“Why trouble His Eminence with my crimes or heresies?” he said quietly, “I am grateful to him from my soul for his gentleness and charity of judgment — but I need no defence — not even from him. I am answerable to God alone! — neither to Church nor Creed! It was needful that I should speak as I spoke to-day—”
“Needful to scandalize the Church?” demanded Moretti sharply.
“The Church is not scandalized by a man who confesses himself an unworthy member of it!” returned Vergniaud, “It is better to tell the truth and go out of the Church than to remain in it as a liar and a hypocrite.”
“According to your own admission you have been a liar and a hypocrite for twenty-five years!” said Moretti bitterly, “You should have made your confession before, and have made it privately. There is something unnatural and reprehensible in the sudden blazon you have made to the public of your gross immorality.”
“‘A sudden blazon’ you call it,—” said the Abbe, “Well, perhaps it is! But murder will out, no matter how long it is kept in. You are not entirely aware of my position, Monseigneur. Have you the patience to hear a full explanation?”
“I have the patience to hear because it is my duty to hear,” replied Moretti frigidly, “I am bound to convey the whole of this matter to His Holiness.”
“True! That is your duty, and who shall say it is not also your pleasure!” and Vergniaud smiled a little. “Well! — Convey to His Holiness the news that I, Denis Vergniaud, am a dying man, and that knowing myself to be in that condition, and that two years at the utmost, is my extent of life on this planet, I have taken it seriously into my head to consider as to whether I am fit to meet death with a clean conscience. Death, Monsignor, admits of no lying, no politeness, no elegant sophistries! Now, the more I have considered, the more I am aware of my total unfitness to confront whatever may be waiting for me in the Afterwards of death — (for without doubt there is an afterwards,) — and being conscious of having done at least one grave injury to an innocent person, I have taken the best and quickest way to make full amends. I wronged a woman — this boy’s mother—” and he indicated with a slight gesture Cyrillon, who had remained a silent witness of the scene,— “and the boy himself from early years set his mind and his will to avenge his mother’s dishonour. I — the chief actor in the drama, — am thus responsible for a woman’s misery and shame; and am equally responsible for the murderous spirit which has animated one, who without this feeling, would have been a promising fellow enough. The woman I wronged, alas! — is dead, and I cannot reinstate her name, save in an open acknowledgment of her child, my son. I do acknowledge him, — I acknowledge him in your presence, and therefore virtually in the presence of His Holiness. I thus help to remove the stigma I myself set on his name. Plainly speaking, Monsignor, we men have no right whatever to launch human beings into the world with the ‘bar sinister’ branded upon them. We have no right, if we follow Christ, to do anything that may injure or cause trouble to any other creature. We have no right to be hasty in our judgment, even of sin.”
“Sin is sin, — and demands punishment—” interrupted Moretti.
“You quote the law of Moses, Monsignor! I speak with the premise ‘if’. IF we follow Christ; — if we do not, the matter is of course different. We can then twist Scripture to suit our own purpose. We can organise systems which are agreeable to our own convenience or profit, but which have nothing whatever of Christ’s Divine Spirit of universal love and compassion in them. My action this morning was unusual and quixotic no doubt. Yet, it seemed to me the only way to comport myself under those particular circumstances. I did a wrong — I seek to make amends. I believe this is what God would have me do. I believe that the Supernal Forces judge our sins against each other to be of a far worse nature than sins against Church or Creed. I also believe that if we try to amend our injustices and set crooked things straight, death will be an easier business, and Heaven will come a little nearer to our souls. As for my attack on the Church—”
“Ah truly! What of your attack on the Church?” said Moretti, his small eyes glistening, and his breath going and coming quickly.
“I would say every word of it again with absolute conviction,” declared Vergniaud, “for I have said nothing but the truth! There is a movement in the world, Monsignor, that all the powers of Rome are unable to cope with! — the movement of an advancing resistless force called Truth, — the Voice of God, — the Voice of Christ! Truth cannot be choked, murdered and killed nowadays as in the early Inquisition! Rather than that the Voice of Truth should be silenced or murdered now at this period of time, God will shake down Rome!”
