CHAPTER XXVI
ROME
A vision rises upon us from the land of shadows. We see a wide plain,miles and miles in extent, rolling in soft billows of green, andgirded on all sides by blue mountains, whose silver crests gleaming inthe setting sunlight tell that the winter yet lingers on their tops,though spring has decked all the plain. So silent, so lonely, so fairis this waving expanse with its guardian mountains, it might be somewild solitude, an American prairie or Asiatic steppe, but that in themidst thereof, on some billows of rolling land, we discern a city,sombre, quaint, and old,--a city of dreams and mysteries,--a city ofthe living and the dead. And this is Rome,--weird, wonderful, ancient,mighty Rome,--mighty once by physical force and grandeur, mightiernow in physical decadence and weakness by the spell of a potent moralenchantment.
As the sun is moving westward, the whole air around becomes floodedwith a luminousness which seems to transfuse itself with pervadingpresence through every part of the city, and make all its ruinous andmossy age bright and living. The air shivers with the silver vibrationsof hundreds of bells, and the evening glory goes up and down,soft-footed and angelic, transfiguring all things. The broken columnsof the Forum seem to swim in golden mist, and luminous floods fill theColiseum as it stands with its thousand arches looking out into thecity like so many sightless eye-holes in the skull of the past. Thetender light pours up streets dank and ill-paved,--into noisome andcavernous dens called houses, where the peasantry of to-day vegetatein contented subservience. It illuminates many a dingy court-yard,where the moss is green on the walls, and gurgling fountains fall intoquaint old sculptured basins. It lights up the gorgeous palaces ofRome's modern princes, built with stones wrenched from ancient ruins.It streams through a wilderness of churches, each with its tollingprayer-bell, and steals through painted windows into the dazzlingconfusion of pictured and gilded glories that glitter and gleam fromroof and wall within. And it goes, too, across the Tiber, up the filthyand noisome Ghetto, where, hemmed in by ghostly superstition, the sonsof Israel are growing up without vital day, like wan white plants incellars; and the black mournful obelisks of the cypresses in the villasaround, it touches with a solemn glory. The castle of St. Angelo lookslike a great translucent, luminous orb, and the statues of saints andapostles on the top of St. John Lateran glow as if made of living fire,and seem to stretch out glorified hands of welcome to the pilgrims thatare approaching the Holy City across the soft, palpitating sea of greenthat lies stretched like a misty veil around it.
Then, as now, Rome was an enchantress of mighty and wonderful power,with her damp, and mud, and mould, her ill-fed, ill-housed populace,her ruins of old glory rising dim and ghostly amid her palaces ofto-day. With all her awful secrets of rapine, cruelty, ambition,injustice,--with her foul orgies of unnatural crime,--with the verycorruption of the old buried Roman Empire steaming up as from acharnel-house, and permeating all modern life with its effluvium ofdeadly uncleanness,--still Rome had that strange, bewildering charm ofmelancholy grandeur and glory which made all hearts cleave to her, andeyes and feet turn longingly towards her from the ends of the earth.Great souls and pious yearned for her as for a mother, and could notbe quieted till they had kissed the dust of her streets. There theyfondly thought was rest to be found,--that rest which through all wearylife ever recedes like the mirage of the desert; there sins were to beshriven which no common priest might forgive, and heavy burdens unboundfrom the conscience by an infallible wisdom; there was to be revealedto the praying soul the substance of things hoped for, the evidenceof things not seen. Even the mighty spirit of Luther yearned for thebreast of this great unknown mother, and came humbly thither to seekthe repose which he found afterwards in Jesus.
At this golden twilight-hour along the Appian Way come the pilgrims ofour story with prayers and tears of thankfulness. Agnes looks forwardand sees the saintly forms on St. John Lateran standing in a cloud ofgolden light and stretching out protecting hands to bless her.
"See, see, grandmother!" she exclaimed, "yonder is our Father's house,and all the saints beckon us home! Glory be to God, who hath brought ushither!"
Within the church the evening-service is going on, and the soft glorystreaming in reveals that dizzying confusion of riches and brightnesswith which the sensuous and color-loving Italian delights to encirclethe shrine of the Heavenly Majesty. Pictured angels in cloudy wreathssmile down from the gold-fretted roofs and over the round, gracefularches; and the floor seems like a translucent sea of precious marblesand gems fused into solid brightness, and reflecting in long gleams andstreaks dim intimations of the sculptured and gilded glories above.Altar and shrine are now veiled in that rich violet hue which theChurch has chosen for its mourning color; and violet vestments, takingthe place of the gorgeous robes of the ecclesiastics, tell the approachof that holy week of sadness when all Christendom falls in penitence atthe feet of that Almighty Love once sorrowful and slain for her.
