"Ah! I see he has not told you!"
The priest smiled but looked puzzled.
"He? Whom do you mean?"
"The other priest, mon pere--your colleague. I regret to have broken in upon his meditations; but I had been so long in the church, and it was all so still and quiet, that it never occurred to me that there might be some one in the confessional."
The priest looked at me in a strange, startled way.
"In the confessional!" he repeated, with a catching of his breath. "You saw some one--in the confessional?"
"I am ashamed to say that, having thoughtlessly opened the door--"
"You saw--what did you see?"
"A priest, mon pere."
"A priest! Can you describe him? Should you know him again? Was he pale, and tall, and gaunt, with long black hair?"
"The same, undoubtedly."
"And his eyes--did you observe anything particular about his eyes?"
"Yes; they were large, wild-looking, dark eyes, with a look in them--a look I cannot describe."
"A look of terror!" cried the pastor, now greatly agitated. "A look of terror--of remorse--of despair!"
"Yes, it was a look that might mean all that," I replied, my astonishment increasing at every word. "You seem troubled. Who is he?"
But instead of answering my question, the pastor took off his hat, looked up with a radiant, awe-struck face, and said:--
"All-merciful G.o.d, I thank Thee! I thank Thee that I am not mad, and that Thou hast sent this stranger to be my a.s.surance and my comfort!"
Having said these words, he bowed his head, and his lips moved in silent prayer. When he looked up again, his eyes were full of tears.
"My son," he said, laying his trembling hand upon my arm, "I owe you an explanation; but I cannot give it to you now. It must wait till I can speak more calmly--till to-morrow, when I must see you again. It involves a terrible story--a story peculiarly painful to myself--enough now if I tell you that I have seen the Thing you describe--seen It many times; and yet, because It has been visible to my eyes alone, I have doubted the evidence of my senses. The good people here believe that much sorrow and meditation have touched my brain. I have half believed it myself till now. But you--you have proved to me that I am the victim of no illusion."
"But in Heaven"s name," I exclaimed, "what do you suppose I saw in the confessional?"
"You saw the likeness of one who, guilty also of a double murder, committed the deadly sin of sacrilege in that very spot, more than thirty years ago," replied the Pere Chessez, solemnly.
"Caspar Rufenacht!"
"Ah! you have heard the story? Then I am spared the pain of telling it to you. That is well."
I bent my head in silence. We walked together without another word to the wicket, and thence round to the churchyard gate. It was now twilight, and the first stars were out.
"Good-night, my son," said the pastor, giving me his hand. "Peace be with you."
As he spoke the words his grasp tightened--his eyes dilated--his whole countenance became rigid.
"Look!" he whispered. "Look where it goes!"
I followed the direction of his eyes, and there, with a freezing horror which I have no words to describe, I saw--distinctly saw through the deepening gloom--a tall, dark figure in a priest"s soutane and broad-brimmed hat, moving slowly across the path leading from the parsonage to the church. For a moment it seemed to pause--then pa.s.sed on to the deeper shade, and disappeared.
"You saw it?" said the pastor.
"Yes--plainly."
He drew a deep breath; crossed himself devoutly; and leaned upon the gate, as if exhausted.
"This is the third time I have seen it this year," he said. "Again I thank G.o.d for the certainty that I see a visible thing, and that His great gift of reason is mine unimpaired. But I would that He were graciously pleased to release me from the sight--the horror of it is sometimes more than I know how to bear. Good night."
With this he again touched my hand; and so, seeing that he wished to be alone, I silently left him. At the Friedrich"s Thor I turned and looked back. He was still standing by the churchyard gate, just visible through the gloom of the fast deepening twilight.
I never saw the Pere Chessez again. Save his own old servant, I was the last who spoke with him in this world. He died that night--died in his bed, where he was found next morning with his hands crossed upon his breast, and with a placid smile upon his lips, as if he had fallen asleep in the act of prayer.
As the news spread from house to house, the whole town rang with lamentations. The church-bells tolled; the carpenters left their work in the streets; the children, dismissed from school, went home weeping.
""Twill be the saddest Kermess in Rheinfelden to-morrow, mein Herr!"
said my good host of the Krone, as I shook hands with him at parting.
"We have lost the best of pastors and of friends. He was a saint. If you had come but one day later, you would not have seen him!"
And with this he brushed his sleeve across his eyes, and turned away.
Every shutter was up, every blind down, every door closed, as I pa.s.sed along the Friedrich"s Stra.s.se about mid-day on my way to Basle; and the few townsfolk I met looked grave and downcast. Then I crossed the bridge and, having shown my pa.s.sport to the German sentry on the Baden side, I took one long, last farewell look at the little walled town as it lay sleeping in the sunshine by the river--knowing that I should see it no more.
