THE CARDINAL
It was a delightful room. One of those happy and artificial conjunctions of architecture and decoration sufficiently chaste to invite repose, sufficiently curious to awaken inquiry, which a scholar enjoys, and a man of taste envies. It was an elliptical apartment, illuminated from a shaded skylight, with low book-cases on two curving sides, their tops or mantels holding marble busts, and above them on the walls, faintly creamed with rose, oddly framed wood engravings of Albert Durer’s. At one extremity of the room an imposing full length portrait of Pope Sextus X, then reigning, with a _priedieu_ before it, and an enormous candlestick holding a giant taper of red wax; at the other end a remarkable gothic tapestry of the 15th century, enclosed in a gothic frame. It represented “The Visit of the Magi,” its background was a deep peacock blue, sown with tiny crescents. The offering to the Holy Child was made by a venerable man with a long beard, wearing a sleeveless tunic of magnificent old-rose velvet, finished at the arms, neck, and around the edge with pearls and garnets, on white silk. The other attires in the woven picture were rich and the Virgin’s Mother’s of wonderful beauty.
There were six chairs in the room, all different in design, archaic and ponderous, cushioned with embossed leather and bearing the singular decoration of a spread eagle.
A square heavily carved center table, on four stout mahogany legs formed of clambering boys on slips of trees whose branches supported the table top, and ended in twigs and leaves, which ran profusely around the sides of the table in a kind of frieze below its scarcely jutting edges, filled the centre of the room. It was in scrupulous order—the files of books upon it being carefully arranged in book racks, and so placed with reference to a leathern framed blotter, at one side of the table, as to suggest their convenient use by any one sitting there.
This place was indeed occupied by Cardinal Fenton—whom we have seen before—and, in his red cassock, with a pectoral cross, a beretta margining his black hair and that observant gaze, leaning back in a chair that surrounded him with griffins and perching imps, and with the brass emblem over him, half suggesting a bird’s flapping consternation, he gave to the room the desirable finish of personal dignity. And before him at the opposite side of the table stood a young man of remarkable beauty.
He was indeed rather beautiful than handsome. His oval face, not too weakly drawn, was crowned with curling jetty hair, his lips closed in a perfect bow, his eyes liquidly glowing, indicated tenderness, and the straight Grecian nose, with the white temples, the delicate modelling of the ears, and the suavity of posture in the lithe, and, a little undersized, figure imparted a half boyish, half feminine impression. Still there were reasons for thinking he was not under puberty and not possessed of power. A moustache covered his upper lip, and as the Cardinal spoke, or when he himself spoke, at moments, the color rose steadily in his cheeks, and his eyes flashed—and then the voice itself was also fully conditioned in age; it was a barytone, eloquent and sustained, with a tendency to deeper notes, not often used but obviously there, if a stronger emphasis was needed.
His scrupulous dress was excellent in its perfect fit, and it was noticeably quiet in color. Indeed in color there was in this interesting figure just one note, a scarf of red silk and a garnet pin.
“Yes,” it was the Cardinal’s voice, “we have reached a period of forcible religious contraction. The Church seems strong, is strong, but only because she is the surviving refuge. The world has decorously repudiated faith.”
“Decorously?” interrogated his listener.
“Yes, I think that suits,” answered the Cardinal gravely, “There is not hatred, though that exists; there is an amused toleration, more pernicious in its effects, more detestable, but absolutely indifferent. De Maistre, who believed in an _auto-da-fe_ and defended the Inquisition, would be curiously confounded to-day. Rather than be burned at the stake, the present up-to-date philosopher would assent, and, under compulsion do all the things the Church asked him to do, and—without a semblance of immodesty—continue to do so with gayety in his heart and a lie on his lips. Not, believe me—” this in remonstrance to an attempted interruption—“that the same philosopher would feel as comfortable doing it as not doing it—not that he would not anathematize the authority, that commanded it—but, doing it to save his skin, feel it was about as important as wiping his feet or lifting his hat, equally a deference to custom. The modern philosopher is pusillanimous under durance; he has not the iron courage of the heretic of six centuries ago.”
“But why bring the Pope to the United States, Father?”
“Why? Look about you. These are the latter days of scripture. I believe the chosen number approaches completion, and religion will soon become abridged to a vanishing quantity and—left with its Science, its Philosophy, and with its Ribaldries of Sense—this old world will be let to go on its way, whither it will, unchecked and uncared for. Religion—I mean the Church—to-day has disappeared in Europe—let it entrench itself, for the short time remaining to it, in this virile country, yet responsive to the ordinances and formulas. Let the Head of the Church be with his church, and not continue the idle function of repeating a stale falsehood in a traditional position, no longer honored, but openly scorned. Reclamation is impossible—The Church can see but one finality, its own speedy departure, lifted up, as it were, as its Sacrament is daily lifted up, into the clouds, into the invisible realm of ideality, to be suddenly returned again with a tyrannous power—with burning fulminations—with sectionizing and filtering tests—with its Christ, to judge and to ordain.”
The Cardinal sat erect, and the pale face flushed and the rebuking eyes—those singular and noticeably inquisitive features in the countenances of confessors—flamed, as if with inspiration. His auditor was not however averse to argument, and after a short silence which seemed a respectful acknowledgment of admiration—he spoke in an accent which showed his Italian extraction, but it was pleasing to hear, and detracted in no wise from his polished poise of language and utterance.
“The world is not yet burnt out. Neither as a physical fact nor as a spiritual being. It remains both ways. Is it not a better place to live in? Do we not live better each year? If wickedness thrives so does goodness thrive. I am a Catholic churchman. Yes. But I have common sense, appreciation, sympathy. Because men are not catholic churchmen—let us admit, because they are less and less catholic churchmen, must the world be considered a futility, must it end? If the Church is catholic indeed, I think, it must provide ways and means for those who are not catholic. Will you, Father and Prince of the Church, annihilate the blameless because they do not believe?”
