My father waited three weeks, and meantime he occupied himself in seeing the sights of the old city.
But the mighty remains which are the luminous light-houses of the past—the Forum with the broken columns of its dead centuries; the Coliseum with its gigantic ruins, like the desolate crater of a moon; the Campagna with its hollow, crumbling tombs and shattered aqueducts,—only vexed and irritated him.
"Guess if I had my way," he said, "I would just clean out this old stone-yard of monuments to dead men, and make it more fit for living ones."
At length the Bishop came to say that the necessary business had been completed, and that to mark its satisfactory settlement the Pope had signified his willingness to receive in private audience both my father and myself.
This threw me into a state of the greatest nervousness, for I had begun to realise that my father's business concerned myself, so that when, early the following morning (clad according to instructions, my father in evening dress and I in a long black mantilla), we set out for the Vatican, I was in a condition of intense excitement.
What happened after we got out of the carriage at the bronze gate near St. Peter's I can only describe from a vague and feverish memory. I remember going up a great staircase, past soldiers in many-coloured coats, into a vast corridor, where there were other soldiers in other costumes. I remember going on and on, through salon after salon, each larger and more luxurious than the last, and occupied by guards still more gorgeously dressed than the guards we had left behind. I remember coming at length to a door at which a Chamberlain, wearing a sword, knelt and knocked softly, and upon its being opened announced our names. And then I remember that after all this grandeur as of a mediæval court I found myself in a plain room like a library with a simple white figure before me, and . . . I was in the presence of the Holy Father himself.
Can I ever forget that moment?
I had always been taught in the Convent to think of the Pope with a reverence only second to that which was due to the Saints, so at first I thought I should faint, and how I reached the Holy Father's feet I do not know. I only know that he was very sweet and kind to me, holding out the delicate white hand on which he wore the fisherman's emerald ring, and smoothing my head after I had kissed it.
When I recovered myself sufficiently to look up I saw that he was an old man, with a very pale and saintly face; and when he spoke it was in such a soft and fatherly voice that I loved and worshipped him.
"So this is the little lady," he said, "who is to be the instrument in the hands of Providence in bringing back an erring family into the folds of Mother Church."