VIII
ROMAN CODGERS AND SOLITARIES
Palazzo Rusticucci, November 28, 1898.
To-day being the last Saturday in the month, Fra Antonio, the begging friar, called for his obolo. I surprised him in the act of offering a shabby horn snuff-box to Filomena. She had taken a pinch daintily between a finger and thumb, and was folding it in a sheet of my best Irish linen note paper.
“Una presa di tabaco per Sora Nena (A pinch of snuff for Mrs. Nena),” she explained. Poor Nena, little withered old woman, the servants’ drudge, it doesn’t matter about her habits! Filomena, eighteen, rosy as Aurora,—so pretty that young men make excuses to call at our old green door to see her open it,—feared the shadow of suspicion that the snuff was for her own use! Snuff is still taken in Italy by the old and the old fashioned: it has the sanction of the clergy. In Rome, it is thought hardly seemly for a priest to smoke, they nearly all use snuff; indeed I have seen a priest take a sly pinch while officiating at the altar. Snuff is the only luxury our monk Antonio knows. Do you blame J. for sometimes keeping back a little of the money which we ought to give the frate for the general fund of the brotherhood, and investing it in a packet of snuff for the old fellow’s particular comfort? I do not.
“Frate,” I said, “why did you become a monk?”
“Signora, the Madonna herself bade me take the vows.”
“You lead a happy life at the monastery?”
“Like others I have my troubles, mainly rheumatism.” (His poor old veined feet looked cold in their sandals.)
“About those vows, now, how many are there?”
“They are three,” he counted them off on the knots of his rope girdle, “poverty, obedience, chastity. Circumstances might conceivably release me from the first and the second, but believe me, Signora,” he fixed an earnest, rheumy eye upon me as he said it, “not even the Holy Father himself could absolve me from the third vow.”