The long-drawn aisles are now full to overflowing with that weirdchanting which one hears nowhere but in Rome at this solemn season.Those voices, neither of men nor women, have a wild, morbid energywhich seems to search every fibre of the nervous system, and, insteadof soothing or calming, to awaken strange yearning agonies of pain,ghostly unquiet longings, and endless feverish, unrestful cravings.The sounds now swell and flood the church as with a rushing torrent ofwailing and clamorous supplication,--now recede and moan themselvesaway to silence in far-distant aisles, like the last faint sigh ofdiscouragement and despair. Anon they burst out from the room, theydrop from arches and pictures, they rise like steam from the glassypavement, and, meeting, mingle in wavering clamors of lamentationand shrieks of anguish. One might fancy lost souls from out theinfinite and dreary abysses of utter separation from God might thuswearily and aimlessly moan and wail, breaking into agonized tumultsof desire, and trembling back into exhaustions of despair. Such musicbrings only throbbings and yearnings, but no peace; and yonder, on theglassy floor, at the foot of a crucifix, a poor mortal lies sobbingand quivering under its pitiless power, as if it had wrenched everytenderest nerve of memory, and torn open every half-healed wound of thesoul.
When the chanting ceases, he rises slow and tottering, and we see inthe wan face turning towards the dim light the well-remembered featuresof Father Francesco. Driven to despair by the wild, ungovernable forceof his unfortunate love, weary of striving, overborne with a hopelessand continually accumulating load of guilt, he had come to Rome to laydown at the feet of heavenly wisdom the burden which he can no longerbear alone; and rising now, he totters to a confessional where sits aholy cardinal to whom has been deputed the office to hear and judgethose sins which no subordinate power in the Church is competent toabsolve.
Father Francesco kneels down with a despairing, confiding movement,such as one makes, when, after a long struggle of anguish, one hasfound a refuge; and the churchman within inclining his ear to thegrating, the confession begins.
Could we only be clairvoyant, it would be worth our while to note thedifference between the two faces, separated only by the thin grating ofthe confessional, but belonging to souls whom an abyss wide as eternitymust forever divide from any common ground of understanding.
On the one side, with ear close to the grate, is a round, smoothlydeveloped Italian head, with that rather tumid outline of featureswhich one often sees in a Roman in middle life, when easy livingand habits of sensual indulgence begin to reveal their signs in thecountenance, and to broaden and confuse the clear-cut, statuesquelines of early youth. Evidently, that is the head of an easy-going,pleasure-loving man, who has waxed warm with good living, and performsthe duties of his office with an unctuous grace as something becomingand decorous to be gone through with. Evidently he is puzzled andhalf-contemptuous at the revelations which come through the grating inhoarse whispers from those thin, trembling lips. The other man, whospeaks with the sweat of anguish beaded on his brow, with a mortalpallor on his thin, worn cheeks, is putting questions to the celestialguide wit
hin which seem to that guide the ravings of a crazed lunatic;and yet there is a deadly, despairing earnestness in the appeal thatmakes an indistinct knocking at the door of his heart, for the man isborn of woman, and can feel that somehow or other these are the wordsof a mighty agony.
He addresses him some words of commonplace ghostly comfort, and givesa plenary absolution. The Capuchin monk rises up and stands meeklywiping the sweat from his brow, the churchman leaves his box, and theymeet face to face, when each starts, seeing in the other the apparitionof a once well-known countenance.
"What! Lorenzo Sforza!" said the churchman. "Who would have thought it.Don't you remember me?"
"Not Lorenzo Sforza," said the other, a hectic brilliancy flushing hispale cheek; "that name is buried in the tomb of his fathers; he youspeak to knows it no more. The unworthy Brother Francesco, deservingnothing of God or man, is before you."
"Oh, come, come!" said the other, grasping his hand in spite of hisresistance; "that is all proper enough in its place; but betweenfriends, you know, what's the use? It's lucky we have you here now; wewant one of your family to send on a mission to Florence, and talk alittle reason into the citizens and the Signoria. Come right away withme to the Pope."
