“Pray do not quote Cardinal Mundo.”
“Well, in short, I was irresistibly moved to propose Your Holiness—”
“And then, because no other candidate was forthcoming: because—We understand. You came to Us, found Us persistent—”
“Yes, Holiness.”
“Well: shall we take a little stroll in the garden, and say some Office?”
Cardinal Courtleigh jumped. “I’m sure—if Your Holiness doesn’t mind walking by the side of my bath-chair—”
“Oh, but We do. It is Our invariable custom to walk behind bath-chairs and push them.”
“Indeed I could not for one moment permit—”
“No: but for an hour you will submit. Nonsense man, do you suppose that one never has pushed a bath-chair before! Now sit-down quietly and open your breviary and read the Office; and We will look over your shoulder and make the responses. It’s awfully good exercise, you know.”
VII
After his morning’s exertions in the way of taming and domesticating a prince of the church, Hadrian was conscious that He required a change of emotions. His thoughts went to the next thing on His list—the matter of Cardinal Nefski. That would be an exceedingly interesting experience. He did not want to intrude upon grief: but He was attracted by all singular phenomena; and the pathos of the pale young prelate seemed to be quite exemplary. Once in His secular life, George Arthur Rose had been taken by a doctor to see a man who had severed his throat in an unusual manner, using a broken penknife and cutting a jagged triangle, of which the apex missed the larynx, and the base the sterno-kleido-mastoid, avoiding by a hair’s breadth carotid and jugular. The doctor wanted a diagram of the wound made for the enlightenment of the jury which was to pronounce upon attempted suicide; and George had made the sketch from the staring speechless life, noted the furniture of the room and the aspect of his model, quite untouched by the man’s sensations or the horror of the event. Hadrian approached Cardinal Nefski with similar feelings. He was curious, He was psychically apart: but, at the same time, something of subconscious sympathy in His manner elicited the desired revelation. It was a ghastly one. Nefski, Cardinal Archbishop, had rushed to a little city in Russian Poland, occupied by anarchists, for the purpose of pleading with them. He arrived at sunset. There was a college there where a hundred and twenty lads of noble birth were being educated: among them, his own youngest brother, just seventeen years old. The cardinal was seized and crucified with ropes to the fountain in the market-square. Anarchists burst into the college: stripped its inmates naked; and flung them into the street before his eyes. He absolved each one dashed from the lofty windows. Some instantly were smashed and killed: others, who fell on others, were broken and shattered, but not killed outright. All night long, Nefski remained crucified. The anarchists must have forgotten him: for they left him; and at dawn someone, whom he did not know, came and cut him down. He remembered nothing more, until he found himself paralyzed, in a wagon with two priests, en route for Prague. Then he came on to Rome, hoping to lose the phantasm which continually occupied his sight and hearing—the heap in the dark night, the growing groaning heap on red stones of white young bodies and writhing limbs like maggots in cheese, the pale forms strained and curved, the flying hair, the fixed eyes, continually falling, the cut-off shrieks, the thudding bounding ooze of that falling, the interminable white writhing. It was a ghastly tale, quite unimpassionately told. The young man still was in that stupor which benignant Nature sends by the side of extreme pain. His paralysis was passing away. He could walk easily now—only he saw and heard. He spoke affectionately of his murdered brother: but he did not mourn for him.
Hadrian was moved. He put all the human kindness which he had, and it was not much, into His voice and manner. He really tried to comfort the cardinal. He quoted the splendid verses of the herald in the Seven Against Thebes,
being pure in respect to the sacred rites of his country,
blameless hath he fallen, where ’tis glorious for the young to fall.
Nefski seemed grateful. The Pontiff offered to remove him from Prague; and to attach him to the Court of Rome: but he preferred to return to his archbishopric for the present, at least, he said, until this tyranny be overpast. And, anon, he asked permission to retire. The sunlight dazzled him.
During the rest of the time at Castel Gandolfo, the Pope seldom was seen. A boatman rowed Him out on Lake Albano for an hour or two in the afternoon, while He occupied Himself in pencilling corrections on manuscript. But the white figure, set in the blaze of the sunny blue water, did not escape the notice of passersby on the high road near the Riformati; and, finding Himself under observation, He returned to the seclusion of the garden. His memory flew back to the time when people used to jeer at Him for His
