Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Meanwhile the cavalier was standing on the velvet mossy bridge which spanned the stream at the bottom of the gorge, watching the play of moonbeams on layer after layer of tremulous silver foliage in the clefts of the black, rocky walls on either side. The moon rode so high in the deep violet-colored sky, that her beams came down almost vertically, making green and translucent the leaves through which they passed, and throwing strongly marked shadows here and there on the flower-embroidered moss of the old bridge. There was that solemn, plaintive stillness in the air which makes the least sound — the hum of an insect’s wing, the cracking of a twig, the patter of falling water — so distinct and impressive.

  It needs not to be explained how the cavalier, following the steps of Agnes and her grandmother at a distance, had threaded the path by which they ascended to their little sheltered nook, — how he had lingered within hearing of Agnes’s voice, and, moving among the surrounding rocks and trees, and drawing nearer and nearer as evening shadows drew on, had listened to the conversation, hoping that some unexpected chance might gain him a moment’s speech with his enchantress.

  The reader will have gathered from the preceding chapter that the conception which Agnes had formed as to the real position of her admirer from the reports of Giulietta was false, and that in reality he was not Lord Adrian, the brother of the King, but an outcast and landless representative of one branch of an ancient and noble Roman family, whose estates had been confiscated and whose relations had been murdered, to satisfy the boundless rapacity of Cæsar Borgia, the infamous favorite of the notorious Alexander VI.

  The natural temperament of Agostino Sarelli had been rather that of the poet and artist than of the warrior. In the beautiful gardens of his ancestral home it had been his delight to muse over the pages of Dante; to sing to the lute, and to write, in the facile flowing rhyme of his native Italian, the fancies of the dreamland of his youth.

  He was the younger brother of the family, — the favorite son and companion of his mother, who, being of a tender and religious nature, had brought him up in habits of the most implicit reverence and devotion for the institutions of his fathers.

  The storm which swept over his house, and blasted all his worldly prospects, blasted, too, and withered all those religious hopes and beliefs by which alone sensitive and affectionate natures can be healed of the wounds of adversity without leaving distortion or scar. For his house had been overthrown, his elder brother cruelly and treacherously murdered, himself and his retainers robbed and cast out, by a man who had the entire sanction and support of the Head of the Christian Church, the Vicar of Christ on Earth. So said the current belief of his times, — the faith in which his sainted mother died; and the difficulty with which a man breaks away from such ties is in exact proportion to the refinement and elevation of his nature.

  In the mind of our young nobleman there was a double current. He was a Roman, and the traditions of his house went back to the time of Mutius Scævola; and his old nurse had often told him that grand story of how the young hero stood with his right hand in the fire rather than betray his honor. If the legends of Rome’s ancient heroes cause the pulses of colder climes and alien races to throb with sympathetic heroism, what must their power be to one who says, “These were my fathers”? Agostino read Plutarch, and thought, “I, too, am a Roman!” and then he looked on the power that held sway over the Tarpeian Rock and the halls of the old “Sanctus Senatus,” and asked himself, “By what right does it hold these?” He knew full well that in the popular belief all those hardy and virtuous old Romans whose deeds of heroism so transported him were burning in hell for the crime of having been born before Christ; and he asked himself, as he looked on the horrible and unnatural luxury and vice which defiled the Papal chair and ran riot through every ecclesiastical order, whether such men, without faith, without conscience, and without even decency, were indeed the only authorized successors of Christ and his Apostles?

  To us, of course, from our modern standpoint, the question has an easy solution, — but not so in those days, when the Christianity of the known world was in the Romish church, and when the choice seemed to be between that and infidelity. Not yet had Luther flared aloft the bold, cheery torch which showed the faithful how to disentangle Christianity from Ecclesiasticism. Luther in those days was a star lying low in the gray horizon of a yet unawakened dawn.

  All through Italy at this time there was the restless throbbing and pulsating, the aimless outreach of the popular heart, which marks the decline of one cycle of religious faith and calls for some great awakening and renewal. Savonarola, the priest and prophet of this dumb desire, was beginning to heave a great heart of conflict towards that mighty struggle with the vices and immoralities of his time in which he was yet to sink a martyr; and even now his course was beginning to be obstructed by the full energy of the whole aroused serpent brood which hissed and knotted in the holy places of Rome.

  Here, then, was our Agostino, with a nature intensely fervent and poetic, every fibre of whose soul and nervous system had been from childhood skillfully woven and intertwined with the ritual and faith of his fathers, yearning towards the grave of his mother, yearning towards the legends of saints and angels with which she had lulled his cradle slumbers and sanctified his childhood’s pillow, and yet burning with the indignation of a whole line of old Roman ancestors against an injustice and oppression wrought under the full approbation of the head of that religion. Half his nature was all the while battling the other half. Would he be Roman, or would he be Christian? All the Roman in him said “No!” when he thought of submission to the patent and open injustice and fiendish tyranny which had disinherited him, slain his kindred, and held its impure reign by torture and by blood. He looked on the splendid snow-crowned mountains whose old silver senate engirdles Rome with an eternal and silent majesty of presence, and he thought how often in ancient times they had been a shelter to free blood that would not endure oppression; and so gathering to his banner the crushed and scattered retainers of his father’s house, and offering refuge and protection to multitudes of others whom the crimes and rapacities of the Borgias had stripped of possessions and means of support, he fled to a fastness in the mountains between Rome and Naples, and became an independent chieftain, living by his sword.

