Last Tales by Isak Dinesen Page B

to her nature. But there was no scandalizing Father Jacopo. He was, as he himself told me, by no means a courageous man, and in the confessional while he listened to the reports of evil doings and thoughts his hair would often stand on end. But he could no more take offense at such things than he could take offense at a stroke of lightning or at an avalanche. In the one case as in the other he would at once endeavor, in every possible way, to stop or repair the havoc worked by the savage powers of nature; but in the one case as in the other he would accept the catastrophe without the slightest personal rancor. This attitude in a servant of the Church surprised Lady Flora; she carried her blasphemy further and grew coarser and harder of speech. Father Jacopo’simperturbable peacefulness under this persecution in the end forced from her a kind of respect which she can rarely, if ever, have felt toward any human being.
    “ ‘In my dealings with Lady Flora,’ Father Jacopo said to me, ‘I sometimes felt that she had donned a heavy armor, which she had till now, quite rightly, considered impenetrable. She had taken pleasure in seeing all bullets glance off from it. And yet it is not impossible that within her proud heart she had at times vaguely desired to meet an opponent worthy of her.’
    “Now Father Jacopo in his quality of priest had a peculiar trait. It went against him to set forth in his prayer any particular request; he disliked pestering Heaven with a specified petition. Nor did he ever pray directly for the salvation of his penitents. Lady Flora a couple of times challenged him: ‘I suppose, Father Jacopo, that you will now be praying for my conversion?’ And guiltily he would have to confess that this he had never done. Whenever the weal and woe of any individual human being lay heavy on his heart, he was wont, he told me, before he began to recite his breviary, to center his thoughts upon that person, and during the prayer to hold him or her, as it were, upon his arms until they ached from the weight. ‘And then,’ he used to explain, ‘it came to me that I must act in such and such a way.’
    “Lady Flora was a strong and healthy woman, and had never in her life been hindered from an undertaking by ill health. But it so happened that on her first day in Rome she slipped on a marble stair of the palazzo on the Piazza del Popolo of which she had rented two floors, and sprained her ankle. For some time she had to keep to her sofa, and the doctor enjoined her to refrain from all excursions, even by coach. During these weeks Father Jacopo in spite of his many duties found time to visit her. And the thought of her filled his whole mind even when he did not see her.
    “So here they sat, two human beings of unique honesty, both singularly free of ever having wronged a fellow-creature,talking together. In one of them the uprightness and the blameless conduct had produced a sovereign arrogance, in the other an unconditional humility.
    “Within the lofty salon they went over both the phenomena of earthly existence and the ideas of Paradise and Hell. Lady Flora was skilled in such debates, and was never at a loss for an answer, while on his side Father Jacopo was often struck dumb by her heart-rending irreverence. It seemed to him that were he to answer her at all he must shriek out loud, and he was only able to stifle the shriek by pressing his lips hard together. Neither would he let himself be driven by her to make the sign of the cross, and he therefore during their conversations sat with his hands firmly folded in the lap of his old soutane. But it happened that on his return to his own small room he crossed himself time after time, so vividly did he feel the presence of the demons evoked by her words; aye, it would seem to him that for hours he had conversed with Lucifer himself. In spite of all this, on the morrow he went back to the palazzo, meek as ever.
    “In his heart Father Jacopo decided that the