Complete works of hall c.., p.378
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 378
But the battle of hate in Roma’s heart was over. She had remembered Rossi and that had swept away all her bitterness. As the Baron stood to her, so she stood to her husband. They were two unforgiven ones, both guilty and ashamed.
“Indeed, indeed I do forgive you, as I hope to be forgiven,” she said, whereupon he laughed again, but with a different note altogether.
Then he asked her to lift up his head. She placed a cushion under it, but still he called on her to lift his head higher.
“Can you lift me in your arms, Roma?... Higher still. So!... Can you hold me there?”
“How do you feel now?” she asked.
“It won’t be long,” he answered. His respirations came in whiffs.
Roma began to repeat as much as she could remember of the prayers for the dying which she had heard at the deathbed of her aunt. The dying man smiled an indulgent smile into the young woman’s beautiful and mournful face and allowed her to go on. As she prayed faster and faster, saying the same words over and over again, she felt his breathing grow more faint and irregular. At length it seemed to stop, and thinking it was gone altogether, she made the sign of the cross and said:
“We commend to Thee, O Lord, the soul of Thy servant Gabriel, that being dead to the world he may live to Thee, and those sins which through the frailty of human life he has committed, Thou by the indulgence of Thy most merciful loving-kindness may wipe out, through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
Then the glazed eyes opened wide and lighted up with a pitiful smile.
“I’m dying in your arms, Roma.”
Then a long breath, and then:
“Adieu!”
He had tried to subdue all men to his will, and there was one man he had subdued above all others — himself. There is a greater man than the great man — the man who is too great to be great.
IX
There had been no light in the dining-room except the reflection from the lamp in the sitting-room, and now it fell with awful shadows on the whitening face turned upward on the couch. The pains of death had given a distorted expression, and the eyes remained open. Roma wished to close them, but dared not try, and the image of inanimate objects standing in the light was mirrored in their dull and glassy surface. The dog in the distance was still barking, and a company of tipsy revellers were passing through the piazza singing a drinking song with a laugh in it. When they were gone the clocks outside began to strike. It was one o’clock, and the hour seemed to dance over the city in single steps.
Roma’s terror became unbearable. Feeling herself to be a murderer, she acted on a murderer’s impulse and prepared to fly. When she recalled the emotions with which she had determined to kill the Baron and then deliver herself up to justice, they seemed so remote that they might have existed only in a dream or belonged to another existence.
Trembling from head to foot, and scarcely able to support herself, she fixed her hat and veil afresh, put on her coat, and, taking one last fearful look at the wide-open eyes on the couch, she went backwards to the door. She dared not turn round from a creeping fear that something might touch her on the shoulder.
The door was open. No doubt Rossi had left it so, and she had not noticed the circumstance until now. She had got as far as the first landing when a poignant memory came to her — the memory of how she had first descended those stairs with Rossi, going side by side, and almost touching. The feeling that she had been fatal to the man since then nearly choked and blinded her, but it urged her on. If she remained until some one came, and the crime was discovered, what was she to say that would not incriminate her husband?
Suddenly she became aware of sounds from below — the measured footsteps of soldiers. She knew who they were. They were the Carabineers, and they were coming for Rossi, who had escaped and was being pursued.
Roma turned instantly, and with a noiseless step fled back to the door of the apartment, opened it with her latch-key, closed it silently, and bolted it on the inside. This was done before she knew what she was doing, and when she regained full possession of her faculties she was in the sitting-room, and the Carabineers were ringing at the electric bell.
They rang repeatedly. Roma stood in the middle of the floor, listening and holding her breath.
“Deuce take it!” said a voice outside. “Why doesn’t the woman open the door if she doesn’t want to get herself into trouble? She’s at home, at all events.”
“So is he, if I know anything,” said a second voice. “He drove here anyway — not a doubt about that.”
“Let’s see the porter — he’ll have another key.”
“The old fool is out at the illuminations. But listen....” (the door rattled as if some one was shaking it). “This door is fastened on the inside.”
There was a chuckling laugh, and then, “All right, boys! Down with it!”
A moment afterwards the door was broken open and four Carabineers were in the dining-room. Roma awaited their irruption without a word. She continued to stand in the middle of the sitting-room looking straight before her.
“Holy saints, what’s this?” cried the voice she had heard first, and she knew that the Carabineers were bending over the body on the couch.
“His Excellency!”
“Lord save us!”
Roma’s head was dizzy, and something more was said which she did not follow. At the next moment the Carabineers had entered the sitting-room; she was standing face to face with them, and they were questioning her.
“The Honourable Rossi is here, isn’t he?”
“No,” she answered in a timid voice.
“But he has been here, hasn’t he?”
“No,” she answered more boldly.
“Do you mean to say that the Honourable Rossi has not been here to-night?”
“I do,” she said, with exaggerated emphasis.
The marshal of the Carabineers, who had been speaking, looked attentively at her for a moment, and then he called on his men to search the rooms.
