love as pure as that I bear my God
“Your Grace, I can’t thank you enough! It’s due to you, this great chance.” “God grant I am sufficiently intelligent to see when a man is too able to leave in obscurity, Ralph! Now let us kneel and pray. God is very good.” His rosary beads and missal were sitting on a table nearby; hand trembling, Bishop Ralph reached for the beads and knocked the missal to the floor. It fell open at the middle. The Archbishop; who was closer to it, picked it up and looked curiously at the brown, tissue thin shape which had once been a rose.
“How extraordinary! Why do you keep this? Is it a memory of your home, or perhaps of your mother?” The eyes which saw through guile and dissimulation were looking straight at him, and there was no time to disguise his emotion, or his apprehension.
“No.” He grimaced. “I want no memories of my mother.”
“But it must have great meaning for you, that you store it so lovingly within the pages of the book most dear to you. Of what does it speak?” “Of a love as pure as that I bear my God, Vittorio. It does the book nothing but honor.”
“That I deduced, because I know you. But the-love, does it endanger your love for the Church?”
“No. It was for the Church I forsook her, that I always will forsake her. I’ve gone so far beyond her, and I can never go back again.”
“So at last I understand the sadness! Dear Ralph, it is not as bad as you think, truly it is not. You will live to do great good for many people, you will be loved by many people. And she, having the love which is contained in such an old, fragrant memory as this, will never want. Because you kept the love alongside the rose.”
“I don’t think she understands at all.”
“Oh, yes. If you have loved her thus, then she is woman enough to understand. Otherwise you would have forgotten her, and abandoned this relic long since.”
“There have been times when only hours on my knees have stopped me from leaving my post, going to her.”
The Archbishop eased himself out of his chair and came to kneel beside his friend, this beautiful man whom he loved as he had loved few things other than his God and his Church, which to him were indivisible. “You will not leave, Ralph, and you know it well. You belong to the Church, you always have and you always will. The vocation for you is a true one. We shall pray now, and I shall add the Rose to my prayers for the rest of my life. Our Dear Lord sends us many griefs and much pain during our progress to eternal life. We must learn to bear it, I as much as you.”
At the end of August Meggie got a letter from Luke to say he was in Townsville Hospital with Weil’s disease, but that he was in no danger and would be out soon.