Harry took his hat and made his best bow. He was really quite tremulous with excitement, surprise, and pleasure. To be so speedily and so easily established was more good fortune than he could realize. When he was at the door Mr. Bonamy called him back.
“Oliver!” he cried, “one moment; I would not knock any more men down if I were you; however quietly it is done, it is a little risky, and Her Majesty’s Service, you know——”
“You needn’t fear, Sir; that’s what Paul-o has been preaching to me all the time,” Harry said.
Upon which the Vice-Consul laughed benignly.
“Paul-o, as you call him, is as good an adviser as you could have,” he said.
“What should I call him but Paul-o?” Harry said to himself; and he went off with his head in the air. Lucky! indeed he had been lucky; only the third day since his arrival and he had a situation and a sort of a home and friends; to make up to him for all the evil that had happened to him before, providence was taking special care of him now. Somehow this made Harry think of his mother, of whom, hitherto, his thoughts had been scarcely more kind than towards the others concerned; a little moisture crept unawares to his eyes. “She’ll have been praying,” he said to himself; and suddenly he seemed to see her, as he had seen her so often, wringing her thin worn hands, her lips trembling with words that were inaudible. He thought—it would be hard to trace the exact connection of ideas, but there was one—that he would go in to the first church in which there seemed to be service going on, on his way back to the inn. It would not have occurred to him to go into a church where there was no service, but when he heard the tinkle of a bell, and saw one or two people creeping up and down the broad stone steps, he went in, though with a little opposition in his mind, as well as a certain craving for sympathy and utterance. But when he went in, Harry saw no signs of public worship. The tinkle of the bell was coming from an altar in a side chapel, where a great many candles were burning. In the body of the church some people were seated quietly, others kneeling on the low rush-bottomed chairs. He stood and gazed for a little with mingled feelings, with a great opposition in his mind to the Papist ritual and ceremonies (of which he saw nothing, and which, to tell the truth, he had never seen, and knew nothing whatever about); and disapproval of the people who were in the church for, as he thought, no purpose—mingled with a curious sense of the grateful calm and quietness and seclusion of the place, the serene coolness and breadth of its lofty roofs and silent space. This stole upon him, he could not tell how. He would not have knelt down, as the few people about were doing, to save his life: it would have seemed to him like the famous bowing down in the house of Rimmon, for the North was very Protestant in those days, and sympathy with Rome was very rare. He would not even say a distinct prayer in his heart, which would have seemed like yielding to temptation. But, as he stood, there rose in him an unwilling devotion, and the thanks that had been in his mind were perhaps not the less given that they were arbitrarily refused utterance. For Harry’s prejudices were a part of his training, not anything that originated in himself. When he went away the moisture came again into the corners of his eyes. His mother was as Protestant, more Protestant, than himself. She would have thought it wrong to go into “a Catholic chapel.” She would scarcely have been able to believe in the existence of a country not given over to all evil, in which a Popish place of worship was not a Catholic chapel, but an established church. Oh, the poor people! what benighted darkness they must be in! she would have said, in her ignorance. But somehow, Harry could not have told how, he felt as if he had approached his mother in that foreign place. The silent church, with the silent people in it praying, made him think of her as he had seen her, with her lips moving and her hands clasped together. Often again he stole in for a moment to renew that sentiment, which was so soft and pathetic. He held out against his mother all the time obstinately, though he knew he was condemning her to great suffering—and he entirely disapproved of the church; but for all that the two had some subtle resemblance, a union of two things he was hostile to, which went to his heart.
Paolo came to dinner in great triumph. He had placed a flower in his button-hole and put on a brilliant new tie in honour of the great event, and fairly threw himself upon his amico and kissed him with enthusiasm before Harry could get out of this extremely embarrassing position. Never young girl blushed more uncomfortably than the young man did as he drew himself out of his enthusiastic friend’s embrace.
“What have I done to you that you make no response?” Paolo said, almost weeping over this repulse.
“Hold your tongue, for goodness’ sake! Men don’t kiss each other in England. Whatever you do, don’t be ridiculous,” Harry cried.
Poor little Paolo was wounded to the heart.