“The burden of the baby’s suffering life is changed to blessing,” she said.  “Earth held no joy for him; God hath been merciful beyond thy prayer, my daughter.”

VII

Fra Paolo Sarpi—­this friar so grave and great and unemotional—­had been since he had entered the convent in his precocious boyhood the central figure, fascinating the interest of his community by the marvel of his progress, so that those who had been his teachers stood reverently aside, before he had attained to manhood, recognizing gifts beyond their leading which had already won homage from the savants of Europe and crowned the order of the Servi with unexampled honors.  The element of the unusual in the young Paolo’s endowments had transformed this Benjamin of the convent into a hero, and surrounded the calm flow of his studious life with a halo of romance for these Servite friars; yet the good Fra Giulio in those early days, having little learning wherewith to estimate his progress and watching over him like a father, had been grieved at his strange placidity.  “He sorely needeth some touch of emotion,” he said yearningly; “methinks I love the lad as if he were mine own son, and I feel something lacking in his life.”

“Fret not the lad needlessly with those fanciful notions of thine,” Fra Gianmaria had retorted with much asperity.  “It is the most marvelous piece of mental mechanism that I have ever dreamed.  Already he hath attained to larger knowledge than thou, with thy gray hairs, canst comprehend.”

Fra Giulio had crossed himself devoutly, as if confessing to some earthliness.  “I measure not my simple mind with that of a genius, my brother; for so God hath endowed our lad.  Yet it may be that He meaneth man to garner other blessings besides knowledge.  We received him as a child into our fold, and we are responsible for his development.  But his condition is not normal.”

“Genius is abnormal,” Fra Gianmaria had responded shortly.

“He hath no wish but for this ceaseless mental labor; all natural youthful fancies, all joy in the things of beauty—­for these he careth naught.”

The elder friar’s troubled utterance had stirred no tremor in his companion’s stern reply.  “Thou and I, my brother, have attained by penances and years of abnegation to that mood which hath been granted the boy as a gift to fit him for the cloister life.  It were small kindness to implant a struggle of which he knows not the beginnings.”

And now, after all these years, through which the good Fra Giulio had watched this son of his affections, whom he loved with a love “passing the loves of earth” he pathetically told himself,—­“as if God thus made up to him for all the loves he had resigned,”—­now that the name of Fra Paolo was uttered with reverence while his own was unknown, he still expressed his heart in many tender cares, providing the new cassock before the scholar had noticed that the one he wore was seamed and frayed, with such other gentle ministries as the convent rule permitted toward one who never gave a worldly thought to the morrow.