Once more on the road, the party in a little time pulled up at another gate, with the usual man in keeping, who expects, and looks daggers indeed out of his black Italian eyes if he does not get, the usual fee.
The countess sat in her carriage, and would not enter the six hundred miles of Christian Catacombs. But Murietta went on with the party. Having voted to take a mile or two of this singular burying ground and resting place of martyrs, they passed through a gate on foot, they climbed a little eminence, and there, among the grape vines and garden plants, with peasants all around them at work, they went down, down, down narrow stairs, led by a guide, who at last stopped at the door of a dark cavern, and furnished them each with a coil of lighted taper.
He led them along a level, narrow passge, with its sides all cut into niches, not much unlike the berths of a ship, and cut in tiers on either hand, as high as you can reach.
Here the bodies had been placed, someimes a whole family side by side, in the red sandstone. After interment, the mouth of the little shelf had been closed with a marble slab, bearing the name and date, and the whole tightly sealed with cement. Many of these had fallen away and had disappeared. Perhaps they now are used to build the wall around the garden of some modern Cincinnatus.
Some of these little tombs are still sealed as they had been at first; and the inscripions on the polished marble are the same as if made yesterday. Often you see the dove bearing the olive branch, and now and then a peafowl, or some other bird familiar to the Romans. Where the marble slab is gone, there lie the bones crumbling to ashes on the stone — only a handful of dust, nothing more.
The enterprising Johnny hid the brown and crumbling jawbone of a possible Chrisian martyr under his waistcoat, and then loudly declared to the unsuspecting guide that he would assist him in detecting any one who attempted to carry off any of the sacred relics, even though the guilty party should be his own mother.
To the infinite satisfaction of Murietta, as he was talking back over his shoulder to the guide from a side passage, this promisng youth fell over a broken stone coffin and nearly broke his neck.
A very noticeable thing here is a great marble slab, which was the tombstone of a bishop, with a long and elaborate inscripion. The interest of the thing hinges on the fact that on the other side of the great slab is another long inscription, showing it to have been primarily used as the tombstone of an ancient Roman pagan of consular dignity.
"Stealing each other's tombstones!" exclaimed the general.
"Let's get out of this," sighed Mollie "I feel queeri!"
Then Mrs. Wopsus was in tears, and she too wanted to go away and get up out of the earth and from among the dead.
And the place was unpleasant to Murietta too, despite the little lamp hung at every corner, and the old pictures, and the crosses and images of the Saviour everywhere.
To him there was something wanting. He did not know how much he missed the countess all the time. He would have laughed if any one had told him the truth; and he really would have believed this truth to be a lie. There was one light that was more to him than all the little lights that hung along these mournful walls of the dead — the light of her great sad eyes of brown.
But the general must see the tomb of St. Cecilia, and thither the guide led the way.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of all this underground place of tombs is the resting place of St. Cecilia. On the stone wall is a fresco painting of the departed, in a fair state of preservation; and also a picture of the Saviour.
You are bound to admit, however, that these paintings were very poor productions from the first. They are done altogether in red and black colours, and look more like the paintings of the savages of the plains on their skins of buffalo.
In another place you are shown two bodies in stone coffins. One is that of a mummy, and it is not much unlike those of Egypt, save that it is perfectly white. The .other is more ghastly — only a little line of bones lying at the bottom, sinking, as it were, into the stone — resting, resting, resting.
Mollie stood here in silence. Her hand was full of candies and sweets, but they were untasted.
"Come," whispered she to her mother, "I hear strange sounds. Perhaps that is somebody lost away out yonder in the laborinths among the dead."
Even the general shuddered at the thought of being lost in the six hundred miles of this awful place, and instinctively reached out his hand and took Johnny by the coat-collar and held him tight and fast.
Mrs. Wopsus threw her arms about Molie's neck and burst into tears.
"Don't mash my hat, mother," said Mollie. And then she shook her parent off, and began once more to eat her candy.
The voices were drawing nearer. There was a glimmer of light through the solemn passages. It was only another party that had descended another way, now coming up to pay a pilgrimage to the tomb of the patron saint of Song.
Our party here moved on, to the infinite delight of Mollie, and the relief of all. For as Murietta looked back over his shoulder, he saw that this new party was headed by his whilom friend, the doctor and missionary of Naples. And above the noise of crushng bones under their feet as they passed out, and the accumulated echoes of every sound through the awful chambers of death, he heard the clarion voice of the Special Correspondent ringing loud and clear.
"Good heavens!" said the artist to himelf as they regained the height, "that monster, that ghoul, has come to steal away a bone of St. Cecilia"
The countess sat in her carriage, leaning her face on her hand. She did not see the party till they came suddenly through the gate. She evidently had not expected them to return so soon. She lifted her face half frightened; and as she did so there were tears on her great sweeping lashes, and her face was still wet with weeping.
The artist took his seat in silence, and Mollie was, for the first time and for a wonder, thoughtful. They drove rapidly on, for the sun was settling to the west.
In a few minutes they were before the little church of St. Sebastian, and without yet having spoken to the countess, and without speaking, the artist descended and entered, while she remained seated still in the carriage as before.
A very small black monk was kneeling before an altar, and rising up as our party entered, he lighted a taper on the staff, and coming forward, pulled aside a red curtain, and showed the original footprints of our Saviour.
