You have made a vow--an outrageous votive offering of something
that is not yours to bestow. That vow you cannot break, you say. Be it
so. But I must seek a remedy elsewhere. To save my son from the Church to
which you would doom him, I will, ere I have done, tear down the Church and
make an end of it in Italy."
And at that she would shrivel up before him with a little moan of horror,
taking her poor white face in her hands.
"Blasphemer!" she would cry in mingled terror and aversion, and upon that
word--the "Amen" to all their conferences in those last days they spent
together--she would turn, and dragging me with her, all stunned and
bewildered by something beyond my understanding, she would hurry me to the
chapel of the citadel, and there, before the high altar, prostrate herself
and spend long hours in awful sobbing intercessions.
And so the gulf between them widened until the day of his departure.
I was not present at their parting. What farewells may have been spoken
between them, what premonitions may have troubled one or the other that
they were destined never to meet again, I do not know.
I remember being rudely awakened one dark morning early in the year, and
lifted from my bed by arms to whose clasp I never failed to thrill. Close
to mine was pressed a hot, dark, shaven hawk-face; a pair of great eyes,
humid with tears, considered me passionately.
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