The Whole Unstinted Hospitality Of The Service Is There For You, As Well As For The Children Of The House, And The Heart Must Be Rude And The Soul Ungrateful That Would Refuse It.

For my part, I accepted it as far as I knew how, and when I left the worshipers on

Their knees and went tiptoeing from picture to picture and chapel to chapel, it was with shame for the unscrupulous sacristan showing me about, and I felt that he, if not I, ought to be put out and not allowed back till the function was over. I call him sacristan at a venture; but there were several kinds of guides in the cathedral, some in the livery of the place and some in civil dress, willing to supplement our hotel interpreter, or lying in wait for us when we came alone. I wish now I had taken them all, but at the time they tired me, and I denied them.

Though not a day passed but we saw it, I am not able to say what the cathedral was like. The choir was planted in the heart of it, as it might be a celestial refuge in that forest of mighty pillars, as great in girth as the giant redwoods of California, and climbing to a Gothic firmament horizoned round as with sunset light from near a hundred painted windows. The chapels on each side, the most beautiful in Spain, abound in riches of art and pious memorials, with chief among them the Royal Chapel, in the prow, as it were, of the ship which the cathedral has been likened to, keeping the bones not only of the sainted hero, King Fernando, but also, among others, the bones of Peter the Cruel, and of his unwedded love, Maria de Padilla, far too good for Peter in life, if not quite worthy of San Fernando in death. You can see the saint's body on certain dates four times a year, when, as your Baedeker will tell you, "the troops of the garrison march past and lower their colors" outside the cathedral. We were there on none of these dates, and, far more regretably, not on the day of Corpus Christi, when those boys whose effigies in sculptured and painted wood we had seen in the museum at Valladolid pace in their mystic dance before the people at the opposite portal of the cathedral. But I appoint any reader, so minded, to go and witness the rite some springtime for me. There is no hurry, for it is destined to endure through the device practised in defeating the pope who proposed to abolish it. He ordained that it should continue only as long as the boys' actual costumes lasted; but by renewing these carefully wherever they began to wear out, they have become practically imperishable.

If we missed this attraction of the cathedral, we had the high good fortune to witness another ceremony peculiar to it, but perhaps less popularly acceptable. The building had often suffered from earthquakes, and on the awful day, _dies irae,_ of the great Lisbon earthquake, during mass and at the moment of the elevation of the Host, when the worshipers were on their knees, there came such a mighty shock in sympathy with the far-off cataclysm that the people started to their feet and ran out of the cathedral. If the priests ran after them, as soon as the apparent danger was past they led the return of their flock and resumed the interrupted rite. It was, of course, by a miracle that the temple was spared, and when it was realized how scarcely Seville had escaped the fate of Lisbon it was natural that the event should be dramatized in a perpetual observance. Every year now, on the 1st of November, the clergy leave the cathedral at a chosen moment of the mass, with much more stateliness than in the original event, and lead the people out of one portal, to return with them by another for the conclusion of the ceremonial.

We waited long for the climax, but at last we almost missed it through the overeagerness of the guide I had chosen out of many that petitioned. He was so politely, so forbearingly insistent in his offer to see that we were vigilantly cared for, that I must have had a heart harder than Peter the Cruel's to have denied him, and he planted us at the most favorable point for the function in the High Chapel, with instructions which portal to hurry to when the movement began, and took his peseta and went his way. Then, while we confidingly waited, he came rushing back and with a great sweep of his hat wafted us to the door which he had said the procession would go out by, but which he seemed to have learned it would come in by, and we were saved from what had almost been his fatal error. I forgave him the more gladly because I could rejoice in his returning to repair his error, although he had collected his money; and with a heart full of pride in his verification of my theory of the faithful Spanish nature, I gave myself to the shining gorgeousness of the procession that advanced chanting in the blaze of the Sevillian sun. There was every rank of clergy, from the archbishop down, in robes of ceremonial, but I am unable honestly to declare the admiration for their splendor which I would have willingly felt. The ages of faith in which those vestments were designed were apparently not the ages of taste; yet it was the shape of the vestments and not the color which troubled the eye of unfaith, if not of taste. The archbishop in crimson silk, with his train borne by two acolytes, the canons in their purple, the dean in his gold-embroidered robes, and the priests and choristers in their black robes and white surplices richly satisfied it; and if some of the clerics were a little frayed and some of the acolytes were spotted with the droppings of the candles, these were details which one remembered afterward and that did not matter at the time.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 66 of 101
Words from 66677 to 67717 of 103320