Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A Book of the Heart

by Donald Grant Mitchell

It is a pageant of death that is passing below. Far down the street we see heads thrust out of the windows and standing in bold relief against the red torchlight of the moving train. Below dim figures are gathering on the narrow side ways to look at the solemn spectacle. A hoarse chant rises louder and louder, and half dies in the night air, and breaks out again with new and deep bitterness.

Now the first torchlight under us shines plainly on faces in the windows and on the kneeling women in the street. First come old retainers of the dead one, bearing long blazing flambeaux. Then comes a company of priests, two by two, bareheaded, and every second one with a lighted torch, and all are chanting.

Next is a brotherhood of friars in brown cloaks, with sandaled feet, and the red light streams full upon their grizzled heads. They add their heavy guttural voices to the chant and pass slowly on.

Then comes a company of priests in white muslin capes and black robes and black caps, bearing books in their hands, wide open, and lit up plainly by the torches of churchly servitors, who march beside them; and from the books the priests chant loud and solemnly. Now the music is loudest, and the friars take up the dismal notes from the white-capped priests, and the priests before catch them from the brown-robed friars, and mournfully the sound rises up between the tall buildings, into the blue night sky that lies between Heaven and Rome.

—“Vede—Vede!” says Cesare; and in a blaze of the red torch fire comes the bier, borne on the necks of stout friars; and on the bier is the body of a dead man, habited like a priest. Heavy plumes of black wave at each corner.

—“Hist,” says my landlady.

The body is just under us. Enrica crosses herself; her smile is for the moment gone. Cesare’s boy-face is grown suddenly earnest. We could see the pale youthful features of the dead man. The glaring flambeaux sent their flaunting streams of unearthly light over the wan visage of the sleeper. A thousand eyes were looking on him, but his face, careless of them all, was turned up, straight toward the stars.

Still the chant rises, and companies of priests follow the bier, like those who had gone before. Friars, in brown cloaks, and prelates and Carmelites come after—all with torches. Two by two—their voices growing hoarse—they tramp and chant.

For a while the voices cease, and you can hear the rustling of their robes, and their footfalls, as if your ear was to the earth. Then the chant rises again, as they glide on in a wavy shining line, and rolls back over the death-train, like the howling of a wind in winter.

As they pass the faces vanish from the windows. The kneeling women upon the pavement rise up, mindful of the paroxysm of Life once more. The groups in the door-ways scatter. But their low voices do not drown the voices of the host of mourners and their ghost-like music.