The Young Passionist Father Who Showed Us Through The Church And The
House Under It Made Us Wait Half An Hour While He Finished His Lunch,
But He Was Worth Waiting For.
He was a charming enthusiast for both,
radiantly yet reverently exulting in their respective treasures, and
justly but not haughtily proud of the newly introduced electricity which
lighted the darkness of the underground rooms and corridors.
He told us
he had been twenty years a missionary in Rumania, where he had possibly
acquired the delightful English he spoke. When he would have us follow
him he said, "All persons come this way," and he politely spoke of the
wicked emperor whose bust was somehow there as Mr. Commodus. With all
his gentleness, however, that good father had a certain smiling severity
before which the spirit bowed. He had made us wait half an hour before
he came to let us into the church, and during the hour we were with him
there he kept the door locked against an unlucky lady who arrived just
too late to enter with us. Not only this, but he utterly refused to go
back with her singly and show her the things we had seen. Perhaps it
would not have been decorous; they do not let ladies, either singly or
plurally, into the garden of the convent, which is memorable among many
other facts as being the retreat of Mr. Commodus when he suffered from
sleeplessness, and where he once carelessly left his list of victims
lying about, so that his friend Marcia found it and, reading her name in
it, joined with other friends in his assassination.
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