Let into the wall of the corner house was a shrine with a lamp before it. The light fell on the face of a pretty girl behind the iron bars of the lower window. She was talking eagerly with a soldier standing outside in the street, a lover, plucking the hen turkey, as the saying goes.
Easter morning we went to the cathedral by the sacristy, filled with kneeling women in black mantillas. A long line of penitents waited outside each confessional: as we came in, Torquemada slipped into the one nearest the door. At the altar rail knelt a row of communicants. An old priest and a young server walked up and down the ever recruited line, administering the communion. The server carried a lighted candle, the priest a gold chalice with the wafer. At each communicant they stopped, the priest took a wafer from the ciborium, made the sign of the cross, and placed it in the mouth of the person before him.
“See how quiet all this is,” said Pemberton; “and this is the real thing! Now for the cathedral, the stage of the church, the last act of the drama. Nowhere in the world can you see so splendid a mass as you will see to-day.”
Archpriests and priests were glorious in priceless embroidered vestments. Boys and acolytes must have been chosen for their beauty. The little fellows were like cherubs; the elder lads, like angels. The boys stood in groups of three, the candles burned in threes; the retablo was lighted by trios of candles,—the mystic number was repeated at every point. On the lower altar steps stood the scarlet and ivory altar boys, each holding a mighty silver candlestick, so tall that the base of the candle stood at the height of the shoulder, and the winged silver angel supporting the taper rose far above the head. From every spire of the great retablo sprang a crucifix, the highest towering up in to the dim roof. Under this crucifix was a painted, wooden group of Virgin and Child. Directly below, in a straight line, one behind the other, stood the three celebrants in their Easter splendor. At one side blazed the vast paschal candle.
“It is of the most fine wax,” Concepcion whispered, “and of the weight of twelve kilos.”
At the moment of the elevation, two stiff, gawky tourists, Germans, I think, stood by, guidebook in hand, staring at the ceremony with no pretence of being anything but spectators.
The Archbishop held up the wafer in his transparent old hands; thick clouds of incense rose; at every tinkle of the golden mass bells, Concepcion, kneeling beside me, crouched lower. A young deacon in a white robe motioned the outlanders to kneel. They paid no attention; he approached and whispered what he had said in pantomime; again they refused. Then, like a young archangel, he drove them from the place with his silver staff. They shrugged stiff, protesting shoulders, and moved on.
Mass over, a procession formed. Two cherubs walking backwards, held open the illuminated missal for the Archbishop to read the prayers; followed Torquemada and the other priests, the old canons from the coro, the choristers, their long goffered white sleeves folded over their arms, their black letter scores held between them, singing as they walked, to the bassoon accompaniment of those two old weedy brothers. Near a gigantic, faded fresco of Saint Christopher, the ferryman with the Niño Jesus on his arm, they stopped beside the tomb of Columbus, a brand new bronze monument in the aisle that makes the right arm of the cross—a place of high honor. Here the first prayer was recited. We waited by the tomb, watched the procession with the glittering cross, the lights, the incense, the booming bassoons, move slowly down the aisle, stopping at one and another of the chapels.
“As a work of art that monument is simply impossible,” said Pemberton; “humanly, it means something. You catch the idea? Those four kings in armor stand for Castille, Leon, Arragon, and Granada. In that sarcophagus they bear on their shoulders lies what is left of the dust of Columbus.”
A vision of life’s morning came back to me! The cathedral at Santo Domingo City on Easter day; my father, my mother, and myself standing by the place in the worn brick pavements that then covered the dust of the Great Admiral. There had been a mass, with incense and candles, and splendid priests, that Easter in Hispaniola, and we had watched, in the plaza before the cathedral, Judas burned in effigy!