Books: The Master Christian

M >> Marie Corelli >> The Master Christian

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"To-morrow!" answered Angela, and her cheeks flushed, and her eyes
sparkled, "I shall be busy all today arranging it for exhibition in
the best light. To-morrow morning Florian is to see it first,--then
my father will come, and you--and Manuel!" and she smiled as she met
the boy's gentle look,--"And Queen Margherita has promised to be
here at mid-day."

"Florian first! And then your father!" said Prince Pietro, with a
touch of melancholy in his tone, "Ah well, Angela mia!--I suppose it
must always be so! The lover's love--the stranger's love,--is
greater than the love of years, the love of home! Yet sometimes, I
fancy that the lover's love often turns out to be a passing impulse
more than a real truth, and that the home-love reasserts itself
afterwards with the best and the holiest power!"

And not trusting himself to say more, he abruptly left the room.
Angela looked after him, a little troubled. The Cardinal took her
hand.

"He is your father, dear girl!" he said gently, "And he cannot but
feel it hard--at first--to be relegated to a second place in your
affections."

Angela sighed.

"I cannot help it!" she said, "Florian is my very life! I should
have no ambition--no joy in anything if he did not love me!"

Over the Cardinal's fine open face there came an expression of great
pain.

"That is idolatry, Angela!" he said gravely, "We make a grievous
mistake when we love human beings too deeply,--for they are not the
gods we would make of them. Like ourselves, they are subject to sin,
and their sins often create more unhappiness for us than our own!"

"Ah! But we can save our beloved ones from sin!" answered Angela,
with a beautiful upward look of exaltation,--"That is love's
greatest mission!"

"It is a mission that cannot always be fulfilled"--said the Cardinal
sorrowfully,--then, after a pause he added--"The Abbe Vergniaud is
dead."

"Dead!" And Angela turned very pale. "His son--"

"His son sends the message--" and he handed her the telegram he had
received. She read it, and returned it to him,--then made the sign
of the cross.

"May he rest in peace!" He died true!"

"Yes, he died true. But remember, child, neither Truth nor Love are
spared their crown of thorns. Love cannot save--would that it could!
It may warn--it may pray--it may watch--it may hope,--but if despite
its tenderness, the sinner sins, what can love do then?"

"It can pardon!" said Angela softly.

Deeply moved, the good Felix took her hand and patted it gently.

"Dear child, God grant your powers of forgiveness may never be put
to the test!" he ejaculated fervently. "The one unforgivable sin
according to our Lord, is treachery;--may THAT never come your way!"

"It can never come my way through Florian!" answered Angela
smiling,--"and for the rest--I do not care!"

Manuel stood by silently, with thoughtful, downcast eyes--but at
these last words of hers he raised his head and looked full at her
with a touch of melancholy in his straight regard.

"Ah, that is wrong!" he said, "You SHOULD care!--you MUST care for
the rest of the world. We must all learn to care for others more
than ourselves. And if we will not learn, God sometimes takes a hard
way of teaching us!"

Angela's head drooped a little. Then she said,

"I DO care for others,--I think perhaps my picture will prove that
for me. But the tenderness I have for the sorrows of the world is
impersonal; and perhaps if I analysed myself honestly, I feel even
that through my love for Florian. If he were not in the world, I am
afraid I should not love the world so much!"

The Cardinal said no more, for just then a servant entered and
announced that His Eminence's carriage was in waiting. Angela
bending low once more before her uncle, kissed his apostolic ring,
and said softly--"To-morrow!"

And Manuel echoed the word, "To-morrow!" as she bade them both a
smiling "addio" and left the apartment. When she had gone, and he
was left alone with his foundling, the Cardinal stood for a few
minutes absorbed in silent meditation, mechanically gathering his
robes about him. After a pause of evident hesitancy and trouble, he
approached the boy and gently laid a hand upon his shoulder.

"Manuel," he said, "Do you understand whom it is that you are going
to see?"

"Yes," replied Manuel quickly, "The Head of the Church. One who
holds an office constituted by man long after Christ. It was founded
upon the name and memory of the Apostle Peter, who publicly denied
all knowledge of His Master. That is how I understand the person I
am to see to-day!"

Cardinal Bonpre's face was a study of varying expressions as he
heard these words.

"My child, you must not say these things in the Pope's presence!"

Manuel lifted his radiant eyes with a look of calm confidence.

"Dear friend, you must trust me!" he said, "They have sent for me,
have they not, to this place you call the Vatican? They desire to
see me, and to question me. That being so, whatever God bids me say,
I will say; fearing nothing!"

A strong tremour shook the Cardinal's nerves,--he essayed to find
words of wisdom and instruction, but somehow language failed him,--
he felt blinded and strengthless, and warned by this impending sense
of feebleness, made an instant effort to brace himself up and master
the strange fainting that threatened to overwhelm him as it had
frequently done before. He succeeded, and without speaking again to
Manuel, but only bending one earnest look upon him, he quitted his
rooms and proceeded slowly down the great marble staircase of the
Palazzo Sovrani,--a staircase famous even in Rome for its
architectural beauty--Manuel stepping lightly at his side--and
reaching his carriage, entered it with his foundling, and was
rapidly driven away.

