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Peter the Priest, a fiction by Maurus Jokai |
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Chapter 6. The Picture Of Saint Anthony |
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_ CHAPTER VI. THE PICTURE OF SAINT ANTHONY Magdalene knelt in prayer at the tomb of her brother. She too celebrated the anniversary of this sad day, when the blood of her beloved brother had been shed, and shed on her account. At one blow, she had lost brother and betrothed; for the hand that killed her brother could not lead her to the marriage altar, and yet both brother and betrothed had loved her. For this twofold love she had exchanged her father's hatred, for the father saw in his daughter only the murderer of his son. And what was the maiden's prayer? Both were dead, and prayer could not bring them back. Her happiness for this world was over, and she had no suspicion of the hand that had destroyed it. Deep stillness reigned throughout the church. Any other maiden would have been afraid to kneel here. The moon shone through the window, and lighted up the carving on the altar, the figure of the martyr, that bound to a tree and pierced through with arrows, writhed in his pain; lighted up, too, the dragon trampled under foot by the victorious archangel, the heavy candelabra, with their wax candles burned down, and finally the altar picture itself, with the figure of the Saint, with the monsters and the seductive woman. The moonlight crept in farther, and lighted up the marble slab under which her brother rested--a prostrate figure, with hands folded on the breast. In the tower hooted the owls, and the death-bird screamed. In the garden outside, the two bears growled to show that they were still on watch. From the castle hall, from time to time, sounded the noise of the drunken revellers. Magdalene would have gladly entered a convent, where her broken heart could have found most peace, but her father would not listen to it. He wanted to marry her, but no suitor came; the young nobility shunned the castle, they pitied the maiden for her sad fate, but they shrunk before the evil nature of her father. The mourning bride and raging father-in-law alike repelled them, and the more mournful the maiden, the more raging became Grazian Likovay. Amid all terrors for the maiden, the most frightful were these wild banquets. It was from these that she sought refuge in the darkness of the church. She knew well that such a revel was nothing but a wild chorus of blasphemy. A hundred throats at once derided Heaven, the future state, and the departed souls,--and this was the way in which the dead brother's memory was celebrated. She tried with her prayers to crowd out the drunken yells on their upward path; while the revellers wandered to the cellars, and their wild cries sounded on the air as if they came from the very bowels of the earth. The maiden trembled as if in fever. The moonlight had left the windows; the church now lay in darkness: only high up on the tower the moon yet shone on the lonely bell. She gazed upwards. Suddenly it seemed to her as if the bell were in motion. Was it an hallucination? Did her dream make visions so real? The bell rang! Then it tolled as for the welfare of a dying soul. And yet the bell had no rope, and there was no one to pull it if it had. In her astonishment new marvels followed. The darkness in the church began to give way to a twilight; 'twas the twilight that comes in dreams. The altar picture shone; around the brow of the saint gleamed an aureole, while the form of the seductive woman grew black. Before this marvel, the maiden sank trembling on her knees. "O God, my Lord!" she murmured. The last notes of the bell were dying away, and at the same moment dropped down with a rolling sound the picture of Saint Anthony of Padua with all its terrifying adjuncts, and in the space thus left vacant stood a living figure. Again it was Anthony of Padua in monk's cowl, barefooted, with tonsured head, a lighted torch in his hand. The maiden in terror clasped both hands to her breast. Did this vision bring death for her? Would that it might be so! The living figure stepped down from the frame of the altar picture, and striding over books and stools came nearer. With a gentle cry of terror the maiden sprang up, stretched out both hands in entreaty, and turned away her face. She heard her name, "Magdalene." Everything swam around her,--she fell in a swoon to the ground. When she recovered consciousness, she saw those eyes beaming upon her, whose glow was more wonderful than that of the sun. Perhaps dreams come in a swoon. Dreams are deceivers; who knows how many worlds her soul had wandered through in this short dream, how many eternities she had lived through; she feared the phantom no more. With his name on her lips she awoke, "Tihamer." To her he was always only "Tihamer." "Have you come down from Heaven to me?" The young monk shook his head sadly. He might with assurance have said that he