"A priest!" he gasped. "Get me a priest! Oh, if you would be saved from the flames of everlasting h.e.l.l, get me a priest to shrive me. I am dying, and I would not go hence with the burden of all this sin upon my soul."

I could feel the heat of his hand through the sleeve of my coat. His condition was plain. A raging fever was burning out his life.

"Be comforted," I said. "I will go at once." And I rose, whilst he poured forth his blessings upon me.

At the door I checked to ask what was the nearest place.

"Casi," he said hoa.r.s.ely. "To your right, you will see the path down the hill-side. You cannot miss it. In half an hour you should be there. And return at once, for I have not long. I feel it."

With a last word of rea.s.surance and comfort I closed the door, and plunged away into the darkness.

CHAPTER V. THE RENUNCIATION

I found the path the hermit spoke of, and followed its sinuous downhill course, now running when the ground was open, now moving more cautiously, yet always swiftly, when it led me through places darkened by trees.

At the end of a half-hour I espied below me the twinkling lights of a village on the hill-side, and a few minutes later I was among the houses of Casi. To find the priest in his little cottage by the church was an easy matter; to tell him my errand and to induce him to come with me, to tend the holy man who lay dying alone in the mountain, was as easy. To return, however, was the most difficult part of the undertaking; for the upward path was steep, and the priest was old and needed such a.s.sistance as my own very weary limbs could scarcely render him. We had the advantage of a lanthorn which he insisted upon bringing, and we made as good progress as could be expected. But it was best part of two hours after my setting out before we stood once more upon the little platform where the hermit had his hut.

We found the place in utter darkness. Through lack of oil his little lamp had burned itself out; and when we entered, the man on the bed of wattles lay singing a lewd tavern-song, which, coming from such holy lips, filled me with horror and amazement.

But the old priest, with that vast and doleful experience of death-beds which belongs to men of his cla.s.s, was quick to perceive the cause of this. The fever was flickering up before life's final extinction, and the poor moribund was delirious and knew not what he said.

For an hour we watched beside him, waiting. The priest was confident that there would be a return of consciousness and a spell of lucidity before the end.

Through that lugubrious hour I squatted there, watching the awful process of human dissolution for the first time.

Save in the case of Fifanti I had never yet seen death; nor could it be said that I had really seen it then. With the pedant, death had been a sudden sharp severing of the thread of life, and I had been conscious that he was dead without any appreciation of death itself, blinded in part by my own exalted condition at the time.

But in this death of Fra Sebastiano I was heated by no partic.i.p.ation.

I was an unwilling and detached spectator, brought there by force of circ.u.mstance; and my mind received from the spectacle an impression not easily to be effaced, an impression which may have been answerable in part for that which followed.

Towards dawn at last the sick man's babblings--and they were mostly as profane and lewd as his occasional bursts of song--were quieted. The unseeing glitter of his eyes that had ever and anon been turned upon us was changed to a dull and heavy consciousness, and he struggled to rise, but his limbs refused their office.

The priest leaned over him with a whispered word of comfort, then turned and signed to me to leave the hut. I rose, and went towards the door.

But I had scarcely reached it when there was a hoa.r.s.e cry behind me followed by a gasping sob from the priest. I started round to see the hermit lying on his back, his face rigid, his mouth open and idiotic, his eyes more leaden than they had been a moment since.

"What is it?" I cried, despite myself.

"He has gone, my son," answered the old priest sorrowfully. "But he was contrite, and he had lived a saint." And drawing from his breast a little silver box, he proceeded to perform the last rites upon the body from which the soul was already fled.

I came slowly back and knelt beside him, and long we remained there in silent prayer for the repose of that blessed spirit. And whilst we prayed the wind rose outside, and a storm grew in the bosom of the night that had been so fair and tranquil. The lightning flashed and illumined the interior of that hut with a vividness as of broad daylight, throwing into livid relief the arrow-pierced St. Sebastian in the niche and the ghastly, grinning skull upon the hermit's pulpit.

The thunder crashed and crackled, and the echoes of its artillery went booming and rolling round the hills, whilst the rain fell in a terrific lashing downpour. Some of it finding a weakness in the roof, trickled and dripped and formed a puddle in the middle of the hut.

For upwards of an hour the storm raged, and all the while we remained upon our knees beside the dead anchorite. Then the thunder receded and gradually died away in the distance; the rain ceased; and the dawn crept pale as a moon-stone adown the valley.

We went out to breathe the freshened air just as the first touches of the sun quickened to an opal splendour the pallor of that daybreak.

All the earth was steaming, and the Bagnanza, suddenly swollen, went thundering down the gorge.

At sunrise we dug a grave just below the platform with a spade which I found in the hut. There we buried the hermit, and over the spot I made a great cross with the largest stones that I could find. The priest would have given him burial in the hut itself; but I suggested that perhaps there might be some other who would be willing to take the hermit's place, and consecrate his life to carrying on the man's pious work of guarding that shrine and collecting alms for the poor and for the building of the bridge.