Arrived at the Vatican, the largest palace in the world, which
contains, so historians agree in saying, no less than eleven
thousand different apartments with their courts and halls and
corridors, they descended at the Portone di Bronzo,--the Swiss Guard
on duty saluting as the Cardinal passed in. On they went into the
vestibule, chilly and comfortless, of the Scala Pia;--and so up the
stone stairs to the Cortile do San Damaso, and thence towards the
steps which lead to the Pope's private apartments. Another Guard met
them here and likewise saluted,--in fact, almost at every step of
the way, and on every landing, guards were on duty, either standing
motionless, or marching wearily up and down, the clank, clank of
their footsteps waking dismal echoes from the high vaulted roofs and
uncarpeted stone corridors. At last they reached the Sala
Clementina, a vast unfurnished hall, rich only with mural
decorations and gilding, and here another Guard met them who,
without words, escorted the Cardinal and his young companion through
a number of waiting-rooms, made more or less magnificent by glorious
paintings, wonderful Gobelin tapestries, and unique sculptures, till
they reached at last what is called the anti-camera segreto, where
none but Cardinals are permitted to enter and wait for an audience
with the Supreme Pontiff. At the door of this "Holy of Holies" stood
a Guarda Nobile on sentry duty,--but he might have been a figure of
painted marble for all the notice he took of their approach. As they
passed into the room, which was exceedingly high and narrow,
Monsignor Gherardi rose from a table near the window, and received
the Cardinal with a kind of stately gravity which suitably agreed
with the coldness and silence of the general surroundings. A small
lean man, habited in black, also came forward, exchanging a few low
whispered words with Gherardi as he did so, and this individual,
after saluting the Cardinal, mysteriously disappeared through a
little door to the right. He was the Pope's confidential valet,--a
personage who was perhaps more in the secrets of everybody and
everything than even Gherardi himself.

"I am afraid we shall have to keep you waiting a little while," said
Gherardi, in his smooth rich voice, which despite its mellow ring
had something false about it, like the tone produced by an invisible
crack in a fine bell, "Your young friend," and here he swept a keen,
inquisitive glance over Manuel from face to feet, and from feet to
face again, "will perhaps be tired?"

"I am never tired!" answered Manuel.

"Nor impatient?" asked Gherardi with a patronising air.

"Nor impatient!"

"Wonderful boy! If you are never tired or impatient, you will be
eminently fitted for the priesthood," said Gherardi, his lip curling
with a faint touch of derision, "For even the best of us grow
sometimes weary in well-doing!"

And turning from him with a movement which implied both hauteur and
indifference, he addressed himself to Bonpre, whose face was
clouded, and whose eyes were troubled.

"The unfortunate affair of our friend Vergniaud will be settled to-
day," he began, when the Cardinal raised one hand with a gentle
solemnity.

"It is settled!" he returned, "Not even the Church can intervene
between Vergniaud and his Maker now!"

Gherardi uttered an exclamation of undisguised annoyance.

"Dead!" he ejaculated, his forehead growing crimson with the anger
he inwardly repressed--"Since when?"

"Last night he passed away," replied the Cardinal. "according to the
telegram I have just received from--his son. But he has been dying
for some time, and what he told me in Paris was no lie. I explained
his exact position to you quite recently, on the day you visited my
niece at her studio. He had a serious valvular disease of the
heart,--he might, as the doctors said, have lived, at the utmost,
two years--but the excitement of recent events has evidently proved
too much for him. As I told you, he felt that his death might occur
at any moment, and he did not wish to leave the world under a false
impression of his character. I trust that now the Holy Father may be
inclined to pardon him, in death, if not in life!"

Gherardi walked up and down the narrow room impatiently.

"I doubt it!" he said at last, "I very much doubt it! The man may be
dead, but the scandal he caused remains. And his death has made the
whole position very much more difficult for you, my lord Cardinal!
For as Vergniaud is not alive to endure the penalty of his offence,
it is probable YOU may have to suffer for having condoned it!"

Felix Bonpre bent his head gently.

"I shall be ready and willing to suffer whatever God commands!" he
answered, "For I most faithfully believe that nothing can injure my
soul while it rests, as I humbly place it, in His Holy keeping!"

Gherardi paused in his pacing to and fro, and gazed at the frail
figure, and fine old face before him, with mingled compassion and
curiosity.

"You should have lived in the early days of the Faith," he said,
"You are too literal--too exact in your following of Christian
ethics. That sort of thing does not work nowadays. Dogma must be
maintained!"

"What is dogma?" asked Manuel suddenly.

Gherardi gave him a careless glance.

"Cardinal Bonpre must teach you that in extenso!" he replied, with a
little smile--"But briefly,--dogma is an opinion or theory derived
from the Gospels, and formulated as doctrine, by the Church."

"An opinion or theory of man, founded on the words of Christ?" said
Manuel.

"Just so!"

"But if Christ was divine, should any man presume to formulate a
theory on what He Himself said?" asked Manuel. "Are not his own
plain words enough?"

Gherardi stared at the young speaker half angrily.

"His own plain words enough?" he repeated mechanically. "What do you
mean, boy?"

"I mean," answered Manuel simply, "that if He were truly a
Manifestation of God in Himself, as the Church declares Him to be,
_I_ WONDER THAT MAN CAN DARE TO FORMULATE MERE DOGMA ON GOD'S OWN
UTTERANCE!"

There was a dead pause. After a few minutes of chill silence
Gherardi addressed the Cardinal.

"Your young friend has a dangerous tongue!" he said sternly, "You
had best warn or command him that he set a guard upon it in the Holy
Father's presence!"

"There is no need to either warn or command me!" said Manuel, a
smile irradiating his fair face as he met the angry eyes of Gherardi
with the full calmness of his own--"I have been sent for, and I am
here. Had I not been sent for I should not have come. Now that I
have been called to answer for myself I will answer,--with truth and
without fear. For what can any man cause me to suffer if I am to
myself true?"

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 passed 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 God only. And whatever his faults he certainly
believes in God!"

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
constitute 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 God,--it has now come to mean the
words or discourses, or quarrels and differences of men on the
things of God! But God's Word remains God'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 companionship 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 attitude
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 pass 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
cassock 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, pass,
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
cassock, 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 exactitude 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!"