Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius.
by A. J. O"Reilly.
Introduction
The Penitent Saints
The interesting and instructive character of this sensational narrative, which we cull from the traditions of a past generation, must cover the shortcomings of the pen that has labored to present it in an English dress.
We are aware that the propriety of drawing from the oblivion of forgotten literature such a story will be questioned. The decay of the chivalrous spirit of the middle ages, and the prudish, puritanical code of morality that has superseded the simple manners of our forefathers, render it hazardous to cast into the hands of the present generation the thrilling records of sin and repentance such as they were seen and recorded in days gone by. Yet in the midst of a literature professedly false, and which paints in fascinating colors the various phases of unrepented vice and crime, without the redeeming shadows of honor and Christian morality, our little volume must fall a welcome sunbeam. The strange career of our heroine const.i.tutes a sensational biography charming and beautiful in the moral it presents.
The evils of mixed marriages, of secret societies, of intemperance, and the indulgence of self-love in ardent and enthusiastic youth, find here the record of their fatal influence on social life, reflected through the medium of historical facts. Therefore we present to the young a chapter of warning--a tale of the past with a deep moral for the present.
The circ.u.mstances of our tale are extraordinary. A young girl dresses in male attire, murders her father, becomes an officer in the army, goes through the horrors of battle, and dies a SAINT.
Truly we have here matter sensational enough for the most exacting novelist; but we disclaim all effort to play upon the pa.s.sions, or add another work of fiction to the ma.s.s of irreligious trash so powerful in the employ of the evil one for the seduction of youth. In the varied scenes of life there are many actions influenced by secret motives known only to the heart that harbors them. Not all are dishonorable. It takes a great deal of guilt to make a person as black as he is painted by his enemies. Many a brave heart has, under the garb of an impropriety, accomplished heroic acts of self-denial.
History is teeming with instances where the love of creatures, and even the holier and more sublime love of the Creator, have, in moments of enthusiasm, induced tender females to forget the weakness of their s.e.x and successfully fulfil the spheres of manhood. These scenes, so censurable, are extraordinary more from the rarity of their occurrence than from the motives that inspire them, and thus our tale draws much of its thrilling interest from the unique character of its details.
"But what a saint!" we fancy we hear whispered by the fastidious and scrupulous into whose hand our little work may fall.
Inadvertently the thought will find a similar expression from the superficial reader; but if we consider a little, our heroine presents a career not more extraordinary than those that excite our surprise in the lives of the penitent saints venerated on the alters of the Church. Sanct.i.ty is not to be judged by antecedents. The soul crimsoned with guilt may, in the crucible of repentance, become white like the crystal snow before it touches the earth. This consoling thought is not a mere a.s.sertion, but a matter of faith confirmed by fact. There are as great names among the penitent saints of the Church as amongst the few brilliant stars whose baptismal innocence was never dimmed by any cloud.
Advance the rule that the early excesses of the penitent stains must debar them from the esteem their heroic repentance has won; then we must tear to pieces the consoling volumes of hagiology, we must drag down Paul, Peter, Augustine, Jerome, Magdalen, and a host of ill.u.s.trious penitents from their thrones amongst the galaxy of the elect, and cast the thrilling records of their repentance into the oblivion their early career would seem to merit. If we are to have no saints but those of whom it is testified they never did a wrong act, then the catalogue of sanct.i.ty will be reduced to baptized infants who died before coming to the use of reason, and a few favored adults who could be counted on the fingers.
Is it not rather the spirit and practice of the Church to propose to her erring children the heroic example of souls who pa.s.sed through the storms and trials of life, who had the same weaknesses to contend with, the same enemies to combat, as they have, whose triumph is her glory and her crown? The Catholic Church, which has so successfully promoted the civilization of society and the moral regeneration of nations, achieved her triumph by the conversion of those she first drew from darkness. Placed as lights on the rocks of eternity, and shining on us who are yet tossed about on the stormy seas of time, the penitent saints serve us as saving beacons to guide our course during the tempest. Many a feeble soul would have suffered shipwreck had it not taken refuge near those tutelary towers where are suspended the memorial deeds of the sainted heroes whose armor was sackcloth, whose watchword the sigh of repentance poured out in the lonely midnight.
While Augustine was struggling with the attractions of the world which had seduced his warm African heart, whose gilded chains seemed once so light, he animated himself to Christian courage by the examples of virtue which he had seen crowned in the Church triumphant.
"Canst thou not do," he said to himself, "what these have done? Timid youths and tender maidens have abandoned the deceitful joys of time for the imperishable goods of eternity; canst thou not do likewise?
