When he found himself within that great incrusted jewel, he fell on his knees. I think he hardly saw the golden roof, the jeweled walls, and the five lifted domes full of sunshine and old gold, or the dark altars, with their mysterious, rich shimmering. All these seemed to pass away beyond the sense of sight; even I felt somehow as if those great walls of St. Mark’s were not so great as I had fancied. Something greater was kneeling there in an old habit and with bare feet, half broken-hearted because a beggar had lied.
I found myself regretting the responsibility laid on my shoulders. Why should I have been compelled to take this strangely innocent, sheltered boy, with his fantastic third-century ideals, out into the shoddy, decorative, unhappy world? I even felt a kind of anger at the simplicity of his soul. I wished he were more like other people; I suppose because he had made me wish for a moment that I was less like them.
“What do you think of Saint Mark’s?” I asked him as we stood once more in the hot sunshine outside, with the strutting pigeons at our feet and wheeling over our heads.
Brother Leo did not answer for a moment, then he said:
“I think Saint Mark would feel it a little strange. You see, I do not think he was a great man in the world, and the great in paradise—” He stooped and lifted a pigeon with a broken foot nearer to some corn a passer-by was throwing for the birds. “I cannot think,” he finished gravely, “that they care very much for palaces in paradise; I should think every one had them there or else—nobody.”
I was surprised to see the pigeons that wheeled away at my approach allow the monk to handle them, but they seemed unaware of his touch.
“Poverino!” he said to the one with the broken foot. “Thank God that He has given you wings!”
Brother Leo spoke to every child he met, and they all answered him as if there was a secret freemasonry between them; but the grown-up people he passed with troubled eyes.
“It seems strange to me,” he said at last, “not to speak to these brothers and sisters of ours, and yet I see all about me that they do not salute one another.”
“They are many, and they are all strangers,” I tried to explain.