FullReads

At midnight he heard the striking of the city’s clocks through the windows, the lattices of which he had forgotten to close. The sound of the city brought back to him the words of the great prelate who had returned with him to San Ambrogio from his first audience with the Holy Father–“Filius urbis et orbis.” How bitterly the city had treated him!

A knock sounded at his door. He walked to it and flung it open. His anger had come to the overflowing of speech. At first he saw only a hand at the door-casing, groping with a blind man’s uncertainty. Then he saw the old General.

In the soul of Ramoni rose an awful revulsion against the old man. Instantly, with a memory of that first day in the cloister garden, of those following days that gave him the unexpected, uncanny glimpses of the priest, he centered all his bitterness upon Denfili. So fearful was his anger as he held it back with the rein of years of self-control, that he wondered to see Father Denfili smiling.

“May I enter, my son?” he asked.

“You may enter.”

The old man groped his way to a chair. Ramoni watched him with glowering rage. When Father Denfili turned his sightless eyes upon him he did not flinch.

“You are disappointed, my son?” the old man asked with a gentleness that Ramoni could not apprehend, “and you can not sleep?”

Ramoni’s anger swept the question aside. “Have you come here, Father Denfili,” he cried, “to find out how well you have finished the persecution you began ten years ago? If you have, you may be quite consoled. It is finished to-night.” His anger, rushing over the gates, beat down upon the old man, who sat wordless before its flood. It was a passionate story Ramoni told, a story of years in the novitiate when the old man had ever repressed him, a story of checks that had been put upon him as a preacher, of his banishment from Rome, and now of this crowning humiliation. Furiously Ramoni told of them all while the old man sat, letting the torrent wear itself out on the rocks of patience. Then, after Ramoni had been silent long moments, he spoke.

“You did not pray, my son?”

“Pray?” Ramoni’s laughter rasped. “How can I pray? My life is ruined. I am ashamed even to meet my brethren in the chapel.”

“And yet, it is God one meets in the chapel,” the old man said. “God, and God alone; even if there be a thousand present.”

“God?” flung back the missionary. “What has He done to me? Do you think I can thank Him for this? Yet I am a fool to ask you, for it was not God who did it–it was you! You interfered with His work. I know it.”

“I hope, my son, that it was God who did it. If He did, then it is right for you. As for me, perhaps I am somewhat responsible. I was consulted, and I advised Pietro.”

“Don’t call me ‘my son,'” cried the other.

“Is it as bad as that with you?” There was only compassion in the old voice. “Yet must I say it–my son. With even more reason than ever before I must say it to you to-night.”

The old man’s thin hands were groping about his girdle to find the beads that hung down from it. He pulled them up to him and laid the string across his knees; but the crucifix that he could not see he kept tightly clasped in his hand. His poor, dull, pathetic eyes were turned to Ramoni who felt again that strange impression that he could see, as they fixed on his face and stared straight at him without a movement of their lashes. And Ramoni knew how it was that a man may be given a finer vision than that of earth, for Father Denfili was looking where only a saint could look, deep down into the soul of another.