How can you serve God here? Is not the world God's world
that you must shun it as if the Devil had fashioned it? Go, I say--and I
say it with the authority of the orders that I bear--go and serve man, and
thus shall you best serve God. All else are but snares to such a nature as
yours."
I looked at him helplessly, and from him to Galeotto who stood there, his
black brows knit; watching me with intentness as if great issues hung upon
my answer. And Gervasio's words touched in my mind some chord of memory.
They were words that I had heard before--or something very like them,
something whose import was the same.
Then I groaned miserably and took my head in my hands. "Whither am I to
go?" I cried. "What place is there in all the world for me? I am an
outcast. My very home is held against me. Whither, then, shall I go?"
"If that is all that troubles you," said Galeotto, his tone unctuously
humorous, "why we will ride to Pagliano."
I leapt at the word--literally leapt to my feet, and stared at him with
blazing eyes.
"Why, what ails him now?" quoth he.
Well might he ask. That name--Pagliano--had stirred my memory so
violently, that of a sudden as in a flash I had seen again the strange
vision that visited my delirium; I had seen again the inviting eyes, the
beckoning hands, and heard again the gentle voice saying, "Come to
Pagliano! Come soon!"
And now I knew, too, where I had heard words urging my return to the world
that were of the same import as those which Gervasio used.
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