"More than a hundred years have rolled away since I first looked on the light of this world—Miserere mei, Domine! Sixty years only have I spent in prayer, penance, solitude, and mortification of the flesh; to atone in some degree for the manifold and deadly sins committed while a denizen of the great and wicked community of mankind. You behold a sinner," he continued, his voice rising as he proceeded—"a villain of no ordinary dye! A wretch, whose enormities are greater than sixty years of piety and repentance can atone for: long though they have been. Centuries seem to have elapsed since this dismal tomb of the wilderness first became the witness of my secret sorrow—since I last heard the din of the bad and busy world! How many of the brave, the beautiful, and the innocent have been gathered to their fathers in that weary time! Generations have been born, have lived their allotted span, and been called to their last account: yet this guilty head has been spared. Memory, with all its goading torments, has never left me; though the torpid apathy of age and a life of solitude—sixty slowly passing years spent in brooding over past horrors, and the crimes of early days—have worn and withered to the core, a heart which for swelling pride and ferocity had not its equal in Italy. Who would think this hand had ever grasped a sword?"
He laughed like a serpent hissing, and thrust before me his right hand: lean, bony, and wrinkled, the large joints protruded beneath the thin shrivelled skin, which revealed every vein, muscle, and fibre. His skeleton form was so covered with hair, that he resembled an overgrown baboon; and as he regarded me with a wild and intense stare, his red and sunken eyes sparkled like those of a Skye terrier through the tangled bush of white locks overhanging them.
"Men say I have been mad!" he continued: "I might well have been so, if bodily torture and mental agony, incessant and acute, can unseat the lofty mind which alone makes man godlike! In this dread hour, the memories of other years—deeds of anger and crime, thoughts of sorrow and remorse—come crowding fast upon me! O miserere mei, Domine!" He seemed talking to himself rather than to me, and often pressed his bony fingers on his sharp angular temples, as if trying to arrange the chaos of recollections.
"Blessed be Madonna, that she sent a fellow mortal to witness these last agonies—to behold the deathbed of a sinner! Let its memory be treasured up in your heart—profit by it, my son! One death-scene such as this is better than a thousand homilies."
(This to me, who but two days before had ridden through the carnage of Maida!)
"You are young, and I am old, my son—old in years, and older still in sin: yet say; think you there is any hope for me? In another hour I shall have passed from this transient life to that which is eternal. What will become of my soul? Will He consume me in his wrath? O Spirito Santo, thou alone can answer! I behold that flaming abyss of everlasting misery and woe, where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Is that my doom? O miserere mei, Domine! Mercy! pity me! speak!"
While raving thus, he clasped my feet with the energy of despair; his whole frame shook with excess of spiritual terror, and his eyes seemed bursting from their sockets. Deeply moved, I heard him in silence, not knowing what to reply. A long pause ensued.
"Holy father!" said I, when the paroxysm had passed away, "there is hope in the mercy of Heaven even for the vilest, how much more for one who has passed so holy a life as you!"
"Alas! alas!" he exclaimed, beating his breast, "thou knowest me not, my son! And the simple peasantry who regard me as a saint—even like the holy Gennaro—know me not!"
"Whatever may be those crimes the recollection of which so haunts you, let us hope that remorse and sincere repentance——"