_ PART SEVEN. THE POPE
CHAPTER XIV
Next day, being Good Friday, was passed by the Pope in religious retreat, which was interrupted by indispensable business only. After Mass of the Presanctified he sat in his study with his confessor, while his chaplain in black passed through on tiptoe from the private chapel, and his chamberlains, tired out by the ceremonies of yesterday, dozed on their stools in the outer hall.
The day was bright but the room was darkened, and the hearts of the two old men were heavy. Over the face of the Pope there was a cloud of trouble, and the countenance of the Capuchin was solemn to the point of sternness. The friar sat in the old-fashioned easy-chair with his bare feet showing from under the edge of his brown habit; the Pope lay on the lounge with both hands in the vertical pockets of his white woollen cassock.
"Your Holiness is not well this morning?"
"Not very well, Father Pifferi."
"Your Holiness was disturbed by the interview in the Sacristy. But you should think no more about it. In any case, what the Minister proposed was impossible, therefore you must dismiss it from your mind. To ask a wife to reveal the secrets of her husband would be tyranny worse than the rack. Besides, it would be uncanonical, and your Holiness could never consider it."
"How so?"
"Didn't your Holiness promise that whatever the nature of this poor lady's confidence you would hold it as sacred as the confessional?"
"Well?"
"What is the confessional, your Holiness? It is a tribunal in which the priest is judge and the penitent a prisoner who pleads guilty. Is the priest to call witnesses to prove other crimes? He has no right and no power to do so."
"But where the penitent wittingly or unwittingly is in the position of an accomplice, what then, Father Pifferi?"
"Even then it is expressly forbidden to demand the names of others upon the plea of preventing evil. How can you hold this lady's confidence as sacred and yet ask her to denounce her husband?"
The Pope rose with a face full of pain, walked to the bookcase, and took down a book. "Listen, Father," he said, and he began to read:--
"_If the penitent was obliged under pain of mortal sin to reveal his accomplices to repair a common injury, I have maintained against other theologians that even then the confessor cannot oblige him to do so._"
"There!" cried the Capuchin. "What did I say? Gaume is wise, and the other theologians, who are they?"
"_Only_," continued the Pope, turning a page and holding up one finger, "_he can and must oblige him to make known his accomplices to other persons who can arrest the scandal._"
The Capuchin took a long breath. "Is that what the Holy Father intends to do in this instance?"
"He _can_ and _must_."
The Capuchin dropped his head, and there was a long pause, in which the Pope walked nervously about the room.
"Poor child!" said the Capuchin. "But perhaps her heart has been too much set on human love."
The Pope sighed.
"Yet who are we, whose hearts are closed to earthly affection, to prescribe a limit to human love?"
"Who indeed?" said the Pope.
"Do you recall her resemblance to any one, your Holiness?"
The Pope stopped in his walk and looked towards the curtained window.
"The same soft voice and radiant smile, the same attitude of idolatry towards the husband she is devoted to, the same...."
"The Sisters of the Sacred Heart will take her when all is over," said the Pope.
"And the man, too, whatever his errors, has a certain grandeur of soul, that lifts him far above these chief gaolers and detectives who call themselves statesmen and diplomatists, these scavengers of civilisation."
"He must go back to America and begin life again," said the Pope.
Two hours later Father Pifferi went off to fetch Roma, and the Pope sat down to his mid-day meal. The room was very quiet, and in the absence of the church bells the city seemed to sit in silence. Cortis stood behind the Pope's chair, and the cat sat on a stool at the opposite side of the table.
The chamberlains, lay and ecclesiastical, waited in the ante-camera, and the Swiss and Noble Guards, the Palatine Guards, and the _palfrenieri_ dotted the decorated halls that led to the royal stairs.
But the saintly old man, who had a palace yet no home, servants yet no family, an army yet no empire, who was the father of all men, yet knew no longer the ordinary joys and sorrows of human life, sat alone in his little plain apartment and ate his simple dish of spinach and beans. _