The Eternal City

by Sir Hall Caine

There was a crowd on the embankment by the corner of the Ripetta bridge. The body of a beggar had been brought out of the river, and it was lying there for the formal inspection of the officials who report on cases of sudden death. Roma stopped to look at the dead man. It was Old John. He had committed suicide.

XX

It was said at the Vatican that the Pope had not slept all night. The attendant whose duty it was to lie awake while the Holy Father expected to sleep said he heard him praying in the dark hours, and at one moment he heard him singing a hymn.

To the Pope it had been a night of searching self-examination. Pictures of his life had passed before him in swift review, pulsing and throbbing out of the darkness like the light of a firefly, now come, now gone.

First the Conclave, the three scrutators, and himself as one of them. The first scrutiny, the second scrutiny, the third scrutiny and his own name going up, up, up, as he proclaimed the votes in a loud voice so that all in the chapel might hear. One vote more to his own name, another, still another; his fear, his fainting; the gentle tones of an old Cardinal, saying, "Take your time, brother; rest, repose a while." Then the election, the awful sense of being God's choice, the almost unearthly joy of the supreme moment when he became the Vicar of Christ on earth.

Then the stepping forth from the dim conclave into the full light of day to be proclaimed the representative of the Almighty, the living voice of God, the infallible one. The sunless chapel, the white and crimson vestments, the fisherman's ring, the vast crowd in the blazing light of the piazza, the sudden silence, and the clear cry of the Cardinal Deacon ringing out under the blue sky, "I announce to you joyful tidings—the Most Eminent and Reverend Cardinal Leone, having taken the name of Pius X., is elected Pope." Then the call of silver trumpets, the roar of ten thousand human throats, the surging mass of living men below the balcony, and the joy-bells ringing out the glad news from every church tower in Rome, that a new King and Pontiff had been given by God to His World.

Somewhere in the dark hours the Pope dozed off, and then Sleep, the maker of visions, dispelled his dream. Another picture—a picture which had pursued him at intervals both in sleeping and waking hours, ever since the great day when he stepped out on to the balcony and was saluted as a god—came to him again that night. He called it his presentiment. The scene was always the same. A darkened room, a chapel, an altar, himself on his knees, with the sense of Someone bending over him, and an awful voice saying into his ears:—"You, the Vicar of Jesus Christ; you, the rock on which the Saviour built His Church; you, the living voice of God; you, the infallible one; you, who fill the most exalted dignity on earth—remember you are but clay!"

The Pope awoke with a start, and to break the oppression of painful thoughts he turned on the light, propped himself up in bed, and taking a book from the night table, he began to read. It was the Catholic legend of a father doomed to destroy his son, or suffer the son to destroy the father. They had been separated early in the son's life, and now that they met again they met as foes, and the son drew his sword upon his father without knowing who he was!

One by one the incidents of the history linked themselves with the incidents of the day before, and the lonely old man of the Vatican—childless, kinless, homeless for all his state, and cut off from every human tie—began to think of things that were still farther back than the conclave and the proclamation—things of the dead past which nature had seemed to bury with so kind a hand, covering the grave with grass and flowers.

A sweet young face, timid and trustful; a sudden shock such as makes the world crumble beneath a man's feet; a vague sense of guilt and shame, unreasonable, unmerited, unjustifiable, yet not to be put away; a blank period of humiliation; the opening of eyes in a new world; the humblest place in a religious house, the kitchen of the Noviciate. Then a great yearning, a great restlessness; coming out of the convent; dispensations; holy orders; works of charity; travels in foreign lands and searchings day and night in the streets of a cruel city for some one who had been lost and was never found.