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, and
girded on all sides by blue mountains, whose silver crests gleaming in
the setting sunlight tell that the winter yet lingers on their tops,
though spring has decked all the plain. So silent, so lonely, so fair
is this waving expanse with its guardian mountains, it might be some
wild solitude, an American prairie or Asiatic steppe, but that in the
midst thereof, on some billows of rolling land, we discern a city,
sombre, quaint, and old,--a city of dreams and mysteries,--a city of
the living and the dead. And this is Rome,--weird, wonderful, ancient,
mighty Rome,--mighty once by physical force and grandeur, mightier
now in physical decadence and weakness by the spell of a potent moral
enchantment.
As the sun is moving westward, the whole air around becomes flooded
with a luminousness which seems to transfuse itself with pervading
presence through every part of the city, and make all its ruinous and
mossy age bright and living. The air shivers with the silver vibrations
of hundreds of bells, and the evening glory goes up and down,
soft-footed and angelic, transfiguring all things. The broken columns
of the Forum seem to swim in golden mist, and luminous floods fill the
Coliseum as it stands with its thousand arches looking out into the
city like so many sightless eye-holes in the skull of the past. The
tender light pours up streets dank and ill-paved,--into noisome and
cavernous dens called houses, where the peasantry of to-day vegetate
in contented subservience. It illuminates many a dingy court-yard,
where the moss is green on the walls, and gurgling fountains fall into
quaint old sculptured basins. It lights up the gorgeous palaces of
Rome's modern princes, built with stones wrenched from ancient ruins.
It streams through a wilderness of churches, each with its tolling
prayer-bell, and steals through painted windows into the dazzling
confusion of pictured and gilded glories that glitter and gleam from
roof and wall within. And it goes, too, across the Tiber, up the filthy
and noisome Ghetto, where, hemmed in by ghostly superstition, the sons
of Israel are growing up without vital day, like wan white plants in
cellars; and the black mournful obelisks of the cypresses in the villas
around, it touches with a solemn glory. The castle of St. Angelo looks
like a great translucent, luminous orb, and the statues of saints and
apostles 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 that
are approaching the Holy City across the soft, palpitating sea of green
that 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 of
to-day. With all her awful secrets of rapine, cruelty, ambition,
injustice,--with her foul orgies of unnatural crime,--with the very
corruption of the old buried Roman Empire steaming up as from a
charnel-house, and permeating all modern life with its effluvium of
deadly uncleanness,--still Rome had that strange, bewildering charm of
melancholy grandeur and glory which made all hearts cleave to her, and
eyes 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 not
be quieted till they had kissed the dust of her streets. There they
fondly thought was rest to be found,--that rest which through all weary
life ever recedes like the mirage of the desert; there sins were to be
shriven which no common priest might forgive, and heavy burdens unbound
from the conscience by an infallible wisdom; there was to be revealed
to the praying soul the substance of things hoped for, the evidence
of things not seen. Even the mighty spirit of Luther yearned for the
breast of this great unknown mother, and came humbly thither to seek
the repose which he found afterwards in Jesus.
At this golden twilight-hour along the Appian Way come the pilgrims of
our story with prayers and tears of thankfulness. Agnes looks forward
and sees the saintly forms on St. John Lateran standing in a cloud of
golden 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 us
hither!"
Within the church the evening-service is going on, and the soft glory
streaming in reveals that dizzying confusion of riches and brightness
with which the sensuous and color-loving Italian delights to encircle
the shrine of the Heavenly Majesty. Pictured angels in cloudy wreaths
smile down from the gold-fretted roofs and over the round, graceful
arches; and the floor seems like a translucent sea of precious marbles
and gems fused into solid brightness, and reflecting in long gleams and
streaks dim intimations of the sculptured and gilded glories above.
Altar and shrine are now veiled in that rich violet hue which the
Church has chosen for its mourning color; and violet vestments, taking
the place of the gorgeous robes of the ecclesiastics, tell the approach
of that holy week of sadness when all Christendom falls in penitence at
the feet of that Almighty Love once sorrowful and slain for her.
The long-drawn aisles are now full to overflowing with that weird
chanting which one hears nowhere but in Rome at this solemn season.
Those voices, neither of men nor women, have a wild, morbid energy
which seems to search every fibre of the nervous system, and, instead
of 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 of
wailing and clamorous supplication,--now recede and moan themselves
away to silence in far-distant aisles, like the last faint sigh of
discouragement and despair. Anon they burst out from the room, they
drop from arches and pictures, they rise like steam from the glassy
pavement, and, meeting, mingle in wavering clamors of lamentation
and shrieks of anguish. One might fancy lost souls from out the
infinite and dreary abysses of utter separation from God might thus
wearily and aimlessly moan and wail, breaking into agonized tumults
of desire, and trembling back into exhaustions of despair. Such music
brings only throbbings and yearnings, but no peace; and yonder, on the
glassy floor, at the foot of a crucifix, a poor mortal lies sobbing
and quivering under its pitiless power, as if it had wrenched every
tenderest nerve of memory, and torn open every half-healed wound of the
soul.
When the chanting ceases, he rises slow and tottering, and we see in
the wan face turning towards the dim light the well-remembered features
of Father Francesco. Driven to despair by the wild, ungovernable force
of his unfortunate love, weary of striving, overborne with a hopeless
and continually accumulating load of guilt, he had come to Rome to lay
down at the feet of heavenly wisdom the burden which he can no longer
bear alone; and rising now, he totters to a confessional where sits a
holy cardinal to whom has been deputed the office to hear and judge
those sins which no subordinate power in the Church is competent to
absolve.
Father Francesco kneels down with a despairing, confiding movement,
such as one makes, when, after a long struggle of anguish, one has
found a refuge; and the churchman within inclining his ear to the
grating, the confession begins.
