The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 13 June 1918, Page 3

The Storyteller

(By Cardinal Wiseman.)

FABIOLA ; OR, THE CHURCH OF THE CATACOMBS

Part Second—Conflict

CHAPTER VII.—DARK DEATH. A few days after Fabiola’s return from the country Sebastian considered it his duty to wait upon her, to communicate so much of the dialogue between Corvinus and her black slave, as he could without causing unnecessary suffering. We have already observed, that of the many noble youths whom Fabiola had met in her father s house, none had excited her admiration and respect except Sebastian. So frank, so generous, so brave, yet so unboasting; so mild, so kind in act and speech, so unselfish and so careful of others, blending so completely in one character nobleness and simplicity, high wisdom and practical sense, he seemed to her the most finished type of manly virtue, one which would not easily suffer by time, nor weary by familiarity. When, therefore, it was announced to her that the officer Sebastian wished to speak to her alone, in one of the halls below, her heart beat at the unusual tidings, and conjured up a thousand strange fancies about the possible topics of his. interview. This agitation was not diminished when, after apologising for his seeming intrusion, he remarked with a smile, that, well knowing how sufficiently she was already annoyed by the many candidates for her hand, he felt regret at the idea that he was going to add another, yet undeclared, to her list. If this ambiguous preface surprised, and perhaps elated her, she was soon depressed again, upon being told it was the vulgar and stupid Corvinus. For her fathei, even, little as he knew how to discriminate characters out of business, had seen enough of him at his late banquet, to characterise him to his daughter by those epithets. Sebastian, fearing rather the physical than the moral activity of Alias drugs, thought it right to inform her of the compact between the two dabblers in the black art , the principal efficacy of which, however, seemed to consist in drawing money from the purse of a reluctant dupe. He, of course, said nothing of what related to the Christians in that dialogue. He put her on her guard, and she promised to prevent the nightly excursions of her necromancer slave. What Afra had engaged to do, she did not for a moment believe it was ever her intention to attempt, neither did she fear arts which she utterly despised. Indeed, Afra’s last soliloquy seemed satisfactorily to prove that she was only deceiving her victim. But she certainly felt indignant at having been bargained about by two such vile characters, and having been represented as a grasping avaricious woman, whose price was gold. ” I feel, she said at last to Sebastian, “how very kind it is of you to come thus to put me on mv guard and I admire the delicacy with which you have unfolded so disagreeable a matter, and the tenderness with which you have treated every one concerned.” I have only done in this instance,” replied the soldier, “what I should have done for any human being—save him, if. possible, from pain or danger.” ‘‘Your friends, I hope you mean,” said Fabiola, smiling; “otherwise I fear your whole life would go in works of unrequited benevolence.” “And so let it go; it could not be better spent.” Surely you are not in earnest, Sebastian. If you saw one who had ever hated you, and sought your destruction, threatened with a calamity which would make him harmless, would you stretch out your hand to save or succor him?” “Certainly I would. While God sends His sun-

