After his morning's exertions in the way of taming and domesticating
a prince of the church, Hadrian was conscious that He required a
change of emotions. His thoughts went to the next thing on His
list--the matter of Cardinal Nefski. That would be an exceedingly
interesting experience. He did not want to intrude upon grief: but
He was attracted by all singular phenomena; and the pathos of the
pale young prelate seemed to be quite exemplary. Once in His secular
life, George Arthur Rose had been taken by a doctor to see a man who
had severed his throat in an unusual manner, using a broken pen-knife
and cutting a jagged triangle, of which the apex missed the larynx,
and the base the sterno-kleido-mastoid, avoiding by a hair's breadth
carotid and jugular. The doctor wanted a diagram of the wound made for
the enlightenment of the jury which was to pronounce upon attempted
suicide; and George had made the sketch from the staring speechless
life, noted the furniture of the room and the aspect of his model,
quite untouched by the man's sensations or the horror of the event.
Hadrian approached Cardinal Nefski with similar feelings. He was
curious, He was psychically apart: but, at the same time, something of
subconscious sympathy in His manner elicited the desired revelation.
It was a ghastly one. Nefski, Cardinal Archbishop, had rushed to a
little city in Russian Poland, occupied by anarchists, for the purpose
of pleading with them. He arrived at sunset. There was a college there
where a hundred and twenty lads of noble birth were being educated:
among them, his own youngest brother, just seventeen years old. The
cardinal was seized and crucified with ropes to the fountain in the
market-square. Anarchists burst into the college: stripped its inmates
naked; and flung them into the street before his eyes. He absolved
each one dashed from the lofty windows. Some instantly were smashed
and killed: others, who fell on others, were broken and shattered, but
not killed outright. All night long, Nefski remained crucified. The
anarchists must have forgotten him: for they left him; and at dawn
some one, whom he did not know, came and cut him down. He remembered
nothing more, until he found himself paralyzed, in a waggon with two
priests, en route for Prague. Then he came on to Rome, hoping to lose
the phantasm which continually occupied his sight and hearing--the
heap in the dark night, the growing groaning heap on red stones of
white young bodies and writhing limbs like maggots in cheese, the pale
forms strained and curved, the flying hair, the fixed eyes, continually
falling, the cut-off shrieks, the thudding bounding ooze of that
falling, the interminable white writhing. It was a ghastly tale, quite
unimpassionately told. The young man still was in that stupor which
benignant Nature sends by the side of extreme pain. His paralysis was
passing away. He could walk easily now--only he saw and heard. He spoke
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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