"You ask why I have done this thing?" he spoke dryly at last. "The hour has come when I must tell you, Ilaria! Not that it can steer the vessel of our lives into different channels,—but that at last I may stand vindicated in your sight. I am the son of Gregorio Villani, Grand Master of the Order of St. John. My mother died at my birth. I was raised at the Court of Avellino. So powerful was the influence of my father, that, notwithstanding the protests of the Holy See, he placed his offspring at a Ghibelline court. There came a day when I was summoned to the bedside of my father at San Cataldo. What passed between us during that interview, neither you nor any one on earth may know. I went into his room a happy, care-free youth. I came out the shadow of my former self,—a monk. One year I lived among shadows in the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino. There I took the vows which made me a prisoner, far more closely bound than you can know; for death alone shall release me from a life which has grown to be a torture. I became a monk half from pity, half from fear. The pity is almost gone; the fear has left me long ago. After a time I was called to Rome. The Church I love not! I am unfit to remain in her service. The monks are to me a hateful body. Willingly, gladly, would I see my scapular replaced by the tunic for my coffin. Yet death is not for me to hope for, or even to dream of,—and in vain I ask, what holds the future?"
Ilaria's head had drooped over his; her eyes wandered blindly over the ground. Then a warm drop fell to the stone at her feet.
During his recital the very soul in Francesco seemed to have withered with dread, and he seemed to shrivel up bodily and to grow feeble and old and wilted, as a leaf that the frost has touched.
"The memory pains you," she said at last.
He bit his lips.
"Deem you, I forget when I am silent? But it is not the thing itself that haunts me! It is the fact that I have lost the power over myself—"
"You have suffered—"
"It is the fact that I have come to the end of my courage,—to the point where I find myself a coward!"
"Surely there is a limit to what one may bear—"
"And he who has once reached that limit never knows when he may reach it again!"