  The rapacity, cruelty, and misgovernment of the various regular authorities of Italy at this time made brigandage a respectable and honored institution in the eyes of the people, though it was ostensibly banned both by Pope and Prince. Besides, in the multitude of contending factions which were every day wrangling for supremacy, it soon became apparent, even to the ruling authorities, that a band of fighting men under a gallant leader, advantageously posted in the mountains and understanding all their passes, was a power of no small importance to be employed on one side or the other; and therefore it happened, that, though nominally outlawed or excommunicated, they were secretly protected on both sides, with a view to securing their assistance in critical turns of affairs.

  Among the common people of the towns and villages their relations were of the most comfortable kind, their depredations being chiefly confined to the rich and prosperous, who, as they wrung their wealth out of the people, were not considered particular objects of compassion when the same kind of high-handed treatment was extended toward themselves.

  The most spirited and brave of the young peasantry, if they wished to secure the smiles of the girls of their neighborhood, and win hearts past redemption, found no surer avenue to favor than in joining the brigands. The leaders of these bands sometimes piqued themselves on elegant tastes and accomplishments; and one of them is said to have sent to the poet Tasso, in his misfortunes and exile, an offer of honorable asylum and protection in his mountain fortress.

  Agostino Sarelli saw himself, in fact, a powerful chief, and there were times when the splendid scenery of his mountain fastness, its inspiring air, its wild eagle-like grandeur, independence, and security, gave him a proud contentment, and he looked
at his sword and loved it as a bride. But then again there were moods in which he felt all that yearning and disquiet of soul which the man of wide and tender moral organization must feel who has had his faith shaken in the religion of his fathers. To such a man the quarrel with his childhood’s faith is a never-ending anguish; especially is it so with a religion so objective, so pictorial, and so interwoven with the whole physical and nervous nature of man, as that which grew up and flowered in modern Italy.

  Agostino was like a man who lives in an eternal struggle of self-justification, — his reason forever going over and over with its plea before his regretful and never-satisfied heart, which was drawn every hour of the day by some chain of memory towards the faith whose visible administrators he detested with the whole force of his moral being. When the vesper-bell, with its plaintive call, rose amid the purple shadows of the olive-silvered mountains, — when the distant voices of chanting priest and choir reached him solemnly from afar, — when he looked into a church with its cloudy pictures of angels, and its window-panes flaming with venerable forms of saints and martyrs, — it roused a yearning anguish, a pain and conflict, which all the efforts of his reason could not subdue. How to be a Christian and yet defy the authorized Head of the Christian Church,105 or how to be a Christian and recognize foul men of obscene and rapacious deeds as Christ’s representatives, was the inextricable Gordian knot, which his sword could not divide. He dared not approach the Sacrament, he dared not pray, and sometimes he felt wild impulses to tread down in riotous despair every fragment of a religious belief which seemed to live in his heart only to torture him. He had heard priests scoff over the wafer they consecrated, — he had known them to mingle poison for rivals in the sacramental wine, — and yet God had kept silence and not struck them dead; and like the Psalmist of old he said, “Verily, I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency. Is there a God that judgeth in the earth?”

  The first time he saw Agnes bending like a flower in the slanting evening sunbeams by the old gate of Sorrento, while he stood looking down the kneeling street and striving to hold his own soul in the sarcastic calm of utter indifference, he felt himself struck to the heart by an influence he could not define. The sight of that young face, with its clear, beautiful lines, and its tender fervor, recalled a thousand influences of the happiest and purest hours of his life, and drew him with an attraction he vainly strove to hide under an air of mocking gallantry.

  When she looked him in the face with such grave, surprised eyes of innocent confidence, and promised to pray for him, he felt a remorseful tenderness as if he had profaned a shrine. All that was passionate, poetic, and romantic in his nature was awakened to blend itself in a strange mingling of despairing sadness and of tender veneration about this sweet image of perfect purity and faith. Never does love strike so deep and immediate a root as in a sorrowful and desolated nature; there it has nothing to dispute the soil, and soon fills it with its interlacing fibres.

  In this case it was not merely Agnes that he sighed for,106 but she stood to him as the fair symbol of that life-peace, that rest of soul which he had lost, it seemed to him, forever.

  “Behold this pure, believing child,” he said to himself,—”a true member of that blessed Church to which thou art a rebel! How peacefully this lamb walketh the old ways trodden by saints and martyrs, while thou art an infidel and unbeliever!” And then a stern voice within him answered, “What then? Is the Holy Ghost indeed alone dispensed through the medium of Alexander and his scarlet crew of cardinals? Hath the power to bind and loose in Christ’s Church been indeed given to whoever can buy it with the wages of robbery and oppression? Why does every prayer and pious word of the faithful reproach me? Why is God silent? Or is there any God? Oh, Agnes, Agnes! dear lily! fair lamb! lead a sinner into the green pastures where thou restest!”

