Don Orsino | Page 2

cardinal-deacon. The keen face was drawn up on one side
with a strange look of mingled pity and contempt. The delicate, thin
hands were clasped together on the breast. The chilly light fell upon the
dead features, the silken robe and the stone floor. A single servant in a
shabby livery stood in a corner, smiling foolishly, while the tears stood
in his eyes and wet his unshaven cheeks. Perhaps he cared, as servants
will, when no one else cares. The door opened almost directly upon a
staircase and the noise of the feet of those passing up and down upon
the stone steps disturbed the silence in the death chamber. At night the
poor body was thrust unhonoured into a common coach and driven out
to its resting-place.
In a vast hall, upon an enormous catafalque, full thirty feet above the
floor, lay all that was left of the honest king. Thousands of wax candles
cast their light up to the dark, shapeless face, and upon the military
accoutrements of the uniform in which the huge body was clothed. A
great crowd pressed to the railing to gaze their fill and go away. Behind
the division tall troopers in cuirasses mounted guard and moved
carelessly about. It was all tawdry, but tawdry on a magnificent
scale--all unlike the man in whose honour it was done. For he had been
simple and brave.
When he was at last borne to his tomb in the Pantheon, a file of
imperial and royal princes marched shoulder to shoulder down the
street before him, and the black charger he had loved was led after him.
In a dim chapel of St. Peter's lay the Pope, robed in white, the jewelled
tiara upon his head, his white face calm and peaceful. Six torches
burned beside him; six nobles of the guard stood like statues with
drawn swords, three on his right hand and three on his left. That was all.
The crowd passed in single file before the great closed gates of the
Julian Chapel.

At night he was borne reverently by loving hands to the deep crypt
below. But at another time, at night also, the dead man was taken up
and driven towards the gate to be buried without the walls. Then a great
crowd assembled in the darkness and fell upon the little band and
stoned the coffin of him who never harmed any man, and screamed out
curses and blasphemies till all the city was astir with riot. That was the
last funeral hymn.
Old Rome is gone. The narrow streets are broad thoroughfares, the
Jews' quarter is a flat and dusty building lot, the fountain of Ponte Sisto
is swept away, one by one the mighty pines of Villa Ludovisi have
fallen under axe and saw, and a cheap, thinly inhabited quarter is built
upon the site of the enchanted garden. The network of by-ways from
the Jesuits' church to the Sant' Angelo bridge is ploughed up and
opened by the huge Corso Vittorio Emmanuele. Buildings which
strangers used to search for in the shade, guide-book and map in hand,
are suddenly brought into the blaze of light that fills broad streets and
sweeps across great squares. The vast Cancelleria stands out nobly to
the sun, the curved front of the Massimo palace exposes its black
colonnade to sight upon the greatest thoroughfare of the new city, the
ancient Arco de' Cenci exhibits its squalor in unshadowed sunshine, the
Portico of Octavia once more looks upon the river.
He who was born and bred in the Rome of twenty years ago comes
back after a long absence to wander as a stranger in streets he never
knew, among houses unfamiliar to him, amidst a population whose
speech sounds strange in his ears. He roams the city from the Lateran to
the Tiber, from the Tiber to the Vatican, finding himself now and then
before some building once familiar in another aspect, losing himself
perpetually in unprofitable wastes made more monotonous than the
sandy desert by the modern builder's art. Where once he lingered in old
days to glance at the river, or to dream of days yet older and long gone,
scarce conscious of the beggar at his elbow and hardly seeing the half
dozen workmen who laboured at their trades almost in the middle of
the public way--where all was once aged and silent and melancholy and
full of the elder memories--there, at that very corner, he is hustled and
jostled by an eager crowd, thrust to the wall by huge, grinding,

creaking carts, threatened with the modern death by the wheel of the
modern omnibus, deafened by the yells of the modern newsvendors,
robbed, very likely, by the light fingers of the modern inhabitant.
And yet he feels that