Читать книгу Carmen Ariza - Charles Francis Stocking - Страница 16

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Days passed––days whose every dawn found the priest staring in sleepless, wide-eyed terror at the ceiling above––days crowded with torturing apprehension and sickening suggestion––days when his knees quaked and his hands shook when his superiors addressed him in the performance of his customary duties. No mental picture was too frightful or abhorrent for him to entertain as portraying a possible consequence of the loss of his journal. He cowered in agony before 71 these visions. He dared not seek the little park again. He feared to show himself in the streets. He dreaded the short walk from his dormitory to the Vatican. His life became a sustained torture––a consuming agony of uncertainty, interminable suspense, fearful foreboding. The cruelty of his position corroded him. His health suffered, and his cassock hung like a bag about his emaciated form.

Then the filament snapped and the sword fell. On a dismal, rainy morning, some two months after the incident in the park, Josè was summoned into the private office of the Papal Secretary of State. As the priest entered the small room the Secretary, sitting alone at his desk, turned and looked at him long and fixedly.

“So, my son,” he said in a voice that froze the priest’s blood, “you are still alive?” Then, taking up a paper-covered book of medium size which apparently he had been reading, he held it out without comment.

Josè took it mechanically. The book was crudely printed and showed evidence of having been hastily issued. It came from the press of a Viennese publisher, and bore the startling title, “Confessions of a Roman Catholic Priest.” As in a dream Josè opened it. A cry escaped him, and the book fell from his hands. It was his journal!

There are sometimes crises in human lives when the storm-spent mind, tossing on the waves of heaving emotion, tugs and strains at the ties which moor it to reason, until they snap, and it sweeps out into the unknown, where blackness and terror rage above the fathomless deep. Such a crisis had entered the life of the unhappy priest, who now held in his shaking hand the garbled publication of his life’s most sacred thoughts. Into whose hands his notes had fallen on that black day when he had sacrificed everything for an unknown child, he knew not. How they had made their way into Austria, and into the pressroom of the heretical modernist who had gleefully issued them, twisted, exaggerated, but unabridged, he might not even imagine. The terrible fact remained that there in his hands they stared up at him in hideous mockery, his soul-convictions, his heart’s deepest and most inviolable thoughts, details of his own personal history, secrets of state––all ruthlessly exposed to the world’s vulgar curiosity and the rapacity of those who would not fail to play them up to the certain advantages to which they lent themselves all too well.

And there before him, too, were the Secretary’s sharp eyes, burning into his very soul. He essayed to speak, to rise to his own defense. But his throat filled, and the words which he would utter died on his trembling lips. The room whirled about 72 him. Floods of memory began to sweep over him in huge billows. The conflicting forces which had culminated in placing him in the paradoxical position in which he now stood raced before him in confused review. Objects lost their definite outlines and melted into the haze which rose before his straining eyes. All things at last merged into the terrible presence of the Papal Secretary, as he slowly rose, tall and gaunt, and with arm extended and long, bony finger pointing to the yellow river in the distance, said in words whose cruel suggestion scorched the raw soul of the suffering priest:

“My son, be advised: the Tiber covers many sins.”

Then pitying oblivion opened wide her arms, and the tired priest sank gently into them.