The Passport

The Passport
Richard Bagot

Richard Bagot

The Passport

I

The fierce heat of the mid-day hours was waning, and the leaves stirred in the first faint breath of the evening breeze stealing over the Roman Campagna from the sea that lay like a golden streak along the western horizon. It was the month of the sollione-of the midsummer sun "rejoicing as a giant to run his course." From twelve o'clock till four the little town of Montefiano, nestling among the lower spurs of the Sabine Hills, had been as a place from which all life had fled. Not a human creature had been visible in the steep, tufa-paved street leading up to the square palace that looked grimly down on the little township clustering beneath it-not even a dog; only some chickens dusting themselves, and a strayed pig.

The cicale, hidden among the branches of a group of venerable Spanish chestnuts on the piazza in front of the church, had never ceased their monotonous rattle; otherwise silence had reigned at Montefiano since the church bells had rung out mezzogiorno– that silence which falls on all nature in Italy during the hours when the sollione blazes in the heavens and breeds life on the earth.

But now, with the first coming of the evening breeze, casements were thrown open, green shutters which had been hermetically closed since morning were flung back and Montefiano awoke for the second time in the twenty-four hours.

A side door of the church opened, and Don Agostino, the parish priest, emerged from it, carrying his breviary in one hand and an umbrella tucked under the other arm. Crossing the little square hurriedly, for the western sun still beat fiercely upon the flag-stones, he sought the shade of the chestnut-trees, under which he began pacing slowly backwards and forwards, saying his office the while.

A tall, handsome man, Don Agostino was scarcely the type of priest usually to be met with in hill villages such as Montefiano. His black silk soutane was scrupulously clean and tidy; and its button-holes stitched with red, as well as the little patch of violet silk at his throat, proclaimed him to be a monsignore. Nobody at Montefiano called him so, however. To his parishioners he was simply Don Agostino; and, in a district in which priests were none too well looked upon, there was not a man, woman, or child who had not a good word to say for him.

This was the more remarkable inasmuch as Don Agostino was evidently of a very different social grade from even the most well-to-do among his flock. At first sight, a stranger would have thought that there could not be much in common between him and the peasants and farmers who stood in a little crowd at the doors of his church on a festa while he said mass, and still less with the women and children who knelt within the building. There was, however, the most important thing of all in common between them, and that was sympathy – human sympathy – so simple a thing, and yet so rare.

This, again, was remarkable; for no one could glance at Don Agostino's countenance without at once realizing that it belonged to a man who was probably intellectual and certainly refined. It would not be imagined, for instance, that there could be any fellow-feeling between him and the woman a few yards down the street who, indifferent as to the scantiness of the garments by way of clothing a well-developed bust, was leaning out of a window screaming objurgations at a small boy for chasing the strayed pig. Nevertheless, Don Agostino would doubtless have entered into the feelings of both the woman and the boy – and, probably, also into those of the pig – had he noticed the uproar, which, his thoughts being concentrated for the moment on the saying of his office, he did not do.

He had been at Montefiano some years now, and the stories current at the time of his arrival in the place as to the reason why he had been sent there from Rome were wellnigh forgotten by his parishioners. At first they held aloof from him suspiciously, as from one who was not of their condition in life, and who had only been sent to Montefiano because – well, because of some indiscretion committed at Rome. Some said it was politics, others that it was women, and others, again, that it was neither the one nor the other. All agreed that an instruito like Don Agostino, with his air of a gran signore, and money behind that air, too, was not sent to a place like Montefiano for nothing.

Don Agostino, however, had not troubled himself as to what was said or thought, but had taken up his duties with that unquestioning obedience which spiritual Rome has incorporated with the rest of her heritage from the Cæsars. He neither offered any explanations nor made any complaints concerning the surroundings to which he found himself relegated. For two or three years after his first coming to Montefiano strangers had sometimes visited him, and once or twice a cardinal had come from Rome to see him – but that was ten years ago and more, and now nobody came. Probably, the Montefianesi said, the Vatican had forgotten him; and they added, with a shrug of the shoulders, that it was better for a priest to be forgotten in Montefiano than remembered in a cup of chocolate in Rome.

As to any little affair of morals – well, it was certain that twenty, nay, even fifteen, years ago Don Agostino must have been a very good-looking young man, priest or no priest; and shoulders were shrugged again.

Whatever had been the cause of it, morals or politics, Monsignor Agostino was parroco of Montefiano, a Sabine village forty miles from Rome, with a population of some three thousand souls – a gray mass of houses clustering on a hill-side, crowned by the feudal fortress of its owners who had not slept a night within its walls since Don Agostino had taken over the spiritual interests of their people.

To be sure, Montefiano was a commune, and petty officialism was as rampant within its bounds as in many a more important place. But the princes of Montefiano were lords of the soil, and lords also of its tillers, as they were of other possessions in the Agro Romano. There had been a time, not so very many years ago, when a prince of Montefiano could post from Rome to Naples, passing each night on one of the family properties; but building-contractors, cards, and cocottes had combined to reduce the acreage in the late prince's lifetime, and Montefiano was now one of the last of the estates left to his only child, a girl of barely eighteen summers.