shine and His rain equally upon His enemies as upon His friends, shall weak man frame another rule of justice?’’ A ’ ~ At these words Fabiola wondered; they , were so like those of her mysterious parchment, identical with the moral theories of her slave. “You have been in the East, I believe, Sebastian,” she asked him, rather abruptly; “was it there that you learnt these principles? For I have one near me who is yet, by her own choice, a servant, a woman of rare moral perceptions, who has propounded to me the same ideas, and she is an Asiatic.” “It is not in any distant country that I learnt them, for here I sucked them in with my mother’s milk ; though originally they doubtless came from the East.” “They are certainly beautiful in the abstract,” remarked Fabiola; “but death would overtake us before we could half carry them out, were we to make them our principles of conduct.” “And how better could death find us, though not surprise us, than- in thus doing our duty, even if not to its completion?” “For my part,” resumed the lady, “I am of the old Epicurean poet’s mind. This world is a banquet, from which I shall be ready to depart when I have had my fill— lit conviva safi/r —and not till then. I wish to read life’s book through, and close it calmly, only when I have finished its last page.” Sebastian shook his head, smiling, and said, “The last page of this world’s book comes but in the middle of the volume, wherever ‘death’ may happen to be written. But on the next page begins the illuminated book of a new —without a last page.” understand you,” replied Fabiola good-humor-edly; “you are a brave soldier, and you speak as such. You. must be always prepared for death from a thousand casualties; we seldom see it approach suddenlyit comes more mercifully and stealthily upon the weak' You no doubt are musing on a more glorious fate, on receiving in front full sheaves of arrows from the enemy, and falling covered with honor. You look to the soldiers funeral pile, with trophies erected over it. To you, after death, opens its bright page the book of glory.” “No, no, gentle lady,” exclaimed Sebastian emphatically; “I mean not so. I care not for glory, which can only be enjoyed by an anticipating fancy, i speak of vulgar death, as it may come to me in common with the poorest slave ; consuming me by slow urning fever, wasting me by long lingering consumption, racking me by slowly eating ulcers; nay, if you please, by the still crueller inflictions of men’s wrath. In any form let it come; it'comes from a hand that I love.” 1 * “And do you really mean that death so contemplated would be welcomed by you?” ~ t. AS joyful as is the epicure, when the doors of the banqueting hall are thrown wide open, and he sees beyond them the brilliant lamps, the glittering table, and its delicious viands, with its attendant ministers well girt, and crowned with roses as blithe as is the bnde when the bridegroom is announced, coming with rich gifts to conduct her to her new home, will my exulting heart be, when death, under whatever form throws back the gates, iron on this side, but golden on the other, which lead to a new and perennial life. And I care not how grim the messenger may be that CSulb the aPl>loath * f Him ""■<> - celestially “And who is He?” asked Fabiola eagerly. "Can death?” be See “ SaVB thl '° Ugh the fleshless ribs of “No,” replied Sebastian: “for it is He who must alsoHann 10 H° nly I™ ° Ur HveS ’ but for our deaths also. Happy they whose inmost hearts, which He has aHhek ’ h-e been kept pure and innocent! a! well as their deeds have been virtuous! For them is this beiln ” vtsten of Him whose true awards oaky then c - very , h ke S y ras doctrines ! she thought But before she could speak again, to ask whence they‘came,

a slave entered, stood on the threshold, and respectfully said, “A courier, madam, is just arrived from Baise.” “Pardon me, Sebastian she exclaimed. “Let him enter immediately/’ The messenger came in, covered with dust and jaded, having left his tired horse at the gate, and offered her a sealed packet. Her hand trembled as she took it; and while she was unloosening its bands, she hesitatingly asked, “From my father?” “About him at least,” was the ominous reply. She opened the sheet, glanced over it, shrieked, and fell. Sebastian caught her before she reached the ground, laid her on a couch, and delicately left her in the hands of her handmaids, who had rushed in at the cry. One glance had told her all. Her father was dead.

