CHAPTER VIII
San Severino, as you pass under the portico of its front entrance, appears to be very much like other Roman churches, spacious, marble-floored, roofed with frescoed cupola and rounded arches; its wide nave is flanked with chapels, some unowned and bare; others, the vested property of great families, gorgeously or artistically decorated, marking to the experienced eye the precise date of each family's apogee of power—pure pre-Raphaelite, Renaissance, Barocco, First Empire sham classic, Gregory the Sixteenth tawdry stucco and color. Even the latest abomination, however, is chastened into harmony by the merciful siftings of years, by the ever-lessening light which struggles through the darkened yellow of windows set too high in dome and walls to be meddled with more than once or twice in a century. When the sun strikes them, long swathes of dusty gold shoot transversely down the unpeopled spaces of the church touching the mote-laden air to slow vibrations of light, calling back to a mockery of life some periwigged or pseudo-classic bust on a monument, or lingering on the lovely, flower-tinted lines of a Renaissance tomb. It is Rome in the church as elsewhere, Rome, superbly indifferent to the quality of the spoils Time chooses to fling in her lap, because she has but to let them lie there awhile in the supernal alembic of her glory-haunted air, to have them subdued, ripened, enriched, and finally incorporated into her own stricken yet transcendent beauty.
Out of the last chapel to the right of the High Altar of San Severino a low swing door gives access to a darker, dimmer sanctuary, formerly a choir, as the blackened stalls and lecterns testify, but now used only once a month for the meeting of the Sodality of the Bona Mors. An unlit altar rises against one wall, supporting a painting always curtained from the dampness save when the doors are closed to the public and the members congregate for their exercises. Only a few can tell what the picture represents—whether Saint Joseph breathes his last sigh in the arms of God Incarnate, or the Penitent Thief writhes on his cross beside the King of the Jews. "Morte certa, modo incerto," the veiled shrine seems to whisper, and something cold and deathly in the air brings the first axiom at least shudderingly home to those who pass through.
Beyond this chapel lies a small irregular chamber, its walls and pavement of marble so darkened with age that it is hard to decipher the inscriptions with which both are covered, brief Latin epitaphs recording the names of the dead who lie in the crypt below, good monks of an order which once prayed in the little chapel of the Bona Mors and has been superseded and absorbed in the course of centuries, even as its modest temple has been absorbed and dominated by the great church of San Severino.
A heavy leather curtain hangs over the outer door of the marble chamber of epitaphs, and is lifted for those who pass in and out by courteous mendicants of a more retiring disposition than those who guard the grand portico. A long, narrow courtyard, high walled but pleasantly open to the sky, and ornamented with a fountain made out of an acanthus capital, marks the final limits of the sacred premises, which run, from the Ripetta, parallel with the Santafede palace, through the entire block to the piazza of that name. The palace has its imposing front on the piazza, but the back door of San Severino leads into an obscure street opening out of the square. The street is narrow and crooked, shut in between the side walls of two or three ancient palaces, great houses of diminished splendors, whose owners do not disdain to let the ground floors of these purlieus as livery stables and small shops. Over one dark, malodorous doorway hangs a picture of a fearfully obese cow, sadly contemplating a yellow ochre field under a cracked blue sky, denoting that milk and butter are to be had within. From a cavernous den opposite, an avalanche of vegetables invades the sidewalk, crisp green lettuces, scarlet tomatoes, the magically fragrant fennel, pumpkins like globes of battered gold—the cornucopia of Ceres seems to be shaken out on the worn stones every morning. But Ceres has grown old; she sits, dark-browed, saturnine, wrinkled, on a low chair in the midst of her trophies, knitting stockings. Customers pause, select their purchases, hold up as many fingers as may represent the coppers they suppose them to be worth, and look inquiringly at Ceres. She bends a frowning glance on the questioner; if the guess be right, she nods her head; if mistaken, she corrects it by the same finger language; and the coppers drop into the basket where her ball of yarn dances at her feet. Few venture to bargain with Sora Rosa; she considers it waste of time. People pay and carry away the stuff; or they will not pay, and then somebody else will, for there is no other vegetable stall within ten minutes' walk, and who is going to risk an apoplexy from over-exercise?
