CHAPTER V. THE RENUNCIATION
I found the path the hermit spoke of, and followed its sinuousdownhill course, now running when the ground was open, now moving morecautiously, yet always swiftly, when it led me through places darkenedby trees.
At the end of a half-hour I espied below me the twinkling lights of avillage on the hill-side, and a few minutes later I was among the housesof Casi. To find the priest in his little cottage by the church was aneasy matter; to tell him my errand and to induce him to come with me, totend the holy man who lay dying alone in the mountain, was as easy. Toreturn, however, was the most difficult part of the undertaking; for theupward path was steep, and the priest was old and needed such assistanceas my own very weary limbs could scarcely render him. We had theadvantage of a lanthorn which he insisted upon bringing, and we made asgood progress as could be expected. But it was best part of two hoursafter my setting out before we stood once more upon the little platformwhere the hermit had his hut.
We found the place in utter darkness. Through lack of oil his littlelamp had burned itself out; and when we entered, the man on the bed ofwattles lay singing a lewd tavern-song, which, coming from such holylips, filled me with horror and amazement.
But the old priest, with that vast and doleful experience of death-bedswhich belongs to men of his class, was quick to perceive the cause ofthis. The fever was flickering up before life's final extinction, andthe poor moribund was delirious and knew not what he said.
For an hour we watched beside him, waiting. The priest was confidentthat there would be a return of consciousness and a spell of luciditybefore the end.
Through that lugubrious hour I squatted there, watching the awfulprocess of human dissolution for the first time.
Save in the case of Fifanti I had never yet seen death; nor could it besaid that I had really seen it then. With the pedant, death had been asudden sharp severing of the thread of life, and I had been consciousthat he was dead without any appreciation of death itself, blinded inpart by my own exalted condition at the time.
But in this death of Fra Sebastiano I was heated by no participation.I was an unwilling and detached spectator, brought there by force ofcircumstance; and my mind received from the spectacle an impression noteasily to be effaced, an impression which may have been answerable inpart for that which followed.
Towards dawn at last the sick man's babblings--and they were mostly asprofane and lewd as his occasional bursts of song--were quieted. Theunseeing glitter of his eyes that had ever and anon been turned upon uswas changed to a dull and heavy consciousness, and he struggled to rise,but his limbs refused their office.
The priest leaned over him with a whispered word of comfort, then turnedand signed to me to leave the hut. I rose, and went towards the door.But I had scarcely reached it when there was a hoarse cry behind mefollowed by a gasping sob from the priest. I started round to see thehermit lying on his back, his face rigid, his mouth open and idiotic,his eyes more leaden than they had been a moment since.
"What is it?" I cried, despite myself.
"He has gone, my son," answered the old priest sorrowfully. "But hewas contrite, and he had lived a saint." And drawing from his breast alittle silver box, he proceeded to perform the last rites upon the bodyfrom which the soul was already fled.
I came slowly back and knelt beside him, and long we remained therein silent prayer for the repose of that blessed spirit. And whilst weprayed the wind rose outside, and a storm grew in the bosom of the nightthat had been so fair and tranquil. The lightning flashed and illuminedthe interior of that hut with a vividness as of broad daylight, throwinginto livid relief the arrow-pierced St. Sebastian in the niche and theghastly, grinning skull upon the hermit's pulpit.
The thunder crashed and crackled, and the echoes of its artillery wentbooming and rolling round the hills, whilst the rain fell in a terrificlashing downpour. Some of it finding a weakness in the roof, trickledand dripped and formed a puddle in the middle of the hut.
For upwards of an hour the storm raged, and all the while we remainedupon our knees beside the dead anchorite. Then the thunder receded andgradually died away in the distance; the rain ceased; and the dawn creptpale as a moon-stone adown the valley.
We went out to breathe the freshened air just as the first touches ofthe sun quickened to an opal splendour the pallor of that daybreak.All the earth was steaming, and the Bagnanza, suddenly swollen, wentthundering down the gorge.
At sunrise we dug a grave just below the platform with a spade which Ifound in the hut. There we buried the hermit, and over the spot I made agreat cross with the largest stones that I could find. The priest wouldhave given him burial in the hut itself; but I suggested that perhapsthere might be some other who would be willing to take the hermit'splace, and consecrate his life to carrying on the man's pious workof guarding that shrine and collecting alms for the poor and for thebuilding of the bridge.
My tone caused the priest to look at me with sharp, kindly eyes.
"Have you such thoughts for yourself, perchance?" he asked me.
"Unless you should adjudge me too unworthy for the office," I answeredhumbly.
