However, it was not in money only that Cardinal Udeschim paid. He paid also in labour. I have said that his titular church was in a slum. Rome surely contained no slum more fetid, none more perilous--a region of cut-throat alleys, south of the Ghetto, along the Tiber bank. Night after night, accompanied by his stout young vicar, Don Giorgio Appolloni, the Cardinal worked there as hard as any hard-working curate: visiting the sick, comforting the afflicted, admonishing the knavish, persuading the drunken from their taverns, making peace between the combative. Not infrequently, when he came home, he would add a pair of stilettos to his already large collection of such relics. And his homecomings were apt to be late--oftener than not, after midnight; and sometimes, indeed, in the vague twilight of morning, at the hour when, as he once expressed it to Don Giorgio, “the tired burglar is just lying down to rest.” And every Saturday evening the Cardinal Prefect of Archives and Inscriptions sat for three hours boxed up in his confessional, like any parish priest--in his confessional at St. Mary of the Lilies, where the penitents who breathed their secrets into his ears, and received his fatherly counsels... I beg your pardon. One must not, of course, remember his rags or his sores, when Lazarus approaches that tribunal.
But I don't pretend that the Cardinal was a saint; I am sure he was not a prig. For all his works of supererogation, his life was a life of pomp and luxury, compared to the proper saint's life. He wore no hair shirt; I doubt if he knew the taste of the Discipline. He had his weaknesses, his foibles--even, if you will, his vices. I have intimated that he was fond of a jest. “The Sacred College,” I heard him remark one day, “has fifty centres of gravity. I sometimes fear that I am its centre of levity.” He was also fond of music. He was also fond of snuff:
“'T is an abominable habit,” he admitted. “I can't tolerate it at all--in others. When I was Bishop of Cittareggio, I discountenanced it utterly among my clergy. But for myself--I need not say there are special circumstances. Oddly enough, by the bye, at Cittareggio each separate member of my clergy was able to plead special circumstances for himself I have tried to give it up, and the effort has spoiled my temper--turned me into a perfect old shrew. For my friends' sake, therefore, I appease myself with an occasional pinch. You see, tobacco is antiseptic. It's an excellent preservative of the milk of human kindness.”
The friends in question kept him supplied with sound rappee. Jests and music he was abundantly competent to supply himself. He played the piano and the organ, and he sang--in a clear, sweet, slightly faded tenor. Of secular composers his favourites were “the lucid Scarlatti, the luminous Bach.” But the music that roused him to enthusiasm was Gregorian. He would have none other at St. Mary of the Lilies. He had trained his priests and his people there to sing it admirably--you should have heard them sing Vespers; and he sang it admirably himself--you should have heard him sing a Mass--you should have heard that sweet old tenor voice of his in the Preface and the Pater Noster.
So, then, Beatrice stood before a pier-glass, and studied her new hat; whilst the Cardinal, amused, indulgent, sat in his high-backed armchair, and watched her.
“Well--? What do you think?” she asked, turning towards him.
“You appeal to me as an expert?” he questioned.
His speaking-voice, as well as his singing-voice, was sweet, but with a kind of trenchant edge upon it, a genial asperity, that gave it character, tang.
“As one who should certainly be able to advise,” said she.
“Well, then--” said he. He took his chin into his hand, as if it were a beard, and looked up at her, considering; and the lines of amusement--the “parentheses”--deepened at either side of his mouth. “Well, then, I think if the feather were to be lifted a little higher in front, and brought down a little lower behind--”
“Good gracious, I don't mean my hat,” cried Beatrice. “What in the world can an old dear like you know about hats?”
There was a further deepening of the parentheses.
“Surely,” he contended, “a cardinal should know much. Is it not 'the badge of all our tribe,' as your poet Byron says?”
Beatrice laughed. Then, “Byron--?” she doubted, with a look.
The Cardinal waved his hand--a gesture of amiable concession.
“Oh, if you prefer, Shakespeare. Everything in English is one or the other. We will not fall out, like the Morellists, over an attribution. The point is that I should be a good judge of hats.”
He took snuff.
“It's a shame you haven't a decent snuff-box,” Beatrice observed, with an eye on the enamelled wooden one, cheap and shabby, from which he helped himself.
