With a strong effort the Pope raised himself and looked into the pleading Angel-face.  With his sudden movement, Gherardi and Moretti also stirred from their frozen attitudes of speechless amazement, and would have approached, but that the Pope signed them away with so fierce and impatient a gesture that they shrank back appalled.  And still he gazed at Manuel as if his very soul were passing through his eyes.

“Come out with you!” he said, in a hoarse, faint whisper—­“Come out with you!”

“Yes!—­come out with me!” repeated Manuel, his accents vibrating with a strange compelling sweetness, “Come out and see the poor lying at the great gates of St. Peter’s—­the lame, the halt, the blind—­come and heal them by a touch, a prayer!  You can, you must, you shall heal them!—­if you will!  Pour money into the thin hands of the starving!—­come with me into the miserable places of the world,- -come and give comfort!  Come freely into the courts of kings, and see how the brows ache under the crowns!—­and the hearts break beneath the folds of velvet and ermine!  Why stand in the way of happiness, or deny even emperors peace when they crave it?  Your mission is to comfort, not to condemn!  You need no throne!  You want no kingdom!—­no settled place—­no temporal power!  Enough for you to work and live as the poorest of all Christ’s ministers,—­without pomp, without ostentation or public ceremonial, but simply clothed in pure holiness!  So shall God love you more!  So shall you pass unscathed through the thick of battle, and command Brotherhood in place of Murder!  Go out and welcome Progress!—­take Science by the hand!—­encourage Intellect!—­for all these things are of God, and are God’s gifts divine!  Live as Christ lived, teaching the people personally and openly;—­loving them, pitying them, sharing their joys and sorrows, blessing their little children!  Deny yourself to no man;—­and make of this cold temple in which you now dwell selfimprisoned, a home and refuge for the friendless and the poor!  Come out with me!”

As he thus spoke, with a living, breathing enthusiasm of entreaty, which might have moved even the dry bones in the valley of the prophet’s vision to rise up and become a great standing army, the Pope’s figure seemed to grow more and more attenuated,—­his worn white hands grasping the gilt arms of his chair, looked like the claws of a dead bird—­and his face, shrunken and withered, like a Chinese ivory carving of some forgotten idol.

“Come out with me and minister with your own hands to the aged and dying!” pursued Manuel, “And so shall you grow young!  Command that the great pictures, the tapestries, the jewels, the world’s trash of St. Peter’s, be sold to the rich, who can afford to set them in free and open places where all the poorest may possess them!  But do not You retain them!  You do not need them—­your treasure must be sympathy for all the world!  Not one section of the world,—­not one