Appears Here]

At length he heard himself, and glancing at the belfry, smiled a little.
"It is a pretty tune," he said, "and it always made me sorry for poor
Fra Diavolo. Auber himself confessed to me that he had made it sad
and put the hermitage bell to go with it because he too was grieved at
having to kill his villain, and wanted him to die, if possible, in a
religious frame of mind. And Auber touched glasses with me and said--how
well I remember it!--'Is it the good Lord, or is it merely the devil,
that makes me always have a weakness for rascals?' I told him it was the
devil. I was not a priest then. I could not be so sure with my answer
now." And then Padre Ignazio repeated Auber's remark in French: "'Est-ce
le bon Dieu, on est-ce bien le diable, qui me fait tonjours aimer les
coquins?' I don't know! I don't know! I wonder if Auber has composed
anything lately? I wonder who is singing Zerlina now?"

He cast a farewell look at the ocean, and took his steps between the
monastic herbs and the oleanders to the sacristy. "At least," he said,
"if we cannot carry with us into exile the friends and the places that
we have loved, music will go where we go, even to such an end of the
world as this. Felipe!" he called to his organist. "Can they sing the
music I taught them for the Dixit Dominus to-night?"

"Yes, father, surely."

"Then we will have that. And, Felipe--" The padre crossed the chancel to
the small shabby organ. "Rise, my child, and listen. Here is something
you can learn. Why, see now if you cannot learn it with a single
hearing."

The swarthy boy of sixteen stood watching his master's fingers, delicate
and white, as they played. So of his own accord he had begun to watch
them when a child of six; and the padre had taken the wild, half-scared,
spellbound creature and made a musician of him.

"There, Felipe!" he said now. "Can you do it? Slower, and more softly,
muchacho. It is about the death of a man, and it should go with our
bell."

The boy listened. "Then the father has played it a tone too low," said
he; "for our bell rings the note of sol, or something very near it, as
the father must surely know." He placed the melody in the right key--an
easy thing for him; but the padre was delighted.

"Ah, my Felipe," he exclaimed, "what could you and I not do if we had a
better organ! Only a little better! See! above this row of keys would be
a second row, and many more stops. Then we would make such music a