“Fra Gervasio!” I cried, leaping to my feet, a premonition of what he was about turning me cold with horror. “Stay!” I almost screamed.
But too late. My answer was a crashing blow. The next instant, as I sank back to my seat and covered my face, the two halves of the image fell at my feet, flung there by the friar.
“Look!” he bade me in a roar.
Fearfully I looked. I saw. And yet I could not believe.
He came quickly back, and picked up the two halves. “The oracle of Delphi was not more impudently worked,” he said. “Observe this sponge, these plates of metal that close down upon it and exert the pressure necessary to send the liquid with which it is laden oozing forth.” As he spoke he tore out the fiendish mechanism. “And see now how ingeniously it was made to work—by pressure upon this arrow in the flank.”
There was a burst of laughter from the door. I looked up, startled, to find Galeotto standing at my elbow. So engrossed had I been that I had never heard his soft approach over the turf.
“Body of Bacchus!” said he. “Here is Gervasio become an image breaker to some purpose. What now of your miraculous saint, Agostino?”
My answer was first a groan over my shattered illusion, and then a deep-throated curse at the folly that had made a mock of me.
The friar set a hand upon my shoulder. “You see, Agostino, that your excursions into holy things do not promise well. Away with you, boy! Off with this hypocrite robe, and get you out into the world to do useful work for God and man. Had your heart truly called you to the priesthood, I had been the first to have guided your steps thither. But your mind upon such matters has been warped, and your views are all false; you confound mysticism with true religion, and mouldering in a hermitage with the service of God. How can you serve God here? Is not the world God's world that you must shun it as if the Devil had fashioned it? Go, I say—and I say it with the authority of the orders that I bear—go and serve man, and thus shall you best serve God. All else are but snares to such a nature as yours.”
I looked at him helplessly, and from him to Galeotto who stood there, his black brows knit; watching me with intentness as if great issues hung upon my answer. And Gervasio's words touched in my mind some chord of memory. They were words that I had heard before—or something very like them, something whose import was the same.