The Cardinal leaned forward with both hands clenched on the blotter in front of him; he seemed to stretch out his neck and the words came, as if deliberately weighed, before they were allowed to pass his lips, they came so slowly.
“Yes; that is the condition; it is hard—but not merciless. Annihilation cannot be regretted, it might be feared. But this civilization does not fear it, therefore to it, annihilation is no penalty. Perhaps catholic theology has passed the point where every human soul must be accounted for. The Church is larval in this world, imaginal elsewhere—and as it grows together the constituents of another transfigured existence in the hurly-burly of a world disowning it, catching, as it can, the materials for its ultimate perfectibility, it must obey at all times its LAW of FORM, the index of its crystallographic symmetry. It knows no compromise, it does not even know what compromise means. IT REMAINS ITSELF.
“Let the world be wise; let Science and Philosophy keep their votaries busy, let it grow more comfortable and more self indulgent, let it banish pain and prolong life—what of it? It means nothing; for such progress is a superficial gloss, the impermanent fashioning of perishable things. Utility is one thing; Immortality is another. The world improves one, the Church absolutely safeguards the other.
“The Church has no quarrel with human improvement, ease of living, bettered political conditions. It knows to-day it has itself been stultified by its own human ignorance—but its fraility, or its meanness, or its cruelty, inhered in its human elements. Its stains cannot obscure its prerogative. Let these ameliorations grow, multiply, and glory and gratitude be to those who bring them, but after all, are they more than the shuffling materialities of the crust? The Church moulds into immaterial permanence the human essence. It has its PROCESS. If the great workman Feil intended to make a lens so gigantic that its light gathering power would bring the Planet Mars to our feet, that lens could be made in but one way. The patented right to make an everlasting soul is the Church’s—let that be the challenge.”
There was again a pause—the young man sank into a chair, his eyes half strangely—almost with astonishment—perusing the Cardinal, who had lost the tense attitude, and looked sorrowfully, and yet smiled at him.
“Father I am not enforced to subscribe to all this—or am I? I cannot. It would be treason to reason to put into nothingness the greatness, sweetness, patience, virtue, that has died outside of the Church doors. That is the madness of conceit. This doctrine Sir,
“_Conjures the wandering stars and makes them stand Like wonder-wounded hearers._”
Cardinal Fenton stood and his voice losing its defiance became sweet, and sad. He stood—looking at the pectoral cross which he had raised above him; it might almost have seemed that he spoke to himself, and IT, and, as the listener himself arose, he leaned over the table between them as if catching a whispered confidence.
“The hardship of thy service is in being misunderstood! To proclaim salvation and charity, but to proclaim them under limitations, that is the test of conviction, and it is often bitter toil—yet, _in hoc signo_—” he kissed the symbol, and sat down. He turned to the youth again, and his voice resumed its former authority but more quietly “I too have wrestled with this myself, but the stoic stage approaches when I feel no more compunction; indeed I now stamp assertion with the harshest lineaments of what appears to be an illiberal exclusiveness. Why not! This emblem appertains to a body of irreversible dogma. Why adulterate or dilute their meaning by subterfuge or concession? And what if there has been goodness, and patience, and virtue, and devotion, outside of the Church?—they have been useful, they have made dark places bright and illuminated misery, but they are _corpora divagua et principia ambigua et speciosa_, because unattached to a primordial propaganda.
“Protestantism is a correction. It protects the Church from the _poison_ of Success, and the abuse of power—and because these United States have practically been a protestant country, here the Church has borne a regal front, has watched and worked; yes, has most nearly touched her best ideals.
“But, my son pardon me—I mean now to engage in no futile arguments with you. You are at liberty, within the purview of the Church’s correction to see these things differently. Let me return to our beginning—the translation of the Papal See, to New York—”
“Yes, yes,” was the ardent answer, “that is what I visited you at your own invitation to hear about. But—”
He was interrupted, a servant entered, bearing on a silver card-receiver the card of a visitor. The Cardinal looked up with pleasure; “How opportune. It is Miss Lorimer. She is an accomplice with me in bringing this project to pass, if indeed it is ever realized. She is beautiful and good, a wonderful woman, as effective in doing as in thinking. Her resolves have a masculine energy, and she strains to her ends with an opulent hand.”
At that instant Miss Lorimer entered the room. She was indeed radiantly beautiful. Her grace, the dignity that she easily gave her bearing, was not more marked than the heartiness of address, and the cordiality which it accompanied;
“Ah Father, I surprise you perhaps. Is this an intrusion?”
“A most fortunate encounter. This,” turning to the young man, “is a kinsman of mine, a true son of the Church—Daughter, and, though born here in our own country, having a lineage like your own that spreads its many branches in the tree of an intricate Italian genealogy—Rudolph Amato, Miss Lorimer.”
The young man had been busy with his eyes. How could he help it—anything so gloriously vivid and capturing he thought he had never seen; her voice, her eyes, the witchery of her manner, and the easily detected ardor of her heart, seized him as with the force of a physical impact. His own tell-tale eyes betrayed this sudden impression, and Helen Lorimer, in whose heart Love had taken up its home—at whose feet too so many eloquent offers had been supplicatingly placed—was able to read those same tell-tale eyes. Perhaps she could not altogether restrain the happy feeling of power they revealed to herself—a power every beautiful woman cherishes for its own sake.
