He smiled with an almost incredulous delight as he saw the package arrive safely at its destination, and caught afterward the faint red light of the lamp that Silvia had taken down from before her Madonna to read the note by. Since she was a little thing only five or six years old his heart had turned toward her, and her small white face had been to him the one star in a dim life. He still kept two or three tiny flowers she had given him years before when his family and hers were coming together down from Monte San Silvestro at the other side of Monte Compatri. The two children, with others, had stopped to stick fresh flowers through the wire screen before the great crucifix half-way up the mountain, and Silvia had given Claudio these blossoms. He had laid them away with his treasures and relics—the bit of muslin from the veil of Our Lady of Loretto, the almost invisible speck from the cord of St. Francis of Assisi and the little paper of the ashes of Blessed Joseph Labré. In those days he was the little priest and she the little nun, and their companions stood respectfully back for them. Now he was no more the priest, and she was up there in her window against the sky reading the note he had written her.
This is what the note said:
“My heart is breaking for your sorrow. Why should such eyes as yours be permitted to weep? Who is there to wipe those tears away? Oh that I might catch them as they fall! Drop me down a handkerchief that has been wet with them, that I may keep it as a relic. Tell me of some way in which I can console you and spend my life to serve you.”
She read with a mingling of consolation and astonishment. Why, this was more than her mother cared for her! But perhaps men were really more strongly loving than women. It would seem so, since God, who knows all, when He wanted to express His love to mankind, took the form of a man, not of a woman. Then she considered whether, and how, she should answer this note, and the result of her considering was this, written hastily on a bit of paper in which some Agnus Dei had been wrapped:
“I do not know what I ought to write to you, but I thank you for your kindness. It comforts me, and I have need of comfort. I think, though, that it may be wrong for you to speak of my handkerchief as if it were a relic. Relics are things which have belonged to the saints, and I am not a saint at all, though I hope to become one. I frequently do wrong. Spend your life in serving God, and pray for me. You pray in singing, and your singing is very sweet.
“Silvia.”
It seemed to her a simple and merely polite note. To him it was as the spark to a magazine of powder. All the possibilities of his life, only half hoped or half dreamed of, burst at once into a flame of certainty. She had need of comfort, and he comforted her! His voice was sweet to her, and his singing was a prayer!
Silvia should not be a nun. She should break the bond imposed by her mother, as he had broken that imposed by his parents. She should be his wife, and they would live in Rome. He knew that his voice would find bread for them.
All this flashed through his mind as he read, and pressed to his lips the handkerchief which she had dropped down to him, though it was not a relic. He lifted his arms upward toward her window with a rapturous joy, as if to embrace her, but she did not look out again. A little scruple for having deprived the Madonna for a moment of her lamp had made her resolve to say at once a decade of the rosary in expiation. He waited till the sound of closing doors and wandering voices told that the inhabitants gathered for the evening in the Lungara were separating to their homes, then went reluctantly away. Matteo would be at home, and Matteo’s face might look down at him from that other window beside Silvia’s. So he also went home, with the moonlight between his feet and the ground and stars sparkling in his brain. He felt as if his head were the sky.