Were these lions, and art thou a timid deer?" Thus this ill.u.s.trious penitent, who was one of the brightest lights of Christianity, has made known to us the triumph he gained in his internal struggles by the examples of his predecessors in the brave band of penitents who shed a luminous ray on the pitchy darkness of his path.
The life of St. Anthony, written by St. Athanasius, produced such a sensation in the Christian world that the desolate caverns of Thebias were not able to receive all who wished to imitate that holy solitary.
Roman matrons were then seen to create for themselves a solitude in the heart of their luxurious capital; offices of the palace, bedizened in purple and gold, deserted the court, amid the rejoicings of a festival, for the date-tree and the brackish rivulets of Upper Egypt!
Where, then, our error in drawing from the archives of the past another beautiful and thrilling tale of repentance which may fall with cheerful rays of encouragement on the soul engaged in the fierce combat with self?
To us the simple, touching story of Alvira has brought a charm and a balm. Seeking to impart to others its interest, its amus.e.m.e.nt, and its moral, we cast it afloat on the sea of literature, to meet, probably, a premature grave in this age of irreligion and presumptuous denial of the necessities of penance.
Chapter I.
Paris One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago.
"Paris is on fire!" "The Tuileries burnt!" "The Hotel de Ville in ashes!" There are few who do not remember how the world was electrified with the telegrams that a few years ago announced the destruction of the French capital. It was the tragic finale of a disastrous war between rival nations; yet the flames were not sent on high to the neutral heavens to be the beacon of triumph and revenge of a conquering army, but set on fire by its own people, who, in a fanaticism unequalled in the history of nations would see their beautiful city a heap of ashes rather than a flourishing capital in the power of its rightful rulers.
Fast were the devouring elements leaping through the palaces and superb public buildings of the city; the petroleum flames were ascending from bas.e.m.e.nt to roof; streets were in sheets of fire; the charred beams were breaking; the walls fell with thundering crash--the empress city was indeed on fire. Like the winds unchained by the storm-G.o.d, the pa.s.sions of men marked their accursed sweep over the fairest city of Europe in torrents of human blood and the wreck of material grandeur.
Those who have visited the superb queen of cities as she once flourished in our days could not, even in imagination, grasp the contrast between Paris of the present and the Paris of two hundred years ago. With a power more destructive than the petroleum of the Commune, we must, in though, sweep away the Tuileries, the boulevards, the Opera-House and superb buildings that surround the Champs Elysees; on their sites we must build old, tottering, ill-shaped houses, six and seven stories high, confining narrow and dirty streets that wind in lanes and alleys into serpentine labyrinths, reeking with filthy odors and noxious vapors. Fill those narrow streets with a lazy, ill-clad people--men in short skirts and clogs, squatting on the steps of antiquated cafes, smoking canes steeped in opium, awaiting the beck of some political firebrand to tear each other to pieces--and in this description you place before the mind"s eye the city some writers have painted as the Paris of two hundred years ago.
But the old city has pa.s.sed away. Like the fabulous creations we have read of in the tales of childhood, palaces, temples, boulevards, and theatres have sprung up on the site of the antiquated and labyrinthine city. Under the dynasty of the Napoleons the capital was rebuilt with lavish magnificence. Accustomed to gaze on the splendor of the sun, we seldom advert to its real magnificence in our universe; but pour its golden flood on the sightless eyeball, and all language would fail to tell the impression upon the paralyzed soul. Thus, in a minor degree, the emigrant from the southern seas who has been for years amongst the cabins on the outskirts of uncultivated plains, where cities were built of huts, where spireless churches of thatched roof served for the basilicas of divine worship, and where public justice was administered under canvas, is startled and delighted with the refinement and civilization of his more favored fellow-mortal who lives in the French capital.
Paris has been rudely disfigured in the fury of her Communist storm; yet, in the invincible energy of the French character, the people who paid to the conquering nation in fifteen months nine milliards of francs will restore the broken ornaments of the empress city. From the smoking walls and unsightly ruins of bureaux and palaces that wring a tear from the patriot, France will see life restored to the emblem of her greatness, the phoenix-like, will rise on the horizon of time to claim for the future generation her position among the first-rate powers of Europe.
To the old city we must wend our way in thought. Crossing the venerable bridge at Notre Dame, we enter at once the Rue de Seine, where we pause before the bank and residence of Ca.s.sier.
Chapter II.
The Usurer.
At a desk in the office we observe a lowsized, whiskered man.
Intelligence beams from a lofty brow; sharp features an aquiline nose tell of Jewish character; his eye glistens and dulls as the heaving heart throbs with its tides of joy and sorrow. Speculation, that glides at times into golden dreams, brightens his whole features with a sunbeam of joy; but suddenly it is clouded. Some unseen intruder casts a baneful shadow on the ungrasped prize; the features of the usurer contract, the hand is clenched, the brow is wrinkled, and woe betide the luckless debtor whose misfortunes would lead him to the banker"s bureau during the eclipse of his good-humor!