Nor was the handsome masculine creature before her unnoticed in this light challenge of observation—an American in whose veins, as in her own, coursed the liquid fires of Italy—and a Catholic; his admiration gave his own beauty a heightened color, and by the instinctive training of nature, whose art, in her best made creature, rests in an equalization of parts, his voice, his manner, his words met the requirements of her attention. She felt instantly friendly to him. Helen Lorimer placed herself opposite to the Cardinal, with the young Amato—indeed their chairs almost touched. It seemed so familiar and pleasant to the Cardinal, that he framed them together in his speech,
“My children, I have made you my confidants in this singular design because, from you at least, Miss Lorimer, the idea itself first came. Since you spoke of it I have been most earnestly canvassing its possibilities, and yesterday received from Rome a batch of letters, which will certainly interest you, though but a few can now be alluded to. Amato has just returned from Rome and Europe, and all he tells me shows that our plan coincides well with conditions that have grown insupportable. The Church like some sea bathed island is now inundated with the rising tides of infidelity, and the swift changes of thought threaten to exterminate her shrinking borders. What can be done?—Well, in answer to my carefully guarded question as to the concentration of the Church forces here in America, raising here some stronger bulwark against the seditions of the age—which I did not conceal flourished everywhere among us—this is the reply of the Archbishop of Ferrate;
Dearly Beloved Brother,
Your inquiry came not amiss. We are to-day like the prisoners of Ice in Dante’s canto. We are encased in repudiation and enmity, and cannot move. On all sides the pressing repression seals and disables us. It is beating the air to preach or exort or prophesy. I look over a deserted realm, and as it were see the meadows and gardens of religion empty, perhaps a solitary man, or some ancient lady, here and there still plucking their flowers, resting in their leafy refuges, or walking by their affluent streams, and beyond these delicious walls of safety I see too the vast populations of the nations, tumultuous, unrestrained, forgetful, chasing whims and fantoms, gaudy butterflies of ornament, the delusions of sense, the pragmatisms of science, lulled to sleep by the worn out iterations of philosophy, or simply stretched over the sun-baked flats of Common Sense, without motion, helpless, destitute, naked, forlorn, hopeless.
Perhaps there is a tide in our affairs which leads on to fortune, and it is this call of yours to come to America, to lift there again the Holy State. I know not; who can? I have importuned several, and they all think seriously of it. But it is a great matter. The Consistory will discuss it and it will be laid before the Holy Father. But will it be better in your new world? Let us not uproot an ancient heritage only to plant upon some shifting sands:
_Nil agit exemplum litem quod lite resolvit._ Write your explicit purpose, and all things will be considered.
Your Brother and servant in Christ, Alonzo of Ferrate.
“My purpose Children would be this; you Amato return to Italy and explain the essential unity and solidity of the Church in these United States, its wealth, the formal splendor of its possessions, and ceremonies, its liberal spirit, yet conserving too the faith once delivered to the Saints, its honored estate in the eyes of men, its numerical majority. Accentuate the sharp contrast with Europe. Let the Church publish its repudiation of Europe, and with august dignity leave it, surrendering it to the perversions of its own reason, while its trailing banners cross the ocean, and in the New World its recreated cradle be found, amid a vast service of song and prayer, and, thus fixed again upon the earth, in this wondrous nation lift its standards under fairer skies, waiting for its redemption from the bondage of a longer stay upon the earth.
“And you dear Daughter, I hoped to join with me in preparing for this sublime event; in making ready in this very city the future seat of the Vicar of Christ. Your own council in this has been my guide and hope. No one can whisper against me that I have used a prelatical influence with you,—the common housewife’s abuse of priestly craft——No! this was your own thought. Hardly the dream of it had entered my mind, when you spoke to me of this strange and glorious——for such I now regard it——project. It will crown our days. It will be the signet of a new era; like some titanic convulsion
_When all the sway of earth Shakes like a thing unfirm_,
but it may also be the harbinger of fairer skies.”
Helen Lorimer looked a moment at Amato, who remained silent, and a blush rose to her cheeks, as she found his eyes fixed on her. It almost seemed to her that perhaps he had not heard the words of the Cardinal. The embarrassment was unnoticed, and Miss Lorimer spoke. It was then curious to observe how the young man listened, and had the Cardinal watched him he might have been impelled to rebuke his too evident pleasure. He even turned his chair slightly that he might more easily see the speaker and, or was it especially for the pleasure of hearing her? Doubtless he heard, but no one would have guessed he cared much for the things she said; any one might have told he was falling in love with the speaker.
“Father” said Miss Lorimer “it has been _my_ thought and I am proud of it. There is a spot that can be made into a beautiful home for the Pope. It is the summit of Staten Island. Here is a glorious outspread view of the ocean, and of the city. The place has a scenic perfection, and it would also seem to have a kind of symbolic beauty in it too. The incoming ships and steamers are seen from the high top; yet
_The murmuring surge That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes, Cannot be heard so high_—
“Yes it can be made supremely fit. The world’s clamor cannot come there and yet the world’s voice can come. It can all be secured, for there are few houses on it as yet, it being an old estate or reservation. It has been called _Todt_ Hill meaning the Dead Hill, from some far off legend of their having been a massacre there of the early Dutch, by the first Indians. We shall make it the Hill of Life. And my idea would be to keep it very simple and unostentatious, full of trees with the wide glimpses below, and a simple serviceable home, some jewel of a church on the highest point, and the home of the Pope, also very simple. I would drop all the abundant pomp of Rome. That would be pernicious here. The utmost severity of living, a kind of homely husbandry. Nothing to tempt the criticism of our democracy. Just the furnishment of the Pope’s court and that bare as it can be made. What else is necessary? Nothing I think. Let the sublimity be moral rather than physical; a few well selected treasures, the impress of culture but all the larger corporeal grandeur cut off.”
The Cardinal smiled approvingly, and then Amato spoke. “Why Father should you not go. I would be a poor embassador to Europe. I have no authority. It is true I brought these letters, and I have seen the fathers of the Church, and Father, perhaps, in that greater matter that concerned me—well—I think that I must pause a while.”
The Cardinal started, and a shadow of wonder passed over his face, the young man reddened to his fine white temples, and Helen Lorimer felt the slight shock of some misunderstanding between the two men; somehow she felt that she was its cause.
“I am sorry my son,” said the Cardinal, “we can talk of that another time. I do not think that I could do as well as you in showing just what is expected here, and what are the chances here, and for my own part—well—there are several reasons that would make the mission, in my hands, impertinent.” He looked earnestly at Amato, and his serious countenance took on the expression of pained abstraction, almost as if he had forgotten his visitors and his own intentions, while he rested those scrutinizing eyes of his upon the young man with an increasing severity.