“What’s this?” said the marshal, taking up a sealed letter from the bureau and reading the superscription: “L’on, Davide Rossi, Carceri Giudiziarie, di Milano.”
“That’s a letter I wrote to my husband and haven’t yet posted,” said Roma.
“But what’s this?” cried a voice from the dining-room. “Presented to the Honourable David Rossi by the Italian colony in Zürich.”
Roma sank into a seat. It was the revolver. She had forgotten it.
“That’s all right,” said the marshal, with the same chuckle as before.
Dizzy and almost blind in her terror, Roma struggled to her feet. “The revolver belongs to me,” she said. “Mr. Rossi left it in my keeping when he went away two months ago, and since that time he has never touched it.”
“Then who fired the shot that killed his Excellency, Signora?”
“I did,” said Roma.
Instinctively the man removed his hat.
Within half-an-hour Roma had repeated her statement at the Regina C[oe]li, and the Carabineers, to prevent a public scandal, had smuggled the body of the Baron, under the cover of night, to his office in the Palazzo Braschi, on the opposite side of the piazza.
X
One thought was supreme in David Rossi’s mind when he left the Piazza Navona — that the world in which he had lived was shaken to its foundations and his life was at an end. The unhappy man wandered about the streets without asking himself where he was going or what was to become of him.
Many feelings tore his heart, but the worst of them was anger. He had taken the life of the Baron. The man deserved his death, and he felt no pity for his victim and no remorse for his crime. But that he should have killed the Minister, he who had twice stood between him and death, he who had resisted the doctrine of violence and all his life preached the gospel of peace, this was a degradation too shameful and abject.
The woman had been the beginning and end of everything. “How I hate her!” he thought. He was telling himself for the hundredth time that he had never hated anybody so much before, when he became aware that he had returned to the neighbourhood of the Piazza Navona. Without knowing what he was doing, he had been walking round and round it.
He began to picture Roma as he had seen her that night. The beautiful, mournful, pleading face, which he had not really seen while his eyes looked on it, now rose before the eye of his mind. This caused a wave of tenderness to pass over him against his will, and his heart, so full of hatred, began to melt with love.
All the cruel words he had spoken at parting returned to his memory, and he told himself that he had been too hasty. Instead of bearing her down he should have listened to her explanation. Before the Baron entered the room she had been at the point of swearing that her love, and nothing but her love, had caused her to betray him.
He told himself she had lied, but the thought was hell, and to escape from it he made for the bank of the river again. This time he crossed the bridge of St. Angelo, and passed up the Borgo to the piazza of St. Peter’s. But the piazza itself awakened a crowd of memories. It was there in a balcony that he had first seen Roma, not plainly, but vaguely in a summer cloud of lace and sunshades.
Then it occurred to him that it must have been on this spot that Roma was inspired with the plot which had ended with his betrayal. At that thought all the bitterness of his soul returned. He told himself she deserved every word he had said to her, and blamed himself for the humiliation he had gone through in his attempt to make excuses for what she had done. To the curse he had hurled at her at the last moment he added words of fiercer anger, and though they were spoken only in his brain, or to the dark night and the rolling river, they intensified his fury.
“Oh, how I hate her!” he thought.
The piazza, was quiet. There was a light in the Pope’s windows, and a Swiss Guard was patrolling behind the open wicket of the bronze gate to the Vatican. A porter in gorgeous livery was yawning by the door of the Prime Minister’s palace. The man was waiting for his master. He would have to wait.
The clock of St. Peter’s struck one, and the silent place began to be peopled with many shadows. The scene of the Pope’s jubilee returned to Rossi’s mind. He saw and heard everything over again. The crowd, the gorgeous procession, the Pope, and last of all his own speech. A sardonic smile crossed his face in the darkness as he thought of what he had said.
“Is it possible that I can ever have believed those fables?”
He was tramping down the Trastevere, picturing his trial for the murder of the Baron, with Roma in the witness-box and himself in the dock. The cold horror of it all was insupportable, and he told himself that there was only one place in which he could escape from despair.
The unhappy man had begun to think of taking his own life. He had always condemned suicide. He had even condemned it in Bruno. But it was the death grip of a man utterly borne down, and there was nothing else to hold on to.
The day began to break, and he turned back towards the piazza of St. Peter’s, thinking of what he intended to do and where he would do it. By the end of the Hospital of Santo Spirito there was a little blind alley bounded by a low wall. Below was the quick turn of the Tiber, and no swimmer was strong enough to live long in the turbulent waters at that point. He would do it there.
The streets were silent, and in the grey dawn, that mystic hour of parturition when the day is being born and things are seen in places where they do not exist, when ships sail in the sky and mountains rise around lowland cities, David Rossi became aware in a moment that a woman was walking on the pavement in front of him. He could almost have believed that it was Roma, the figure was so tall and full and upright. But the woman’s dress was poorer, and she was carrying a bundle in her arms. When he looked again he saw that her bundle was a child, and that she was weeping over it.
“Taking her little one to the hospital,” he thought.
