"Taking her little one to the hospital," he thought.
But on turning into the little Borgo he saw that the woman went up to
the Rota, knelt before it, kissed the child again and again, put it in
the cradle, pulled the bell, and then, crying bitterly, hastened away.
Rossi remembered his own mother, and a great tide of simple human
tenderness swept over him. What he had seen the woman do was what his
mother had done thirty-five years before. He saw it all as by a mystic
flash of light, which looked back into the past.
Suddenly it occurred to him that the Rota had been long since closed,
and therefore it was physically impossible that anybody could have put a
child into the cradle. Then he remembered that he had not heard the
bell, or the woman's footsteps, or the sound of her voice when she wept.
He stopped and looked back. The woman was returning in the direction of
the piazza of St. Peter's. By an impulse which he could not resist he
followed her, overtook her, and looked into her face.
Again he thought he was looking at Roma. There was the same nobility in
the beautiful features, the same sweetness in the tremulous mouth, the
same grandeur in the great dark eyes. But he knew perfectly who it was.
It was his mother.
It did not seem strange that his mother should be there. From her home
in heaven she had come down to watch over her son on earth. She had
always been watching over him. And now that he too was betrayed and
lost, now that he too was broken-hearted and alone....
He was utterly unmanned. "Mother! Mother! I am coming to you! Every door
is closed against me, and I have nowhere to go to for refuge. I am
coming!... I am coming!"
Then the spirit paused, and pointing to the bronze gate of the Vatican,
said, with infinite tenderness: "Go there!"