Fabiola; Or, The Church of the Catacombs

by Nicholas Patrick Wiseman

The letter of which Torquatus was the bearer to him, had produced its desired effect. He called at his villa, and spent a few days with his daughter, on his way to Asia. He was more than usually affectionate; and when they parted, both father and daughter seemed to have a melancholy foreboding that they would meet no more. He soon, however, recovered his spirits at Baiæ, where a party of good livers anxiously awaited him; and where he considered himself obliged to stay, while his galley was being fitted up and stored with the best wines and provisions which Campania afforded, for his voyage. He indulged, however, his luxurious tastes to excess; and on coming out of a bath, after a hearty supper, he was seized with a chill, and in four-and-twenty hours was a corpse. He had left his undivided wealth to his only child. In fine, the body was being embalmed when the courier started, and was to be brought by his galley to Ostia.

On hearing this sad tale, Sebastian was almost sorry that he had spoken as he had done of death, and left the house with mournful thoughts.

Fabiola’s first plunge into the dark abyss of grief was deep and dismal, down into unconsciousness. Then the buoyancy of youth and mind bore her up again to the surface; and her view of life, to the horizon, was as of a boundless ocean of black seething waves, on which floated no living thing save herself. Her woe seemed utter and unmeasured; and she closed her eyes with a shudder, and suffered herself to sink again into obliviousness, till once more roused to wakefulness of mind. Again and again she was thus tossed up and down, between transient death and life, while her attendants applied remedies to what they deemed a succession of alarming fits and convulsions. At length she sat up, pale, staring, and tearless, gently pushing aside the hand that tried to administer restoratives to her. In this state she remained long; a stupor, fixed and deadly, seemed to have entranced her; the pupils were almost insensible to the light, and fears were whispered of her brain becoming oppressed. The physician, who had been called, uttered distinctly and forcibly into her ears the question: “Fabiola, do you know that your father is dead?” She started, fell back, and a bursting flood of tears relieved her heart and head. She spoke of her father, and called for him amidst her sobs, and said wild and incoherent, but affectionate things about, and to, him. Sometimes she seemed to think him still alive, then she remembered he was dead; and so she wept and moaned, till sleep took the turn of tears, in nursing her shattered mind and frame.

Euphrosyne and Syra alone watched by her. The former had, from time to time, put in the commonplaces of heathen consolation, had reminded her too, how kind a master, how honest a man, how loving a father he had been. But the Christian sat in silence, except to speak gentle and soothing words to her mistress, and served her with an active delicacy, which even then was not unnoticed. What could she do more, unless it was to pray? What hope for else, than that a new grace was folded up, like a flower, in this tribulation; that a bright angel was riding in the dark cloud that overshadowed her humbled lady?

As grief receded it left some room for thought. This came to Fabiola in a gloomy and searching form. “What was become of her father? Whither was he gone? Had he melted into unexistence, or had he been crushed into annihilation? Had his life been searched through by that unseen eye which sees the invisible? Had he stood the proof of that scrutiny which Sebastian and Syra had described? Impossible! Then what had become of him?” She shuddered as she thought, and put away the reflection from her mind.

Oh, for a ray from some unknown light, that would dart into the grave, and show her what it was! Poetry had pretended to enlighten it, and even glorify it; but had only, in truth, remained at the door, as a genius with drooping head, and torch reversed. Science had stepped in, and come out scared, with tarnished wings and lamp extinguished in the fetid air; for it had only discovered a charnel-house. And philosophy had barely ventured to wander round and round, and peep in with dread, and recoil, and then prate or babble; and, shrugging its shoulders, own that the problem was yet unsolved, the mystery still veiled. Oh, for something, or some one, better than all these, to remove the dismal perplexity!

While these thoughts dwell like gloomy night on the heart of Fabiola, her slave is enjoying the vision of light, clothed in mortal form, translucid and radiant, rising from the grave as from an alembic, in which have remained the grosser qualities of matter, without impairing the essence of its nature. Spiritualized and free, lovely and glorious, it springs from the very hot-bed of corruption. And another and another, from land and sea; from reeking cemetery, and from beneath consecrated altar; from the tangled thicket where solitary murder has been committed on the just, and from fields of ancient battle done by Israel for God; like crystal fountains springing into the air, like brilliant signal-lights, darted from earth to heaven, till a host of millions, side by side, repeoples creation with joyous and undying life. And how knows she this? Because One, greater and better than poet, sage, or sophist, had made the trial; had descended first into the dark couch of death, had blessed it, as He had done the cradle, and made infancy sacred; rendering also death a holy thing, and its place a sanctuary. He went into it in the darkest of evening, and He came forth from it in the brightest of morning; He was laid there wrapped in spices, and he rose again robed in His own fragrant incorruption. And from that day the grave had ceased to be an object of dread to the Christian soul, for it continued what he had made it,—the furrow into which the seed of immortality must needs be cast.

The time was not come for speaking of these things to Fabiola. She mourned still, as they must mourn who have no hope. Day succeeded day in gloomy meditation on the mystery of death, till other cares mercifully roused her. The corpse arrived, and such a funeral followed as Rome then seldom witnessed. Processions by torch-light, in which the waxen effigies of ancestors were borne, and a huge funeral pile, built up of aromatic wood, and scented by the richest spices of Arabia, ended in her gathering up a few handfuls of charred bones, which were deposited in an alabaster urn, and placed in a niche of the family sepulchre, with the name inscribed of their former owner.

Calpurnius spoke the funeral oration; in which, according to the fashionable ideas of the day, he contrasted the virtues of the hospitable and industrious citizen with the false morality of those men called Christians, who fasted and prayed all day, and were stealthily insinuating their dangerous principles into every noble family, and spreading disloyalty and immorality in every class. Fabius, he could have no doubt, if there was any future existence, whereon philosophers differed, was now basking on a green bank in Elysium, and quaffing nectar. “And oh!” concluded the old whining hypocrite, who would have been sorry to exchange one goblet of Falernian for an amphora[115] of that beverage, “oh! that the gods would hasten the day when I, his humble client, may join him in his shady repose and sober banquets!” This noble sentiment gained immense applause.

To this care succeeded another. Fabiola had to apply her vigorous mind to examine, and close her father’s complicated affairs. How often was she pained at the discovery of what to her seemed injustice, fraud, over-reaching and oppression, in the transactions of one whom the world had applauded as the most honest and liberal of public contractors!