For he felt no strength now to resist,—he felt no wish to conquer,—he only prayed that he might lie there and die. It seemed to him that the love which possessed him and tyrannized over his very being was a doom,—a curse sent upon him by some malignant fate with whose power it was vain to struggle. He detested his work,—he detested his duties,—he loathed his vows,—and there was not a thing in his whole future to which he looked forward otherwise than with the extreme of aversion, except one to which he clung with a bitter and defiant tenacity,—the spiritual guidance of Agnes. Guidance!—he laughed aloud, in the bitterness of his soul, as he thought of this. He was her guide,—her confessor,—to him she was bound to reveal every change of feeling; and this love that he too well perceived rising in her heart for another,—he would wring from her own confessions the means to repress and circumvent it. If she could not be his, he might at least prevent her from belonging to any other,—he might at least keep her always within the sphere of his spiritual authority. Had he not a right to do this?—had he not a right to cherish an evident vocation,—a right to reclaim her from the embrace of an excommunicated infidel, and present her as a chaste bride at the altar of the Lord? Perhaps, when that was done, when an irrevocable barrier should separate her from all possibility of earthly love, when the awful marriage-vow should have been spoken which should seal her heart for heaven alone, he might recover some of the blessed calm which her influence once brought over him, and these wild desires might cease, and these feverish pulses be still.
Such were the vague images and dreams of the past and future that floated over his mind, as he lay in a heavy sort of lethargy on the floor of his cell, and hour after hour passed away. It grew afternoon, and the radiance of evening came on. The window of the cell overlooked the broad Mediterranean, all one blue glitter of smiles and sparkles. The white-winged boats were flitting lightly to and fro, like gauzy-winged insects in the summer air,—the song of the fishermen drawing their nets on the beach floated cheerily upward. Capri lay like a half-dissolved opal in shimmering clouds of mist, and Naples gleamed out pearly clear in the purple distance. Vesuvius, with its cloud-spotted sides, its garlanded villas and villages, its silvery crown of vapor, seemed a warm-hearted and genial old giant lying down in his gorgeous repose and holding all things on his heaving bosom in a kindly embrace.
So was the earth flooded with light and glory, that the tide poured into the cell, giving the richness of an old Venetian painting to its bare and squalid furniture. The crucifix glowed along all its sculptured lines with rich golden hues. The breviary, whose many-colored leaves fluttered as the wind from the sea drew inward, was yet brighter in its gorgeous tints. It seemed a sort of devotional butterfly perched before the grinning skull, which was bronzed by the enchanted light into warmer tones of color, as if some remembrance of what once it saw and felt came back upon it. So also the bare, miserable board which served for the bed, and its rude pillow, were glorified. A stray sunbeam, too, fluttered down on the floor like a pitying spirit, to light up that pale, thin face, whose classic outlines had now a sharp, yellow setness, like that of swooning or death; it seemed to linger compassionately on the sunken, wasted cheeks, on the long black lashes that fell over the deep hollows beneath the eyes like a funereal veil. Poor man! lying crushed and torn, like a piece of rockweed wrenched from its rock by a storm and thrown up withered upon the beach!
From the leaves of the breviary there depends, by a fragment of gold braid, a sparkling something that wavers and glitters in the evening light. It is a cross of the cheapest and simplest material, that once belonged to Agnes. She lost it from her rosary at the confessional, and Father Francesco saw it fall, yet would not warn her of the loss, for he longed to posses something that had belonged to her. He made it a mark to one of her favorite hymns; but she never knew where it had gone. Little could she dream, in her simplicity, what a power she held over the man who seemed to her an object of such awful veneration. Little did she dream that the poor little tinsel cross had such a mighty charm with it, and that she herself, in her childlike simplicity, her ignorant innocence, her peaceful tenderness and trust, was raising such a turbulent storm of passion in the heart which she supposed to be above the reach of all human changes.
And now, through the golden air, the Ave Maria is sounding from the convent-bells, and answered by a thousand tones and echoes from the churches of the old town, and all Christendom gives a moment's adoring pause to celebrate the moment when an angel addressed to a mortal maiden words that had been wept and prayed for during thousands of years. Dimly they sounded through his ear, in that half-deadly trance,—not with plaintive sweetness and motherly tenderness, but like notes of doom and vengeance. He felt rebellious impulses within, which rose up in hatred against them, and all that recalled to his mind the faith which seemed a tyranny, and the vows which appeared to him such a hopeless and miserable failure.
But now there came other sounds nearer and more earthly. His quickened senses perceive a busy patter of sandalled feet outside his cell, and a whispering of consultation,—and then the silvery, snaky tones of Father Johannes, which had that oily, penetrative quality which passes through all substances with such distinctness.
"Brethren," he said, "I feel bound in conscience to knock. Our blessed Superior carries his mortifications altogether too far. His faithful sons must beset him with filial inquiries."
The condition in which Father Francesco was lying, like many abnormal states of extreme exhaustion, seemed to be attended with a mysterious quickening of the magnetic forces and intuitive perceptions. He felt the hypocrisy of those tones, and they sounded in his ear like the suppressed hiss of a deadly serpent. He had always suspected that this man hated him to the death; and he felt now that he was come with his stealthy-tread and his almost supernatural power of prying observation, to read the very inmost secrets of his heart. He knew that he longed for nothing so much as the power to hurl him from his place and to reign in his stead; and the instinct of self-defence roused him. He started up as one starts from a dream, waked by a whisper in the ear, and, raising himself on his elbow, looked towards the door.
A cautious rap was heard, and then a pause. Father Francesco smiled with a peculiar and bitter expression. The rap became louder, more energetic, stormy at last, intermingled with vehement calls on his name.
Father Francesco rose at length, settled his garments, passed his hands over his brow, and then, composing himself to an expression of deliberate gravity, opened the door and stood before them.