"I suppose so."

"Very well, then. That is faith. You need say no more. You have been to confession?"

"This afternoon."

The old man was silent for a moment.

"As to the unreality, the feeling that the Church is heartless, I think that is natural. You had a violent mental shock in your illness. That means that your emotions are very sensitive, almost to the point of morbidness. Well, the heart of the Church is very deep, and you have not found it yet. That does not greatly matter. You must keep your _will_ fixed. That is all that G.o.d asks. . . . I think it is true that the Church is hard, in a certain sense; or shall we call it a Divine strength? It is largely a matter of words. She has had that strength always. Once it nerved her to suffer; now it nerves her to rule. But I think you would find that she could suffer again."

"Your Eminence!" cried the priest lamentably, "I am beginning to see that. . . . Yourself. . . . Prince Otteone. . . ."

The Cardinal lifted his hand.

"Of myself we need not speak. I am an old man, and I do not expect to suffer. Prince Otteone was another matter. He was a young man, full of life; and he knew to what he was going. Well, does not his case impress you? He went quite cheerfully, you know."

The priest was silent.

"What are you thinking of, my son?"

The priest shivered a little.

"Tell me," said the Cardinal again.

"It is the Holy Father," burst out the other impulsively.

"He was terrible: so unconcerned, so careless as to who lived or died. . . ."

He looked up in an agony, and saw a look almost of amus.e.m.e.nt in the old man's eyes fixed on him.

"Yes, do not be afraid," murmured the old man. "You think he was unconcerned? Well, ought he not to be? Is not that what we should expect of the Vicar of Christ?"

"Christ wept."

"Yes, yes, and his Vicar too has wept. I have seen it. But Christ went to death without tears."

"But . . . but this man is not going," cried the priest. "He is sending others. If he went himself----"

He stopped suddenly; not at a sound, but at a kind of mental vibration from the other. Up here in these heights, under the pressure of these thoughts, every nerve and fibre seemed stretched to an amazing pitch of sensitiveness. It seemed to him as if he had never before lived at such a pitch.

But the other said nothing. Once his lips opened, but they closed again. The priest said nothing. He waited.

"I think no one would expect the Holy Father to go himself under such circ.u.mstances," said the Cardinal gently and blandly. "Do you not think that it might be harder for him to remain?"

Monsignor felt a wave of disappointment. He had expected a revelation of some kind, or a vivid sentence that would make all plain.

The old man leaned forward again smiling.

"Do not be impatient and critical," he said. "It is enough that you and I are going. That should occupy us. Come, let us look through these papers again."

It was an hour later that they swept down into the French plains.

The gla.s.s cleared again as they reached the warmer levels, and Monsignor became conscious of an overpowering weariness. He yawned uncontrollably once or twice. His companion laughed.

"Lie down a little, Monsignor. You have had a hard day of it.

I must have some sleep too. We must be as fresh as we can for our interview."

Monsignor said nothing. He stepped across to the other couch, and slipped off his shoes, took off his cincture, and lay down without a word. Almost before he had finished wondering at the marvellous steadiness of this flying arrow of a ship, he had sunk down into complete unconsciousness.

(V)

He awoke with a start, coming up, as is common after the deep sleep of exhaustion, into a state in which, although the senses are awake, the intellect is still in a kind of paralysis of slumber. He threw his feet off the couch and sat up, staring about him.

The first thing which he noticed was that the cabin was full of a pale morning light, cold and cheerless, although the shaded lights still burned in the roof. Then he saw that the Cardinal was sitting at the farther end of the opposite couch, looking intently out; that one of the gla.s.s shutters was slid back, and that a cold, foggy air was visibly pouring in past the old man's head. Then he saw the head of the driver through the gla.s.s panes in the door; his hand rested on the grip of some apparatus connected with the steering, he believed.

But beyond this there was nothing to be seen through the windows opposite, of which the curtains had been drawn back; he saw nothing but white driving mist. He tore back the curtains behind him, and there also was the mist. It was plain then that they were not at rest at any stage; and yet the slight humming vibration, of which he had been conscious before he fell asleep, and even during one or two moments of semi-wakefulness during the night, this had ceased. The car hung here, like a floating balloon, motionless, purposeless--far up out of sight of land, and an absolute silence hung round it.

He moved a little as these things began to arrange themselves in his mind, and at the movement the Cardinal turned round. He looked old and worn in this chilly light, and his unshaven chin sparkled like frost. But he spoke in his ordinary voice, without any sign of discomposure.

"So you are awake, Monsignor? I thought I would let you have your sleep out."

"What has happened? Where are we?"

"We arrived half an hour ago. They signalled to us to remain where we were until they came up."

"We have arrived!"

"Certainly. We pa.s.sed the first Berlin signalling light nearly three-quarters of an hour ago. We slowed down after that, of course."

The priest turned his head suddenly and made a movement with it downwards. The Cardinal leaned forward again and peered through the open shutter.

"I think they are coming up at last," he said, drawing his head back. "Hush! Listen, Monsignor."

The priest listened with all his might. At first he heard nothing except the faint whistle of the wind somewhere in the roof. Then he heard three or four metallic noises, as if from the depths of a bottomless. .h.i.t, faint and minute; and then, quite distinctly, three strokes of a bell.

The Cardinal nodded.

"They are starting," he said. "They have kept us long enough."

He slipped along the seat to where his scarlet cincture and cap lay, and began to put these on.

Monsignor sprang across and lifted down the great Roman cloak from its peg.

"You had better get ready yourself," said the Cardinal. "They will be here in a moment."

As the priest slipped on his second shoe, a sound suddenly stopped him dead for an instant. It was the sound of voices talking somewhere beneath in the fog. Then he finished, and stood up, just as there slid cautiously upwards, like a whale coming up to breathe, past the window by which the Cardinal was now standing cloaked and hatted, first a shining roof, then a row of little ventilators, and finally a line of windows against which a dozen faces were pressed. He saw them begin to stir as the scarlet of the Cardinal met their eyes.

"We can sit down again," said the old man, smiling. "The rest is a matter for the engineers."