“I told him about the Novena,” Miss Pembroke said when she made her explanatory visit to the convent. “And I told him that you and all the Sisters joined with me; and he bade me thank you for his part, and say that he hoped you would never be sorry for having done so.”
But Honora did not tell how astonished and touched her lover had been at this confession of what seemed to her the most simple thing in the world.
“I never thought of asking God for you,” he said; “and yet there is nothing in the world so well worth praying for. I am a very ignorant Catholic, Honora, in all except doctrine. You will have much to teach me. But, then,” he added, smiling, “we have all our lives for that.”
“The only blot on my happiness,” Honora said to her friends, “is the thought of Annette. A letter came from her last night which seems to shut us all out from giving her either society or comfort. She evidently does not wish to see any one she has ever known. She says that her time and thoughts are entirely occupied.”
Annette Gerald was fully occupied. She was like one who stands at the head of a long flight of winding stairs, watching another descend, and, beginning to lose sight of the object of her attention, begins to follow slowly, intent, at the same time, not to be too near or too far away.
It was necessary that she should keep Lawrence Gerald in sight without attracting attention either to him or to herself. As a rich lady, driving in her own carriage, she could not do this. She therefore gave up her carriage, and moved to an humbler apartment, where she lived with one servant. Still, the dainty elegance of the widow's attire she had assumed, fastidious in her choice, not consciously, but from habit, pointed her out as of a different class from the people she went most among. To remedy this, it was necessary only to be passive; and in a few months Roman dust and mud and brambles had reduced her to a dinginess almost Roman, and she could go unremarked, could see Lawrence about his work, digging in the excavations, carrying stone and mortar for the masons, doing any rough labor that offered. She could see him in the church, where he spent an hour every morning; she knew that every Sunday he entered the same confessional, and, as she could well guess, told the same tale to the priest, who, when his penitent left him, leaned forward and looked after him with a [pg 688] sad and earnest gaze. More than once, late in the evening, she had looked up from the street where her close carriage stood waiting, and seen, out on the corner of the open roof, to which no one but he had access, his form drawn clearly against the transparent purple of the sky, and, after waiting as long as prudence would allow, had gone away to her lonely apartment, leaving him there in company of the marble angels that clustered about the church front, and the blessed bells, and whatever invisible spirits God should will and his own soul invoke. Never did she see a light in that lofty window; and, after a while, it occurred to her to ask the reason of the padrona, who often came to the church in the hope of receiving money from the lady.
“He never will have a candle,” the woman said. “I think he is very poor. And he never drinks wine or eats meat. And, signora, he is growing very pale.”
That night Annette Gerald extinguished the candles in her own apartment, and never lighted them again. She could weep and pray without light. The next day she dismissed her one servant, and thenceforward waited on herself. No ease or elegance must her life know while his was passed in such poverty. He ate the dry, sour bread of the poor; she ate it too. He discarded every luxury of the table; she also became an ascetic. If she put wine or fruit to her lips, tears choked her, and she set them aside. As he went down, so she followed him, unseen, weeping pitifully, watching constantly, loving utterly.
Without suspecting it, both became after a while objects of interest to those about them. No dinginess or apparent poverty could hide their refinement; and the extraordinary piety of both invested them with a certain sacredness in the eyes of these people, who had walked and talked with saints. The rude workmen ceased, not only to jest with, but to jest in the presence of this man who never smiled, or spoke without necessity, whose pale face was for ever downcast, and who, in the midst of Italian indelicacy, carried himself with the refinement of an angel. In the long noon rest of the hot summer days they withdrew from the place where he threw himself down, faint with fatigue and the heat, and left him to that solitude he unmistakably desired. Only little children ventured near the “penitent,” as he began to be called, and smiled wistfully in his face, and kissed the hand that now and then gave them a soldo.
Once, as he lay asleep on the grass, in the shadow of a ruined arch, an artist, who was just returning home from a morning's sketching in the Campagna, paused to look at him. The other workmen lounged about at a distance, some asleep, some eating their noon luncheon of dry bread, others smoking and talking. This one seemed laid there apart for a picture. Thrown carelessly on his back, with his hand under the cheek turned a little aside, and the hat dropped off, his form and face were fully seen. It was not the form and face of a plebeian. The elegant shape was not disguised by its faded garments; the beauty of the face, delicately flushed with heat, and beaded with perspiration, was even enhanced by the unshorn and untended beard and the confused mass of clustering hair; and the expression of calm melancholy, which was not obliterated even by the unconsciousness of [pg 689] sleep, did not belong to a common nature.