“Not so!” exclaimed Moretti hotly— “Every nation in the world shall perish before Rome shall lose her sacred power! She is the ‘headstone of the corner’ — and ‘upon whomsoever that stone shall fall, it shall grind him to powder!’”
“You think so?” and Verginaud shrugged his shoulders ever so slightly— “Well! For me, I believe that material as well as spiritual forces combine to fight against long-concealed sin and practised old hypocrisies. It would not surprise me if the volcanic agencies which are for ever at work beneath the blood-stained soil of Italy, were to meet under the Eternal City, and in one fell burst of flame and thunder prove its temporary and ephemeral worth! The other day an earthquake shook the walls of Rome and sent a warning shock through St. Peter’s. St. Peter’s, with its vast treasures, its gilded shrines, its locked-up wealth, its magnificence, — a strange contrast to Italy itself! — Italy with its people ground down under the heel of a frightful taxation, starving, and in the iron bonds of poverty! ‘The Pope is a prisoner and can do nothing’? Monsignor, the Pope is a prisoner by his own choice! If he elected to walk abroad among the people and scatter Peter’s Pence among the sick and needy, he would then perhaps be BEGINNING to do the duties our Lord enjoined on all His disciples!”
Moretti had stood immovable during this speech, his dark face rigid, his eyes downcast, listening to every word, but now he raised his hand with an authoritative gesture.
“Enough!” he said, “I will hear no more! You know the consequences of this at the Vatican?”
“I do.”
“You are prepared to accept them?”
“As prepared as any of the truth-tellers who were burned for the love of Christ by the Inquisition,” replied Vergniaud deliberately. “The world is wide, — there is room for me in it outside the Church.”
“One would imagine you were bitten by the new ‘Christian Democratic’ craze,” said Moretti with a cold smile, “And that you were a reader and follower of the Socialist, Gys Grandit!”
At this name, Vergniaud’s son Cyrillon stirred, and lifting his dark handsome head turned his flashing eyes full on the speaker.
“Did you address me, Monsignor?” he queried, in a voice rich with the musical inflexions of Southern France, “I am Gys Grandit!”
Had he fired another pistol shot in the quiet room as he had fired it in the church, it could hardly have created a more profound sensation.
“You — you—” stammered Moretti, retreating from him as from some loathsome abomination, “You — Gys Grandit!”
“You, Cyrillon! — you! — you, my son!” — and the Abbe almost lost breath in the extremity of his amazement, while Cardinal Bonpre half rose from his chair doubting whether he had heard aright. Gys Grandit! — the writer of fierce political polemics and powerful essays that were the life and soul, meat and drink of all the members of the Christian Democratic party!
“Gys Grandit is my nom-de-plume,” pursued the young man, composedly, “I never had any hope of being acknowledged as Cyrillon Vergniaud, son of my father, — I had truly no name and resolved to create one. That is the sole explanation. My history has made me — not myself.”
There was a dead pause. At last Moretti spoke.
“I have no place here!” he said, biting his lips hard to keep them from trembling with rage, “This house which I thought was the abode
of a true daughter of the Church, Donna Sovrani, is apparently for the moment a refuge for heretics. And I find these heretics kept in countenance by Cardinal Felix Bonpre, whose reputation for justice and holiness should surely move him to denounce them were he not held in check by some malignant spirit of evil, which seems to possess this atmosphere—”
“Monsignor Moretti,” interposed the Cardinal with dignity, “it is no part of justice or holiness to denounce anything or anybody till the full rights of the case have been heard. I was as unaware as yourself that this young man, Cyrillon Vergniaud, was the daring writer who has sent his assumed name of ‘Gys Grandit’ like a flame through Europe. I have read his books, and cannot justly denounce them, because they are expressed in the language of one who is ardently and passionately seeking for Truth. Equally, I cannot denounce the Abbe, because he has confessed his sin, declared himself as he is, to the public, saved his son from being a parricide, and has to some extent we trust, made his peace with God. If you can find any point on which, as a servant of Christ, I can denounce these two human beings who share with me the strange and awful privileges of life and death, and the promise of an immortal hereafter, I give you leave to do so. The works of Gys Grandit do not blaspheme Christ, — they call, they clamour, they appeal for Christ through all and in all—”
“And with all this clamour and appeal their writer is willing to become a murderer!” said Moretti satirically.