Miss Lorimer felt the unseen obstruction, and rose.
“One moment,” began the Cardinal who also stood up, “one moment Miss Lorimer. Just a few words will show you how far we have got along in this difficult scheme. Nothing very definite has as yet been effected abroad, but I am sending out communications to all the bishops, over the names of a council of American bishops who you know have discussed this subject. This council has told you of its gratitude for your proffered help. It has been fairly unanimous in considering the many aspects of the plan—and I had hoped that Amato would assist us in reaching, in a personal way, certain influential members of the papal household, before we came more out in the open——as it were—in placing the whole subject upon a public basis of discussion. But—” here a glance of mute reproach at the beautiful youth, who with crimsoned cheeks, and an evidently rising temper, stood near Miss Lorimer, “perhaps something more will develop shortly, and it will be my pleasure to let you know everything. I agree with your views exactly as to the delicacy of the innovation. Nothing must jar or irritate the spirit of our countrymen. It involves for the Church a new procedure, a new vista, a new apprehension of its tasks. It is pregnant with the strangest possibilities of good. It is likely to land us too in new vicissitudes. It is a challenge to the age in one sense, and again IT IS RETREAT. Perhaps a clerical habit of thought makes me dull, but I foresee a new warfare, and the Church Militant deserving its name in a fiercer struggle. For the Pope to leave Rome and confound the traditions of over two thousand years, to reestablish his theological supremacy in this newer world, means a violation of prestige whose consequences we can scarcely measure.”
Miss Lorimer turned to the young and yet silent man at her side, and invited him to visit her, and handed him her card, and then to the Cardinal, yet watching with an alert suspicion, she gave her hand, bade him farewell, and protesting that they had not seen him lately left the room, and, escorted by an attendant, the residence.
The two men were facing each other in the room that, to the younger, had suddenly grown distasteful, after the glorious woman that had been near him there, had left it.
“Rudolph,” it was the Cardinal speaking, “you have been entranced, perverted by beauty. You renounce a mission you were anxious to undertake. But more grievously you will deny the Church your consecrated service. Is it so?”
“Father” answered the Amato, but without a tremor of hesitation, “I do. I never will be a priest. You say I am perverted by beauty. It is no perversion. I love that woman who left us. I care nothing for promise, advowson, nor expectation. I have not been sure that I was right to engage myself so closely in your plans. _I do love life._ My visit in Europe stirred the fires of my emotion. It suddenly painted the skies and put flowers on the earth. The hidden, separated, cloistered, existence grew hideous to my eyes—impossible. I am not traitorous to my ideals, to my service to the Church. No, no, they remain, but all the beckoning truthful loveliness of life overwhelms me now. It seems embodied in that superb woman, who has just left us. Call it what you will, revile me, despise me, but I break with the past. It has now no meaning; it was a mistake, a mad design made thoughtlessly, in obedience to one strong feeling, which now turns to weakness before a stronger—Oh—an irresistible compelling impulse.”
There was good reason for the Cardinal to trust his ears, though he was angry enough to be compelled to; to his eyes the Passion in Rudolph Amato’s face was palpable enough. The Mayor would have felt some distrust of his fancied security in Helen Lorimer’s opening affections—and perhaps Helen Lorimer herself—susceptible to beauty, carrying in her breast the yet but half awakened power of love, would have bowed before a storm that came so suddenly, a storm like some onrushing freshet of the spring, bearing all before it in its tumultuous rending strength.
The Cardinal gazed at the young man with interest. He was breathing heavily, his arched lips parted, his eyes became intensely dark and brilliant, and, through some impatient movement of his head, his raven black hair, hanging almost artfully, shading the pale brow and brushing the burning cheeks; and the Cardinal’s interest turned to admiration.
Cardinal Fenton was a connoisseur, and he responded intuitively to every glimpse and form of beauty; he was indeed a _bon vivant_, and a man of subtlety, faculties conjoined in him with intellectualism, administrative resources, and an almost inerrant judgment, within which too ran the current of an optimistic policy. But he knew Cleopatra’s maxim, “wishers were ever fools,” and, one expedient dashed, it was not lamented, but itself trodden upon by a quick successor.
He understood Rudolph Amato, and he knew that instant that he was lost as a priest to the Holy Roman Catholic Church, but his flashing instinct told him he was yet useful, a tool rejected in one service can be brought to an infinite test of usefulness in another.
And so this bundle of unfixed desires must not be too loosely pardoned, too carelessly freed from his own sense of obligation. He stood yet in the place of service, of friendship, of fealty—much value remained. The quickly coining Cardinal knew that, and just now when his own ambition—for Cardinal Fenton was ambitious—had launched a tremendous undertaking, an instrument so skillful—he knew Amato’s talent—must be kept husbanded, not rejected, because wandering from its first design.
The Cardinal kept his appreciation of Amato’s beauty to himself, and when he answered, “wait,” he motioned the young man to his seat, sat down himself, rang a bell, and told the servant, who attended, to bring them wine and cordials and cigars—the latter for Amato—the Cardinal never smoked, and, though he relished the qualities of good wines, he was abstemious: he yielded to a perverse appetite for cordials. When these were brought, and the two had regained a composure mutually lost for an instant, the Cardinal without at once raising his eyes from the liqueur glass before him—a delicate affair of cut glass and gold—spoke;
“Rudolph Amato you must remember some things. Your dying Mother entrusted you to me when her husband deserted her—and, when your Father was brought home dead, killed in some brawl in Constantinople, I secured for you his wealth, guarded it, increased it. You must realize that your education—certainly better than is usually allotted to young plutocrats—since you were protected, by me against the indulgences your fortune made possible—was under my charge;” there was a motion of expostulation from Rudolph—“Yes; I remember too some things—I recall them with sorrow now. I did indeed hope you would enter holy orders; I recognized your poetic power of language, your unadulterated idealistic fancies, your spiritual grace; I knew the needs of the Church; I hoped—alas; how vainly—that you would become a priest, and I was not placing too great a sanction in my faith in your powers and virtue to promise these eyes the pleasure of seeing you exalted to the bishopric, and hearing your voice raised in aid, in the desperate approaching crises of the Church. Nothing else I can recall, ever disappointed these expectations until this moment. You were obedient, grateful, indefatigable and devout, apparently contented with this prescription, even accepting it with enthusiasm. Are you quite sure you do not owe me a greater effort at self-control than you have shown; is it fair to me; is it fair to the Church?”