came down from the realms of the dead, so pallid was his countenance, so cold his hands. The wax candle that he had brought with him now stood in a candlestick on the altar and lighted up their faces. The young man spoke in a subdued and gentle voice. "Be not astounded, I am no marvel, nor ghost, nor spirit from the other world. I am a living, miserable man. The rumor of my death was false. It was not my head that the Turks cut off in prison, but my servant's, who had changed clothes with me." "And this dress of yours?" whispered Magdalene, touching his rough monk's cowl. "This is my mourning garb for you, and for the whole world lost to me. My name is Father Peter. I belong to the order of Jesuits. No longer your beloved and betrothed--no longer the hope of your future, nor your support in misfortune. No longer your defender against men, but only your mediator between Heaven and earth, Father Peter." The maiden knelt before him and fervidly kissed his hand. "Father!" The youth sighed deeply. "You could not belong to me, so I give you to the Lord, you could not be my bride, so you shall be Heaven's bride. I am come to make smooth the way, to prepare the way whither you long to go." "To a convent? Then you know! Is it true, you have talked with me in my dreams?" "Not in your dreams. I will not deceive you. Sound reason has brought me to the knowledge that after this staggering blow that has fallen on your heart, you must long to enter a convent. Your father will not allow it; he intends to marry you to the Pole Berezowsky." "I do not know him at all." "I know him; this bridegroom intended for you is an ugly decrepit old drunkard, who has already buried six wives, and furthermore is a Socinian." "What! deny his God!" "Denies the Trinity, believes Christ only a good man, and the Holy Ghost only a white dove; nothing more." "But you will free me from him, won't you?" entreated the maiden, clasping the young man's knees. "With your assent." "How could you get here? Whence did you come?" "Truly, I have taken my way through the lower regions to come to you; a long underground passage, that men worse than the devil planned for the destruction of mankind, and that is still filled with evidences of their deeds of terror. It is frightful to wander there. The secret of this hidden way, I learned from an old yellowed book, which had made ten wise men fools, and whose secret was finally revealed by a Fool. This book too was a work of the Devil, but the real Hell and the genuine Devil, Fate has shown me in another form. The inexorable rules of our order compel me to serve as instructor and confessor in the house of that woman, who, in my opinion, is worse than Belial and all his demons. I am at the castle of the Lady of Madocsany." The maiden put her hand on her heart and caught her breath. "This is my Hell and my Devil; day after day to see the woman whom I have hated since our first acquaintance. Offensive is the woman, however beautiful she may be, who is ever eager to disclose to a man the feelings of her heart, which ought to be a secret to divine, a prize to win, a treasure to guard for their possessor. Still more ought this woman to have concealed her secret, for every one of her thoughts was inspired by sin; her husband still lived. How she became a widow was a burden on her conscience. How she treated me--may she answer for it to God! Her secrets told in confession rest in my breast under the seal of the sacrament. I must in God's name absolve her from sins that my human heart cannot forgive. Day after day must I look upon that face whose accursed smile destroyed our fortunes. I must lend an ear to her diabolical words of enticement, which she whispers to me under the mantle of confession. Is not that worse than Hell?" The maiden pressed his hand, and said in soothing tones, "You are right; yours is the greater suffering. I will not complain." "Your sufferings too are well known to me. This demon entertains me daily with bad news about you. She knows everything that happens in your house, and she takes special delight when she can distress me with such tales. But let us not waste our time in complaining. We must part. I have a long way to go underground and must arrive while it is still dark, so no one can mark the entrance by which I go. Answer me one question. Do you wish to go into a convent?" "It is my one wish." "It shall be fulfilled. I must first tell your decision to the Abbess of a convent, so that when I take you away through the underground passage to the Madocsany Castle, a nun may be waiting for you there with a closed carriage. Great prudence and careful preparations are necessary. We must agree upon the day for meeting here again." "Next Sunday." "Well, then, any Sunday after midnight. I cannot get away earlier, for it is so late before the spoiled child who is entrusted to my care falls asleep, and the Fool who keeps vigils with me becomes drunk." "But tell me," asked the maiden, "How could you guess that you would find me here at this