You have made a vow--an outrageous votive offering of something that is not yours to bestow.

That vow you cannot break, you say.

Be it so.

But I must seek a remedy elsewhere.

To save my son from the Church to which you would doom him, I will, ere I have done, tear down the Church and make an end of it in Italy." And at that she would shrivel up before him with a little moan of horror, taking her poor white face in her hands.
"Blasphemer!" she would cry in mingled terror and aversion, and upon that word--the "Amen" to all their conferences in those last days they spent together--she would turn, and dragging me with her, all stunned and bewildered by something beyond my understanding, she would hurry me to the chapel of the citadel, and there, before the high altar, prostrate herself and spend long hours in awful sobbing intercessions.
And so the gulf between them widened until the day of his departure.
I was not present at their parting.