The Montefiano family had been singularly unlucky in its last two generations. The three younger brothers of the late prince had died – two of them when mere lads, and the third as a married but childless man. The prince himself had married early in life the beautiful daughter of a well-known Venetian house, who had brought a considerable dowry with her, and whom he had deceived and neglected from the first week of his marriage with her until her death, which had occurred when the one child born of the union was but a few months old.

Then, after some years, the prince had married again. He had taken to religion in later life, when health had suddenly failed him.

His second wife was a Belgian by birth, and had gained a considerable reputation for holiness in "black" circles in Rome. Indeed, it was generally supposed that it was a mere question of time before Mademoiselle d'Antin should take the veil. Other questions, however, apparently presented themselves for her consideration, and she took the Principe di Montefiano instead. It appeared that, after all, this, and not the cloister, was her true vocation; for she piloted the broken-down roué skilfully, and at the same time rapidly to the entrance, at all events, to purgatory, where she left the helm in order to enjoy her widow's portion, and to undertake the guardianship of her youthful step-daughter Donna Bianca Acorari, now princess of Montefiano in her own right.

Some people in Rome said that the deceased Montefiano was bored and prayed to death by his pious wife and the priests with whom she surrounded him. These, however, were chiefly the boon companions of the prince's unregenerate days, whose constitutions were presumably stronger than his had proved itself to be.

Rome – respectable Rome – was edified at the ending that the Prince of Montefiano had made, at the piety of his widow, and also at the fact that there was more money in the Montefiano coffers than anybody had suspected could be the case.

The portion left to the widowed princess was, if not large, at least considerably larger than had been anticipated even by those who believed that they knew the state of her husband's affairs better than their neighbors; and by the time Donna Bianca should be of an age to marry, her fortune would, or should, be worth the attention of any husband, let alone the fiefs and titles she would bring into that husband's family.

The Princess of Montefiano, since her widowhood, had continued to live quietly on the first floor of the gloomy old palace behind the Piazza Campitelli, in Rome, which had belonged to the family from the sixteenth century. The months of August, September, and October she and her step-daughter usually spent at a villa near Velletri, but except for this brief period Rome was their only habitation. The princess went little into the world, even into that of the "black" society, and it was generally understood that she occupied herself with good works. Indeed, those who professed to know her intimately declared that had it not been for the sense of her duty towards her husband's little girl, she would have long ago retired into a convent, and would certainly do so when Donna Bianca married.

In the mean time, the great, square building, with its Renaissance façade which dominated the little town of Montefiano, remained unvisited by its possessors, and occupied only by the agent and his family, who lived in a vast apartment on the ground-floor of the palace. The agent collected the rents and forwarded them to the princess's man of business in Rome, and to the good people of Montefiano the saints and the angels were personalities far more realizable than were the owners of the soil on which they labored.

Not that Don Agostino knew the princess any better than did his parishioners. He always insisted that he had never seen her. His attitude, indeed, had been a perpetual cause of surprise to the agent, who, when Don Agostino first came to the place, had not unreasonably supposed that whenever the priest went to Rome, which he did at long intervals, becoming ever longer as time went on, one of his first objects would be to present himself at the Palazzo Acorari.

Apparently, however, Don Agostino did not deem it necessary to know the princess or Donna Bianca personally. Possibly he considered that so long as his formal letters to the princess on behalf of his flock in times of distress or sickness met with a satisfactory response, there was no reason to obtrude himself individually on their notice. This, at least, was the conclusion that the agent and the official classes of Montefiano arrived at. As to the humbler members of Don Agostino's flock, they did not trouble themselves to draw any conclusions except the most satisfactory one involved in the knowledge that, as the Madonna and the saints stood between them and Domeneddio without their being personally acquainted with him, so Don Agostino stood between them and the excellencies in Rome, who, of course, could not spare the time to visit so distant a place as Montefiano.

II

Don Agostino, his office completed, closed his breviary and stood gazing across the plain below to where Rome lay. On a clear day, and almost always in the early mornings in summer, the cupola of St. Peter's could be seen from Montefiano, hung, as it were, midway between earth and heaven; but now only a low-lying curtain of haze marked the position of the city. Down in the valley, winding between low cliffs clothed with brushwood and stunted oaks, the waters of the Tiber flashed in the slanting sun-rays, and the bold outline of Soracte rose in the blue distance, like an island floating upon a summer sea.

And Don Agostino stood and gazed, and as he did so he thought of the restless life forever seething in the far-off city he knew so well – the busy brains that were working, calculating, intriguing in the shadow of that mighty dome which bore the emblem of self-sacrifice and humility on its summit, and of all the good and all the evil that was being wrought beneath that purple patch of mist that hid – Rome.

