot would crush in, where the lavahad hardened in a thinner crust, and he would draw it suddenly backfrom the lurid red-hot metal beneath. The staff on which he restedwas constantly kindling into a light blaze as it slipped into someheated hollow, and he was fain to beat out the fire upon the coolersurface. Still he went on half-stifled by the hot and pungent vapor,but drawn by that painful, unnatural curiosity which possesses one ina nightmare dream. The great cone in the centre was the point to whichhe wished to attain,--the nearest point which man can gain to thiseternal mystery of fire. It was trembling with a perpetual vibration, ahollow, pulsating undertone of sound like the surging of the sea beforea storm, and the lava that boiled over its sides rolled slowly downwith a strange creaking; it seemed the condensed, intensified essenceand expression of eternal fire, rising and still rising from someinexhaustible fountain of burning.
Father Francesco drew as near as he could for the stifling heat andvapor, and, resting on his staff, stood gazing intently. The luridlight of the fire fell with an unearthly glare on his pale, sunkenfeatures, his wild, haggard eyes, and his torn and disarrangedgarments. In the awful solitude and silence of the night he felt hisheart stand still, as if indeed he had touched with his very hand thegates of eternal woe, and felt its fiery breath upon his cheek. Hehalf-imagined that the seams and clefts which glowed in lurid linesbetween the dark billows would gape yet wider and show the blastingsecrets of some world of fiery despair below. He fancied that he heardbehind and around the mocking laugh of fiends, and that confused clamorof mingled shrieks and lamentations which Dante describes as fillingthe dusky approaches to that forlorn realm where hope never enters.
"Ah, God," he exclaimed, "for this vain life of man! They eat, theydrink, they dance, they sing, they marry and are given in marriage,they have castles and gardens and villas, and the very beauty ofParadise seems over it all,--and yet how close by burns and roars theeternal fire! Fools that we are, to clamor for indulgence and happinessin this life, when the question is, to escape everlasting burnings! IfI tremble at this outer court of God's wrath and justice, what must bethe fires of hell? These are but earthly fires; they can but burn thebody: those are made to burn the soul; they are undying as the soulis. What would it be to be dragged down, down, down, into an abyss ofsoul-fire hotter than this for ages on ages? This might bring mercifuldeath in time: that will have no end."
The monk fell on his knees and breathed out piercing supplications.Every nerve and fibre within him seemed tense with his agony of prayer.It was not the outcry for purity and peace, not a tender longing forforgiveness, not a filial remorse for sin, but the nervous anguishof him who shrieks in the immediate apprehension of an unendurabletorture. It was the cry of a man upon the rack, the despairing screamof him who feels himself sinking in a burning dwelling. Such anguishhas found an utterance in Stradella's celebrated "Pieta, Signore,"which still tells to our ears, in its wild moans and piteous shrieks,the religious conceptions of his day; for there is no phase of theItalian mind that has not found expression in its music.
When the oppression of the heat and sulphurous vapor became toodreadful to be borne, the monk retraced his way and climbed withdifficulty up the steep sides of the crater, till he gained thesummit above, where a comparatively free air revived him. All nighthe wandered up and down in that dreary vicinity, now listening tothe mournful roar and crackle of the fire, and now raising his voicein penitential psalms or the notes of that terrific "Dies Irae" whichsums up all the intense fear and horror with which the religion of theMiddle Ages clothed the idea of the final catastrophe of humanity.Sometimes prostrating himself with his face towards the stifling soil,he prayed with agonized intensity till Nature would sink in a temporarycollapse, and sleep, in spite of himself, would steal over him.
So waned the gloomy hours of the night away, till the morning broke inthe east, turning all the blue wavering floor of the sea to crimsonbrightness, and bringing up, with the rising breeze, the barking ofdogs, the lowing of kine, the songs of laborers and boatmen, all freshand breezy from the repose of the past night.
Father Francesco heard the sound of approaching footsteps climbing thelava path, and started with a nervous trepidation. Soon he recognizeda poor peasant of the vicinity, whose child he had tended during adangerous illness. He bore with him a little basket of eggs, with amelon and a fresh green salad.
"Good-morning, holy father," he said, bowing humbly. "I saw you comingthis way last night, and I could hardly sleep for thinking of you; andmy good woman, Teresina, would have it that I should come out to lookafter you. I have taken the liberty to bring a little offering;--it wasthe best we had."
"Thank you, my son," said the monk, looking wistfully at the fresh,honest face of the peasant. "You have taken too much trouble for such asinner. I must not a
llow myself such indulgences."
"But your Reverence must live. Look you," said the peasant, "at leastyour Reverence will take an egg. See here, how handily I can cookone," he added, striking his stick into a little cavity of a rock,from which, as from an escape-valve, hissed a jet of hot steam,--"seehere, I nestle the egg in this little cleft, and it will be done in atwinkling. Our good God gives us our fire for nothing here."
There was something wholesomely kindly and cheerful in the action andexpression of the man, which broke upon the overstrained and disturbedmusings of the monk like daylight on a ghastly dream. The honest,loving heart sees love in everything; even the fire is its fatherlyhelper, and not its avenging enemy.
Father Francesco took the egg, when it was done, with a silent gestureof thanks.
"If I might make bold to say," said the peasant, encouraged, "yourReverence should have some care for yourself. If a man will not feedhimself, the good God will not feed him; and we poor people have toofew friends already to let such as you die. Your hands are trembling,and you look worn out. Surely you should take something more, for thevery love of the poor."
"My son, I am bound to do a heavy penance, and to work out a greatconflict. I thank you for your undeserved kindness. Leave me now tomyself, and come no more to disturb my prayers. Go, and God bless you!"
"Well," said the peasant, putting down the basket and melon, "I shallleave these things here, any way, and I beg your Reverence to have acare of yourself. Teresina fretted all night for fear something mightcome to you. The _bambino_ that you cured is grown a stout littlefellow, and eats enough for two,--and it is all of you; so she cannotforget it. She is a busy little woman, is Teresina; and when she getsa thought in her head, it buzzes, buzzes, like a fly in a bottle, andshe will have it your Reverence is killing yourself by inches, and saysshe, 'What will all the poor do when he is gone?' So your Reverencemust pardon us. We mean it all for the best."
So saying, the man turned and began sliding and slipping down the steepashy sides of the mountain cone with a dexterity which carried him tothe bottom in a few moments; and on he went, sending back after him acheerful little air, the refrain of which is still to be heard in ourdays in that neighborhood. A word or two of the gay song fluttered backon the ear of the monk,--
"Tutta gioja, tutta festa."
So gay and airy it was in its ringing cadence that it seemed a musicallaugh springing from sunny skies, and came fluttering into the dismalsmoke and gloom of the mountaintop like a very butterfly of sound.It struck on the sad, leaden ear of the monk much as we might fancythe carol of a robin over a grave might seem, could the cold sleeperbelow wake one moment to its perception. If it woke one regretful sighand drew one wandering look downward to the elysian paradise thatlay smiling at the foot of the mountain, he instantly suppressed thefeeling and set his face in its old deathly stillness.