The Passport

"And do I not know it – I?" returned Sor Beppe. "There are some tables and some chairs – and there are things that once were beds; but there is nothing else, unless it is some pictures on the walls – and the prince – blessed soul – took the best of those to Rome years ago."

Don Agostino read the letter attentively.

"The princess says that all the necessary furniture will be sent from Rome at once," he observed, "and servants – everything, in fact. The rooms on the piano nobile are to be made ready – and the chapel. Well, Signor Fontana," he continued, "you will have plenty to occupy your time if, as the princess says, everything is to be ready in a fortnight from to-day. After all, the palace was built to be lived in – is it not true?"

"Very true, reverence; but it is so sudden. After so many years, to want everything done in fifteen days – "

"Women, my dear Signor Fontana – women!" said Don Agostino, deprecatingly.

The agent laughed. "That is what I said to my wife," he replied.

"It was not a wise thing to say," observed Don Agostino.

"It is an incredible affair," resumed the other, brushing a fly from his horse's flank as he spoke; "and no reception by the people – as little notice as possible to be taken of their excellencies' arrival. You see what the letter says, reverence?"

"Yes," replied Don Agostino, meditatively. "It is unusual, certainly, under the circumstances."

"But," he added, "the princess has undoubtedly some good reason for wishing to arrive at Montefiano in as quiet a manner as possible. Perhaps she is ill, or her daughter is ill – who knows?"

"They say she is a saint," observed Fontana.

Don Agostino looked at him; the tone of Sor Beppe's voice implied that such a fact would account for any eccentricity. Then he smiled.

"She is at all events the mistress of Montefiano, until the young princess is of age or marries," he remarked; "so, Signor Fontana, there is nothing more to be said or done."

"Except to obey her excellency's instructions."

"Exactly – except to obey her instructions," repeated Don Agostino.

"It is strange that your reverence, the parroco of Montefiano, should never have seen our padrona."

"It is still stranger that you – her representative here – should never have seen her," returned Don Agostino.

"That is true," said the agent; "but" – and his white teeth gleamed in his beard as he smiled – "saints do not often show themselves, reverendo! My respects," he added, lifting his hat and gathering up his reins. "I have to ride down to Poggio to arrange with the station-master there for the arrival of the things which will be sent from Rome." And settling himself in his saddle, Sor Beppe started off at an easy canter and soon disappeared round a turn of the white road, leaving a cloud of dust behind him.

Don Agostino looked after him for a moment or two, and then returned thoughtfully to his house.

The intelligence the agent had brought him was news, indeed, and he wondered what its true purport might be. It was certainly strange that, after studiously avoiding Montefiano for all these years, the princess should suddenly take it into her head to come there for a prolonged stay. Hitherto, Don Agostino had been very happy in his exile, chiefly because that exile was so complete. There had been nobody at Montefiano to rake up the past, to open old wounds which the passing of years had cicatrized, and which only throbbed now and again when memory insisted upon asserting her rights.

The petty jealousies and malignities which poison the atmosphere of most courts, and which in that of the Vatican are the more poisonous inasmuch as they wear a religious mask, could not penetrate to Montefiano, or, if they did, could not long survive out of the air of Rome. Monsignor Lelli had quickly realized this; and, the confidence of his parishioners once gained, he had learned to appreciate the change of air. The financial conditions of the Vatican did not interest Montefiano. Consequently, the story of Don Agostino's financial indiscretions had not reached the little room in the Corso Garibaldi, which was the nightly resort of the more wealthy among the community, and in which high political matters were settled with a rapidity that should have made the parliaments of Europe blush – were any one of them capable of blushing.

As to the other stories – well, Don Agostino had soon lived them down. Montefiano had declared – with some cynicism, perhaps, but with much justice – that there were those who were lucky in their adventures and those who were unlucky, and that priests, when all was said and done, were much the same as other people. Nevertheless, Montefiano had kept its eyes on Don Agostino for a while, in case of accidents – for nobody likes accidents to happen at home.

But it was not entirely of these matters that Don Agostino was thinking as he let himself into the little garden by the side of the church. His house, connected with the sacristy by a pergola over which vines and roses were struggling for the mastery, stood at the end of this garden, and Don Agostino, opening the door quietly lest his housekeeper should hear and descend upon him, passed into his study.

The news Sor Beppe had brought had awakened other memories – memories which took him back to the days before he was a priest; when he had been a young fellow of three or four and twenty, very free from care, very good to look upon, and very much in love.

It was strange, perhaps, that the impending arrival at Montefiano of an elderly lady and a girl of seventeen, neither of whom Don Agostino had ever seen, should arouse in him memories of his own youth; but so it was. Such links in the chain that binds us to the past – a chain that perhaps death itself is powerless to break – are perpetually forging themselves in the present, and often trifles as light as air rivet them.

In this case the link had been forged long ago. Don Agostino remembered the forging of it every time he donned the sacred vestments to say mass, and was conscious that the years had riveted it only more firmly.

