More than one letter of resistance and impotent pleading in Caterina's own hand, had gone from this Daughter of the Republic to the Doge himself, and passed from the Serenissimo into the secret archives of San Marco; but the very fact of the appeal was an acknowledgment of Venetian right, and the evils steadily increased. While Caterina tried to forget that the clasp of a velvet paw may fatally crush, when the force of an angry lion is behind it: or—if she remembered it too cruelly in the hours of her desolate midnight vigils, what could she do but ignore the insult, with a woman's power of endurance, that she might defer the day that should separate her from her work and her people with whom her last dim hopes of happiness were inextricably bound up: for to them she knew that she was still the Mother Queen—"Nostra Madonna," and the dear title was a cure for much heart-anguish.
More than once the good Father Johannes—his hair and beard now falling in thin gray locks about his throat and breast, but the spirit within him still gleaming fiercely from his deep eyes—had come with painful steps down the long way from his distant Troödos to help and comfort her.
"Daughter," he said, "for thy brave wrestling I absolve thee from thy vow. Christ and the Holy Mother are merciful. They ask no more than man may do. If thou hast not the strength——"
"Father, without my work I have naught to live for. I have not the strength to leave it."
"Then God help thee! and the prayers of all the pilgrims to the Troödista help thee! And of all who have tasted of thy bounty; and of all who have known thy care!"
"Unless, my Father," she interrupted painfully, "there should be one who might better hold this trust, to whom I may yield it? If Carlotta——"
"Is she not like her Mother, the Paléologue?" the Lampadisti answered angrily. "Hath she not plotted murder and treachery to compass her ends? Aye—even a fratricide—because forsooth of the crime of the grace that her brother possessed? Is there a record of good deeds, that the people should wish her back?—Did she strive to uphold the laws, or to know them?—To have her people taught and comforted?"—his eyes blazed.
"Thou dost verily comfort me, my Father."
"For that I am sent. The Holy Relic on the altar of the Troödista seemed to point me hither, with every Sacred Thorn. I could pray no prayers but for thee; I could hearken to no other tales of woe. My feet turned ever thither without my will: and thus I knew that thou hadst need of me!"
But once when he came, and she knew not that it was the last time, she said: