Such were the thoughts of Agnes the day when she was preparing for her confession; and all the way to church she found them floating and dissolving and reappearing in new forms in her mind, like the silvery smoke-clouds which were constantly veering and sailing over Vesuvius.
Only one thing was firm and never changing, and that was the purpose to reveal everything to her spiritual director. When she kneeled at the confessional with closed eyes, and began her whispered acknowledgments, she tried to feel as if she were speaking in the ear of God alone, — that God whose spirit she was taught to believe, for the time being, was present in His minister before whom her inmost heart was to be unveiled.
He who sat within had just returned from his lonely retreat with his mind and nerves in a state of unnatural tension, — a sort of ecstatic clearness and calmness, which he mistook for victory and peace. During those lonely days when he had wandered afar from human converse, and was surrounded only by objects of desolation and gloom, he had passed through as many phases of strange, unnatural experience as there were flitting smoke-wreaths eddying about him.
There are depths in man’s nature and his possibilities which no plummet has ever sounded, — the wild, lonely joys of fanatical excitement, the perfectly ravenous appetite for self-torture, which seems able, in time, to reverse the whole human system, and make a heaven of hell. How else can we understand the facts related both in Hindoo and in Christian story, of those men and women who have found such strange raptures in slow tortures, prolonged from year to year, till pain became a habit of body and mind? It is said that after the tortures of the rack, the reaction of the overstrained nerves produces a sense of the most exquisite relief and repose; and so when mind and body are harrowed, harassed to the very outer verge of endurance, come wild throbbings and transports, and strange celestial clairvoyance, which the mystic hails as the descent of the New Jerusalem into his soul.
It had seemed to Father Francesco, when he came down from the mountain, that he had left his body behind him, — that he had left earth and earthly things; his very feet touching the ground seemed to tread not on rough, resisting soil, but on an elastic cloud. He saw a strange excess of beauty in every flower, in every leaf, in the wavering blue of the sea, in the red grottoed rocks that overhung the shore, with their purple, green, orange, and yellow hangings of flower-and-leaf tapestry. The songs of the fishermen on the beach, the peasant-girls cutting flowery fodder for the cattle, all seemed to him to have an unnatural charm. As one looking through a prism sees a fine bordering of rainbow on every object, so he beheld a glorified world. His former self seemed to him something forever past and gone. He looked at himself as at another person,242 who had sinned and suffered, and was now resting in beatified repose; and he fondly thought all this was firm reality, and believed that he was now proof against all earthly impressions, able to hear and to judge with the dispassionate calmness of a disembodied spirit. He did not know that this high-strung calmness, this fine clearness, were only the most intense forms of nervous sensibility, and as vividly susceptible to every mortal impression as is the vitalized chemical plate to the least action of the sun’s rays.
When Agnes began her confession, her voice seemed to him to pass through every nerve; it seemed as if he could feel her presence thrilling through the very wood of the confessional. He was astonished and dismayed at his own emotion. But when she began to speak of the interview with the cavalier, he trembled from head to foot with uncontrollable passion. Nature long repressed came back in a tempestuous reaction. He crossed himself again and again, he tried to pray, and blessed those protecting shadows which concealed his emotion from the unconscious one by his side. But he set his teeth in deadly resolve, and his voice, as he questioned her, came forth cutting and cold as ice crystals.
“Why did you listen to a word?”
“My father, it was so sudden. He wakened me from sleep. I answered him before I thought.”
“You should not have been sleeping. It was a sinful indolence.”
“Yes, my father.”
“See now to what it led. The enemy of your soul, ever watching, seized this moment to tempt you.”
“Yes, my father.”
“Examine your soul well,” said Father Francesco, in a tone of austere severity that made Agnes tremble. “Did you not find a secret pleasure in his words?”
“My father, I fear I did,” said she, with a trembling voice.
“I knew it! I knew it!” the priest muttered to himself, while the great drops started on his forehead, in the intensity of the conflict he repressed. Agnes thought the solemn pause that followed was caused by the horror that had been inspired by her own sinfulness.
“You did not, then, heartily and truly wish him to go from you?” pursued the cold, severe voice.
“Yes, my father, I did. I wished him to go with all my soul.”
“Yet you say you found pleasure in his being near you,” said Father Francesco, conscious how every string of his own being, even in this awful hour, was vibrating with a sort of desperate, miserable joy in being once more near to her.
“Ah,” sighed Agnes, “that is true, my father, — woe is me! Please tell me how I could have helped it. I was pleased before I knew it.”
“And you have been thinking of what he said to you with pleasure since?” pursued the confessor, with an intense severity of manner, deepening as he spoke.
“I have thought of it,” faltered Agnes.
“Beware how you trifle with the holy sacrament! Answer frankly. You have thought of it with pleasure. Confess it.”
“I do not understand myself exactly,” said Agnes. “I have thought of it partly with pleasure and partly with pain.”
“Would you like to go with him and be his wife, as he said?”
“If it were right, father, — not otherwise.”
“Oh, foolish child! oh, blinded soul! to think of right in connection with an infidel and heretic! Do you not see that all this is an artifice of Satan? He can transform himself into an angel of light. Do you suppose this heretic would be brought back to the Church by a foolish girl? Do you suppose it is your prayers he wants? Why does he not seek the prayers of the Church, — of holy men who have power with God? He would bait his hook with this pretense that he may catch your soul. Do you believe me?”
“I am bound to believe you, my father.”
“But you do not. Your heart is going after this wicked man.”
“Oh, my father, I do not wish it should. I never wish or expect to see him more. I only pray for him that his soul may not be lost.”
“He has gone, then?”
“Yes, my father. And he went with my uncle, a most holy monk, who has undertaken the work of his salvation. He listens to my uncle, who has hopes of restoring him to the Church.”
“That is well. And now, my daughter, listen to me. You must root out of your thought every trace and remembrance of these words of sinful earthly love which he hath spoken. Such love would burn your soul to all eternity with fire that never could be quenched. If you can tear away all roots and traces of this from your heart, if by fasting and prayer and penance you can become worthy to be a bride of your divine Lord, then your prayers will gain power, and you may prevail to secure his eternal salvation. But listen to me, daughter, — listen and tremble! If ever you should yield to his love and turn back from this heavenly marriage to follow him, you will accomplish his damnation and your own; to all eternity he will curse you, while the fire rages and consumes him, — he will curse the hour that he first saw you.”
These words were spoken with an intense vehemence which seemed almost supernatural. Agnes shivered and trembled; a vague feeling of guilt overwhelmed and disheartened her; she seemed to herself the most lost and abandoned of human beings.
“My father, I shall think no penance too severe that may restore my soul from this sin. I have already made a vow to the blessed Mother that I will walk on foot to the Holy City, praying in every shrine and holy
place; and I humbly ask your approval.”
This announcement brought to the mind of the monk a sense of relief and deliverance. He felt already, in the terrible storm of agitation which this confession had aroused within him, that nature was not dead, and that he was infinitely farther from the victory of passionless calm than he had supposed. He was still a man, — torn with human passions, with a love which he must never express, and a jealousy which burned and writhed at every word which he had wrung from its unconscious object. Conscience had begun to whisper in his ear that there would be no safety to him in continuing this spiritual dictatorship to one whose every word unmanned him, — that it was laying himself open to a ceaseless temptation, which in some blinded, dreary hour of evil might hurry him into acts of horrible sacrilege; and he was once more feeling that wild, stormy revolt of his inner nature that so distressed him before he left the convent.
This proposition of Agnes’s struck him as a compromise. It would take her from him only for a season, she would go under his care and direction, and he would gradually recover his calmness and self-possession in her absence. Her pilgrimage to the holy places would be a most proper and fit preparation for the solemn marriage-rite which should forever sunder her from all human ties, and make her inaccessible to all solicitations of human love. Therefore, after an interval of silence, he answered, —
“Daughter, your plan is approved. Such pilgrimages have ever been held meritorious works in the Church, and there is a special blessing upon them.”
“My father,” said Agnes, “it has always been in my heart from my childhood to be the bride of the Lord; but my grandmother, who brought me up, and to whom I owe the obedience of a daughter, utterly forbids me; she will not hear a word of it. No longer ago than last Monday she told me I might as well put a knife into her heart as speak of this.”
“And you, daughter, do you put the feelings of any earthly friend before the love of your Lord and Creator who laid down His life for you? Hear what He saith: ‘He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.’”
“But my poor old grandmother has no one but me in the world, and she has never slept a night without me; she is getting old, and she has worked for me all her good days; — it would be very hard for her to lose me.”
“Ah, false, deceitful heart! Has, then, thy Lord not labored for thee? Has He not borne thee through all the years of thy life? And wilt thou put the love of any mortal before His?”
“Yes,” replied Agnes, with a sort of hardy sweetness, “but my Lord does not need me as grandmother does; He is in glory, and will never be old or feeble; I cannot work for Him and tend Him as I shall her. I cannot see my way clear at present; but when she is gone, or if the saints move her to consent, I shall then belong to God alone.”
“Daughter, there is some truth in your words; and if your Lord accepts you, He will dispose her heart. Will she go with you on this pilgrimage?”
“I have prayed that she might, father, — that her soul may be quickened; for I fear me, dear old grandmamma has found her love for me a snare, — she has thought too much of my interests and too little of her own soul, poor grandmamma!”
“Well, child, I shall enjoin this pilgrimage on her as a penance.”
“I have grievously offended her lately,” said Agnes, “in rejecting an offer of marriage with a man on whom she had set her heart, and therefore she does not listen to me as she is wont to do.”
“You have done right in refusing, my daughter. I will speak to her of this, and show her how great is the sin of opposing a holy vocation in a soul whom the Lord calls to Himself, and enjoin her to make reparation by uniting with you in this holy work.”
Agnes departed from the confessional without even looking upon the face of her director, who sat within listening to the rustle of her dress as she rose, — listening to the soft fall of her departing footsteps, and praying that grace might be given him not to look after her: and he did not, though he felt as if his life were going with her.
Agnes tripped round the aisle to a little side-chapel where a light was always kept burning by her before a picture of Saint Agnes, and, kneeling there, waited till her grandmother should be through with her confession.
“Ah, sweet Saint Agnes,” she said, “pity me! I am a poor ignorant young girl, and have been led into grievous sin; but I did not mean to do wrong, — I have been trying to do right; pray for me, that I may overcome as you did. Pray our dear Lord to send you with us on this pilgrimage, and save us from all wicked and brutal men who would do us harm. As the Lord delivered you in sorest straits, keeping soul and body pure as a lily, ah, pray Him to keep me! I love you dearly, — watch over me and guide me.”
In those days of the Church, such addresses to the glorified saints had become common among all Christians. They were not regarded as worship, any more than a similar outpouring of confidence to a beloved and revered friend yet in the body. Among the hymns of Savonarola is one addressed to Saint Mary Magdalen, whom he regarded with an especial veneration. The great truth, that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, that all live to Him, was in those ages with the truly religious a part of spiritual consciousness. The saints of the Church Triumphant, having become one with Christ as He is one with the Father, were regarded as invested with a portion of his divinity, and as the ministering agency through which his mediatorial government on earth was conducted; and it was thought to be in the power of the sympathetic heart to attract them by the outflow of its affections, so that their presence often overshadowed the walks of daily life with a cloud of healing and protecting sweetness.
If the enthusiasm of devotion in regard to these invisible friends became extravagant and took the language due to God alone, it was no more than the fervid Italian nature was always doing with regard to visible objects of affection. Love with an Italian always tends to become worship, and some of the language of the poets addressed to earthly loves rises into intensities of expression due only to the One, Sovereign, Eternal Beauty. One sees even in the writings of Cicero that this passionate adoring kind of love is not confined to modern times. When he loses the daughter in whom his heart is garnered up, he finds no comfort except in building a temple to her memory, — a blind outreaching towards the saint-worship of modern times.
Agnes rose from her devotions, and went with downcast eyes, her lips still repeating prayers, to the font of holy water, which was in a dim shadowy corner, where a painted window cast a gold and violet twilight. Suddenly there was a rustle of garments in the dimness, and a jeweled hand essayed to pass holy water to her on the tip of its finger. This mark of Christian fraternity, common in those times, Agnes almost mechanically accepted, touching her slender finger to the one extended, and making the sign of the cross, while she raised her eyes to see who stood there. Gradually the haze cleared from her mind, and she awoke to the consciousness that it was the cavalier! He moved to come towards her, with a bright smile on his face; but suddenly she became pale as one who has seen a spectre, and, pushing from her with both hands, she said faintly, “Go, go!” and turned and sped up the aisle silently as a sunbeam, joining her grandmother, who was coming from the confessional with a gloomy and sullen brow.
Old Elsie had been enjoined to unite with her grandchild in this scheme of a pilgrimage, and received the direction with as much internal contumacy as would a thriving church-member of Wall Street a proposition to attend a protracted meeting in the height of the business season. Not but that pilgrimages were holy and gracious works, — she was too good a Christian not to admit that, — but why must holy and gracious works be thrust on her in particular? There were saints enough who liked such things; and people could get to heaven without, — if not with a very abundant entrance, still in a modest way, — and Elsie’s ambition for position and treasure in the spiritual world was of a very moderate cast.
“Well, now, I hope you are satisfied,” she said to Agnes, as she pulled her along with no very gentle hand; “you’
ve got me sent off on a pilgrimage, — and my old bones must be rattling up and down all the hills between here and Rome, — and who’s to see to the oranges? — they’ll all be stolen, every one.”
“Grandmother” — began Agnes in a pleading voice.
“Oh, you hush up! I know what you’re going to say. ‘The good Lord will take care of them.’ I wish He may. He has his hands full, with all the people that go cawing and psalm-singing like so many crows, and leave all their affairs to Him!”
Agnes walked along disconsolate, with her eyes full of tears, which coursed one another down her pale cheeks.
“There’s Antonio,” pursued Elsie, “would perhaps look after things a little. He is a good fellow, and only yesterday was asking if he couldn’t do something for us. It’s you he does it for, — but little you care who loves you, or what they do for you!”
At this moment they met old Jocunda, whom we have before introduced to the reader as portress of the Convent. She had on her arm a large square basket, which she was storing for its practical uses.
“Well, well, Saint Agnes be praised, I have found you at last,” she said. “I was wanting to speak about some of your blood-oranges for conserving. An order has come down from our dear gracious lady, the Queen, to prepare a lot for her own blessed eating, and you may be sure I would get none of anybody but you. But what’s this, my little heart, my little lamb? — crying? — tears in those sweet eyes? What’s the matter now?”
“Matter enough for me!” said Elsie. “It’s a weary world we live in. A body can’t turn any way and not meet with trouble. If a body brings up a girl one way, why, every fellow is after her, and one has no peace; and if a body brings her up another way, she gets her head in the clouds, and there’s no good of her in this world. Now look at that girl, — doesn’t everybody say it’s time she were married? — but no marrying for her! Nothing will do but we must off to Rome on a pilgrimage, — and what’s the good of that, I want to know? If it’s praying that’s to be done, the dear saints know she’s at it from morning till night, — and lately she’s up and down three or four times a night with some prayer or other.”
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 187