And next we hear Guido screaming and foaming like a wild cat in a trap, while beside him, in his fetid cell, near the Castle of St. Angelo, crouch two awestruck figures, a Cardinal and an Abbot, both Tuscan friends, and one of them formerly his patron. They are doing their best to bring him to confession and absolution, and outside sweeps together, like a flock of crows, and slowly settles down in silence, the frightful Brotherhood of Death, with their black cowls and frocks, black rosaries dangling at each waist, torches lighted, cross-bones banner spread, and gigantic crucifix planted in the midst. They wait only for a sign that the murderer's soul is safe, and then they will lead him to his doom. Fiercely he curses his judges, his lawyers, and his victims. Bitterly he scoffs at all talk of confessing his sins. He has lived, like all the rest of the world, trying to get all the pleasure he could without being caught by the laws, though at last he blundered into the trap. The two priests have sought only such pleasures as he did, and never done a single action to show that they cared for anything else. It is merely for worldly advantages that people feign faith, and not one saintly act is done in Rome which might not have been prompted by the devil. What an explosion real belief in Christianity would make! At present one of the Pope's guards who should break in upon his Holiness to talk about danger to his soul would be. scourged, but he would be rewarded for rushing in to say that he had found a powder-barrel with a lighted match. We interrupt a friend's supper to tell him of a plague-spot on his cheek, but we dare not tell him of one in his soul. What the Book calls gold we turn away from, and what it calls dross we prize. For one monk or nun, who really clutches such gold and spurns such dross, there are fifty maniacs in the asylums. To God Himself he would say, 'If I am all one mistake, whose fault is it? Not mine at least, for I did not make myself!' Pompilia he calls at best a vapid nullity, whom he hates all the more because she forgave him; for he would not flee from hell to heaven if such a flight enabled his enemy to raise the head he held under his own foot on the fiery pavement. He burns to claim Lucrezia Borgia in hell as his bride, and teach her sins, in face of which she still is virtuous. At last he says, 'I have lived and died like a man, honest and bold, and I may take my chance. Right will be done to such men ! But who are these people you have let descend my stair? Ha, their accursed psalm! Lights at the sill! Dare they bid you open? Treachery! Sirs, I have not yet spoken one word out of all the world of words I had to say. I have only laughed and mocked. It was all folly. My first true word is Save me notwithstanding! Life is all! I was stark mad. Load the madman with chains and let him live! Don't open! Keep me from them! I am yours the Grand murder me?' The priests called this a confession, and Guido, after riding intrepidly through the streets, in the same disguise in which he did the murder, and, as was declared by a beggar, healing him of lameness by his prayers, mounted the scaffold, where his accomplices were already dangling, harangued the multitude, and laid his head on the block, with the name of Jesus on his lips. It was sunset on the twenty-second of February, 1698. Innocent XII. lived long enough to protect the little Gaetano from the attack on his inheritance made by the rapacious nuns, whose lawyer was the same Bottinius who had succeeded in vindicating Pompilia's purity, and now failed utterly in trying to defame her. Thus the State and Church which had suffered her to be wronged so cruelly did her justice at last. PIPPA PASSES. I T is New Year's Day at Asolo, a little town near Treviso and Possagno, at the foot of the Venetian Alps; and Felippa, or, as she is commonly called, Pippa, a poor little orphan who winds silk in the mill, and has only this one holiday in all the year, springs out of bed as she sees the pure gold of dawn boiling over the night's cloudy brim. She does not mean to lose a single moment of this her only day. She feels how much more she needs to have it all sunshine than do those people in Asolo who are called the happiest. There is her employer's wife, that superb, haughty Ottima; no rain will keep her lover from spending the morning with her in her greenhouse. And there is Jules, the French sculptor, who is to be married that very noon, and will not let any cloud which may then veil the sky darken the sunshine in his heart and his bride's. Nor will a misty evening prevent young Luigi and his mother from sitting together, calmer than lovers but more fond than friends. And even the fiercest storm will not trouble the peace of the good old Bishop, who is to arrive that night to say masses for the soul of his brother, a nobleman of Asolo, lately deceased. But one such disaster would darken all the year for poor little Pippa. As she dresses, she wonders how she would like to be Ottima, with her Sebald to make love to her, while the husband sleeps and all the town gossips. No, there must be better love than that. She would rather be that dainty little blossom of a bride, whom Jules should not touch carelessly. But no, Pippa does not wish to be fettered even thus, and she fears that such a love might not last all her life. Much better would be a mother's love like Luigi's. Alas! that she has never felt her father or mother love her. Best of all, though, must be God's love! If she could change places with anyone, it would be with that holy and beloved Bishop; but she need not do that to have the love of God. Her New Year's hymn says: 'All service ranks the same with God: If now, as formerly He trod Paradise, His presence fills Our earth, each only as God wills Can work-God's puppets, best and worst, "Say not "a small event!" Why "small ?" * Works, 1868, p. 228, v. ii. |