ENRICA
I hearher glancing feet the moment I have tinkled the bell; and there she is, with her brown hair gathered into braids, and her eyes full of joy and greeting. And as I walk with the mother to the window to look at some pageant that is passing, she steals up behind and passes her arm around me, with a quick electric motion and a gentle pressure of welcome that tells more than a thousand words.
It is a pageant of death that is passing below. Far down the street we see heads thrust out of the windows and standing in bold relief against the red torchlight of the moving train. Below dim figures are gathering on the narrow side ways to look at the solemn spectacle. A hoarse chant rises louder and louder, and half dies in the night air, and breaks out again with new and deep bitterness.
Now the first torchlight under us shines plainly on faces in the windows and on the kneeling women in the street. First come old retainers of the dead one, bearing long blazing flambeaux. Then comes a company of priests, two by two, bareheaded, and every second one with a lighted torch, and all are chanting.
Next is a brotherhood of friars in brown cloaks, with sandaled feet, and the red light streams full upon their grizzled heads. They add their heavy guttural voices to the chant and pass slowly on.
Then comes a company of priests in white muslin capes and black robes and black caps, bearing books in their hands, wide open, and lit up plainly by the torches of churchly servitors, who march beside them; and from the books the priests chant loud and solemnly. Now the music is loudest, and the friars take up the dismal notes from the white-capped priests, and the priests before catch them from the brown-robed friars, and mournfully the sound rises up between the tall buildings, into the blue night sky that lies between Heaven and Rome.
—“Vede—Vede!” says Cesare; and in a blaze of the red torch fire comes the bier, borne on the necks of stout friars; and on the bier is the body of a dead man, habited like a priest. Heavy plumes of black wave at each corner.
—“Hist,” says my landlady.
The body is just under us. Enrica crosses herself; her smile is for the moment gone. Cesare’s boy-face is grown suddenly earnest. We could see the pale youthful features of the dead man. The glaring flambeaux sent their flaunting streams of unearthly light over the wan visage of the sleeper. A thousand eyes were looking on him, but his face, careless of them all, was turned up, straight toward the stars.
Still the chant rises, and companies of priests follow the bier, like those who had gone before. Friars, in brown cloaks, and prelates and Carmelites come after—all with torches. Two by two—their voices growing hoarse—they tramp and chant.
For a while the voices cease, and you can hear the rustling of their robes, and their footfalls, as if your ear was to the earth. Then the chant rises again, as they glide on in a wavy shining line, and rolls back over the death-train, like the howling of a wind in winter.
As they pass the faces vanish from the windows. The kneeling women upon the pavement rise up, mindful of the paroxysm of Life once more. The groups in the door-ways scatter. But their low voices do not drown the voices of the host of mourners and their ghost-like music.
I look long upon the blazing bier, trailing under the deep shadows of the Roman palaces, and at the stream of torches, winding like a glittering, scaled serpent. It is a priest—say I to my landlady as she closes the window.
“No, signor—a young man never married, and so, by virtue of his condition, they put on him the priest-robes.”
“So I,” says the pretty Enrica—“if I should die, would be robed in white, as you saw me on a carnival night, and be followed by nuns for sisters.”
“A long way off may it be, Enrica.”
She took my hand in hers and pressed it. An Italian girl does not fear to talk of death, and we were talking of it still as we walked back to my little parlor—my hand all the time in hers—and sat down by the blaze of my fire.
It was holy week; never had Enrica looked more sweetly than in that black dress—under that long, dark veil of the days of Lent. Upon the broad pavement of St. Peter’s—where the people, flocking by thousands, made only side groups about the altars of the vast temple—I have watched her kneeling beside her mother, her eyes bent down, her lips moving earnestly, and her whole figure tremulous with deep emotion. Wandering around among the halberdiers of the pope, and the court coats of Austria, and the barefooted pilgrims with sandal, shell and staff, I would sidle back again to look upon that kneeling figure, and, leaning against the huge columns of the church, would dream—even as I am dreaming now.
