THE DORATORE’S ANTIQUES
So Italy walked into the little white Surrey house almost as soon as the doors were open to us. But it is in the drawing-room that she has mostly established her self. It is so filled with dear Roman things that we can think ourselves back again in that haunt of all joy, when we cross its threshold. It is full of associations of delightful days, of quaint beings. There is the rococo paravent, gilt and carved in most delicate extravagance, which we bought of the doratore in the Piazza Nicosia. That fire-screen—a real Bernini, once the frame of an altar-piece—now holds in its strong bold oval a pane of glass where perhaps some wan Madonna shewed her seven-pierced heart. The doratore picked up these things in old villas and disused churches. His booth was indeed a sight to see.—Having recently been on a visit to Rome, Loki’s “great-aunt” was naturally charged with many commissions in that quarter. Armed with a letter of directions from the Italian scholar of the family, she and a Lancashire maid wandered down there one misty afternoon in November, at an hour when all the crazy little houses of the ancient Piazza seem to fold up and huddle together in the purple Roman dusk.
The doratore’s wares winked through the dimness; and having duly knocked their heads against wreaths of dangling frames in his doorway, the pilgrims proceeded to steer a perilous path among the heaps of gilded débris within.
The doratore, made visible only by his paper cap, was seated in a nest of angels, tinkering at a fat cherub and whistling gaily. Hearing steps he poked his head through the large oval of an empty mirror, and stared unconcernedly at the visitors, whose advance was punctuated by cataclysms of falling frames, church candlesticks, and other “oggetti religiosi.”
At the fifth or sixth tumble, he rolled away from his angels with unimpaired cheerfulness, and apologized.
“Scusi, scusi!” Smilingly he picked up a broken wing and a bit of acanthus leaf. “Scusi!” again. “Aha! a letter!”
Here the fat laugh merged into a bellow which made the walls ring, and brought a dirty little urchin tumbling down a ladder from some loft overhead. The urchin diving under a heap of prostrate apostles, produced a stick with an iron spike, which he held respectfully under his patron’s chin. The doratore stuck a candle on the spike, lit it, and with the flame in fearful proximity to his bearded face, proceeded to open the letter.
“Aha! from the noble family at Villino Loki!” Here he took off his cap with a flourish and did not replace it. “The signor Inglese, is he well?—Mi piace. And the gentilissima signorina who does me the honour to write?—Mi piace, mi piace. And Mama?—Better?—Bonissimo! Please the good God to bring her again to Rome. But not this month,” waving a warning finger before his nose. “In April. In the primavera, Rome is as salubrious as she is beautiful. Now what does Mama want? Brackets? Angels?—Ecco.”
He pointed to a pair of fantastic creatures that jutted out like gargoyles under the ceiling. “What? Not pretty? Ma! Scusi! they are antichi bellissimi—they come from a castle in the Abruzzi; there is not their match in Rome.” Snapping the candle from the imp, on whose locks it was unheededly guttering, he waved it round his own head, waking up unexpected companies of saints on the walls and making pools of light and darkness among the golden hillocks.