“There will be no war,” Marcantonio declared, with assurance.  “Thou see’st, carina, these matters are not for women to discuss; they cannot understand; they are questions for the government alone; and well it is for us that the clergy are out of it, or we might have the spectacle of a Senate drowned in tears!  There will be no war,” he declared again, mistaking the self-control for which she had bravely struggled as an outcome of his attempts at consolation.  “And now, since thou art thy sweet self again, hath the boy not made the day richer for thee with some tale of wonder thou wouldst unfold?”

XVI

There was no longer any doubt as to the intention of his Holiness toward the rebellious spirit of the Most Serene Republic; the Ambassade Extraordinary which had been appointed to convey to the Holy See the dutiful congratulations of her devoted Venetian sons, on the accession of Paul V, had few amenities to report in those lengthy dispatches to which the Senate listened with a dignity which disdained to show the least outward trace of irritation or forgetfulness, in a presence so exasperating as that of the Papal Nuncio, Orazio Mattei.

Day after day the Senate sat, in solemn state, to hear its delinquencies rehearsed in the words of Paul V, by the graphic pen of his Excellency Agostino Nani, Ambassador from the Republic to the Holy See, with ceaseless repetitions of demand on the part of the Sovereign Pontiff; with ceaseless repetitions of refusal, most deferently couched, from the courtly representative of the offending power; with threats of that most dread compeller of obedience which none but a sovereign pontiff may wield; and very clearly phrased, that all might understand, the declaration in the words of his Holiness himself, that he had determined to “mortify the over-weening audacity of the secular rulers of the world.”

With a patience which bore its fruit in a more rigid determination to conquer, they listened, also, to many violent speeches from the Nuncio, explanatory of papal authority, founded upon the dicta of a Gregory, “That none may judge the Pope.  That all princes should kiss the feet of the Pope,” and invariably sustained by this axiom of Mattei, delivered as a refrain—­so sure were the college of its repetition, “I am Pope here; I want no replies, only obedience,” and the reiterated assertion that “Christianity depends upon the acceptance in its entirety of the doctrine of papal supremacy, and that he has heard much of the vaunted piety of the Venetian Republic, of which he fails to find evidence.”

In vain the Senate pleaded that on such a point there might be differing views, and that men should be known for Christians by their faithfulness in duty, by their practice of almsgiving and of the sacraments and of all other good and Christian works; but the answer came swiftly, “Naught else availeth.”