Peter the Priest. Mór Jókai

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      "The Lord of Mitosin has cursed me," said the monk.

      "How often has he cursed me! Every word he speaks is a curse. If all took effect, there would be no thunder left in Heaven or devil in Hell. I laugh at his curse."

      "But he really has cursed me. At the funeral feast of his son, he hurled after me the words, that if he ever caught sight of my face again, he would put his daughter in a boat, push her out on the sea in the black night, and leave her to perish."

      "And your love for her was so great that for this reason you went out into the wide world—nay, more, you went out of the world—you became a monk! And yet you could not free yourself from her. Her charm brought you back again, that you might be near her, might even see her again. Am I not right?"

      Envy and jealousy blazed in her glance.

      "No. I made a pilgrimage to Rome, and was received into the Jesuit order. The Provincial, finding that I was of this vicinity ordered me to the monastery of Madocsany."

      "Whither you never wanted to come."

      "I had to obey. And since then, I have been spending my years of penance here. I have done the most menial work. Begged from village to village, and tortured my body and my soul."

      "Just to see her once more!"

      "To avoid her."

      "What! Have you not yet seen her? Not heard of her? She is more beautiful than ever and still unmarried. She waits for you."

      "She waits in vain! Even in prayer, I do not venture to approach her. I am what I have become—a rigid, unfeeling monk. Only in my hands do I carry the rose-wreath, not on my brow. Its fragrance is no more sweet; its thorns give no more pain."

      "And you are the one the Jesuit convent selected to send to me!"

      "The rest were all afraid of you."

      "On account of my bad reputation; and yet they do not know me at all. You had most cause to fear, for you know me, and yet you came—to the woman whom you hate, whom you despise, at whose warm whisper you shudder, whom you have so often thrust aside, and of whom you know that she clings to you so madly that she will never give you up to God, or Devil, or angel! Whose windows are written all over with your name, who when she is silent, and when she speaks, and when she dreams, thinks only of you! And yet you came!"

      "The command was given and I obeyed."

      "And why are you here?"

      "To fulfil a sacred mission."

      "Ha, ha! What mission?"

      "To instruct your son in the true faith, and in worldly knowledge."

      "I understand. They are afraid that if I get angry, I will take my son with me to Saros-Patak, and make a Calvinist of him; and will my wealth to that college; they have a holy dread of that."

      "Possibly."

      "But you have still another sacred mission. As I understand from their letter, the Jesuits never send an instructor into a family except with the title of Father Confessor. You are to be my Father Confessor."

      "I know it."

      "You know it. And do not suspect that what I shall whisper in your ear day after day, will be not only my curse, but also yours. That you who must absolve my soul of the sin, if sin it is, renew that sin day by day; that when you lay your hand upon my head in blessing, every one of your five fingers will burn in my red hair as in glowing coals. Do you know that?"

      "I know it."

      "And yet you venture to incline your ear when I kneel before you and venture to hear me when I whisper, 'Father I have sinned;' I love a man with a maddening love that sets my brain on fire; I cannot pray, for his name ever rushes to my lips; I cannot look to the saints above, for everywhere I see his face; I cannot do penance, for I love my sin, and am ever returning to it; I had a good, true husband who was as gentle as a lamb; this good and gentle husband I tortured to death—perhaps I even caused his death—I exulted and rejoiced in my widow's veil for I thought, Now he whom I seek can be mine; ah, my sin, my sin! But his heart would not incline to me for he loved another—a more beautiful, a better, an innocent maiden; and I disturbed their union, I roused her father and brother against him, I sowed enmity between them, and he killed the brother of his betrothed, and so I tore them from each other. My sin! My sin! Hear me, God in Heaven! I did not come to you to pray, but I will contend with you. This man I love more than my soul's salvation, the man to whom I pray rather than to Heaven, whose heart Thou first didst take from me, and now dost take him too. Thou hast chained him to Thine altar, but I will not leave him to Thee, I will tear him from Thine altar, and if Thou wilt not permit me to be happy on earth, to be blessed in Heaven with him, then will I be damned in Hell with him. Father, I will sin!"

      The woman rocked on her knees in the dust before the man, kissing his feet, and with her hand beating her unrepentant breast.

      A deep sigh was wrung from the heart of Father Peter. He turned his face away, and laying a trembling hand on the woman's head, sobbed with stifled voice, "May God pity you your sins, poor wretched woman!" And then he let her lie sobbing on the ground, and let her drag herself along the marble floor, following his footsteps and kissing them, one after the other.

CHAPTER IV.

       Table of Contents

YAW DEREVOCSID EHT.

       Table of Contents

      That good-sized book that Father Peter had brought to the Castle with him was no book of magic to exorcise devils, but rather a book that had had some man-tormenting devil for composer: it had moulded already for two centuries in the Madocsany Monastery library before the Jesuit order was founded by Ignatius Loyola; at that time the Carmelite fathers were in the abbey; the contents of this book must have caused them, too, many a headache, for they wrote many pages of Latin commentaries to explain this text of a few leaves which nobody understood yet. This much had the investigators already worked out; that the characters were the same that the Arabs employed in their secret correspondence, and the alphabet was that known among Orientalists as "Lijakah." On the other hand, the words which the letters formed were not to be found in any speech of any known people on the whole globe. One linguist insisted that he recognized the Arabic, another the Coptic, and a third the Mongolian in some one of its forms. The words that most frequently appeared were explained by all kinds of philological cunning. The title of the book was Yaw Derevocsid Eht. One word sounded like Arabic, and another was evidently of Turkish origin; but what the whole meant no human understanding could decide. Whole sheets were written over, with desperate and useless effort. It seemed as if everybody must go mad who attempted its investigation. The Jesuits later adopted the custom, whenever a monk ventured to demur against a task assigned, of putting into his hand this book, Yaw Derevocsid Eht, and telling him that he might spend his time in quiet linguistic studies, that he might acquire the language in which these few pages were written, and when he had accomplished this, he might go as a missionary to the people who wrote and spoke this language. But this secret had never yet been penetrated throughout СКАЧАТЬ