Young Vergniaud sprang forward.
“Monsignor, in the name of the Master you profess to serve I would advise you to set a watch upon your tongue!” he said, “Granted that I was willing to murder the man who had made my mother’s life a misery, I was also willing to answer to God for it! I saw my mother die—” here he gave a quick glance towards the Abbe who instinctively shrank at his words, “I shall pain you, my father, by what I say, but the pain is perhaps good for us both! I repeat — I saw my mother die. She passed away uncomforted after a long life of patient loneliness and sorrow — for she was faithful to the last, ever faithful! I have seen her weep in the silence of the night! — I have heard her ever since I was able to understand the sound of weeping! Oh, those tears! — Do you not think God has seen them! She worked and toiled, and starved herself to educate me, — she had no friends, for she had ‘fallen’, they said, and sometimes she could get no employment, and often we starved together; and when I thought of the man who had done this thing, even as a young boy I said to myself, ‘I will kill him!’ She did not mean, poor mother, to curse her lover to me — but unconsciously she did, — her sorrow was so great — her loneliness so bitter!”
Moretti gave a gesture of impatience and contempt. Cyrillon noted it, and his dark eyes flashed, but he went on steadily, —
“And then I saw her die — she stretched her poor thin hard-working hands out to God, and over and over again she muttered and moaned in her fever the refrain of an old peasant song we have in Touraine, ‘Oh, la tristesse d’avoir aime!’ If you had heard her — if you had seen her — if you had, or have a heart to feel, nerves to wrench, a brain to rack, blood to be stung to frenzy, you would, — seeing your mother perish thus, — have thought, that to kill the man who had made such a wreck of a sweet pure life, would be a just, aye even a virtuous deed! I thought so. But my intended vengeance was frustrated — whether by the act of God, who can say? But the conduct of the man whom I am now proud to call my father—”
“You have great cause for pride!” said Moretti sarcastically.
“I think I have” — said the young man, “In the close extremity of death at my hands, he won my respect. He shall keep it. It will be my glory now to show him what a son’s love and pardon may be. If it be true as I understand, that he is attacked by a disease which needs must be fatal, his last hours will not be desolate! It may be that I shall give him more comfort than Churches, — more confidence than Creeds! It may be that the clasp of my hand in his may be a better preparation for his meeting with God, — and my mother, — than the touch of the Holy Oils in Extreme Unction!”
“Like all your accursed sect, you blaspheme the Sacraments” — interrupted Moretti indignantly— “And in the very presence of one of her chiefest Cardinals, you scorn the Church!”
Cyrillon gave a quick gesture of emphatic denial.
“Monsignor, I do not scorn the Church, — but I think that honesty and fair dealing with one another is better than any Church! Christ had no Church. He built no temples, He amassed no wealth, — He preached simply to those who would hear Him under the arching sky, — in the open air! He prophesied the fall of temples; ‘In this place,’ He said, ’is One greater than the temple.’ [Footnote: Matt. xii. v. 6.] He sought to destroy long built-up hypocrisies. ‘My house is called the house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves.’ Thieves, not only of gold, but of honour! — thieves of the very Gospel, which has been tampered with and twisted to suit the times, the conditions and opinions of varying phases of priestcraft. Who that has read, and thought, and travelled and studied the manuscripts hidden away in the old monasteries of Armenia and Syria, believes that the Saviour of the world ever condescended to ‘pun’ on the word Petrus, and say, ‘On this Rock (or stone) I will build my Church,’ when He already knew that He had to deal with a coward who would soon deny Him?”
“Enough! I will hear no further!” cried Moretti, turning livid with fury— “Cardinal Bonpre, I appeal to you . . .”