Again there was a short silence. Amato—so quickly swayed by any sympathetic appeal—had walked around the table and was kneeling before the Cardinal; his upturned face told his contrition—if it were contrition—or at the worst his honest regret for the Cardinal’s disappointment; but it told nothing of a changed mind. The Cardinal placed his hand on the handsome youth—he really loved him as a son—and the severity melted from his face, though he yet withheld his pardoning smile, reserving a little the new purposes he intended Amato to undertake.
Amato regained his feet apparently satisfied with the relenting gesture of the Cardinal. He spoke less impetuously, but the Cardinal noted—and he was a keen listener—only a deeper settled determination to banish the past, uproot its incentives, and its aims, to—forget it, to
_Wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there._
The Cardinal saw the logic in nature of this sudden change; a growth leaping to the light, and brought into instant blossom by the beauty of Helen Lorimer. At least, he should guide it in its further advances there,—and keep it too. Here were two great talents, two great fortunes; they should be forged into a great implement of protection against the adversities of the Church.
“There could be no greater injustice to you Sir, nor to the Church, if I covered myself with the confusion of a bitter renunciation, which I rebelled against. I should have made myself into a distracted fool, perhaps worse—a fool and an apostate;
_Velut silvis, ubi passim Palantes error certo de tramite pellit, Ille sinistrorsum, his dextrorusm abit; unus utrique Error, sed variis illudit partibus_.
“What lay undiscovered has been, as with a lightning’s flash, revealed. This moment has been providential. If, as you once taught me, God stirs the wind, that stirs the leaf, that drops its tiny pellet of dew upon the thirsting flower, at the foot of the tree, that becomes the adornment of the altar whereon the Sacrament shall lie, then I feel that I have been saved by the same interposition from a blunder, and you from a disgrace.
“If service is wanted I am still yours to use, but a fire now bums so brightly in my soul, that all the waters of abnegation could not put it out.”
The Cardinal was now looking very earnestly at the speaker, who returned his gaze unabashed, and strangely enough there dawned on both faces a smile. On the elder man it appeared as an imperceptible admission of defeat, on the younger as the harbinger of happiness. Perhaps in neither case was it justified, for the issues for either of them were yet undecided.
“Well,” said the Cardinal, “I must still remain your confessor. I confess if I must withdraw those hopes, that you, to this day, have consistently strengthened, the unions of your name with that of Helen Lorimer would also give me pleasure, and—let us believe it is God’s better way;” he paused, turned again in his hand the fragile glass, and then continued, “Miss Lorimer is a beautiful woman indeed; she is a remarkable one too, and much admired, and her hand has been sought by distinguished suitors—some of them those hungry bankrupts from Europe. I know she has been dismayed and angry with them; she is a year or two older than you my son—but—Ah, well, she is indeed very beautiful, and—perhaps—you may succeed—but, if you fail; how then, how then; have you thought of that ambitious boy?”
“I shall not fail,” was the unexpected answer, an answer that made the Cardinal turn quickly. His glance assured him that the ardent youth felt no misgivings, and as he saw him there, knowing too the trained and gentle power of the boy, his intensity of tastes, and his winning spirit, raised now by this manly daring into something knightly, the Cardinal silently accorded him his acquiescence.
A few minutes later Rudolph Amato passed down the steps of the episcopal residence—then as now upon Madison Avenue—and walked to Fifth Avenue, and again he went on into the famous thoroughfare, which still resisted, above that point, the ingression of the sky climbing stores. Had the Cardinal been able to have followed his protégée he would have felt some astonishment, for this _ci-devant_ postulant for the priesthood, walked briskly, with no little assertive grace of motion, to Forty-Second Street, and, stopping for an instant to watch the boiling tumult of that Four-corners, turned west, and a second after entered the massive entrance of the glorious successor of the Fleischman Baths, which, expanded far beyond the corners of Sixth Avenue, and no longer restricted to the attic of a building, filled a magnificent structure opposite Bryant Park, itself changed into a brilliant bed of flowering plants.
The place was famous. It was called The Agonistarch, and roofed every sort of athletic diversion and comfort. Huge swimming tanks, mimic race tracks, boxing tiers, gymnasia, offices of rest and relaxation, whimsical levities, like curious tilting stairs that went up and down jolting into dizziness their walkers, queer rippling falls of carpet upon which the shouting players rolled and tumbled, whirling tables that shot the tranced occupants off into surrounding piles of cushions, pulsating rugs that threw their human loads up into the air, and strange downy sheaves that passed a man over and under, twisting him into a curling line, health lifts, and precipices of painted wood, from which the players jumped into a sea of satiny leaves, a vast medley of conceits, where the youth of the city resorted for repair and exercise.
It was crowned by a luxurious garden with swings and captive balloons hedged in with coppiced fig trees, with sprinkling fountains, perfumed winds, a theatre, big aquaria, with cages of animals, singing birds, with mossy banks, glistening with tiny lizards, little canals of water on which floated huge nut shells, their capsules opening and admitting couples into the silken lined cups within them, with clay pipes or funnels playing in great bowls of glycerized soapsuds and blowing up iridescent bubbles, that came off in dancing streams rising and falling and exploding, and in the midst of this garden rose a pair of the steel antennae which emitted that wonderful mysterious light which at night bathed the air above the city with a wizard sheen. At night too the garden itself thrilled with a delicately tinted illumination brought from a host of lamps.