Could we only be clairvoyant, it would be worth our while to note the
difference between the two faces, separated only by the thin grating of
the confessional, but belonging to souls whom an abyss wide as eternity
must forever divide from any common ground of understanding.
On the one side, with ear close to the grate, is a round, smoothly
developed Italian head, with that rather tumid outline of features
which one often sees in a Roman in middle life, when easy living
and habits of sensual indulgence begin to reveal their signs in the
countenance, and to broaden and confuse the clear-cut, statuesque
lines of early youth. Evidently, that is the head of an easy-going,
pleasure-loving man, who has waxed warm with good living, and performs
the duties of his office with an unctuous grace as something becoming
and decorous to be gone through with. Evidently he is puzzled and
half-contemptuous at the revelations which come through the grating in
hoarse whispers from those thin, trembling lips. The other man, who
speaks with the sweat of anguish beaded on his brow, with a mortal
pallor on his thin, worn cheeks, is putting questions to the celestial
guide within which seem to that guide the ravings of a crazed lunatic;
and yet there is a deadly, despairing earnestness in the appeal that
makes an indistinct knocking at the door of his heart, for the man is
born of woman, and can feel that somehow or other these are the words
of a mighty agony.
He addresses him some words of commonplace ghostly comfort, and gives
a plenary absolution. The Capuchin monk rises up and stands meekly
wiping the sweat from his brow, the churchman leaves his box, and they
meet face to face, when each starts, seeing in the other the apparition
of 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 his
pale cheek; "that name is buried in the tomb of his fathers; he you
speak to knows it no more. The unworthy Brother Francesco, deserving
nothing of God or man, is before you."
"Oh, come, come!" said the other, grasping his hand in spite of his
resistance; "that is all proper enough in its place; but between
friends, you know, what's the use? It's lucky we have you here now; we
want one of your family to send on a mission to Florence, and talk a
little reason into the citizens and the Signoria. Come right away with
me to the Pope."
"Brother, in God's name let me go! I have no mission to the great of
this world; and I cannot remember or be called by the name of other
days, or salute kinsman or acquaintance after the flesh, without a
breach 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 a
pretty peasant-girl! One of your rank and taste, too! I warrant me the
little 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 perfectly
incomprehensible. If you had tripped a little,--paid a compliment, or
taken a liberty or two,--it would have been only natural; but this
desperation, when you have resisted like Saint Anthony himself, shows
your 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 as
quite 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 with
a man whom he considered as a monomaniac; but he stepped smoothly and
stealthily after him and watched him go out.
"Look you," he said to a servant in violet livery who was waiting by
the door, "follow yonder Capuchin and bring me word where he abides. He
may be cracked," he said to himself; "but, after all, one of his blood
may be worth mending, and do us good service either in Florence or
Milan. We must have him transferred to some convent here, where we can
lay hands on him readily, if we want him."
Meanwhile Father Francesco wends his way through many a dark and
dingy street to an ancient Capuchin convent, where he finds brotherly
admission. Weary and despairing is he beyond all earthly despair, for
the 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. Again
and again the worldly, almost scoffing, tone of the superior to whom he
has 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 has
long been sick and failing, and who gladly embraces this opportunity
to make his last confession to a man of such reputed sanctity in his
order as Father Francesco. For the acute Father Johannes, casting about
for various means to empty the Superior's chair at Sorrento, for his
own benefit, and despairing of any occasion of slanderous accusation,
had taken the other tack of writing to Rome extravagant laudations of
such feats of penance and saintship in his Superior as in the view of
all the brothers required that such a light should no more be hidden in
an obscure province, but be set on a Roman candlestick, where it might
give light to the faithful in all parts of the world. Thus two currents
of worldly intrigue were uniting to push an unworldly man to a higher
dignity than he either sought or desired.
When a man has a sensitive or sore spot in his heart, from the pain of
which he would gladly flee to the ends of the earth, it is marvelous
what coincidences of events will be found to press upon it wherever he
may go. Singularly enough, one of the first items in the confession of
the Capuchin Superior related to Agnes, and his story was in substance
as follows. In his youth he had been induced by the persuasions of
the young son of a great and powerful family to unite him in the holy
sacrament of marriage with a _protégée_ of his mother's; but the
marriage being detected, it was disavowed by the young nobleman, and
the girl and her mother chased out ignominiously, so that she died in
great misery. For his complicity in this sin the conscience of the
monk had often troubled him, and he had kept track of the child she
left, thinking perhaps some day to make reparation by declaring the
true marriage of her mother. That the residence of this young girl had
been at Sorrento, where she had been living quite retired, under the
charge of her old grandmother,--and here the dying man made inquiry if
Father Francesco was acquainted with any young person answering to the
description which he gave.
Father Francesco had no difficulty in recognizing the person,--and
assured the dying penitent, that, in all human probability, she was
at this moment in Rome. The monk then certified upon the holy cross
to the true marriage of her mother, and besought Father Francesco to
make the same known to one of the kindred whom he named. He further
informed him, that this family, having fallen under the displeasure of
the Pope and his son, Cæsar Borgia, had been banished from the city,
and their property confiscated, so that there was none of them to be
found thereabouts except an aged widowed sister of the young man, who,
having married into a family in favor with the Pope, was allowed to
retain her possessions, and now resided in a villa near Rome, where
she lived retired, devoting her whole life to works of piety. The old
man therefore conjured Father Francesco to lose no time in making this
religious lady understand the existence of so near a kinswoman, and
take her under her protection. Thus strangely did Father Francesco find
himself obliged to take up that enchanted thread which had led him into
labyrinths so fatal to his peace.