Taquisara

by F. Marion Crawford

"Is it as serious as that?" asked Don Matteo, very much surprised, for only the very gravest matters, and generally the most terrible crimes, are referred to the bishop by a confessor.

"It is a grave matter," answered Don Teodoro. "Have the kindness to get your stole, and I will make my confession, here. But we will lock the enter door of the outer room, if you please."

He was shivering, and his face was white as he rose to go and slip the bolt. Re-entering the room, he locked the inner door also behind him. Don Matteo had produced from a drawer an old violet stole with tarnished silver embroidery. It was carefully wrapped up in thin, clean, white paper. A priest always wears the stole in administering any of the seven sacraments. He passed it over his head, and the broad bands fell over his breast, and he held the ends, upon which were embroidered small Greek crosses, in one of his hands. Grave and silent, he sat down beside the table, resting his elbow upon it and shading his eyes with his other hand.

Don Teodoro knelt down, beside him at the table, and each said his part of the preliminary form in a low voice. When Don Teodoro had said the first half of the 'Confiteor,' he was silent for some time, and Don Matteo was aware that his tall, thin frame was trembling, for the table shook under his elbow. Then he began to speak, as follows:—

"I must tell the story of my life. My father was an officer in the army of King Ferdinand, under the former government, and I was his only child. He had a little fortune, and his pay was relatively large for those days, so that I was brought up as a gentleman's son. My father, who had been so fortunate as to make many advantageous friendships in the course of his career, wished me to enter the military academy and the army. By his interest I should have had rapid advancement. But this was not my inclination. Ever since I can remember anything, I know that I ardently wished to be a priest. As a little boy, I used to make a small altar in a dark room behind my own, and I used to adorn it and dress it for the feast days, and light tapers on it, and save my pocket money to buy tiny silver ornaments for it. Before I could read I knew the Rosary and the short Litanies, and I used to say them very devoutly before my little altar, with genuflexions and other gestures such as I saw the priests make in church. My father smiled sometimes, but he did not interfere. He was a devout man, though he was a soldier. I had some facility for learning, also, and was fond of all books. My mother died when I was four years old.

"I need not tell how the devout passion increased in me as I grew older. I passed through all the stages of such development very quickly. My father believed that I had a true vocation for the Church, and yielding to my entreaties and to the advice of his friends, who told him that he could never make a soldier of such a boy, he allowed me to enter a seminary. I was very happy, and my love of books and my earnest desire to be a priest continued to increase. I was made a deacon and received the tonsure. Then I fell ill. It was the will of Heaven, for I never was ill before that, nor have been since. It was a long illness, a dangerous fever. Just before that time, while I was in the seminary, my father had married a second time, a young and very beautiful woman, scarcely two years older than I. They both took care of me, and she was very kind and liked me from the first.

"I loved her. That was perhaps an illness also, for I never suffered in that way again. It was very terrible, for I knew what a great sin it was to love my father's wife. I never told her that I loved her, and she was always the same, kind and good. My heart was red-hot iron in my breast, day and night, and it was very long before I was really well again. After that, I confessed my sin many times, but I could not feel repentance for it. My father wondered, and so did she, why I would not go back to the seminary for the few months that remained to complete my studies. It would have been better if I had gone back. But I loved her, and I could not. I could not confess the sin in my heart to the confessor of the seminary, for whom I had great esteem and who had known me so long, I was ashamed, and waited, thinking that it would pass. But I wished to escape.

"I joined myself as a lay brother to a Franciscan mission that was going to Africa. My father made many objections to this, but I overcame them. I think he guessed that I loved his wife, and though he loved me, too, he was glad that I should go away. As for me, I trusted that in the labours of a distant mission I should forget my love, feel honest repentance, receive absolution, and be ordained a true priest by a missionary bishop.

"We were seven who started together upon that mission. After two years I alone was left alive. One after the other they died of the fever of that country. We had written for help, but I knew afterwards that our letters had not reached the sea. That was why no one came to bring help. We had converted people amongst those savages and had built a chapel. Even those who were not converted were friendly, for we had taught them many things. My companions all died, one by one, and I buried the last. But I myself was never ill of the fever. Yet the people there clung around me. I committed a great sin. They had no priest, and they did not understand that I was not one, for I dressed like the others. If there were no more services in the little chapel, they would think that Christianity was dead, and they would fall back to their former condition. I took the sin upon myself, and I said mass for them, knowing that it was no mass, and praying that God would forgive me, and that it might not be a sacrilege. I did not fall ill. I lived amongst them, and received their confessions and administered all the sacraments when they were required, for the space of a year and a half, during which I sent many appeals for help. But in my letters I did not explain what I was doing, for I intended to go to the bishop if I ever got home alive, and confess to him.

"At last help came, priests and lay brothers. It pleased Heaven that they should come at last at the very moment when I was saying mass for the people. Of course there was no bishop amongst them, and none of them knew that I was not a priest. I should have confessed the truth to the eldest of them, but I had no courage, for I did not do it at once, but put it off, and as every priest said mass every day, I said mine, too, on the first morning after the others had come. I wished to go away at once. But I alone knew all the people, and could preach a little in their language, and I was much loved by them, for I had been alone with them during eighteen months. So my new brethren would not let me go, and after what I had done so far, I was ashamed to tell the truth about myself. They looked up to me as a superior, because I had been so long in the mission and had lived through what had killed so many. They thought me very humble and praised my humility. But it was not humility—it was shame.