CHAPTER VIII.—DARKER STILL. When Sebastian came into the court, he found a little crowd of domestics gathered round the courier, listening to the details of their master’s death. The letter of which Torquatus was the 'bearer to him had produced its desired effect. He called at his villa, and spent a few days with his daughter, on his way to Asia. He was more than' usually affectionate; and when they parted, both father and daughter seemed to have a melancholy foreboding that they would meet no more. He soon, however, recovered his spirits at Paige, where a party of good livers anxiously awaited him ; and where he considered himself obliged to stay, while his galley was being fitted up, and stored with the best wines and provisions which Campania afforded, for his voyage. He indulged, however, his luxurious tastes to excess; and "on coming out of a bath, after a hearty supper, he was seized with a chill, and in four-and-twenty hours was a corpse. He had left his undivided wealth to his only child. In fine, the body was being embalmed when the courier started, and was to be brought by his galley to Ostia. On hearing this sad tale, Sebastian was almost sorry that he had spoken as he had done of death ; and left the house with mournful thoughts. Fabiola’s first plunge into the dark abyss of grief was deep and dismal, down into unconsciousness. Then the buoyancy of youth and mind bore her up again to the surface; and her view of life, to the horizon, was as of a boundless ocean of black seething waves, on which floated no living thing save herself. Her woe seemed utter and unmeasured ; and she closed her eyes with a shudder, and suffered herself to sink again into obliviousness, till once more roused to wakefulness of mind. Again and again she was thus tossed up and down, between transient death and life, while her attendants applied remedies to what they deemed a succession of alarming fits and convulsions. At length she sat up, pale, staring, and tearless, gently pushing aside the hand that tried to administer restoratives to her. In this state she remained long ; a stupor, fixed and deadly, seemed to have entranced her; the pupils were almost insensible to the light, and fears were whispered of her brain becoming oppressed. The physician, who had been called, uttered distinctly and forcibly into her ears the question, “Fabiola, do you know that your father is dead?” She started, fell back, and a-bursting flood of tears relieved her heart and head. She spoke of her father, and called for him amidst her sobs, and said wild and incoherent, but affectionate things about, and to, him. Sometimes she seemed to think him still alive, then she remembered he was dead ; and so she wept and moaned, till sleep took the turn of tears, in nursing her shattered mind and frame. Euphrosyne and Syra alone watched by her. The former had, from time to time, put in the commonplaces of heathen consolation, had reminded her, too, how kind a master, how honest a man, how loving a father he had been. But the Christian sat in silence, except to speak gentle and soothing words to her mistress, and served her with an active delicacy, which even then was not unnoticed. What could she do more,

unless it was to pray ? What hope for else, than that a new grace was folded up, like a flower, in this tribulation ; that a bright angel was riding in the dark cKud that overshadowed her humbled lady ? As grief receded, it left some room for thought. This came to Fabiola in a gloomy and searching form. “What was become of her father? Whither was he gone ? Had he melted into unexistence, or had ae been crushed into annihilation? Had his life been searched through by that unseen eye which sees the invisible? Had he stood the proof of that scrutiny which Sebastian and Syra had described ? Impossible ! Then what had become of him?” She shuddered as she thought, and put away the reflection from her mind. Oh, for a lay from some unknown light, that would dart into the grave, and show her what it was! Poetry had pretended to enlighten it, and even glorify it; but had only, in truth, remained at the door, as a genius with drooping head, and torch reversed. Science had stepped in, and come out scared, with tarnished wings, and lamp extinguished in the foetid air ; for it had only discovered a charnel-house. And philosophy had barely ventured to wander round and round, and peep in with dread, and recoil, and then prate or babble: and, shrugging its shoulders, own that the problem was yet unsolved, the mystery still veiled. Oh, for something, or some one, better than all these, to remove the dismal perplexity ! While these thoughts dwell like gloomy night on the heart of Fabiola, her slave is enjoying the vision of light, clothed in mortal form, translucid and radiant, rising from the grave as from an alembic, in which have remained (he grosser qualities of matter, without impairing the essence of its nature. Spiritualised and free, lovely and glorious, it springs from the very hotbed of corruption. And another and another, from land and sea ; from reeking cemetery, and from beneath consecrated altar; from the tangled thicket where solitary murder has been committed on the just, and from fields of ancient battle clone by Israel for God : like crystal fountains springing into the air, like brilliant signal-lights, darted from earth to heaven, till a host, of millions, side by side, repeoples creation with joyous and undying life. And how knows she this? Because One, greater and better than poet, sage, or sophist, had made the trial ; had descended first into the dark couch of death, had blessed it, as Me had done the cradle, and made infancy sacred ; rendering also death a holy thing, and its place a sanctuary. He went into it in the darkest of evening, and He came forth from it in the brightest of morning He was laid there wrapped in spices, and He rose again robed in His own fragrant incorruption. And from that day the grave had ceased to be an object of dread to the Christian soul for it continued what He had made it—the furrow into which the seed of immortality must needs be cast. (To be continued.)