Adjoining the Agonistarch was a hotel called the Anchorite, where Rudolph Amato had his chambers. This hotel connected on every story with Agonistarch, and its name was a palpable cynicism. But Amato’s residence there need not be misconstrued. The Cardinal had brought up his charge with the keenest sense of the enormous value of physical perfection. It was a pet theory of the Cardinal’s, that the demand of the flesh had two issues, one in lust, the other in exercise; that these excluded each other. He acted on that principle with Amato, and in him he had virtually trained a splendid athlete.
When Amato returned from his visit to Europe—sent there by the Cardinal for the purposes hinted at in their interview—Amato had reached his conclusion to slowly extricate himself from the implied obligation to his spiritual guardian to enter the Church. He had begun by assuming the control of his own fortune which, now as he was of age, came under his own guidance, though he had allied with himself in its direction, a business man, a lawyer of the city, and a friend of Cardinal Fenton’s. This opening to a more independent existence successfully accomplished, Amato began to consider the serious problem—yet unsolved—of his life, for with him the mere position of wealth could not abrogate the value and meaning of occupation. His well balanced nature forbade it, and the consciousness of availability in himself for some good ends forbade it even more imperiously. The incidents attending these silently working changes had kept him from the Cardinal, and that perspicacious observer had not failed to note his absence, together with the greater freedom of his charge in choosing his own way. It was indeed in response to a remonstrance, that he had been at the Cardinal’s on that day, when—as he felt—the meeting with Miss Lorimer suddenly illumined his future with purpose and decision.
He had been attracted to the conveniences of the Anchorite from its nearness to the excellent gymnasia of the Agonistarch and perhaps too in an awakened desire of dalliance with the world. Its brilliancy and the raging life around it, inwoven with the swirling activities of commerce on all sides of it attracted him. His visit to Europe had administered many shocks to his opening nature, and the reaction from study and seclusion, playing in a system appropriated by its psychology and make-up to the uses of a social life, gave him momentarily a sense of conflict.
He knew but few persons in the city; the Cardinal had been his confidant and friend, filling almost entirely the relations of a father to him, and so successfully had the Cardinal kept him from the usual intercourse of life, that the young man was practically a stranger in the city of his birth. He had been a fairly good student, excelling in language and in art, with no inconsiderable power of memory, showing a predilection for history, which he most appreciated on its poetic and artistic sides. Carefully guarded by the Cardinal in his religious feelings his fidelity and admiration for the Catholic Church were most sincere, and his observances of his religious duties, onerous and constant. The plan of making him a priest of the Church had been the Cardinal’s, with the delighted approval of his Mother, and he had himself felt a pleasant predisposition for this end.
And now returning to the customary anticipations of life, his youth and nature thirsting for their satisfaction he felt a sort of mental confusion. He had taken a rather sumptuous suite of rooms at the Anchorite, consisting of a larger sitting room, used as a library, and study, a smaller inner room devoted to his meals, which were individually served to him, and a third room—his bed-room. This group of chambers was pleasingly furnished, and, as he had chosen his position near the top of the building, their outlook commanded the city to the south. The comfort of it, was very real, and, bordering as it did upon luxuriousness, Amato realized its pleasure, but experienced a slight inner impatience and self rebuke for enjoying them.
Of course he had been well observed by his neighbors in the establishment, and particularly admired, in his gymnastic exercises, for his physique and abundant skill, and his good looks. Many had made overtures to him in a friendly way, and while Amato received these advances with perfect courtesy, he seemed to repel familiarity, and he offered no encouragement to that servile and indecent _facetia_ which marred the conversations around him; he was conscious of it and despised it. This attitude was not long in developing a natural anger among the habituées of the place, and Amato, feeling this, had about determined to go elsewhere, though the charm and perfection of the material side of this popular caravansary still held him. Among these fault-finding and petulant critics of Amato, was a particularly large and gross fellow who took occasion again and again to make himself obnoxious, and by a silent effrontery caused Amato’s resentment. A mean sneer disfigured the face of his unpleasant physiognomy when Amato appeared in the dressing rooms, or in the baths, or in the gymnasium, and it was too evident that he waited for some opportune moment to openly fall foul of the young man. Amato remarked to himself, with a little trepidation, that the man wanted to disable or injure him, and sought some occasion for a quarrel.
It was only a day before Amato’s interview with the Cardinal that this man’s—his name was Gynt—sullenness and envy, if it was envy, came to a conclusion of open violence. It was customary after the exercise in the gymnasium for the athletes and young executants to go to the splendid bathing room, and plunge in the broad and deep bath or pool, after enjoying perhaps a shower, in one of the many adjoining closets. At one end of this pool, and raised somewhat above its surface, was a jumping platform not accommodating easily more than three, to which the men in turns ascended, leaving it as quickly as they reached it, and so that a line of plunging figures followed each other in an almost continuous parade into the boiling waters of the tank.
The man Gynt was on this platform, and Amato came up behind him for his own turn, and the big occupant of the board noticing this, planted himself squarely on the end of the jump, and with evidently no intention of using the board for its usual purposes, enjoyed emitting a few stupid and vulgar railleries at his friends in the water.
Amato waited a reasonable time, and then saw that the moment of a collision had come. Moving up on the board he quietly asked the man to move. The giant turned contemptuously, grinned at Amato, and with unconcealed malice said “He guessed his young nibs could wait for his betters,” and winking at the men in the water—, many of whom saw the trouble brewing—, resumed his fixed and dogged attitude, with spread legs and folded arms.