At nightfall I urged my way into the Sistine Chapel; Enrica is beside me—looking with me upon the gaunt figures of the Judgment of Angelo. They are chanting theMiserere. The twelve candlesticks by the altar are put out one by one as the service continues. The sun has gone down, and only the red glow of twilight steals through the dusky windows. There is a pause, and a brief reading from a red-cloaked cardinal, and all kneel down.Shekneels beside me, and the sweet, mournful flow of theMisererebegins again, growing in force and depth, till the whole chapel rings and the balcony of the choir trembles; then it subsides again into the low, soft wail of a single voice, so prolonged, so tremulous and so real that the heart aches and the tears start—for Christ is dead!
—Lingering yet, the wail dies not wholly, but just as it seemed expiring it is caught up by another and stronger voice that carries it on, plaintive as ever; nor does it stop with this, for just as you looked for silence three voices more begin the lament—sweet, touching, mournful voices—and bear it up to a full cry, when the whole choir catch its burden and make the lament change into the wailing of a multitude—wild, shrill, hoarse—with swift chants intervening, as if agony had given force to anguish. Then, sweetly, slowly, voice by voice, note by note, the wailings sink into the low, tender moan of a single singer—faltering, tremulous, as if tears checked the utterance, and swelling out, as if despair sustained it.
It was dark in the chapel when we went out; voices were low. Enrica said nothing—I could say nothing.
I was to leave Rome after Easter; I did not love to speak of it—nor to think of it. Rome—that old city, with all its misery, and its fallen state, and its broken palaces of the empire—grows upon one’s heart. The fringing shrubs of the coliseum, flaunting their blossoms at the tall beggar-men in cloaks who grub below—the sun glimmering over the mossy pile of the House of Nero—the sweet sunsets from the Pincian, that make the broad pine-tops of the Janiculan stand sharp and dark against a sky of gold, can not easily be left behind. And Enrica, with her silver-brown hair, and the silken fillet that bound it, and her deep hazel eyes, and her white, delicate fingers, and the blue veins chasing over her fair temples—ah, Easter is too near!
But it comes, and passes with the glory of St. Peter’s—lighted from top to bottom. With Enrica, I saw it from the Ripetta, as it loomed up in the distance, like a city on fire.
The next day I bring home my last bunch of flowers, and with it a little richly-chased Roman ring. No fire blazes on the hearth, but they are all there. Warm days have come, and the summer air, even now, hangs heavy with fever in the hollows of the plain.
I heard them stirring early on the morning of which I was to go away. I do not think I slept very well myself—nor very late. Never did Enrica look more beautiful—never. All her carnival robes and the sad drapery of theFriday of Crucifixioncould not so adorn her beauty as that neat morning dress and that simple rosebud she wore upon her bosom. She gave it to me—the last—with a trembling hand. I did not, for I could not, thank her. She knew it; and her eyes were full.
The old man kissed my cheek—it was the Roman custom, but the custom did not extend to the Roman girls; at least not often. As I passed down the Corso I looked back at the balcony, where she stood in the time of Carnival in the brown sombrero with the white plume. I knew she would be there now; and there she was. My eyes dwelt upon the vision, very loth to leave it; and after my eyes had lost it, my heart clung to it—there, where my memory clings now.
At noon the carriage stopped upon the hills, toward Soracte, that overlooked Rome. There was a stunted pine tree grew a little way from the road, and I sat down under it—for I wished no dinner—and I looked back with strange tumult of feeling upon the sleeping city, with the gray, billowy sea of the Campagna lying around it.
I seemed to see Enrica, the Roman girl, in that morning dress, with her brown hair in its silken fillet; but the rosebud that was in her bosom was now in mine. Her silvery voice, too, seemed to float past me, bearing snatches of Roman songs; but the songs were sad and broken.
—After all, this is sad vanity! thought I; and yet if I had espied then some returning carriage going down toward Rome, I will not say—but that I should have hailed it, and taken a place, and gone back, and to this day, perhaps, have lived at Rome.
But the vetturino called me; the coach was ready; I gave one more look toward the dome that guarded the sleeping city, and then we galloped down the mountain, on the road that lay toward Perugia and Lake Thrasimene.
—Sweet Enrica! art thou living yet? Or hast thou passed away to that Silent Land where the good sleep, and the beautiful?
The visions of the past fade. The morning breeze has died upon the meadow; the Bob-o’-Lincoln sits swaying on the willow tufts—singing no longer. The trees lean to the brook; but the shadows fall straight and dense upon the silver stream.
Noonhas broken into the middle sky, andMorningis gone.