Perhaps, monk and aged as he was, the apprehensions with which his
mind was busy seemed more big with possible evil than they might to
another. Perhaps it was so long since he had had aught to do with
stormy passions that the contemplation of them affrighted his
stagnant mind all the more by reason of the long years of
passionless placidity to which it was accustomed. Perhaps he had
known passions stormy enough in the long long past, and had
experience of the harvest of evils which might be expected to be
produced by them.
Report said, that when Father Fabiano had been sent by his superiors
to occupy the miserable and forlorn sentinel's post at the church-
door of St. Apollinare, amid inundations in winter, and fever and
ague in summer, his appointment to the dreary office had been of the
nature of a penance and an exile. It was said, too, that the
sentence of exile, which placed him in his present position, had
been an alleviation of a more rigorous punishment; that he had been
allowed, after a period of many years of imprisonment in a monastery
of his order at Venice, to change that punishment for the duty to
which he had been appointed, and which would scarcely have seemed an
amelioration of destiny to any one save a man who had for years been
deprived of the light of the sun and the scent of the free air.
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