“The box is but the guinea-stamp; the snuff's the thing.--Was it Shakespeare or Byron who said that?” enquired the Cardinal.
Beatrice laughed again.
“I think it must have been Pulcinella. I'll give you a lovely silver one, if you'll accept it.”
“Will you? Really?” asked the Cardinal, alert.
“Of course I will. It's a shame you haven't one already.”
“What would a lovely silver one cost?” he asked.
“I don't know. It does n't matter,” answered she.
“But approximately? More or less?” he pursued.
“Oh, a couple of hundred lire, more or less, I daresay.”
“A couple of hundred lire?” He glanced up, alerter. “Do you happen to have that amount of money on your person?”
Beatrice (the unwary woman) hunted for her pocket--took out her purse--computed its contents.
“Yes,” she innocently answered.
The Cardinal chuckled--the satisfied chuckle of one whose unsuspected tactics have succeeded.
“Then give me the couple of hundred lire.”
He put forth his hand.
But Beatrice held back.
“What for?” she asked, suspicion waking.
“Oh, I shall have uses for it.”
His outstretched hand--a slim old tapering, bony hand, in colour like dusky ivory--closed peremptorily, in a dumb-show of receiving; and now, by the bye, you could not have failed to notice the big lucent amethyst, in its setting of elaborately-wrought pale gold, on the third finger.
“Come! Give!” he insisted, imperative.
Rueful but resigned, Beatrice shook her head.
“You have caught me finely,” she sighed, and gave.
“You should n't have jingled your purse--you should n't have flaunted your wealth in my face,” laughed the Cardinal, putting away the notes. He took snuff again. “I think I honestly earned that pinch,” he murmured.
“At any rate,” said Beatrice, laying what unction she could to her soul, “I am acquainted with a dignitary of the Church, who has lost a handsome silver snuffbox--beautiful repousse work, with his arms engraved on the lid.”
“And I,” retaliated he, “I am acquainted with a broken-down old doctor and his wife, in Trastevere, who shall have meat and wine at dinner for the next two months--at the expense of a niece of mine. 'I am so glad,' as Alice of Wonderland says, 'that you married into our family.'”
“Alice of Wonderland--?” doubted Beatrice.
The Cardinal waved his hand.
“Oh, if you prefer, Punch. Everything in English is one or the other.”
Beatrice laughed. “It was the I of which especially surprised my English ear,” she explained.
“I am your debtor for two hundred lire. I cannot quarrel with you over a particle,” said he.
“But why,” asked she, “why did you give yourself such superfluous pains? Why couldn't you ask me for the money point-blank? Why lure it from me, by trick and device?”
The Cardinal chuckled.
“Ah, one must keep one's hand in. And one must not look like a Jesuit for nothing.”
“Do you look like a Jesuit?”
“I have been told so.”
“By whom--for mercy's sake?”
“By a gentleman I had the pleasure of meeting not long ago in the train--a very gorgeous gentleman, with gold chains and diamonds flashing from every corner of his person, and a splendid waxed moustache, and a bald head which, I think, was made of polished pink coral. He turned to me in the most affable manner, and said, 'I see, Reverend Sir, that you are a Jesuit. There should be a fellow-feeling between you and me. I am a Jew. Jews and Jesuits have an almost equally bad name!'”
The Cardinal's humorous grey eyes swam in a glow of delighted merriment.
“I could have hugged him for his 'almost.' I have been wondering ever since whether in his mind it was the Jews or the Jesuits who benefited by that reservation. I have been wondering also what I ought to have replied.”
“What did you reply?” asked Beatrice, curious.
“No, no,” said the Cardinal. “With sentiments of the highest consideration, I must respectfully decline to tell you. It was too flat. I am humiliated whenever I recall it.”
“You might have replied that the Jews, at least, have the advantage of meriting their bad name,” she suggested.
“Oh, my dear child!” objected he. “My reply was flat--you would have had it sharp. I should have hurt the poor well-meaning man's feelings, and perhaps have burdened my own soul with a falsehood, into the bargain. Who are we, to judge whether people merit their bad name or not? No, no. The humiliating circumstance is, that if I had possessed the substance as well as the show, if I had really been a son of St. Ignatius, I should have found a retort that would have effected the Jew's conversion.”