"But you are very young, my son," he said, and laid a kindly hand uponmy shoulder. "Have you suffered, then, so sorely at the hands of theworld that you should wish to renounce it and to take up this lonelylife?"
"I was intended for the priesthood, father," I replied. "I aspired toholy orders. But through the sins of the flesh I have rendered myselfunworthy. Here, perhaps, I can expiate and cleanse my heart of all thefoulness it gathered in the world."
He left me an hour or so later, to make his way back to Casi, havingheard enough of my past and having judged sufficiently of my attitude ofmind to approve me in my determination to do penance and seek peace inthat isolation. Before going he bade me seek him out at Casi at anytime should any doubts assail me, or should I find that the burden I hadtaken up was too heavy for my shoulders.
I watched him go down the winding, mountain path, watched the bent oldfigure in his long black gaberdine, until a turn in the path and a clumpof chestnuts hid him from my sight.
Then I first tasted the loneliness to which on that fair morning I hadvowed myself. The desolation of it touched me and awoke self-pity in myheart, to extinguish utterly the faint flame of ecstasy that had warmedme when first I thought of taking the dead anchorite's place.
I was not yet twenty, I was lord of great possessions, and of life I hadtasted no more than one poisonous, reckless draught; yet I was donewith the world--driven out of it by penitence. It was just; but it wasbitter. And then I felt again that touch of ecstasy to reflect that itwas the bitterness of the resolve that made it worthy, that through itsvery harshness was it that this path should lead to grace.
Later on I busied myself with an inspection of the hut, and my firstattentions were for the miraculous image. I looked upon it with awe, andI knelt to it in prayer for forgiveness for the unworthiness I broughtto the service of the shrine.
The image itself was very crude of workmanship and singularly ghastly.It reminded me poignantly of the Crucifix that had hung upon thewhitewashed wall of my mother's private dining-room and had been sorepellent to my young eyes.
From two arrow wounds in the breast descended two brown streaks, relicsof the last miraculous manifestation. The face of the young Romancenturion who had suffered martyrdom for his conversion to Christianitywas smiling very sweetly and looking upwards, and in that part of hiswork the sculptor had been very happy. But the rest of the carvingwas gruesome and the anatomy was gross and bad, the figure being sodisproportionately broad as to convey the impression of a stunted dwarf.
The big book standing upon the pulpit of plain deal proved, as I hadexpected, to be a missal; and it became my custom to recite from it eachmorning thereafter the office for the day.
In a rude cupboard I found a jar of baked earth that was half full ofoil, and another larger jar containing some cakes of maize bread anda handful of ches
tnuts. There was also a brown bundle which resolveditself into a monkish habit within which was rolled a hair-shirt.
I took pleasure in this discovery, and I set myself at once to strip offmy secular garments and to don this coarse brown habit, which, by reasonof my great height, descended but midway down my calves. For lack ofsandals I went barefoot, and having made a bundle of the clothes I hadremoved I thrust them into the cupboard in the place of those which Ihad taken thence.
Thus did I, who had been vowed to the anchorite order of St. Augustine,enter upon my life as an unordained anchorite. I dragged out the wattlesupon which my blessed predecessor had breathed his last, and havingswept the place clean with a bundle of hazel-switches which I cut forthe purpose, I went to gather fresh boughs and rushes by the swollentorrent, and with these I made myself a bed.
My existence became not only one of loneliness, but of grim privation.People rarely came my way, save for a few faithful women from Casi orFiori who solicited my prayers in return for the oil and maize-cakeswhich they left me, and sometimes whole days would pass without thesight of a single human being. These maize-cakes formed my chiefnourishment, together with a store or nuts from the hazel coppice thatgrew before my door and some chestnuts which I went further afield togather in the woods. Occasionally, as a gift, there would be a jar ofolives, which was the greatest delicacy that I savoured in those days.No flesh-food or fish did I ever taste, so that I grew very lean andoften suffered hunger.
My days were spent partly in prayer and partly in meditation, and Ipondered much upon what I could remember of the Confessions of St.Augustine, deriving great consolation from the thought that if thatgreat father of the Church had been able to win to grace out of so muchsin as had befouled his youth, I had no reason to despair. And as yetI had received no absolution for the mortal offences I had committedat Piacenza. I had confessed to Fra Gervasio, and he had bidden me dopenance first, but the penance had never been imposed. I was imposing itnow. All my life should I impose it thus.
Yet, ere it was consummated I might come to die; and the thoughtappalled me, for I must not die in sin.
So I resolved that when I should have spent a year in that fastness Iwould send word to the priest at Casi by some of those who visited myhermitage, and desire him to come to me that I might seek absolution athis hands.