None knew the good and the evil better than he, and the mysterious way in which the one sprang from the other in a never-ending circle, as it had sprung now for wellnigh twenty centuries – ever since the old gods began to wear halos and to be called saints.

Don Agostino, or, to give him his proper name and ecclesiastical rank, Monsignor Lelli, had been a canon of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, in Rome, before he fell into disgrace at the Vatican.

Notwithstanding the gossip which had been rife concerning the reasons for his exile from Rome to Montefiano, private morals had had nothing to do with the matter. For several years he had filled a post of some confidence at the Vatican – a post, like that held by Judas Iscariot, involving considerable financial responsibility.

Judas Iscariot, however, had been more fortunate than Monsignor Lelli, inasmuch as he was attached to the financial service of Christ, and not to that of Christ's vicar.

To make a long story short, certain loans, advanced for political purposes, though private social interests were not extraneous to the transactions, lightened the money-bags to an unforeseen extent, and the securities which Monsignor Lelli held in their stead soon proved to be little better than waste paper. It was known that Monsignor Lelli had acted under protest, and, moreover, that he had obeyed instructions which he had no choice but to obey.

The Vatican, however, differs in no way from any other organization to carry on which the rules of discipline must be strictly maintained; and when a superior officer blunders, a subordinate must, if possible, be found to bear the blame. In this case Monsignor Lelli was manifestly the fit and proper scape-goat; and here all comparison with Judas Iscariot ended, for he had walked off with his burden to Montefiano without uttering so much as a protesting bleat.

But at Rome the true motives for actions both public and private are rarely to be discovered on the surface. Nominally, Monsignor Lelli's disgrace was the direct consequence of his negligence in safeguarding the sums of money for the sound investment of which he was supposed to be responsible. Practically, its cause lay elsewhere. He was known to be a Liberal in his political views, the friend of a prominent foreign cardinal resident in Rome, to whose influence, indeed, he owed his canonry of Santa Maria Maggiore, and whose attitude towards the Italian government, and also towards various dogmatic questions, had for some time aroused the ill-will of a pontiff who was even more anti-Italian than his predecessor. Unfortunately for himself, Monsignor Lelli had published his views on the relations between Church and State, and had drawn down upon his head the wrath of the clerical party in consequence. His enemies, and they were many, left no means untried to bring about his disgrace, fully aware that by doing so they would at the same time be striking a blow at the obnoxious cardinal who supported not only Monsignor Lelli but also every Liberal ecclesiastic in Rome. When it became evident that more than one grave financial blunder had been committed by others in authority, it was equally obvious that the moment to strike this blow had arrived, and it was delivered accordingly.

All these things, however, had happened years ago. The cardinal was dead – of one of those mysteriously rapid illnesses which he made no secret to his more intimate friends as being likely some day to overtake him – and Monsignor Lelli remained at Montefiano, forgotten, as his parishioners declared, though he himself knew well that at Rome nothing is forgotten, and that so long as his enemies lived, so long would he, Monsignor Lelli, be required to devote his learning and his intellect to the needs of a peasant population. Afterwards – well, it was of the afterwards he was thinking, as he gazed dreamily over the great plain stretching away to Rome, when the sound of horses' hoofs in the street below attracted his attention, and, looking round, he saw the agent, Giuseppe Fontana – Sor Beppe, as he was commonly called in Montefiano – riding towards him apparently in some haste.

Don Agostino moved out of the shade to meet him.

"Signor Fattore, good-evening!" he said, courteously, knowing that the man liked to be given his full official title as administrator of the Montefiano fief.

Sor Beppe rode up alongside of him, raising his felt hat as he returned the salutation. He wore his official coat of dark-blue cloth, on the silver buttons of which were engraved the arms and coronet of the Montefiano. He was a powerfully made man with a dark, grizzled beard, inclining to gray, and he sat his horse – a well-built black stallion – as one who was more often in the saddle than out of it. On ordinary days he would carry a double-barrelled gun slung across his shoulders, but to-day the weapon was absent.

Don Agostino noted the fact, and also that the agent's face was lighted up with unusual excitement.

"And what is there new, Signor Fontana?" he asked, briefly.

"Perbacco! What is there new?" repeated Fontana. "There is a whole world of new – but your reverence will never guess what it is! Such a thing has not happened for fifteen years – "

"But what is it?" insisted Don Agostino, tranquilly. "I quite believe that nothing new has happened in Montefiano for fifteen years. I have been here nearly ten, and – "

"I have ridden down to tell you. The letter came only an hour ago. Her excellency the princess – their excellencies the princesses, I should say – "

"Well," interrupted Don Agostino, "what about them?"

The agent took a letter from his pocket and spread it out on the pommel of his saddle. Then he handed it to Don Agostino.

"There!" he exclaimed. "It is her excellency herself who writes. They are coming here – to the palace – to stay for weeks – months, perhaps."

Don Agostino uttered a sudden ejaculation. It was difficult to say whether it was of surprise or dismay.

"Here!" he said – "to Montefiano? But the place is dismantled – a barrack!"