“Come, my son, it’s late and, to tell the truth, growing cold. Come to the point.”
“Father, I haven’t the courage,” stammered the little priest.
“Whatever have you done? On the whole you seem a good fellow. You haven’t killed anyone, I imagine. Have you been defiled by pride?”
“Even so,” said the other in a scarcely audible voice.
“A murderer?”
“No, the other.”
“You are proud? Impossible!”
Contrite, the priest nodded.
“Well, speak, explain, my good soul. Although in these days we make exaggerated demands on God’s mercy, it is without limit. The amount disposable and uninvested should be enough for you, I imagine.”
The other made up his mind at last.
“Well, Father, it’s very simple as well as serious. I have been a priest for a few days only. I have only just assumed my office in the parish assigned to me. Well . . .”
“Well, speak up, my son, speak up. I swear I won’t eat you.”
“Well, when I hear myself called ‘Your Reverence,’ what do you think? It will seem silly to you, but I experience a feeling of joy, of something which warms me through and through.”
Truly it was not a great sin, for the majority of faithful, including priests, the idea of confessing it would never have entered their minds. Therefore the anchorite, although an expert in the phenomenon known as man, was not expecting it, and at first did not know what to say (something which had never happened to him before).
“Hm . . . hm . . . I understand. It’s not a pretty thing. If it’s not the Devil himself who is warming you within . . . he’s not far off. But all this luckily you have understood yourself and your shame makes one seriously hope that you will not fall again. Ego te absolvo.”
Three or four years passed and Father Celestino had almost completely forgotten the incident when the anonymous priest returned to him to confess.
“But haven’t I seen you before, or am I mistaken?”
“You have.”
“Let me look at you. But yes, but yes, you are he, you who enjoyed hearing yourself called ‘Reverence.’ Or am I wrong?”
“That is so,” replied the priest, who seemed perhaps not such a little priest now through a kind of greater dignity in his expression. But for the rest he was as young-looking and thin as before. And he seemed to shine with an inward flame.
“Oh, oh,” diagnosed Celestino drily with a resigned smile. “In all this time, you have not been able to reform?”
“Worse than that.”
“You almost frighten me, my son, explain.”
“Well,” said the priest, making a tremendous effort to master himself, “it is much worse than before . . . I . . . I . . .”
“Out with it!” exhorted Celestino, seizing both his hands, “don’t keep me in suspense.”
“It happens that . . . there are some who call me ‘Monsignor.’ I . . . I . . .”
“It gratifies you, you mean?”
“Unhappily, yes.”
“A sensation of well-being, of warmth?”
“Exactly.”
But Father Celestino dispatched him with a few words. The first time the case had seemed quite interesting as a human singularity. But not now. Evidently, he thought, it’s a question of a poor fool, a holy man maybe, whom people take delight in teasing. Was it a case of withholding absolution? In a couple of minutes Father Celestino commended him to God.
Another ten years passed and the hermit was almost old when the little priest returned. He had grown old too, naturally, more dried up, paler and with gray hair. At first Father Celestino did not recognize him. But as soon as he began to speak, the tone of his voice reawakened his memory.
“Ah, you are he of the ‘Reverence’ and the ‘Monsignor’—or am I wrong?” asked Celestino with his disarming smile.
“You have a good memory, Father.”
“And how long ago was that?”
“About ten years.”
“And after ten years . . . at what point have you arrived?”
“Worse, worse.”
“That is to say?”
“You see, Father, now, if someone happens to call me ‘Excellency,’ I . . .”
“Don’t say any more, my son,” said Celestino with his bomb-proof patience, “already I understand everything. Ego te absolvo.”
And meanwhile he was thinking, Unhappily over the years this poor priest is becoming more and more ingenuous and simple: and people amuse themselves more than ever by pulling his leg. And he falls for it and even enjoys it, poor beggar. In five or six years I wager I shall see him here again to confess that when they call him “Eminence,” etc., etc.
Which is precisely what happened. Except that it was a year earlier than he predicted.
There passed, with the terrifying swiftness that we all know, another large slice of time. And Father Celestino was now such a decrepit old man that they had to hoist him up to his confessional every morning and down again to his den when evening fell.
And now must we tell in full detail how the anonymous priest reappeared one day? And how he too had grown old, white-haired, bent and more dried up than ever. And how he was still tormented by the same remorse. No, of course it’s not necessary.
“My poor little priest,” the old anchorite greeted him lovingly, “you are still here with your old sin of pride?”
“You read my very soul, Father.”
“And now how do people flatter you? Now they call you ‘Your Holiness,’ I imagine?”
“Even so,” admitted the priest in a tone of the most bitter mortification.
“And every time they call you this, a sense of joy, of well-being, of life, pervades you, almost of happiness.”
“Unhappily yes, unhappily yes. Is God able to forgive me?”
Father Celestino smiled to himself. Such obstinate frankness seemed somehow moving. And in a flash his imagination reconstructed the obscure life of this poor little humble, not very intelligent, priest in a remote mountain parish among bucolic, insensitive or malignant people. And his monotonous days, one just like the other, the monotonous seasons and the monotonous years causing him