Amato then requested him to make way for himself, if he was not going to leap, and pushed against him. In a flash, as if expecting and coveting this very attempt to pass him, the bully seized Amato, and before Amato could resist effectually hurled him off sideways in the tank with an oath. Amato fell fortunately upon his head in the water, and suffered no shock, but there was a half stilled cry of “shame,” as he rose and swam to the egress from the water. The ruffian still kept his place on the board, and was laughing, though not perhaps with the best confidence, the unfairness of the trick appealing to the settled code of honor among the men. He was looking at Amato with a strained attention, and his eyes were joined by those of every other man in the room, in the same scrutiny.
Amato was soon out of the water, scrambling up at one of the stairways, and he was angry all through. His rage mounted to his face, and he felt that this fierce rebellious temper surging now in him formed another suddenly new break with the placid and regulated past. He ran through the bathers around the tank, and came back to the steps leading up to the platform, where his assailant, now less mirthful from a sense of the general disapproval, and some sharp reminders of the prowess of Amato, stood grimly waiting the next move of the young man, and apparently expecting an assault, for he turned towards the front of the stage.
The next instant Amato had passed up the steps and confronted him. Gynt did not take advantage of his superior position to resist Amato’s return, but remained at the end of the platform. He wore his provoking sneer, and though evidently a little inclined to make a joke of it, his attitude suggested his readiness for a fray. His expectations were not to be disappointed. Amato sprang quickly in front of him, and in a low voice said; “Mr. Gynt you’re a loafer. Defend yourself.”
The words had scarcely passed his lips before he countered and struck Gynt such a smart blow that the big fellow staggered and almost fell backward into the tank. He recovered, however, and then with his massive body plunged into the smaller but much quicker man in front of him. The stage was too narrow for successful evolutions of the sparring type. Amato saw this, and as Gynt rushed at him he cowered, bent, and steadying himself with all his might and main, caught Gynt’s body around the middle, stopping its impetus with a drive forward. He overpowered Gynt’s motion, and the next moment with his arms wrapped around the bulky form of the man, who had lost in part his balance, by this sudden arrest, and was sprawling over Amato’s back, he rose, and lifting the fighter off his feet, flung him helplessly writhing, and dazed with astonishment, on his back into the water.
He fell heavily and sank. The walls of the tank bristled with crowding forms as the men watched the foaming indentation on the surface. Gynt appeared and lamely swam to the stairway, evidently hurt. He was breathing heavily and in pain. Then Amato did something that, in the turn of a hand, won him the admiration of most of the men there. He jumped from the platform swam swiftly to the point where Gynt was being assisted, and coming behind him supported him up. Gynt was in a faint; he had fallen in the water too violently and suffered from an impacted side. As he came to the floor of the room he sank into the arms of his helpers and among these was Amato. Rudolph looked sorrowfully at the man, and then gazing around him said; “My friends, I believe you can bear me witness that this act of mine was not unprovoked. I am sincerely sorry that it has turned out so badly. But would any of you have done differently? I was incensed, and I forgot myself—but my resentment was surely not unnatural. I had been insulted and I had never done this man any wrong. Do you exonerate me?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” came loudly from many sides; “it was Gynt’s fault. He was peevish and ugly. You’re all right. He isn’t hurt much. Help him out of this, and get him some brandy,” were the various comments, and Amato taking almost bodily the limp shape assisted the men to carry their comrade into a dressing room, where restoratives brought him to his senses.
He came to slowly, and when fully conscious roamed the room weariedly with his eyes until they fell upon the watching Amato; his face contracted and an impulsive shudder shook him. He seemed to dread Amato, and turned his face aside. Amato leaned over him and said, “I am very sorry. Will you give me your hand?”; but the man remained silent, and then Amato slowly moved off and walked away.
The incident gave the habituées of the Agonistarch a very salutary impression of Amato’s great strength, and during the rest of his stay there, he was a momentary favorite. His exclusiveness and repression were forgiven, and many good words came to his ears, unsolicited, praising his magnanimity, while he learned that Gynt had already won some enmities among the weaker men by his overbearing and bullying style. He left the Anchorite a few days later, with a good reputation, and a moderate popularity.
Amato was indeed now an example of a discovered temperament. Brought up with a carefully inculcated confidence in the Church, with an assiduously perfected environment of religious considerations, with the cultured superintendence of affectionate and learned tutors, and imbued himself with the dawning powers of a Rossettian taste for the mysterious and moonish, he, at first, in his younger years put on all the aspects of a recondite and spiritual nature. These appearances really covered a strongly human and virile sense, in which all the appetencies of the man had grown into rounded and perfect size. Like a rolling away of a cloth concealing some hidden growth which at the first touch of the generous sun spawns again into a vivid flourish of flowers, Amato’s movement out upon the scene of the world’s powerful appeals, its pictures, and its wreathing invitations, had torn from his eyes the sapient tapestry of his artful schooling, and he leaped like an actor from the dark flies of the stage into the pageant of the play’s procession.
But he came upon that stage “with modest eyes and still conclusions,” though his heart panted with desire. The skill of his education kept him restrained, and the serviceable disposition bred in him, stiffened his senses with admonitory cautions. And thus by an almost heavenly opportunity—the form, face, and character, of Helen Lorimer came before him. That “psychological moment,” so much maligned and misnamed, was here a potent fact and deep reality. Limited by training, and habit, and ingrained teaching, from catching, as it were, the world in his arms—arms that ached to embrace and enjoy—there walked right into the focus of his raised eyes this beautiful and noble woman.
That explained in a sort of way his sudden passion, his convinced determination. And here again there was a paradox. To a man, whose intercourse with women had always been on the decorous extremes of civility, strengthened by what had been assumed as a foregone abnegation, Amato’s fervor and unhesitating self-confidence seemed abnormal, if not grotesque. It was so. It arose exactly from his inexperience. His love flamed upward like a discharging igneous flood. It knew no barriers; it cared for none. Circumspection was ridiculous, apprehension impossible. The wind blew, his sail was fixed, he knew his port.
_So that when Hope’s deep source in fullest flow, Like earthquake did uplift the stagnant ocean Of human thoughts—his shook beneath the wide emotion_.
