At the conferring of the episcopal ring, He drew-back His hand; and demanded an amethyst instead of the proffered emerald. The ceremony halted till the canonical stone came. Cardinals noted the first manifestation of pontifical will, with much concern, and with some annoyance. Ragna muttered of ignoble upstarts: Vivole, of boyish arrogance: Berstein, of beggars on horseback. “He, who is born of a hen, always scratches the ground,” asserted the Benedictine Cacciatore: and “He, who was a frog, is now a king,” Labeur quoted from the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter.
They brought Him before the altar; and set Him in a crimson-velvet chair, asking what pontifical name He would choose.
“Hadrian the Seventh:” the response came unhesitatingly, undemonstratively.
“Your Holiness would perhaps prefer to be called Leo, or Pius, or Gregory, as is the modern manner?” the Cardinal-Dean inquired with imperious suavity.
“The previous English pontiff was Hadrian the Fourth: the present English pontiff is Hadrian the Seventh. It pleases Us; and so, by Our Own impulse, We command.”
Then there was no more to be said. The election of Hadrian the Seventh was proclaimed in the Conclave. They came to the ceremony of adoration. One by one, Their Eminencies kissed the Supreme Pontiff’s foot and hand and cheek. Contact with senile humanity made His juvenile soul shudder. All the time he was saying in His mind “Not unto Us, O Lord, not unto Us. …” Yet that seemed such a silly inadequate thing to say. It was not humility, it was physical loathing which nauseated Him all secretly. Some had the breaths of bustards, and all but one were hot. He would have liked to tear off His Own cheek with clawed tongs. By a peculiar mental gymnastic, He vaulted to the verse, “Who sweeps an house as in Thy Sight makes that and th’ action fine.” He clutched the thought and clung to it. “Greatest and Best, or by what other Name Thou wishest to be called, I am only Thy means. This horrible osculation is no more than a chance for them to benefit themselves by honouring Thee through me. Let them. I will be the means—Thy means to all men. Ouf! How it hurts!” His external serenity was unflinchingly feline. He just tolerated attention. The arrows of cardinalitial eyes impinged upon Him; and glanced off the ice of His mail. He withdrew His sensibilities from the surface; and concentrated them in the inmost recesses of his soul, foreseeing, forescheming. “One step’s enough for me” was another tag, which became detached from the bundles of His memory to float in the ocean of His counsels. He made sure of the one step: fearlessly strode and stood; and prepared for the next. He never looked behind. The amethyst, the pontifical name, and now—? Yes! “Begin as you mean to go on,” He advised Himself.
When the huge princes of the church bourgeoned in ermine and vermilion, Hadrian, mitred and coped in silver and gold, followed Macca who bore the triple cross. Tumultuous sumptuous splendour proceeded through the Conclave into the gallery of benediction over the porch of St. Peter’s. Masons were removing brickwork from a blocked window leading to a balcony on the right hand, halfway down the long gallery. The Supreme Pontiff beckoned Orezzo.
“Lord Cardinal, this balcony looks-into the church?”
“Into the church, Holiness.”
“Which window looks-out over the City?”
“The window on the left.”
“Let the window on the left be opened.”
The Sacred College swung together as to a scrum.
Pressure never had influenced George Arthur Rose. He used to say that you might squash him to death, if you could: but you never should make him do what you were too lazy, or too proud, or too silly, to persuade him to do. He would wait a century for his own way; and, unless you actually and literally had removed him from the face of the earth by the usual methods of assassination, you would find him still implacably persistent at the end of the said century. He had learned the trick from Flavio: observing that, if he would not open the door when the cat mewed to go out, the creature remained in the room, but would not come and sit on his friend’s neck, nor agree to anything except the opening of the door. And Hadrian the Seventh was quite prepared to be hustled and hullabaloed-at, as Leo the Thirteenth had been hullabaloed at and hustled in 1878: but no earthly power should extort Apostolic Benediction from His hand and lips, except at a place and a time of His Own choosing. They might push this Pope on to the inner balcony; and they might lead a horse to the water: but not even the College of Cardinals arrayed in all its glory could make the one drink, the other bless.
“Holiness, that window was bricked-up in 1870; and has not been opened since.”
“Let it now be opened.”
Ragna snarled and burst out of the phalanx. There was a tinge of truculence about him. “Holiness, Pope Leo wished to have had it opened on the day of His Own election; but it was impossible. Impossible! Capisce? The rust of the stanchions, the solidity of the cement—”
“All that We know. The gentleness of Pope Leo was persuaded. We are not gentle; and We are not to be persuaded by violence.”
Orezzo, though secretly inchanted that anyone should act differently to his one antipathy, Pope Leo, was rather shocked at the notion of blessing the City and the World while (what he held to be) the Piedmontese Usurper was occupying Peter’s so-called Patrimony and Intangible Rome. It is an ingrained idea with his school that peoples