Ca.s.sier was a banker by name, but in reality dealt in usurious loans, Shylock-like wringing the pound of flesh from the victims of his avarice. He was known and dreaded by all the honest tradesmen of the city; the curse of the orphan and the widow, whom he unfeelingly drove into the streets, followed in his path; the children stopped their games and hid until he pa.s.sed. That repulsive character which haunts the evil-doers of society marked the aged banker as an object of dread and scorn to his immediate neighbors.
In religion Ca.s.sier at first strongly advocated the principles of Lutheranism; but, as is ever the case with those set adrift on the sea of doubt, freed from the anchor of faith, the definite character of his belief was shipwrecked in a confusion of ideas. At length he lapsed into the negative deism of the French infidels, just then commencing to gain ground in France. He joined them, too, in open blasphemies against G.o.d and plotting against the stability of the Government. The blood chills at reading some of the awful oaths administered to the partisans of those secret societies. They proposed to war against G.o.d, to sweep away all salutary checks against the indulgence of pa.s.sion, to level the alter and the throne, and advocated the claims of those impious theories that in modern times have found their fullest development in Mormonism and Communism.
Further on we shall find this noxious weed, that flourishes in the vineyards whose hedges are broken down, producing its poisonous fruit.
But it was at this period of our history that he became a frequent attendant at their reunions, returning at midnight, half intoxicated, to pour into the horrified ears of his wife and children the issue of the last blasphemous and revolutionary debate that marked the progress and development of their impious tendencies.
No wonder Heaven sent on the Ca.s.sier family the curse that forms the thrill of our tragic memoir.
Chapter III.
A Mixed Marriage.
The Catholic Church has placed restrictions on unions that are not blessed by Heaven. Benedict XIV. has called them DETESTABLE. A sad experience has proved the wisdom of the warning. When the love that has existed in the blinding fervor of pa.s.sion has subsided into the realities of every-day life, the bond of nuptial duty will be religion. But the conflict of religious sentiment produces a divided camp.
The offspring must of necessity be of negative faith. When intelligence dawns on the young soul, its first reasoning powers are caught in a dilemma. Reverential and filial awe chains the child to the father and chains it to the mother; but the father may sternly command the Methodist chapel for Sunday service; the mother will wish to see her little one worship before the alters of the Church. Fear or love wins the trusting child, but neither gains a sincere believer.
See that young mother, silent and fretful; the rouge that grief gives the moistened eye tells its own tale of secret weeping.
Trusting, confiding in the power of young love, attracted by the wealth, the family, or the manners of her suitor, she allows the indissoluble tie to bind her in unholy wedlock. Soon the faith she has trifled with a.s.sumes its mastery in her repentant heart, but liberty is gone; for the dream of conjugal bliss which dazzled when making her choice, she finds herself plunged for life into the most galling and irremediable of human sorrows--secret domestic persecution. Few brave the trial; the largest number go with the current to the greater evil of apostasy.
Ca.s.sier loved a beautiful Catholic girl named Madeleine. Blinded by the stronger pa.s.sion, he waived religious prejudice. He wooed, he promised, he won. The timid Madeleine, beneath her rich suitor in position, dazzled by wealth, and decoyed by the fair promises that so often deceive the confiding character of girlhood, gave her hand and her heart to a destiny she soon learned to lament.
Fancy had built castles of future enjoyment; dress, ornament, and society waved their fascinating wings over her path. Unacquainted with their shadowy pleasures, her preparations for her nuptials were a dream of joy, too soon to be blasted with the realities of suffering that characterize the union not blessed by Heaven. Amid the music and flowers, amid the congratulations of a thousand admiring friends, with heart and step as light as childhood, Madeleine, like victims, dressed in flowers and gold, led to the alter of Jupiter in the Capitol of old, was conducted from the bridal alter to the sacrifice of her future joy. Story oft told in the vicissitudes of betrayed innocence and in the fate of those who build their happiness in the castles of fancy: like the brilliancy of sunset her moment of pleasure faded; the novelty and tinsel of her gilded home lost their charm, and the virtue of her childhood was wrecked on golden rocks. She no longer went to daily Ma.s.s; her visits to the convent became less frequent, her dress lighter; her conversation, toned by the ideas of pride and self-love reflected from the society she moved in, was profane and irreligious; and soon the roses of Christian virtue that bloom in the cheek of innocent maidenhood became sick and withered in the heated, feverish air of perverse influences that tainted her gilded home.