It was, perhaps, as well that his housekeeper was busy plucking a chicken in the back premises; and it was certainly as well that none of his flock could have observed their pastor's actions when he had shut himself into his study, otherwise unprofitable surmises, long rejected as such, would have cropped up again round the measures of wine in the Caffè Garibaldi that evening.

For some time Don Agostino sat in front of his writing-table thinking, his face buried in his hands. The joyous chattering of the house-martins flying to and from their nests came through the open windows, and the scent of roses and Madonna lilies. But presently the liquid notes of the swallows changed into the soft lapping of waters rising and falling on marble steps; the scent of the lilies was there, but mingling with it was the salt smell of the lagoons, the warm, silky air blowing in from the Adriatic. The distant sounds from the village street became, in Don Agostino's ears, the cries of the gondoliers and the fishermen, and Venice rose before his eyes – Venice, with the rosy light of a summer evening falling on her palaces and her churches, turning her laughing waters into liquid flame; Venice, with her murmur of music in the air as the gondolas and the fishing-boats glided away from the city across the lagoons to the Lido and the sea; Venice, holding out to him youth and love, and the first sweet dawning of the passion that only youth and love can know.

Suddenly Don Agostino raised his head and looked about him as one looks who wakes from a dream. His eyes fell upon the crucifix standing on his table and on the ivory Christ nailed to it. And then his dream passed.

Rising, he crossed the room, and, unlocking a cabinet, took from it a tiny miniature and one letter – the only one left to him, for he had burned the rest. The keeping of this letter had been a compromise. For do not the best of us make a compromise with our consciences occasionally?

The face in the miniature was that of a young girl – a child almost – but exceedingly beautiful, with the red-gold hair and creamy coloring of the Venetian woman of the Renaissance.

Don Agostino looked at it long; afterwards, almost mechanically, he raised the picture towards his lips. Then, with a sudden gesture, as though realizing what he was about to do, he thrust it back into the drawer of the cabinet. But he kissed the letter before he replaced it beside the miniature.

It was merely another compromise, this time not so much with his conscience, perhaps, as with his priesthood.

"Bianca!" he said, aloud, and his voice dwelt on the name with a lingering tenderness. "Bianca! And she – that other woman – she brings your child here – here, where I am! Well, perhaps it is you who send her – who knows? Perhaps it was you who sent me to Montefiano – you, or the blessed Mother of us all – again, who knows? It was strange, was it not, that of all places they should send me here, where your child was born, the child that should have been – "

The door was flung open hastily, and Don Agostino's housekeeper filled the threshold.

"Madonna mia Santissima!" she exclaimed. "It is your reverence, after all. I thought I heard voices – "

"Yes, Ernana, it is I," said Don Agostino, quietly.

"Accidente! but you frightened me!" grumbled the woman. "I was plucking the chicken for your reverence's supper, and – "

"So I perceive," remarked Don Agostino, watching feathers falling off her person to the floor. "And you heard voices," he added. "Well, I was talking to myself. You can return to the chicken, Ernana, in peace!"

"The chicken is a fat chicken," observed Ernana, reflectively. "A proposito," she added, "will your reverence eat it boiled? It sits more lightly on the stomach at night – boiled."

"I will eat it boiled," said Don Agostino.

"And with a contorno of rice?"

Don Agostino sighed.

"Rice?" he repeated, absently. "Of course, Ernana; with rice, certainly with rice."

III

Palazzo Acorari, the residence in Rome of the princes of Montefiano, was situated, as has already been said, in that old quarter of the city known as the Campitelli. It stood, indeed, but a few yards away from the piazza of the name, in a deserted little square through which few people passed save those whose business took them into the squalid streets and vicoli opening out of the Piazza Montanara.

It was not one of the well-known palaces of Rome, although it was of far greater antiquity than many described at length in the guide-books; neither was it large in comparison with some of its near neighbors. Nine people out of ten, if asked by a stranger to direct them to Palazzo Acorari, would have been unable to reply, although, from a mingled sense of the courtesy due to a forestiero, and fear of being taken for forestiero themselves, they would probably have attempted to do so all the same, to the subsequent indignation of the stranger.

There was no particular reason why Palazzo Acorari should be well known. It contained no famous works of art, and its apartments, though stately in their way, were neither historic nor on a large enough scale to have ever been rented by rich foreigners as a stage on which they could play at being Roman nobles to an appreciative if somewhat cynical audience.

A narrow and gloomy porte cochère opened from the street into the court-yard round which the Palazzo Acorari was built. Except for an hour or two at mid-day no ray of sunlight ever penetrated into this court, which, nevertheless, was picturesque enough with its graceful arches and its time-worn statues mounting guard around it. A porter in faded livery dozed in his little office on one side of the entrance, in the intervals of gossiping with a passer-by on the doings and misdoings of the neighbors, and he, together with a few pigeons and a black cat, were generally the only animate objects to be seen by those who happened to glance into the quadrangle.

The princess and her step-daughter inhabited the first floor of the palace, while the ground-floor was apportioned off into various locali opening on to the streets, in which a cobbler, a retail charcoal and coke vender, a mattress-maker, and others plied their respective trades.