“There is Old Popolo!” Boy would shout from his crib. “It is eight o’clock!”
It was half-past eight on the day of which I speak, and the shops were not yet open; the Piazza deserted but for a flock of goats and the attendant contadini who milked them from one door to another for their customers. Birds were twittering among the trees in the Pincian Gardens upon my left; there was a lingering flush of pink in the sky that would be, within an hour and until evening, of the “incomparable sweet” blue, American heavens put on after one thunder-shower, and before another blackens them. In Italy nobody calls the exquisite depth of color “a weather-breeder.” A church-bell was ringing so far away that it was a musical pulse, not a chime. Down the Via della Croce to my right, over half a mile of tiled roofs, round and distinct in the dry, pure atmosphere, towered the Castle of San Angelo—the bronze angel on the summit sheathing the sword of pestilence, as Pope Gregory affirmed he beheld him at the approach to the Tiber of the penitential procession headed by the pontiff. As the goats turned into the Via del Babuino, the faint tinkle of their bells was blent with the happy laugh of a young contadina. I quaffed slow, delicious draughts of refreshment that seemed to touch and lift the heart; that lulled the brain to divinest dreaming.
Then and there, I had a revelation; bowed my soul before my Angel of Annunciation, I should not die, but live. Then and thus, I accepted the conviction that, apart from the intellectual delight I drew from our present life—the ministry of sky and air, of all goodly sights and sounds and the bright-winged fancies that were a continual ecstasy, was to my body—Health! That hour I thanked God and took courage!
CHAPTER XVIII.
“Paul—a Prisoner.”
JUST outside of the Ostian Gate is the pyramid of Caius Cestius—Tribune, Prætor and Priest, who died thirty years before Christ was born, and left a fortune to be expended in glorification of himself and deeds. The monument is one hundred and twenty feet high, nearly one hundred feet square at the base, built of brick and overlaid with marble slabs. Modeled after the Egyptian mausoleums, and unaccountably spared by Goth and Pope, it stands to-day, after the more merciful wear and tear of twenty centuries, entire, and virtually unharmed. Alexander VII., when he had the rubbish cleared away from the base, also ordered a door to be cut in the side. The body, or ashes of Cestius had been deposited in the centre of the pyramid before its completion, and hermetically inclosed by the stupendous walls. What was done with the handful of dust that had been august and a member of the College of Epulones, appointed to minister by sacrifices to the gods, history does not relate. The great pile contains one empty chamber contemptible in dimensions by comparison with the superficies of the exterior. The walls of this retain signs of frescoes, designed for the delectation of the dead noble, and such ghostly visitants as were able to penetrate the marble facing and twenty feet of brick laid with Roman cement. The custodian of the English burial-ground has the key of Alexander’s door, and shows the vault for a consideration. Nobody goes to see it a second time.
The Ostian Gate is now the Porta S. Paolo, and is a modern structure. Here begins the Via Ostiensis, in St. Paul’s life-time, the thronged road to Rome’s renowned sea-port. Ostia is now a wretched fishing-village of less than one hundred inhabitants. Over the intervening country broods malaria, winter and summer. Conybeare and Howson have told us in words that read like the narrative of an eye-witness, how the route looked when, “through the dust and tumult of that busy throng, the small troop of soldiers”—having Paul in charge—“threaded their way under the bright sky of an Italian midsummer.”