"Brother, in God's name let me go! I have no mission to the great ofthis world; and I cannot remember or be called by the name of otherdays, or salute kinsman or acquaintance after the flesh, without abreach of vows."
"Poh, poh! you are nervous, dyspeptic; you don't understand things.Don't you see you are where vows can be bound and loosed? Come along,and let us wake you out of this nightmare. Such a pother about apretty peasant-girl! One of your rank and taste, too! I warrant me thelittle sinner practiced on you at the confessional. I know their ways,the whole of them; but you mourn over it in a way that is perfectlyincomprehensible. If you had tripped a little,--paid a compliment, ortaken a liberty or two,--it would have been only natural; but thisdesperation, when you have resisted like Saint Anthony himself, showsyour nerves are out of order and you need change."
"For God's sake, brother, tempt me not!" said Father Francesco,wrenching himself away, with such a haggard and insane vehemence asquite to discompose the churchman; and drawing his cowl over his face,he glided swiftly down a side-aisle and out the door.
The churchman was too easy-going to risk the fatigue of a scuffle witha man whom he considered as a monomaniac; but he stepped smoothly andstealthily after him and watched him go out.
"Look you," he said to a servant in violet livery who was waiting bythe door, "follow yonder Capuchin and bring me word where he abides. Hemay be cracked," he said to himself; "but, after all, one of his bloodmay be worth mending, and do us good service either in Florence orMilan. We must have him transferred to some convent here, where we canlay hands on him readily, if we want him."
Meanwhile Father Francesco wends his way through many a dark anddingy street to an ancient Capuchin convent, where he finds brotherlyadmission. Weary and despairing is he beyond all earthly despair, forthe very altar of his God seems to have failed him. He asked for bread,and has got a stone,--he asked a fish, and has got a scorpion. Againand again the worldly, almost scoffing, tone of the superior to whom hehas been confessing sounds like the hiss of a serpent in his ear.
But he is sent for in haste to visit the bedside of the Prior, who haslong been sick and failing, and who gladly embraces this opportunityto make his last confession to a man of such reputed sanctity in hisorder as Father Francesco. For the acute Father Johannes, casting aboutfor various means to empty the Superior's chair at Sorrento, for hisown benefit, and despairing of any occasion of slanderous accusation,had taken the other tack of writing to Rome extravagant laudations ofsuch feats of penance and saintship in his Superior as in the view ofall the brothers required that such a light should no more be hidden inan obscure province, but be set on a Roman candlestick, where it mightgive light to the faithful in all parts of the world. Thus two currentsof worldly intrigue were uniting to push an unworldly man to a higherdignity than he either sought or desired.
When a man has a sensitive or sore spot in his heart, from the pain ofwhich he would gladly flee to the ends of the earth, it is marvelouswhat coincidences of events will be found to press upon it wherever hemay go. Singularly enough, one of the first items in the confession ofthe Capuchin Superior related to Agnes, and his story was in substanceas follows. In his youth he had been induced by the persuasions ofthe young son of a great and powerful family to unite him in the holysacrament of marriage with a _protegee_ of his mother's; but themarriage being detected, it was disavowed by the young nobleman, andthe girl and her mother chased out ignominiously, so that she died ingreat misery. For his complicity in this sin the conscience of themonk had often troubled him, and he had kept track of the child sheleft, thinking perhaps some day to make reparation by declaring thetrue marriage of her mother. That the residence of this young girl hadbeen at Sorrento, where she had been living quite retired, under thecharge of her old grandmother,--and here the dying man made inquiry ifFather Francesco was acquainted with any young person answering to thedescription which he gave.
Father Francesco had no difficulty in recognizing the person,--andassured the dying penitent, that, in all human probability, she wasat this moment in Rome. The monk then certified upon the holy crossto the true marriage of her mother, and besought Father Francesco tomake the same known to one of the kindred whom he named. He furtherinformed him, that this family, having fallen under the displeasure ofthe Pope and his son, Caesar Borgia, had been banished from the city,and their property confiscated, so that there was none of them to befound thereabouts except an aged widowed sister of the young man, who,having married into a family in favor with the Pope, was allowed toretain her possessions, and now resided in a villa near Rome, whereshe lived retired, devoting her whole life to works of piety. The oldman therefore conjured Father Francesco to lose no time in making thisreligious lady understand the existence of so near a kinswoman, andtake her under her protection. Thus strangely did Father Francesco findhimself obliged to take up that enchanted thread which had led him intolabyrinths so fatal to his peace.