  So wrestled the strong nature, tempest-tossed in its strength, — so slept the trustful, blessed in its trust, — then in Italy, as now in all lands.

  CHAPTER X. THE INTERVIEW

  The dreams of Agnes, on the night after her conversation with the monk and her singular momentary interview with the cavalier, were a strange mixture of images, indicating the peculiarities of her education and habits of daily thought.

  She dreamed that she was sitting alone in the moonlight, and heard some one rustling in the distant foliage of the orange groves, and from them came a young man dressed in white of a dazzling clearness like sunlight; large pearly wings fell from his shoulders and seemed to shimmer with a phosphoric radiance; his forehead was broad and grave, and above it floated a thin, tremulous tongue of flame; his eyes had that deep, mysterious gravity which is so well expressed in all the Florentine paintings of celestial beings; and yet, singularly enough, this white-robed, glorified form seemed to have the features and lineaments of the mysterious cavalier of the evening before, — the same deep, mournful dark eyes, only that in them the light of earthly pride had given place to the calm, strong gravity of an assured peace, — the same broad forehead, — the same delicately chiseled features, but elevated and etherealized, glowing with a kind of interior ecstasy. He seemed to move from the shadow of the orange trees with a backward floating of his lustrous garments, as if borne on a cloud just along the surface of the ground; and in his hand he held the lily spray, all radiant with a silvery, living light, just as the monk had suggested to her a divine flower might be.108 Agnes seemed to herself to hold her breath and marvel with a secret awe, and as often happens in dreams, she wondered to herself, “Was this stranger, then, indeed, not even mortal, not even a king’s brother, but an angel? How strange,” she said to herself, “that I should never have seen it in his eyes!” Nearer and nearer the vision drew, and touched her forehead with the lily, which seemed dewy and icy cool; and with the contact it seemed to her that a delicious tranquillity, a calm ecstasy, possessed her soul, and the words were impressed in her mind, as if spoken in her ear, “The Lord hath sealed thee for his own!” — and then, with the wild fantasy of dreams, she saw the cavalier in his wonted form and garments, just as he had kneeled to her the night before, and he said, “Oh, Agnes! Agnes! little lamb of Christ, love me and lead me!” — and in her sleep it seemed to her that her heart stirred and throbbed with a strange, new movement in answer to those sad, pleading eyes, and thereafter her dream became more troubled.

  The sea was beginning now to brighten with the reflection of the coming dawn in the sky, and the flickering fire of Vesuvius was waxing sickly and pale; and while all the high points of rocks were turning of a rosy purple, in the weird depths of the gorge were yet the unbroken shadows and stillness of night. But at the earliest peep of dawn the monk had risen, and now, as he paced up and down the little garden, his morning hymn mingled with Agnes’s dreams, — words strong with all the nerve of the old Latin, which, when they were written, had scarcely ceased to be the spoken tongue of Italy.

  “Splendor paternæ gloriæ,

  De luce lucem proferens,

  Lux lucis et fons luminis,

  Dies diem illuminans!

  “Votis vocemus et Patrem,

  Patrem potentis gratiæ,

  Patrem perennis gloriæ:

  Culpam releget lubricam!

  “Confirmet actus strenuos,

  Dentes retundat invidi,

  Casus secundet asperos,

  Donet gerendi gratiam!

  “Christus nobis sit cibus,

  Potusque noster sit fides:

  Læti bibamus sobriam

  Ebrietatem spiritus!

  “Lætus dies hic transeat,

  Pudor sit ut diluculum,

  Fides velut meridies.

  Crepusculum mens nesciat!”3

  Splendor of the Father’s glory,

  Bringing light with cheering ray,

  Light of light and fount of brightness,

  Day, illuminating day!

  In our prayers we call thee Father,

  Father of eternal glory,

  Fath
er of a mighty grace:

  Heal our errors, we implore thee!

  Form our struggling, vague desires;

  Power of spiteful spirits break;

  Help us in life’s straits, and give us

  Grace to suffer for thy sake!

  Christ for us shall be our food;

  Faith in him our drink shall be;

  Hopeful, joyful, let us drink

  Soberness of ecstasy!

  Joyful shall our day go by,

  Purity its dawning light,

  Faith its fervid noontide glow,

  And for us shall be no night!

  The hymn in every word well expressed the character and habitual pose of mind of the singer, whose views of earthly matters were as different from the views of ordinary working mortals as those of a bird, as he flits and perches and sings, must be from those of the four-footed ox who plods. The “sobriam ebrietatem spiritus” was with him first constitutional, as a child of sunny skies, and then cultivated by every employment and duty of the religious and artistic career to which from childhood he had devoted himself. If perfect, unalloyed happiness has ever existed in this weary, work-day world of ours, it has been in the bosoms of some of those old religious artists of the Middle Ages, whose thoughts grew and flowered in prayerful shadows, bursting into thousands of quaint and fanciful blossoms on the pages of missal and breviary. In them the fine life of color, form, and symmetry, which is the gift of the Italian, formed a rich stock on which to graft the true vine of religious faith, and rare and fervid were the blossoms.