“As soon as I am pope, I will do both. My sacred word for it! Shall I strengthen my promise by swearing upon the Bible?”
Cardinal Albani gave the questioner a glance of astonishment, and then broke out with a loud and scornful laugh.
“You forget that you are speaking to one of your kind! Of what use would such a holy farce be to us who have no faith in its binding power? No, no, we priests know each other. Such buffoonery amounts to nothing. One written word is worth a thousand sworn oaths! Let us have a contract prepared—that is better. We will both sign it!”
“Just as you please!” said Braschi, with a smile, stepping to his writing desk and rapidly throwing some lines upon paper, which he signed after it had been carefully read by Albani.
“At length the business is finished,” said Albani. “Now, Cardinal Braschi, go to your signora, and surprise her with the news that she holds in her arms a pope in spe. Pope Clement will soon need a successor; he must be very ill, the poor pope!”
So speaking, he took leave of the future pope with a friendly nod, and departed with as much haste as he had come.
“And now to these pious Jesuit fathers!” said he, stepping out upon the grass. “It was very prudent in me that I went on foot to Corilla to-day. Our cursed equipages betray every thing; they are the greatest chatterboxes! How astonished these good Romans would be to see a cardinal’s carriage before these houses of the condemned! No, no, strengthen yourselves for another effort, my reverend legs! Only yet this walk, and then you will have rest.”
And the cardinal trudged stoutly on until he reached the Jesuit college. There he stopped and looked cautiously around him.
“This unfortunate saintly dress is also a hindrance,” murmured he. “Like the sign over the shop-door it proclaims to all the world: ‘I am a cardinal. Here indulgences, dispensations, and God’s blessings are to be sold! Who will buy, who will buy?’ I dare not now enter this scouted and repudiated sacred house. I might be remarked, suspected, and betrayed. Corilla, dear, beautiful woman, it costs me much pains and many efforts to conquer you; will your possession repay me?”
The cardinal patiently waited in the shadow of a taxus-bush until the street become for a moment empty and solitary. Then he hastened to a side-door of the building, and, sure of being unobserved, entered.