As We Forgive Them

by William Le Queux

The monk, that man whose bearded face I had seen once before in England, had thrown himself upon his knees, and was mumbling to himself and fingering the huge rosary suspended from his girdle.

A woman dressed in black with the black santuzza of the Lucchesi over her head had entered noiselessly, and was prostrated a few feet from me. She held a miserable baby at her breast, a child but a few months old, in whose shrivelled little face there was already the stamp of death. She was praying ardently for him, as the tapers gradually diminished, the penny tapers she had placed before the humble picture of Sant’ Antonio, this sorrowing creature. The contrast between the prodigious wealth around and the rags of the humble supplicant was overwhelming and cruel; between the persistent durability of those many thousand Saints draped in gold, and the frailty of that little being with no to-morrow.

The woman was still kneeling, her lips moving in obstinate and vain repetitions. She looked at me, her eyes full of desolation, divining a pity no doubt in mine; then she turned her gaze upon the hooded Capuchin, the hard-faced, bearded man who held the key to the secret of Burton Blair.

I stood behind the ponderous column, bowed but watchful. The poor woman, after a quick glance at the splendour around, turned her eyes more anxiously upon me—a stranger. Did I really think they would listen to her, those magnificent divinities?

Ah! I did not know if they would listen. In her place I would rather have carried the child to one of those wayside shrines where the Virgin of the contadini reigns. The Madonnas and Saints of Ghirlandajo and Civitali and Della Querica who inhabited that magnificent old church seemed somehow to be creatures of ceremony, hardened by secular pomp. Strange as it may seem, I could not imagine that they would occupy themselves with a poor old woman from the olive mill or with her deformed and dying child.

Vespers ended. The dark, murmuring figures rose, shuffling away over the marble floor towards the door, and as the lights were quickly extinguished, the woman and her child became swallowed up in the gloom.

I loitered, desiring that the Capuchin should pass me, in order that I could obtain a further view of him. Should I address him, or should I remain silent and set Babbo to watch him?

He approached me slowly, his big hands hidden in the ample sleeves of his snuff-coloured habit, the garment which men of his order have new only once in ten years, and which they wear always, waking or sleeping.

I had halted before the ancient tomb of Santa Zita, that patroness of Lucca whom Dante mentions in his Inferno. In the little chapel a single light was burning in the great antique lantern of gold, which the proud Lucchese placed there ages ago when the black plague was feared. As I turned, I saw that, although watching me narrowly, he still seemed to be awaiting the appearance of the man who was now, alas! no more. Yes, now that in a better light I could see his features, I had no hesitation in pronouncing him to be the same man I had met a year ago at Burton’s table in Grosvenor Square.

I recollected the occasion well. It was in June, in the height of the London season, and Blair had invited me to dine with several bachelor friends and go to the Empire afterwards. The man now in a religious habit, shuffling along in his worn-out sandals, had presented the very different figure of the easy-going prosperous man-of-the-world, with a fine diamond in his shirt-front and a particularly well-cut dinner jacket. Burton had introduced him to us as Signor Salvi, the celebrated engineer, and he had sat at table opposite me and chatted in excellent English. He struck me as a man who had travelled very widely, especially in the Far East, and from certain expressions he let drop I concluded that, like Burton Blair, he had been to sea, and that he was a friend of the old days before the great secret became so profitable.