Chapter Ten.
Some Curious Stories.
The festa of San Sebastiano fell on a Sunday.
The ancient church a mile and a half outside Rome on the Appian Way—the road constructed three hundred years before the birth of Christ—was thronged by the populace in festa attire, for San Sebastiano, built as it is over the Catacombs where reposed the remains of the Christian martyrs, is one of the seven churches to which pilgrims have flocked from every part of western Christendom, while in its chapel is the marble slab bearing what is held by tradition to be the footprints of Christ, and which, therefore, is held by the Romans in special veneration.
Though January, the morning was sunny and cloudless, and with Lady Cathcart, the Ambassador’s wife, and young Edward Mervyn, the rather foppish honorary attaché, Hubert Waldron had motored out to watch the festival with all its gorgeous procession of priests and acolytes, its swinging censers and musical chants.
As at all the festas in Rome, there was the usual crowd of gaping Cookites and the five-guinea excursionists of other agencies, for is not the Eternal City the city of the tourist par excellence? In it he can live in a cheap pension for four lire a night, or he can spend a hundred lire a night in certain hotels de luxe on his room alone.
The road was dusty and crowded as, the ceremony over, the party sped back, past the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla—paltry indeed after those left by Rameses in Egypt—and the churches of Santi Nereo ed Achilleo and San Cesareo, afterwards re-entering the city and speeding up the broad modern Via Nazionale and into the long, straight Via Venti Settembre, at last pulling up before the great grey façade of the British Embassy.
Hubert Waldron was no stranger to Rome. For five years he had lived at the Embassy when his father was Ambassador, and in those days had been very popular in the very exclusive Society of the Italian capital. Nowadays, however, he did not live at the Embassy, but rented the same cosy flat over a bank in the Via Nazionale which had been occupied by his predecessor—a charming, artistic little place which was the very ideal of a bachelor pied-à-terre.
That day there was a smart luncheon-party at the Embassy; among the guests being the Austrian and Russian Ambassadors with their wives, Prince Ghika, of the Roumanian Legation, the stout and wealthy Duca di Carpenito, the old Marchesa Genazzano, a hideous guy with her protruding yellow teeth, yet one of the leaders of Roman Society, the young Marchese Montalcino, who wore upturned moustachios and yellow boots; the pretty Contessa Stella Pizzoli, one of the Queen’s dames de la Cour, and half a dozen others whose names in the Italian capital were as household words.
Around the luncheon-table, charmingly arranged with delicate floral decorations, the chatter had been universal, Sir Francis Cathcart, K.C.M.G., the British Ambassador, holding a long and animated conversation with Princess Bezanoff, wife of “The Russian”—as the Tzar’s representative was termed in the diplomatic circle—while Lady Cathcart had been gossiping with the Duca di Carpenito, who was perhaps the greatest landowner in all Italy, and whose ancient Palazzo in the Corso is pointed out to the traveller as one of the finest mediaeval residences in the city.