But Cyrillon went on unheedingly, —
“Beware of that symbol of your Church, Monsignor! It is a very strange one! It seems about to be expanded into a reality of dreadful earnest! ‘I know not the man,’ said Peter. Does not the glittering of the world’s wealth piled into the Vatican, — useless wealth lying idle in the midst of hideous beggary and starvation, — proclaim with no uncertain voice, ‘I KNOW NOT THE MAN’? The Man of sorrows, — the Man of tender and pitying heart, — the Man who could not send the multitude away without bread, and compassed a miracle to give it to them, — the Man who wept for a friend’s death, — who took little children in His arms and blessed them, — who pardoned the unhappy outcast and said, ‘Sin no more,’ — who was so selfless, so pure, so strong, so great, that even sceptics, while denying His Divinity, are compelled to own that His life and His actions were more Divine than those of any other creature in human shape that has ever walked the earth! Monsignor, there is no true representative of Christ in this world!”
“Not for heretics possibly,” said Moretti disdainfully.
“For no one!” said Cyrillon passionately— “For no poor sinking, seeking soul is there any such visible comforter! But there is a grand tendency in Mankind to absorb His Spirit and His teaching; — to turn from forms and shadows of faith to the Faith itself, — from descriptions of a possible heaven to the REAL Heaven, which is being disclosed to us in transcendent glimpses through the jewel-gates of science! There were twelve gates in the visioned heaven of St. John, — and each gate was composed of one pearl! Truly do the scoffers say that never did any planetary sea provide such pearls as these! No, — for they were but prophetic emblems of the then undiscovered Sciences. Ah, Monsignor! — and what of the psychic senses and forces? — forces which we are just beginning to discover and to use, — forces which enable me to read your mind at this present moment and to see how willingly you would send me to the burning, Christian as you call yourself, for my thoughts and opinions! — as your long-ago predecessors did with all men who dared to reason for themselves! But that time has passed, Monsignor; the Spirit of Christ in the world has conquered the Church THERE!”
The words rushed from his lips with a fervid eloquence that was absolutely startling, — his eyes were aglow with feeling — his face so animated and inspired, that it seemed as though a flame behind it illumined every feature. Abbe Vergniaud, astonished and overcome, laid a trembling hand on the arm of the passionate speaker with a gesture more of appeal than restraint, and the young man caught that hand within his own and held
it fast. Moretti for a moment fixed his eyes upon father and son with an expression of intense hatred that darkened his face with a deep shadow as of a black mask, — and then without a word deliberately turned his back upon both.
“Your Eminence has heard all this,” he said coldly, addressing the Cardinal who sat rigidly in his chair, silent and very pale.
“I have,” replied Bonpre in a low strained tone.
“And I presume your Eminence permits — ?”
“Why talk of permission?” interrupted the Cardinal, raising his eyes with a sorrowful look, “Who is to permit or deny freedom of speech in these days? Have I — have you — the right to declare that a man shall not express his thoughts? In what way are we to act? Deny a hearing? We cannot — we dare not — not if we obey our Lord, who says, ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them.’ If we ask for ourselves to be heard, we must also hear.”
“We may hear — but in such a case as the present one must we not also condemn?” demanded Moretti, watching the venerable prelate narrowly.
“We can only condemn in the case of a great sin,” replied Bonpre gently, “and even then our condemnation must be passed with fear and trembling, and with full knowledge of all the facts pertaining to the error. ‘Judge not that ye be not judged.’ We are told plainly that our brother may sin against us not only seven times but seventy times seven, and still we are bound to forgive, to sustain, to help, and not to trample down the already fallen.”
“These are your Eminence’s opinions?” said Moretti.
“Most assuredly! Are they not yours?”
Moretti smiled coldly.
“No. I confess they are not! I am a faithful servant of the Church; and the Church is a system of moral government in which, if the slightest laxity be permitted, the whole fabric is in danger—”
“A house of cards then, which a breath may blow down!” interposed “Gys Grandit,” otherwise Cyrillon Vergniaud, “Surely an unstable foundation for the everlasting ethics of Christ!”
Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 22) Page 478