THE TRAGEDY IN THE PALAZZO BARDELLO.
[The scene of this story is laid in the Rome of fifteen years ago, when the old Pontifical regime was yet in full force, and Victor Emanuel was still King of Sardinia.]
CHAPTER I.
The sun had been up for the best part of an hour; the golden haze in the East was slowly melting away; the sluggish tide of bullock trucks had fairly set in along the Via Sacra; and a faint, universal stir of awakening life was to be felt rather than heard in the pleasant morning air, when a certain Englishman, Hugh Girdlestone by name, rose from his lounging att.i.tude against the parapet of the Tower of the Capitol, and prepared to be gone. He had been standing there in the same spot, in the same att.i.tude, since the first grey of the dawn. He had seen the last star fade from the sky. He had seen the shadowy Sabine peaks uplift themselves one by one, and the Campagna emerge, like a troubled sea, from the mystery of the twilight.
Rome with its mult.i.tudinous domes and bell-towers, its history, its poetry, its fable, lay at his feet--yonder the Coliseum, brown, vast, indistinct against the light, with the blue day piercing its topmost arches; to the left the shapeless ruins of the Palace of the Caesars; to the right, faintly visible above the mist, the pyramid of Caius Cestius, beside which, amid a wilderness of sweet wild violets, lie the ashes of John Keats; nearer still, the sullen Tiber eddying over the fast vanishing piers of the Pons Emilius; nearest of all, the Forum, with its excavations, its columns, its triumphal arches, its scanty turf, its stunted acacias, its indescribable air of repose and desolation; and beyond and around all, the brown and broken Campagna, bounded on the one hand by long chains of snow-streaked Apennines, and on the other by a shining zone of sea. A marvellous panorama! Perhaps, taking it for all in all, the most marvellous panorama that Europe has to show. Hugh Girdlestone knew every feature of it by heart. He was familiar with every crumbling tower and modern campanile, with every s.p.a.ce of open piazza, with every green enclosure, with the site of every famous ruin and the outline of every famous hill. It was his favourite haunt--the one pageant of which his eyes and his imagination were never weary. He had seen the sun rise and set upon that scene many and many a time, both now and in years past. He might, in all probability, stand in the same spot and witness the same gorgeous spectacle to-morrow; and yet he lingered there as fondly as if this visit were his first, and left as reluctantly as if it were destined to be his last.
Slowly and thoughtfully he went his way, out through the s.p.a.cious courtyard, past the bronze horse and his imperial rider, down the great steps, and along the Via Ara Coeli. Pa.s.sing the church of the Jesuits, he paused for a moment to listen to the chanting. As he did so, a Campagna drover in a rough sheepskin jacket stopped his truck to kneel for a moment on the lowest step and then trudge on again; and presently an Albano woman lifted the ponderous leather curtain and came out, bringing with her a momentary rush of rolling harmonies. The Englishman listened and lingered, made as if he would go in, and then, with something of a smile upon his lip, turned hastily away. Going straight on, with his head a little thrown forward and his hat pulled somewhat low upon his brow, he then pushed on at a swift, swinging stride, proceeding direct to the post-office, and pa.s.sing the Pantheon without so much as a glance.
Manly, well-born, well-educated, gifted with a more than ordinary amount of brains, and, perhaps, with a more than ordinary share of insular stubbornness, Hugh Girdlestone was just one of those men whom it does one good to meet in the streets of a continental city. He was an Englishman through and through; and he was precisely that type of Englishman who commands the respect, though seldom the liking, of foreigners. He expressed and held to his opinions with a decision that they disliked intensely. His voice had a ring of authority that grated upon their ears. His very walk had in it something characteristic and resolute that offended their prejudices. For his appearance, it was as insular as his gait or his accent. He was tall, strongly made, somewhat gaunt and swift-looking about the limbs, with a slight stoop in the shoulders, and a trick of swinging his gloves in his right hand as he went along. In complexion and feature he was not unlike the earlier portraits of Charles II. The lines of his face were less harsh, and his skin was less swarthy; but there was the same sarcastic play of lip, and now and then a flash of the same restless fire in the eye.
Nor did the resemblance end here. It came out strongest of all in a mere pa.s.sing shadow of expression--that expression of saturnine foreboding which Walpole aptly defined as the "fatality of air" common to the line of the Stuarts. The look was one which came to his face but rarely--so rarely that many of his intimate acquaintances had never seen it there; but it started to the surface sometimes, like a hidden writing, and sometimes settled like a darkness on his brow.