Suddenly light dawned! The colonello is undoubtedly the “Old Person of Ischia.” On the flanks of Epomeo we had looked for him, in the sun-pierced alleys of Ischian vineyards, among the sailors on the Marina, even in the halls of the stabilimento—our quest, the magnet that drew us out of the path of duty (that led back to Rome and the studio), the hero of Lear’s verse. He was here, sleeping under the same roof with us, sitting at the same table! Have not we ourselves seen him eat scores, possibly hundreds of figs? If we could postpone our return to Rome we should doubtless get up into the thousands, for,—
“There was an old person of Ischia,
Whose conduct grew friskier and friskier.
He danced hornpipes and jigs,
And ate thousands of figs,
This lively old person of Ischia.”
XI
OLD AND NEW ROME—PALESTRINA
Palazzo Rusticucci, Rome, 1899.
Sunday afternoon we went over to hear vespers at St. Peter’s (the music was Palestrina’s). The service was celebrated in the gorgeous Cappella del Coro. It must have been some especial festa, for the chapel was even more magnificent than usual, the priests wore extra fine flowered brocade robes, the air was bluer and heavier with incense, there were more candles. The slumbrous canons, in purple gowns and gray squirrel-skin capes, dozed in their fretted stalls. Over their heads, in the carved and gilded gallery, stood the choristers, two by two, each pair holding between them a quaint, black-lettered music book; behind the choir was the organ, in front, the leader, baton in hand. They all wore white lace-trimmed cottas over black gowns. Their voices, dominated by the piercing sweetness of the Pope’s angel, a male soprano, filled the chapel with an almost overpowering melody, that flowed through the gilded gates and floated out into the distant aisles and transepts of the great church.
Wandering about after service, we came upon the tomb of Palestrina, in the transept near the chapel where his magnificat had rung out so gloriously.
“The Church has a long memory for its saints, sinners, and master-workmen. If I thought it would remember me, now, I would take the vows to-morrow,” somebody said in my ear. It was Patsy.
“Jolly to think,” he went on, “of the old boy who led that choir and composed that music for ’em—he died, you know, in 1594,—lying here within the smell of the incense, within the sound of his own harmonics.” Patsy’s only instrument is the guitar.
“I like incense,” he went on; “the Roman populace smells no sweeter than in the days Shakespeare wrote about them; but the real value of incense, of course, lies in its being a germ destroyer, a safeguard to the priest. In the old days, when people did not know so much about health as they do now, they used to come to church to give thanks for recovery from smallpox while still in a state to give it to others.”
Here Helen came up. We had scarcely finished asking her news when Mr. Z—— joined us.