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Page 37
You so often found the former abodes of glorious names with a modern
rental out of all proportion with their historic interest. This house,
poppa calculated, would let to-day at a figure discreditable neither to
Cristoforo himself, nor to the United States of America. Mr. Bebbini,
unfortunately, could not tell him what that figure was.
On the steps of San Lorenzo Cathedral momma paused and cast a searching
glance into all the corners.
"Where are the beggars?" she inquired, not without injury. "I have
_always_ been given to understand that church entrances in Italy were
disgracefully thronged with beggars of the lowest type. I have never
seen a picture of a sacred building without them!"
"So that was why you wanted so much small change, Augusta," said the
Senator. "Mr. Bebbini says there's a law against them nowadays. Now that
you mention it, I'm disappointed there too. Municipal progress in Italy
is something you've not prepared for somehow. I daresay if we only knew
it, they're thinking of lighting this town with electricity, and the
Board of Aldermen are considering contracts for cable cars."
"Do not inquire, Alexander," begged momma, but the Senator had fallen
behind with Mr. Bebbini in earnest conversation, and we gathered that
its import was entirely modern.
It was our first Italian church and it was impressive, for a President
of the French Republic had just fallen to the knife of an Italian
assassin, and from the altar to the door San Lorenzo was in mourning and
in penance. Masses for his soul's repose had that day been said and
sung; near the door hung a request for the prayers of all good
Christians to this end. Many of the grave-eyed people that came and went
were doubtless about this business, but one, I know, was there on a
private errand. He prayed at a chapel aside, kneeling on the floor
beside the railings, his cap in his hands, grasping it just as the
peasant in The Angelus grasps his. Inside the altar hung a picture of a
pitying woman, and there were candles and foolish flowers of tinsel, but
beside these, many tokens of hearts, gold and silver, thick below the
altar, crowding the partition walls. The hearts were grateful
ones--Alessandro explained in an undertone--brought and left by many
who had been preserved from violent death by the saint there, and he who
knelt was a workman just from hospital, who had fallen, with his son,
from a building. The boy had been killed, the father only badly hurt.
His heart token was the last--a little common thing--and tied with no
rejoiceful ribbon but with a scrap of crape. I hoped Heaven would see
the crape as well as the tribute. When we went away he was still
kneeling in his patched blue cotton clothes, and as the saint had very
beautiful kind eyes, and all the tinsel flowers were standing in the
glowing light of stained glass, and the voice of the Church had begun to
speak too, through the organ, I daresay he went away comforted.
Momma says there is only one thing she recollects clearly about San
Lorenzo, and that is the Chapel of St. John the Baptist. This does not
remain in her memory because of the _Cinquecento_ screen or the
altar-canopy's porphyry pillars which we know we must have seen because
the guide-book says they are there, but because of the fact that Pope
Innocent the Eighth had it closed to our sex for a long time, except on
one day of the year, on account of Herodias. Momma considered this
extremely invidious of Innocent the Eighth, and said it was a thing no
man except a Pope would have thought of doing. What annoyed poppa was
that she seemed to hold Alessandro Bebbini responsible, and covered him
with reproaches, in the guise of argument, which he neither deserved nor
understood. And when poppa suggested that she was probably as much to
blame for Herodias's conduct as Mr. Bebbini was for the Pope's, she said
that had nothing whatever to do with it, and she thanked Heaven she was
born a Protestant anyway, distinctly implying that Herodias was a Roman
Catholic. And if poppa didn't wish her back to give out altogether,
would he please return to the carriage.
We wandered through a palace or two and thought how interesting it must
have been to be rich in the days of "Sir Horatio Palavasene, who robbed
the Pope to pay the Queen." Wealth had its individuality in those days,
and expressed itself with truth and splendour in sculpture, and picture,
and tapestry, and precious things, with the picturesqueness of contrast
and homage. As the Senator said, a banquet hall did not then suggest a
Fifth Avenue hairdresser's saloon. But now the Genoese merchant-princes
would find that their state had lost its identity in machine made
imitations, and that it would be more distinguished to be poor, since
poverty is never counterfeited. But poppa declined to go as far as that.
Alessandro, as we drove round and up the winding roads that take one to
the top of Genoa--the hotels and the palaces and the churches are mostly
at the bottom--was full of joyous and rapid information. Especially did
he continue to be communicative on the subject of Christopher Columbus,
and if we are not now assured of the school that discoverer attended in
his youth, and the altar rails before which he took the first communion
of his early manhood, and the occupation of his wife's parents, and
many other matters concerning him, it is the fault of history and not
that of Alessandro Bebbini. After a cathedral and a palace and a long
drive, this was bound to have its effect, and I very soon saw resentment
in the demeanour of both my parents. So much so, that when we passed the
family group in memory of Mazzini, and Alessandro explained dramatically
that "the daughter he sitta down and cryo because his father is a-dead,"
poppa said, "Is that so?" without the faintest show of excitement, and
momma declined even to look round.
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