The stone is of a brown colour, hard as marble, and about eighteen inches square. The prints are side by side, as close as possible, are rather large, and set at least an inch deep in the stone.
The rim or edge of the stone seems to be cased in gold. It stands up against an altar to the right of the entrance to the church, or monastery as they are called here, and is kept under cover behind a double iron gate. Here you are also shown an arrow, said to be one of those by which the martyr fell, and also a portion of a stone pillar, to which he was bound when slain.
Johnny told the quiet little monk that he had seen the whole column at Milan.
"Very likely," answered the priest, gravely; "for there were three of these small columns set together, and to these three was St. Sebastian bound."
Ah! the wealth and the levity of these places of worship!
"It looks bad to see so much extravaance in this way, when there is so much poverty and misery among the poor," said the general to the monk.
"But," said the monk in answer, "when we reflect that it is the poor who chiefly use these sacred houses, and that they there, at least, are peers with the proudest of the land, it is not so bad after all/'
The general saw that the subject, like nearly all others in the world, had two sides to it, and was silent.
While they were here an old woman came in with her weaving apparatus — a part of a loom it seemed — on her shoulders, and setting it down in a comer, crossed herself, said a prayer, and then asked to see the sacred relics. Murietta remarked, with pleasure, that the priest lighted the taper, and put the red curtain aside, preisely the same for this old weaver-woman, as he did for the party of sovereigns from America.
What had come between Murietta and the countess? Surely nothing had been said or done that day by either that they should now be standing wide apart as it were.
The artist took his seat once more, and once more without one word. The lady did not look up. As the carriages whirled away that the party might see the sun go down from the Tomb of Metella, the lady's little pink and pearl hands lay still on the flower beds of rose and pink, and her pretty baby face kept trying to hide back behind her companion.
Yea, they were standing wide apart. A stream was flowing between them. It was growing cold in their hearts — cold enough to freeze the flowing stream to ice.
Ruins! ruins! ruins! right and left. After passing the Tomb of Metella, with its girdle of oxen skulls bound in wreaths — a tomb that has been a battlement, a palace, and a prison, they came to a tomb that has not even a name; and yet it is almost as colossal as a pyramid, and twice as gray.
"Marvellous, marvellousi!" mused the general, as they turned their carriages, and rested here a moment before returning to Rome.
On the top of this lofty and colossal structure, that even the most imaginative Italian falters before, there is growing a grove of olive trees, and there is a little farm house perched up there, and the man has really a little farm on the top of his tomb.
While our party rested here, a cock came to the edge of his little world, and strutting up and down, he flapped his wings and crowed above them, loud and clear and defiant.
Then Johnny rose up, and standing in his seat, answered back the challenge. Then the cock again strutted along the edge of his little world, and looking conemptuously down again, crowed and crowed and crowed as the party drove across.
Here are ruins that will probably survive all other structures now in existence, save the Pyramids, either old or new.
The one thing that saddens a man in contemplating these great works is the reflection that the labour was all done by slaves. Done by men chiefly brought captive from other lands and made to waste out their existence here in most ignoble toil for masters as cruel and as insolent as the Pharaohs.
Yonder is the sacred wood, and hard by the ruins of the Temple of Bacchus. Here and there are mounds, and you can guess what lies beneath. Only now and then the ruins lift in mass above the climbing grass and shrubs and trees. Sometimes, however, they loom up as if they would never stop, and stand hundreds of feet in the air. These will never fall. The earth may climb up around them; the grass will take root, and in time will smooth the rugged path; but they have melted together as it were in one solid mass, and stand like a spur of the Sierras.
Kind earth claims them for her own, and has pressed them so long and so close against her breast that they have sunk all together, brick and mortar in one indisinguishable mass.
The sun had gone down on Rome; and round about Rome on the mighty mountain tops was drawn a girdle of fire.
Twenty miles away to the west as they returned, flashed the sea in the dying sun of Italy like a hemisphere of flame.
Before them, in the middle of the great Campagna, with its far off wall of eternal and snowy mountains, huddled together the white houses of Rome, like a flock of goats gathered to rest for the night; and mighty St. Peter's towered above them all like a tall shepherd keeping watch and ward.
"Now I can see that it was no chance or accident that built the Eternal City in the centre of this mighty amphitheatre," said Murietta. "Nature ordered it. She pointed to the little group of hills lifting out of the plain by the Tiber, and said, "Build your city on the Palatine!"
The countess did not answer; but the man seemed inspired with the scene, and went on as if speaking to himself.
"Yonder mighty crescent of snowy mountains seems to me, as the sun is fading from their forked summits, to be but another, a more magnificent Coliseum. Yonder are the gladiators now, battling to the death — Papist and Protestant, Turk and Jew. Rome is the arena! and I am but an idle looker-on."
Still the countess did not answer. She did not look up or even lift a finger.
What could have been the matter? The stream that flowed between them was indeed frozen over. It was dark and still. It was dead and made no sound.
They drew up at the palace, and Murietta, after lifting the lady from the carriage and ringing a bell, left her, and gathering his cloak about him, turned away with no other word than the coldest courtesies of the occasion.
He was half down the steps.
"You will come to-morrow."
He turned, folded his cloak tighter about him, but did not speak.
"You will come tomorrow. I comand you to come"
The door opened, and she disappeared.
The man stood there and tapped the step a moment with his foot, and then was gone.
Start reading Chapter 35 ofThe One Fair Lady