But on turning into the little Borgo he saw that the woman went up to the Rota, knelt before it, kissed the child again and again, put it in the cradle, pulled the bell, and then, crying bitterly, hastened away.
Rossi remembered his own mother, and a great tide of simple human tenderness swept over him. What he had seen the woman do was what his mother had done thirty-five years before. He saw it all as by a mystic flash of light, which looked back into the past.
Suddenly it occurred to him that the Rota had been long since closed, and therefore it was physically impossible that anybody could have put a child into the cradle. Then he remembered that he had not heard the bell, or the woman’s footsteps, or the sound of her voice when she wept.
He stopped and looked back. The woman was returning in the direction of the piazza of St. Peter’s. By an impulse which he could not resist he followed her, overtook her, and looked into her face.
Again he thought he was looking at Roma. There was the same nobility in the beautiful features, the same sweetness in the tremulous mouth, the same grandeur in the great dark eyes. But he knew perfectly who it was. It was his mother.
It did not seem strange that his mother should be there. From her home in heaven she had come down to watch over her son on earth. She had always been watching over him. And now that he too was betrayed and lost, now that he too was broken-hearted and alone....
He was utterly unmanned. “Mother! Mother! I am coming to you! Every door is closed against me, and I have nowhere to go to for refuge. I am coming!... I am coming!”
Then the spirit paused, and pointing to the bronze gate of the Vatican, said, with infinite tenderness:
“Go there!”
PART NINE — THE PEOPLE
I
The Pope awoke next morning in the dreary hour of cock-crow, and rang for his valet while he was still in bed. When the valet came he was greatly agitated.
“What’s amiss, Gaetanino?” said the Pope.
“A madman, your Holiness,” said the valet. “They wanted me to awaken your Holiness, and I wouldn’t do it. A madman is down at the bronze gate, and insists on seeing you.”
At this moment the Maestro di Camera came into the room. He also was greatly agitated.
“What is this about some poor madman at the bronze gate?” asked the Pope.
“I have come to tell your Holiness,” said the master of the household. “The man declares he is pursued, and demands sanctuary.”
“Who is he?”
“He says he will give his name to the Holy Father only; but his face....”
“The man’s mad,” said the valet.
“Be quiet, Gaetanino.”
“His face,” continued the Maestro di Camera, “is known to the Swiss Guard, and when they sent up word....”
The Pope sat up and said, “Is it perhaps...”
“It is, your Holiness.”
“Where is he now?”
“He has forced his way in as far as the Sala Clementina, and nothing but physical force....”
Sounds of voices raised in dispute could be heard in a distant room. The Pope listened and said:
“Let the man come up immediately.”
“Here, your Holiness?”
“Here.”
The Maestro di Camera had hardly gone from the Pope’s bedroom when the Secretary of State entered it with hasty steps.
“Your Holiness,” he said, “you will not allow yourself to receive this person? It is sufficiently clear that he must have escaped from the police during the night, probably by the help of confederates, and to shelter him will be to come into collision with the civil authorities.”
“The young man demands sanctuary, your Eminence, and whatever the consequences we have no right to refuse it.”
“But sanctuary is obsolete, your Holiness.”
“Nothing can be obsolete that is of divine institution, your Eminence.”
“But, your Holiness, it can only exist by virtue of concession from the State, and the present relation of the Church to the State of Italy...”
“Your Eminence, I will ask you to let the young man come in.”
“Your Holiness, I beg, I pray, reflect...”
“Let the young man come in, your Em...”
The Pope had not finished when the words were struck out of his mouth by an apparition which appeared at his bedroom door. It was that of a young man, whose eyes were wild, whose nostrils were quivering, and whose clothes hung about him in rags as if they had been torn in a recent struggle. He had a look of despair and suffering, yet it was the same to the Pope at that moment as if he were looking at his own features in a glass.
The young man was surrounded by Swiss Guards, and the Maestro di Camera pushed in ahead of him. Coming face to face with the Pope propped up in his bed, the loud tones on which he was protesting died in his throat, and he stood in silence on the threshold of the room.
The Pope was the first to speak.
“What is it you wish to say to me, my son?”
The young man seemed to recover his self-possession, but without a genuflexion or even a bow of the head, and with a slightly defiant manner, he said, “My name is David Leone. They call me Rossi, because that was my mother’s name, and they said I had no right to my father’s. I am a Roman, and I have been two months abroad. For ten years I have worked for the people, and now I am denounced and betrayed to the police. Three days ago I was arrested on returning to Italy, and to-night by the help of friends I have escaped from the Carabineers. But every gate is closed against me, and I cannot get out of Rome. This is the Vatican, and the Vatican is sanctuary. Will you take me in?”
The Pope looked at the Swiss Guard, and said in a tremulous voice, “Gentlemen, you will take this young man to your own quarters, and see that no Carabineer lays hand on him without my knowledge and consent.”
“Your Holiness!” protested the Cardinal Secretary, but the Pope raised his hand and silenced him.