It would have amused the travelled courtier of the world, this unquestioning certainty; Amato’s mind fled even beyond the hour of possession, and he had begun to lay his plans for the mutual service he and Helen Lorimer might render the world. He exulted in these reveries. In them his love, his religious earnestness, his ambition, his feeling of accountability, blended delightfully. The young man walked in clouds, but he was not so far above the earth, the hard ground of day life, as to neglect beginning his suit. Contiguity was important.
He deserted the Anchorite, leaving it, yet unreconciled with his enemy Gynt, and established himself at the southern boundary of Carrara, in the Arrowhead Inn. To-day that half metamorphosed villa, turned to the uses of entertainment, under old oaks, and glimpsing the river at 168th Street, and the Lafayette Boulevard, down a creased hillside, is a promising eerie for dreams and good dinners. In the year 2000 it would still retain its summery charm, under yet greater shadowing oaks, but much changed, expanded into a red tiled mansion of three stories, with a bulging skirt of balconies at every story, and fitted for the seclusion of all those who required or cared for retirement, and divested of its present day publican features.
It was a delightful nook, and Amato found it most convenient and inviting. A pale of trees hid the crowning glory of New York—Carrara—to the north; there was not much to wish to see in the east, another wall of umbrage shut off the south, but westward through artificially prepared arches of boughs, the noble river, with its cargoes, cargasons, and excursions, fed the eyes with interest.
The night that Amato left him, the Cardinal passed into the cathedral, for his evening devotion. The late twilight of a bright day bathed the interior—walls, clerestory, pavements, and flaming windows—with a vanishing light; the shadows crept upward against the pale illumination, that shrank more and more into the higher recesses, or spun itself in ropes of mote deluged rays from the apertures in the roof. A few supplicants knelt here and there in the darkened pews, the vestal light burned before the high altar, while guttering tapers in front of the shrine of the Holy Mother, gave forth an unsteady radiance.
The Cardinal advanced through the gates of the chancel rails, and, prostrating himself at the very foot of the sanctuary, stayed, thus bowed in a prayer, that was half meditation, half uttered petitions. His heart was indeed heavy. He had regarded Amato as a spiritual son and he had wished to embrace him as one with himself in the transcendental service of the altar, and now—this precious offering to God had turned away his face, regained the world, released himself from that immaterial bondage of the spirit, which meant the eternal liberty of Heaven, and would no longer be his companion in the mystical company of the Priesthood.
Ah! he too—the great Cardinal—had his affections, his heart yearned with the human implanted hunger for love, thirsting perhaps with a grievous loneliness for that metaphysical union of soul with soul, which, in its dim and spectral way, stands for those—involved in self immolation to the world—for the material partnership of the earth. The Cardinal prayed for Amato’s joy, his success, his usefulness; he struggled with himself to give those prayers true potency, and he fought off the complaining regrets that he really felt. He prayed for Helen Lorimer, he prayed that this union of two whom he had watched and guided, who represented to him a very virtual excellence, might redound to the glory of the Church, might form a new and blessed nucleus for the spreading of truth.
And, even as he prayed, his heart rebelled. _He knew that._ But before he left that throne of grace, though the night was spent in the vast effort he would subdue the warring flesh—if flesh it was—and, devoutly, humbly, yield up his life-long hope to the ordained purposes of his God.
The twilight faded, the poor wanderers from the street who had entered to grasp some crumbs of comfort in the still holiness of the place, had, one by one, wonderingly left. A desperate woman came to the chancel rails and sobbed her heartbreak there, and she, with a muttered ejaculation of surprise, had gone away, the sexton snuffed out the tapers, and observing the Cardinal yet motionless on the altar grades, had crept off in a keen bewilderment; darkness muffled nave and apse and transept in the black gloom, save as a penumbral light smeared the colored windows, and broke disheartenedly through their red and purple shades; the whispering noises of a deserted habitation were heard, and with them came anon cries, or rumblings, or beats of trotting horses, or uncertain whizzes, impossible to understand, and yet—the unmoved figure of the Cardinal like a blacker clot stained the lightness of the altar steps.
But now he rises; the victory is won; he has surrendered his heart’s fondest desire, and his soul in contentment, with submission, bows to the new change. But were the darkness less deep, one standing near his stumbling path out of the sanctuary, would have detected tears on the grave face, and lines beneath the tired eyes.
Still later in the night, as when the dawn was first preparing the eastern skies, a reeling man leaning against the wall of the Bishop’s house stared upward and saw a light in a lower window, and he saw into the room, and saw there too a man dressed and reading; it was the Cardinal, and the page he so steadfastly perused held these words; they may be found in _De Imitatione Christi_;
“My son renounce thyself and thou shalt find Me. Give up all choice, all personal inclination, and thou shalt even be the gainer. For greater grace shall be given thee as soon as thou resignest thyself unalterably.
“‘O Lord how often shall I resign myself, and in what respects am I to renounce myself?’
“Always every hour: in small things as well as greater ones. I except nothing; but wish to find thee in every respect naked. How otherwise will thou be able to be Mine, and I thine, unless thou have been deprived of every personal inclination, respecting either external things or internal feelings? The sooner thou dost accomplish this the better it will be with thee, and the more completely and thoroughly thou doest this, the more wilt thou please Me, and the greater will be thy gain?”
The drunken man fearful a little of the apparelled priest, and not unobservant of the approaching steps of a policeman, stole away in the deserted street, where the fading light of the lamps yet struggled with the misty lightening of the sky.
And just at that same hour, the luxurious Amato pushing his feet out of the sheet upon the rugged floor, and seeing the same dawn paint with its dewy rays the opposite wall, rubbing his winking eyes straightened himself, and staring at the colored picture of a full sailing ship upon the rolling green waves of an interminable sea, suddenly leaped to his feet and cried;
“It was the same. Yes, the lady in the box at the Mayor’s speech in the Carnegie Hall, was Helen Lorimer.”