I wish I knew his
history." I also wish she had known it, for it would have unveiled for
her the most beautiful facts about other holy youths of our own day,
as well as similar facts of earlier days,--truths whose purity would
have rapt her thought even more deeply than Fra Angelico's purity in
art, uncurtained by brave and humble hands for her sight. It is to be
observed that her views and tacit beliefs and my father's are
identical. They did not really believe that Italy was under an
"incubus;" they felt the physical weight of Catholicity, or the Cross,
and half guessed its spiritual spring.
Some of the rooms at Montauto I studiously avoided. The forlorn cavern
of a parlor, or ball-room, I remember to have seen only once. There
was a painful vacuum where good spirits ought to have been. Along the
walls were fixed seats, like those in the apse of some morally fallen
cathedral, and they were covered with blue threadbare magnificence
that told the secrets of vanity. Heavy tables crowded down the centre
of the room. I came, saw, and fled. The oratory was the most thrilling
place of all. It opened out of my sister's room, which was a large,
sombre apartment. It was said to attract a frequently seen ghost by
the force of its profound twilight and historic sorrows; and my
sister, who was courageous enough to startle a ghost, highly approved
of this corner of her domain. But she suddenly lost her buoyant taste
for disembodied spirits, and a rumor floated mistily about that Una
had seen the wretched woman who could not forget her woes in death.
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