Don Teodoro was exhausted. His face sank upon his folded hands on the edge of the table, and his shoulders trembled.
"My poor friend! My poor friend!" repeated Don Matteo, in a low and wondering tone. "No—it is quite clear," he added. "There is nothing which I have not understood. But I can say nothing, my poor friend! Pray—pray for forgiveness. God will forgive you, for you have done evil only to yourself, and never anything but good to others."
Don Teodoro in a hardly audible voice repeated the second half of the 'Confiteor' and remained on his knees a little while longer. Don Matteo covered his eyes with his hands, and during several minutes there was silence. Then the two old men rose and looked at each other for a moment.
"Courage!" said Don Matteo, and he gently patted his friend's shoulder.
He took off his stole, folded it carefully, and wrapped it in its clean white paper again, before putting it away. But he did that by force of habit. Confessors hear strange things sometimes and are not easily disconcerted, but Don Teodoro's was the strangest tale that had ever come to Don Matteo's ears. Again he came and patted Don Teodoro's shoulder in a way of kindly encouragement.
Then he took his three-cornered hat and went out without a word. In such a case there was no time to be lost.
Cardinal Campodonico was at that time the archbishop of Naples, and he received Don Matteo immediately, for the priest was a man of extraordinarily brilliant gifts and well known to the prelate, who liked him and had caused him to be made a canon of the cathedral not many years earlier.
Don Matteo, as was right in such a position, laid the whole matter before him as a theoretical case of conscience, without names, and without any useless details which might by any possibility give a clue to his real penitent's identity. He stated it all with great clearness and force, but he dwelt much upon the spotless life of charity and good works which the man had led, in spite of his one chief sin. He knew, when Don Teodoro spoke of having spent his father's fortune, that almost every penny of it had gone to the poor of Naples in one way or another, and he had seen at a glance how his poor friend had in his youth exaggerated his boyish admiration for his stepmother. But Don Matteo put the main point very clearly before the cardinal—always as a purely theoretical case of conscience, asking what a confessor's duty would be in such an extremely difficult situation.
The cardinal listened attentively, and then was silent for some time.
"The first thing to be done," he said at last, "would be to make a priest of him. He is evidently a man with a vocation, and the chain of circumstances which led him into this sin and difficulty is a very strange one. I hardly know what to say of it—left alone with savages only just converted—well, he was wrong, of course. But the man you represent in your theoretical case is supposed to be in all other respects almost a holy man."