XX
While the dwarves were diverting themselves as aforesaid, their rulers were in council together. And one day Sir Francis Bertram found no closed doors at the Vatican. He was granted an audience which was friendly and unofficial and secret: so secret in fact that no news of it “transpired.” It was treated as the return visit of an Englishman to an Englishman. He came in an electric brougham, quite unattended. No one noted that he brought a small dispatch-box with him: or that he did not carry it away with him: but some of the senior cardinals, who kindly came to discuss the latest effusions of the Daily Anagraph with Hadrian in the evening, found His Holiness brimful of gaiety. They remarked that the visit of the ambassador had done Him no end of good. His bearing was vivid, serene, and youthful: His conversation was witty, limpid, facile: no one would have taken Him for the person described in the newspapers. He read those which obligingly were handed to him: but showed no emotion whatever, although very eager expert eyes searched for some trace from which to lead theories and hypotheses. Nor did He utter any comment. He read: He laid down the paper; and resumed the conversation. Before Their Eminencies withdrew, He summoned the Sacred Consistory to meet at noon on the morrow; and that was the only noteworthy event of the evening.
Hadrian mounted the throne; and the vermilion college displayed itself before Him. A pigskin kit-bag, which a gentleman-of-the-secret-chamber had placed by the pontifical footstool before the doors were locked, did not escape the notice of the more observant. The Pontiff Himself was in singularly good form: and this was incomprehensible, for He carried in His hand a copy of the very newspaper which everyone had read and retched-over. That He should be so aggressively cheerful, so vividly dominant, with that in His hand, was considered hardly decorous. Even among those who firmly were determined to force themselves to believe in Him, that He should not bend His neck to the smiter now, did not tally at all with conceptions of propriety. With these sentiments, Their Eminencies composed themselves to listen.
After the formal opening of the session, a Consistorial Advocate (in garments of a violet colour and furred with ermine about the neck) was commanded to read aloud, from the Daily Anagraph, the account of the Pope’s visit in disguise to the house on Via Morino. He was to read it, first, in English, then, in Latin. It was not a long lection: for journalistic instinct had perceived that the facts stated would be more damnatory in their nakedness. With that inscrutable incomprehensible vivid gleam of hilarity irradiating His face, Hadrian checked the Consistorial Advocate from time to time, preventing him from drifting into the monotonous gabble, which is used for the formal reading of documents whose contents already are known informally; and, if His object was to cause each deadly detail of the charge against Himself to come out clearly, with all the contours definite and all the tints brilliantly varnished, it must be admitted that His method was pontifically successful.
“Ebbene dunque?” muttered Cardinal Ragna.
Hadrian darted a word at the Cardinal-Prefect-of-Propaganda: “Will Your Eminency have the goodness to describe, to the Sacred College, your acts of the afternoon and evening of the festival of St. Michael Archangel?”
The naming of the festival of Michaelmas was like a touch on the latch of the Red Pope’s memory. His pure and gentle face lighted up: for he perceived the connotation; and that inspired him with a joy so delectable that he paused to pick his words, tasting them deliberately, lingering over them. “After siesta on the festival of St. Michael Archangel—and that would be about 15½ hours of the clock, not later—I came to Vatican and was received by Your Holiness. I was admitted to the secret chamber. I sat opposite to Your Holiness, by the window. I remember that, for a reason. I spoke to Your Holiness on the subject of removing England from the control of Propaganda. I said that I had pondered Your Holiness’s proposition. I said that it appeared to me, as it already had appeared to Your Holiness, that the necessity for treating England as a barbarous uncivilized savage country, in which the Faith is preached by missionaries, no longer existed. I added my own opinion, that to continue to treat England as a savage uncivilized barbarous country, now, amounted to perennial insult. I received Your Holiness’s thanks. I am giving only the heads of this conversation, which was prolonged until the seventeenth hour. Then, the pontifical pages brought in a tray containing fruit and triscuits and some English tea. I told Your Holiness that tea astringed my nerves, remarking on the difference between English nerves and Italian. I was permitted to make a few jokes. In the midst of these very diverting burlesques, I ate a little fruit—perhaps a fig and a half—and I drank a little wine of Cinthyanum. Afterwards, I proceeded to discuss another case with Your Holiness. That case was the removal, from the
