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The City And The World
by
On the day the letter from the Vatican came, Father Ramoni, detained in the cloister by the expected visit of a prelate who had expressed his desire to meet the missionary of Marqua, passed Father Denfili on his way to the reception-room. While Father Ramoni, summoning his secretary to bring some photographs for better explanation of the South American missions, went on his way, the blind man groped along the wall till he reached the General’s office. He had come to the door when he felt that undercurrent of anxiety which showed itself on the white faces of the General and his assistant, who stood gazing mutely at the letter the former held. He heard the General call Father Tomasso. “Take this to Father Pietro, my son,” he said. Then he listened to the younger priest’s retreating footsteps.
Father Tomasso, frightened by the unwonted strangeness of the General’s tone, carried the atmosphere of tense and troubled excitement with him when he entered the room the prelate was just leaving. Father Pietro glanced up at him from the table where he was returning to their case the photographs of Marqua. Tomasso laid the letter before him and left the room just as Father Ramoni, bidding his visitor a gay good-bye, turned back.
Father Pietro was taking the letter from its large square envelope. He read it with puzzled wonder rising to his eyes. Before he came to its end he was on his feet.
“No! No!” he cried. “It is impossible. It is a mistake.”
Father Ramoni turned quickly. The man who had been his faithful servant for ten years in Marqua was very dear to him. “What is a mistake, Pietro?” he asked, coming to the table.
“The Consistory,” Father Pietro stammered, “the Consistory has made a mistake. They have done an impossible thing. They have mixed our names. This letter to the General–this letter–” he pointed to the document on the table “–says that I have been made Archbishop of Marqua.”
Ramoni took the letter. As he read it he knew what Pietro had not known. The news was genuine. The name signed at the letter’s end guaranteed that. Ramoni caught the edge of the table. The pain of the blow gripped him relentlessly and he knew that it was a pain that would stay. He had been passed over, ignored, set down for Pietro, who sat weeping beside the table, his head buried in his hands.
“I can’t take it,” he was sobbing; “I am not able. It’s a mistake, a terrible mistake.”
Ramoni put his hand on the other man’s head. “It is true, Pietro,” he said. “You are Archbishop of Marqua. May God bless you!”
But he could say no more. Pietro was still weeping when Ramoni went away, crossing the cloister on his way to his cell, where, with the door closed behind him, he fought the battle of his soul.
II.
In the beginning Ramoni could not think. He sat looking dully at the softened tones of the wall, trying to evolve some order of thought from the chaos into which the shock of his disappointment had plunged his mind. It was late in the night before the situation began to outline itself dimly.
His first thought was, curiously enough, not of himself directly, but of the people out in Marqua who were anxiously looking for his return as their leader, confident of his appointment to the new Archbishopric. He could not face them as the servant of another man. From the crowd afar his thoughts traveled back to the crowd on the Pincio–the crowd that welcomed him as the great missionary. He would go no more to the Pincio, for now they would point him out with that cynical amusement of the Romans as the man who had been shelved for his servant. He resented the fate that had uprooted him from Rome ten years before, sending him to Marqua. He resented the people he had converted, Pietro, the Consistory–everything. For that black and bitter night the Church, which he had loved and reverenced, looked to him like the root of all injustice. The more he thought of the slight that had been put upon him, the worse it became, till the thought arose in him that he would leave the Community, leave Rome, leave it all. After long hours, anger had full sway in the heart of Father Ramoni.