In the early morning, great ladies, quietly dressed, glide past Sora Rosa, avoid the horses which are being confidentially curried in the street, and disappear through the low doorway into the court of San Severino on their way to Mass. During the rest of the day the genial squalor of the Via Tresette is not disturbed by any jarring reminder of the prosperity and cleanliness of neighboring quarters. Near the ground at any rate all is dark, promiscuous, and prehistoric so far as modern ways are concerned. But the monastery building of San Severino rises up and up, a long, irregular pile, reaching the higher air and the sunshine at last, and breaking out into little terraces and balconies, flowery and bird-haunted, where the Fathers whom Fra Tommaso served with such zeal took their rest after the labors of the day. Fra Tommaso's own little loggia, the hanging garden which Giannella had begged to be taken to see so many years ago, was one of these, the least accessible from the larger apartments, but possessing for its owner the immense advantage of looking directly down into the Via Santafede and commanding a view of a section of the piazza at one end and of the Ripetta at the other; also of some fifty windows of the palace itself. The incorrigible amateur of the human drama, as he climbed from his forum, the church, to his villa, the loggia, always thanked Heaven for having cast his lines in pleasant places, and pitied his immediate opposite neighbors, Mariuccia and Giannella, for being exposed to the distracting temptations and vanities of the world and at the same time deprived of the delights of flower tending and pigeon feeding which he enjoyed on his terrace.
The vanities of the world had only approached Giannella by proxy for a long time past. Since Onorato's chance admiration and his untimely bit of farce had closed the doors of the piano nobile to her, life had become so narrow, so uniform, that she hardly recognized it for life at all. Three colorless years had slipped by; good Signori Dati was dead; the Princess, busy as ever, but in failing health, seemed to have forgotten her former protegé's very existence. The brief churchgoing and shopping with Mariuccia, the needlework by which she still earned small sums from ladies who remembered her address, the assistance rendered in housework and in waiting on the Professor, who, after his first surprise at her presence, never seemed to know whether she or Mariuccia brought him his meals—these made the round of Giannella's days; and since she had, in obedience to the advice of her spiritual director, put rebellion down and accepted her fate by sheer effort of will, she lacked even the stimulus of conflict with her unnatural destiny. She had not lost either her health or her beauty in the strait abode of frowning circumstance, but her buoyancy seemed gone; her eyes were deep rather than bright, and no gallant resolve to smile on life could keep the corners of her pretty mouth from drooping pathetically out of the happy upward curves of her childhood. That period was so long past that it seemed to belong to life on another planet, one much nearer the sun than this earth; but when, as in piety bound, she made one meditation a month on the joys of paradise, the angels, and the heavenly gardens and the celestial music, slid into the familiar semblance of her friends and play-fellows at Castel Gandolfo, the vineyards and the chestnut woods, the barking of the old dog—the braying of the donkey—Madonna Santissima, what abominable sacrilege were her thoughts committing? Dogs and donkeys in heaven? Those red-cheeked, dusty-legged contadini children as angels of the Lord? Oh, what a wicked girl Giannella Brockmann must be—and what would Padre Anselmo say when she told him?
She had fallen into this grievous sin for the twentieth time one winter afternoon. The light was failing, and as she rose from her seat to put her work away, the door bell, grown terribly decrepit in its advanced age, jangled with an imperious querulousness which announced a stranger. The Professor always handled it with tender care for fear of expense in repairs. Mariuccia, who seemed to have grown suddenly old, came out from the back room groaning with headache, for which she had applied her favorite remedy of tufts of "madrecara" stuffed up her nostrils. The sight of her thus adorned was one of the few things which still made Giannella shake with laughter; the dear old face resembled a boar's head in a butcher's window at Christmas time.