DECEMBER 24, 1844.
CHAPTER I.
ARRAYED FOR THE BRIDAL.
It was toward evening, when, amid the crowd of Broadway—that crowd of mad and impetuous life—there glided, like a specter through the mazes of a voluptuous dance, a man of sober habit, pallid face, and downcast eyes. Beautiful women, wrapped in soft attire, passed him every moment; brushed him with their perfumed garments; but he heeded them not. There was the free laugh, the buzz of voices, and the tramp of footsteps all about him, but he did not raise his eyes, nor bend his ear. Gliding along in his dark habit, he was as much alone on that thronged pathway, as though he walked the sands of an Arabian desert. A man of hollow cheeks, features boldly marked, and eyes large and dark, and shining with the fire of disease, or with the restlessness of a soul that had turned upon itself, and was gnawing ever and ever at its own life-strings.
His habit—a long black coat, single breasted, and with a plain white band about the neck—indicated that he was a Catholic Priest.
He was a Priest. Struck down in his early manhood by an irreparable calamity, he had looked all around the horizon of his life for—peace. Repose, repose—a quiet life—an obscure grave—became the objects of his soul's desire, instead of the ambitions which his young manhood had cherished.
As there was not peace within him, so he searched the world for it, and in vain.
He sought it in a money-bound Protestant church, behind whose pulpit-bible—like a toad upon an altar—Mammon, holy mammon, squats in bank-note grandeur. And there, he found money, and much cant, and abundance of sect,—but no peace.
To the Catholic church he turned. Won by the poetry of that church—we use the word in its awful and intense sense, for poetry and religion are one—and, forgetful of the infernal deeds which demoniacs, in purple and scarlet, have done in the name of that church, tracking their footsteps over half the globe in blood, and lighting up the history of ten centuries, at least, with flames of persecution,—won by all that is good and true in that church, (which he forgot is good and true under whatsoever form it occurs,)—he sought repose in its bosom.