When they had finished their course and ended their canticles of grief
they gathered about the pulpit and the Capuchin got up to preach. He was
a bearded man with a face full of light, almost of frenzy, and a cross
and a rosary hung from his girdle. He spoke of their poverty, their
lost ones, their privations, of the dark hour they were passing through,
and of answers to prayer in political troubles. During this time the
silence was breathless; but when he told them that God had sent their
sufferings upon them for their sins, that they must confess their sins,
in order that their holy mother, the Church, might save them from their
sins, there was a deep hum in the air like the reverberation in a great
shell.
A line of confessional boxes stood in each of the church aisles, and as
the preacher described the sorrows of the man-God, His passion, His
agony, His blood, the women and girls, weeping audibly, got up one by
one and went over to confess. No sooner had one of them arisen than
another took her place, and each as she rose to her feet looked calm and
comforted.
The emotion of the moment was swelling over Roma like a flood. If she
could unburden her heart like that! If she could cast off all the
trouble of her days and nights of pain! One of the confessional boxes
had a penitential rod protruding from it, and going past the front of it
she had seen the face of a priest. It was a soft, kindly, human face.
She had seen it before somewhere--perhaps in the Pope's procession.
At that moment a poor girl with a handkerchief on her head, who had
knelt down crying, was getting up with shining eyes. Roma was shaken by
violent tremors. An overpowering desire had come upon her to confess.
For a moment she held on to a chair, lest she should fall to the floor.
Then by a sudden impulse, in a kind of delirium, scarcely knowing what
she was doing until it was done, she flung herself in the place the girl
had risen from, and with a palpitating heart said in a tremulous voice
through the little brass grating: "Father, I am a great sinner--hear me, hear me!"
The measured breathing inside the confessional was arrested, and the
peaceful face of the priest looked out at the hectic cheeks and blazing
eyes.
"Wait, my daughter, do not agitate yourself. Say the Confiteor."
She tried to speak, but her words were hardly audible or coherent.
"I confess ... I confess ... I cannot, Father."