Mass is said here early in the morning, and a Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament given every Tuesday evening an hour before Ave Maria, the bells ringing always three times for each service.
The Signora had spoken at home of this little church of Sant’Antonino, and had laughingly called the attention of the family to the slipshod ringing of the Angelus, where the different divisions of strokes, the bell being swung from below, “spilled over,” as she expressed it, in a number of fainter strokes before and after the regular ones. “But it is a dear little place to go to,” she said. “There one finds the Lord as one might have found him when on earth visibly—in the midst of the poor, with but few followers, and no splendor of circumstance to take one’s eyes away from him. And sometimes, if one’s disposition be fortunate, his presence overflows the place.”
Coming homeward alone, one evening, just as the bell rang, Mr. Vane stepped into the chapel, and, after hesitating a moment inside the door, went up the side aisle and seated himself in a corner. He
had been there more than once early in the morning, but this was his first evening visit, and he did not care, for several reasons, to encounter any of his family, should they come.
The congregation was, as the Signora had said, poor enough. There were a few old women, with kerchiefs on their heads; a sober, decent man, who hid himself in a retired corner, and knelt with his hands covering his face during the whole service; a lame old man, with a worn and sorrowful face; and a young mother, with an infant in her arms and two little ones clinging to her skirts.
Not one of these paid the slightest attention to the others, or showed any consciousness of being, or expecting to be, observed. All looked toward the altar, on which the Host was now exposed, and all prayed with a fervor which could not but communicate itself to the spectator; for it was the quiet fervor of faith and habit, and was not excited by beautiful sights, or music, or the presence of a crowd. They beheld the mysterious token of the Holy Presence, and the Madonna—the Lady of Health, they called her—and worshipped, as untroubled by vanity as by doubt.
The two little ones whispered and played behind their mother’s back, but no one was disturbed by them. No one ever hushes the play of children in a Roman church. The infant crowed and prattled at first, and pulled the kerchief from its mother’s head; but espying presently the candles, and hearing the organ and voices, it fell into a trance, divided between staring and listening, which held it motionless till the service was over. Rather late came a young woman dressed in an absurd travesty of the
prevailing fashion, with a cheap soiled skirt trailing behind her, a hideous tunic pulled in about her and tied behind in that style that gives a woman the appearance of one trying to walk in a sack, and a bonnet made up of odds and ends of ribbon and flowers and feathers pitiable to see. But the poor thing had donned this miserable finery with no worse intention than that any lady has when assuming Worth’s last costume, and, hearing the voice of prayer as she passed, had done what the lady of fashion would not, perhaps, have done—obeyed its summons, and entered modestly and humbly the presence of God. Perhaps it was the one pleasure in a hard life, that occasional promenade in what she conceived to be a fine dress; perhaps she had been pleased, and was thankful for it, as we sometimes are for pleasures no more harmless; it may be she was disappointed and had come to find comfort. Who knows?
Mr. Vane looked intently at this girl a few minutes in a way he had, something penetrating in his scrutiny, yet nothing offensive; for it was as far removed from impertinent curiosity as from a too familiar sympathy. Then the Litany recalled him. As he listened to it, he thought that he had never heard music at once so good and so bad. The organ was like a sweet, courageous soul in an infirm body. All the wheezing and creaking of the bellows could not prevent the tones from being melodious. How many there were in the choir he could not tell. The absurd little organ-loft over the door, reached by a ladder in full view at the side, had so high a screen that the singers were quite hidden. They sounded like a host, however, for their voices
echoed and reverberated from arch to arch and from end to end of the chapel, so that, without the aid of sight, it was hard to know where the sound had its origin; and when, at every fourth verse, the priest and congregation took up the song, the air literally trembled with the force of it. Mr. Vane fancied he felt his hair stir.