My tone caused the priest to look at me with sharp, kindly eyes.

"Have you such thoughts for yourself, perchance?" he asked me.

"Unless you should adjudge me too unworthy for the office," I answered humbly.

"But you are very young, my son," he said, and laid a kindly hand upon my shoulder. "Have you suffered, then, so sorely at the hands of the world that you should wish to renounce it and to take up this lonely life?"

"I was intended for the priesthood, father," I replied. "I aspired to holy orders. But through the sins of the flesh I have rendered myself unworthy. Here, perhaps, I can expiate and cleanse my heart of all the foulness it gathered in the world."

He left me an hour or so later, to make his way back to Casi, having heard enough of my past and having judged sufficiently of my att.i.tude of mind to approve me in my determination to do penance and seek peace in that isolation. Before going he bade me seek him out at Casi at any time should any doubts a.s.sail me, or should I find that the burden I had taken up was too heavy for my shoulders.

I watched him go down the winding, mountain path, watched the bent old figure in his long black gaberdine, until a turn in the path and a clump of chestnuts hid him from my sight.

Then I first tasted the loneliness to which on that fair morning I had vowed myself. The desolation of it touched me and awoke self-pity in my heart, to extinguish utterly the faint flame of ecstasy that had warmed me when first I thought of taking the dead anchorite's place.

I was not yet twenty, I was lord of great possessions, and of life I had tasted no more than one poisonous, reckless draught; yet I was done with the world--driven out of it by penitence. It was just; but it was bitter. And then I felt again that touch of ecstasy to reflect that it was the bitterness of the resolve that made it worthy, that through its very harshness was it that this path should lead to grace.

Later on I busied myself with an inspection of the hut, and my first attentions were for the miraculous image. I looked upon it with awe, and I knelt to it in prayer for forgiveness for the unworthiness I brought to the service of the shrine.

The image itself was very crude of workmanship and singularly ghastly.

It reminded me poignantly of the Crucifix that had hung upon the whitewashed wall of my mother's private dining-room and had been so repellent to my young eyes.

From two arrow wounds in the breast descended two brown streaks, relics of the last miraculous manifestation. The face of the young Roman centurion who had suffered martyrdom for his conversion to Christianity was smiling very sweetly and looking upwards, and in that part of his work the sculptor had been very happy. But the rest of the carving was gruesome and the anatomy was gross and bad, the figure being so disproportionately broad as to convey the impression of a stunted dwarf.

The big book standing upon the pulpit of plain deal proved, as I had expected, to be a missal; and it became my custom to recite from it each morning thereafter the office for the day.

In a rude cupboard I found a jar of baked earth that was half full of oil, and another larger jar containing some cakes of maize bread and a handful of chestnuts. There was also a brown bundle which resolved itself into a monkish habit within which was rolled a hair-shirt.

I took pleasure in this discovery, and I set myself at once to strip off my secular garments and to don this coa.r.s.e brown habit, which, by reason of my great height, descended but midway down my calves. For lack of sandals I went barefoot, and having made a bundle of the clothes I had removed I thrust them into the cupboard in the place of those which I had taken thence.

Thus did I, who had been vowed to the anchorite order of St. Augustine, enter upon my life as an unordained anchorite. I dragged out the wattles upon which my blessed predecessor had breathed his last, and having swept the place clean with a bundle of hazel-switches which I cut for the purpose, I went to gather fresh boughs and rushes by the swollen torrent, and with these I made myself a bed.

My existence became not only one of loneliness, but of grim privation.

People rarely came my way, save for a few faithful women from Casi or Fiori who solicited my prayers in return for the oil and maize-cakes which they left me, and sometimes whole days would pa.s.s without the sight of a single human being. These maize-cakes formed my chief nourishment, together with a store or nuts from the hazel coppice that grew before my door and some chestnuts which I went further afield to gather in the woods. Occasionally, as a gift, there would be a jar of olives, which was the greatest delicacy that I savoured in those days.

No flesh-food or fish did I ever taste, so that I grew very lean and often suffered hunger.

My days were spent partly in prayer and partly in meditation, and I pondered much upon what I could remember of the Confessions of St.

Augustine, deriving great consolation from the thought that if that great father of the Church had been able to win to grace out of so much sin as had befouled his youth, I had no reason to despair. And as yet I had received no absolution for the mortal offences I had committed at Piacenza. I had confessed to Fra Gervasio, and he had bidden me do penance first, but the penance had never been imposed. I was imposing it now. All my life should I impose it thus.

Yet, ere it was consummated I might come to die; and the thought appalled me, for I must not die in sin.

So I resolved that when I should have spent a year in that fastness I would send word to the priest at Casi by some of those who visited my hermitage, and desire him to come to me that I might seek absolution at his hands.