She glittered with jewels from head to foot, her shoes were fastened with diamond buckles, aigrettes of diamonds were in her hair—“a splendor still the more astonishing as it is so very common,” he said. Nay, she even scattered perfume through her nosegays. On great fête days she tiptoed to church, enveloped all but one eye in a silk-lace shawl. Beneath it glinted a flower-embroidered dress of rarest stuff, fluttering a multitude of ribbons; under a petticoat of heavy brocade, miniature golden feet peeped out, or slippers of peach-colored velvet. The lady of Lima was famed for her wit, entrancing the visitor as she sipped her Paraguay tea from a silver-mounted gourd.
Little is left of former splendor. The statues, the five rows of orange trees, the sweet smells are gone. At the end of the long Alameda, bordered with wind-blown trees and wrecks of marble benches, is a fountain under palms and Norfolk Island pines. Across a shady space and above a high, yellow plaster wall, is the monastery tower, where hangs a clear-toned bell. Rugged hills rise abruptly. This is the home of the Barefoot Friars. A labyrinth of paths leads to their orchards and gardens and cells. Going every morning in pairs to the markets to beg for food, they own nothing. They live entirely on alms.
Just before two o’clock each day, the lame, halt, and blind begin to gather from all the town wards, each carrying a receptacle. One poor woman with three or four babies seats herself upon the plaster shelf skirting the wall, setting down her pottery jar by the brook to wait.
The bell strikes two long, clear tones. The whole space is filled. The great monastery gate is flung open, and two brown-clad monks, sleeves rolled up, bring out between them a steaming copper cauldron. The famished multitude fall to their knees, many with difficulty, and a prayer is intoned.
Then the procession begins: men, women, and children in various stages of decrepitude. Beggars with old tin cans totter forward as to the Mecca of a long, hard journey. Decent-looking women, very haughty, conceal their pails under black mantas. Each receives two ladlefuls of meat, soup, and vegetables. The kettle is filled again and refilled, till all are served. After the little groups of people have finished their cazuela, the heavy door clashes together.
Beyond the turn of the wall, far down the avenue of palms, the Mendicant Friars emerge, four by four, and swing off across country for their daily walk.
CHAPTER IX
CONVENTS OPEN AND CLOSED
Lima is the city of bells. Exuberant wedding carols blend their metallic jingle with three solemn peals for the dying. Hoarse, ill-cast bells mingle with bells whose tones drip like honey upon the monks beneath, who, with cowls thrown back, are pruning monastery gardens, bringing water to the fig-tree from the fountain. Bells are pitched high and bells are pitched low. Bells struck from without shake off the clear ring circling their edges. There are notes with a dry sonority like the clash of bones. Sharp bells nag the persistent sinner. Soft, sweet bells lure him to prayer. Quick strokes near at hand only half conceal those distant thuds, as if the tone had been struck from the atmosphere, giving “a solemn, religious shimmer to the day.”
Though they are more used than those elsewhere, the bells of Lima, it is said, never grow old.
The tones are of every quality, from the tinkle of little convent bells calling the sisters to midnight prayer, to the great bell of the Jesuits, whose “clash, throb, and long swoon of sound” strikes your chest. Silver and gold in this bell cling to the clear, deep notes struck from it and pulsate more than half a minute in the tone, which carries far out over city roofs to sugar-fields and vineyards. The left tower of San Pedro was built about this bell in 1666 and it cannot be removed.