hour? Did vision tell you?" "Even if I deceive the whole world, I will tell you only the truth. I have had no visions; neither ecstacy nor second-sight revealed this to me. I had certainty. To-day is the anniversary of your brother's death, and to-night it is celebrated in your castle with a carouse. You could not remain in the house, where every nook and corner was filled with their disgusting gluttony. Here only, could you find protection--at your brother's grave, where you could pray through the frightful night. You must pray, first for the soul of your brother, and then for his murderer's--the whole litany from beginning to end. Finally, I decided that if I did not find you here, I would pass through the church door into the castle. Many buffoons are there now, disguised in monk's cowl, and it would not have been difficult for me to join them and look for you." The young man saw a look of terror on Magdalene's face, and she seized him by the hand. "What is the matter?" he asked. She said nothing; she only thought what if her beloved had been torn to pieces by the bears in his attempt to pass to the castle. But she would not say this to him, lest she waken his fears for her, a weak woman; she must always pass to the church through such perils. "I was thinking," she said, with a constrained, distressed smile, "what if you had found the door locked when you tried to go out of the church?" "I knew for a fact that the door of the church is never locked. Your father has given orders that it shall always remain open. Every corner of this church has its sad history, but none more sad than the history of the door." "You know it?" "I heard it from the tormentor of my soul. It will be better for you not to know it; you have enough in your misfortune." "I beg of you, tell me this story. The knowledge that another has suffered still more gives me consolation. Who was it?" "Your older sister, Sophie." "I remember her; she was tall and beautiful, with large dark eyes. How often I stroked her beautiful rosy cheeks, when she took me in her lap, for I was still a child. And then I remember when they laid her in her coffin, I stroked her cheeks again, but they were marble-white and cold." "There she rests," said the young man, pointing to the wall, where two marble tablets were in sight, one large, one small; on one was a large cross, on the other a small one; then the date. On the smaller tablet one year more than on the larger, and that was all the inscription. "Why is there neither name nor inscription?" asked Magdalene, stunned. "There are two of them, mother and child." "And why are their names not on the tablets?" "They had no names." "I do not understand you." "You ought not to. It is a sad story. They too loved one another, more passionately than we. They too suffered, still more than we. They too were disturbed by your father in their love. Shame was to him preferable to a son-in-law. His daughter died the day her child was born, and was buried here; a year later the child followed; and when they brought her here to bury her beside her mother and opened the church door, your father stumbled over the body of his daughter; the unhappy girl had been buried in a trance, had wakened, struggled to the church door, found it locked, and so perished pitiably at its threshold." "Frightful!" stammered the maiden, shuddering, and glancing with a look of terror at the two tablets. "That is why there are no names inscribed. Since then, Grazian Likovay never has this church door locked." "Let us hurry away from here," said the maiden, trembling. "Will you come here next Sunday about midnight?" "I will come; but you must hurry away now." They parted with a pressure of the hand. Father Peter had to pass through the hiding-place behind the altar picture, which with all its demons resumed its place. For some time the face of Saint Anthony was surrounded with a halo of light from the torch of the departing monk. The small bell in the tower rang again, for it was connected by hidden clock-work with the secret passage-way. Formerly, when the castle had been held by the Hussites, this bell rung, by its secret clock-work, had given warning when any one was approaching from Madocsany. When the bell stopped ringing, the altar picture was again in darkness. It was two minutes past midnight; outside the cock crowed. The maiden, as she went toward the church door, looked timidly before and behind to see if her sister Sophie were present; outside a still greater terror waited. One bear lay across the threshold asleep. She needed only to summon all her courage and climb over him; but the other was awake, grimly gnawing a bone that he could not crush in his teeth. "Help me, God," sighed the maiden, and ran past the creature, throwing her honey-cakes as she went. The wild beasts let her pass unharmed, but it would have been better for her had they torn her to pieces, then would she have been a beautiful martyr and saint in Paradise. _ |
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