Browning's Heroines Part 17

--and at once announced his resolve to go to Rome as soon as Lent was over. One evening, before he went, he was sitting thinking how his life "had shaken under him"; and

"Thinking moreover . . . oh, thinking, if you like, How utterly dissociated was I A priest and celibate, from the sad strange wife Of Guido . . .

. . . I had a whole store of strengths Eating into my heart, which craved employ, And she, perhaps, need of a finger's help-- And yet there was no way in the wide world To stretch out mine."

Her smile kept glowing out of the devotional book he was trying to read, and he sat thus--when suddenly there came a tap at the door, and on his summons, there glided in "a masked m.u.f.fled mystery," who laid a letter on the open book, and stood back demurely waiting.

It was Margherita, the "kind of maid" of Count Guido, and the letter purported to be from Pompilia, offering her love. Caponsacchi saw through the trick at once: the letter was written by Guido. He answered it in such a way that it would save _her_ from all anger, and at the same time infuriate the "jealous miscreant" who had written it:

". . . What made you--may one ask?-- Marry your hideous husband?"

But henceforth such letters came thick and fast. Caponsacchi was met in the street, signed to in church; slips were found in his prayer-book, they dropped from the window if he pa.s.sed. . . . At length there arrived a note in a different manner. This warned him _not_ to come, to avoid the window for his life. At once he answered that the street was free--he should go to the window if he chose, and he would go that evening at the Ave. His conviction was that he should find the husband there, not the wife--for though he had seen through the trick, it did not occur to him that it was more than a device of jealousy to trap them, already suspected after that mutual gaze at the theatre. What it really was, he never guessed at all.

Meanwhile--turning now to Pompilia's dying speech to the nuns who nursed her--the companion persecution had been going on at the castle. Day after day, Margherita had dinned the name of Caponsacchi into the wife's ears. How he loved her, what a paragon he was, how little she owed fidelity to the Count who used _her_, Margherita, as his pastime--ought she not at least to see the priest and warn him, if nothing more? Guido might kill him! Here was a letter from him; and she began to impart it:

"I know you cannot read--therefore, let me!

'_My idol_'" . . .

The letter was not from Caponsacchi, and Pompilia, divining this as surely as she had divined that he did not throw the comfits, took it from the woman's hands and tore it into shreds. . . . Day after day such moments added themselves to all the rest of the misery, and at last, at end of her strength, she swooned away. As she was coming to again, Margherita stooped and whispered _Caponsacchi_. But still, though the sound of his name was to the broken girl as if, drowning, she had looked up through the waves and seen a star . . . still she repudiated the servant's report of him: had she not that once beheld him?

"Therefore while you profess to show him me, I ever see his own face. Get you gone!"

But the swoon had portended something; and on "one vivid daybreak," half through April, Pompilia learned what that something was. . . . Going to bed the previous night, the last sound in her ears had been Margherita's prattle. "Easter was over; everyone was on the wing for Rome--even Caponsacchi, out of heart and hope, was going there." Pompilia had heard it, as she might have heard rain drop, thinking only that another day was done:

"How good to sleep and so get nearer death!"

But with the daybreak, what was the clear summons that seemed to pierce her slumber?

". . . Up I sprang alive, Light in me, light without me, everywhere Change!"

The exquisite morning was there--the broad yellow sunbeams with their "myriad merry motes," the glittering leaves of the wet weeds against the lattice-panes, the birds--

"Always with one voice--where are two such joys?-- The blessed building-sparrow! I stepped forth, Stood on the terrace--o'er the roofs such sky!

My heart sang, 'I too am to go away, I too have something I must care about, Carry away with me to Rome, to Rome!

Not to live now would be the wickedness.'"[137:1]

Pope Innocent XII--"the great good old Pope," as Browning calls him in the summary of Book I--when in his turn he speaks to us, gives his highest praise, "where all he praises," to this trait in her whom he calls "My rose, I gather for the breast of G.o.d."

"Oh child, that didst despise thy life so much When it seemed only thine to keep or lose, How the fine ear felt fall the first low word 'Value life, and preserve life for My sake!'

Thou, at first prompting of what I call G.o.d, And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend, Accept the obligation laid on thee, Mother elect, to save the unborn child.

. . . Go past me, And get thy praise--and be not far to seek Presently when I follow if I may!"

"Now" (says the sympathetic Other Half-Rome), "begins the tenebrific pa.s.sage of the tale." As we have seen, Pompilia had tried all other means of escape, even before the great call came to her. Her last appeal had been made to two of Guido's kinsmen, on the wing for Rome like everyone else--Conti being one. Both had refused, but Conti had referred her to Caponsacchi--not evilly like Margherita, but jestingly, flippantly. Nevertheless, that name had come to take a half-fateful sense to her ears . . . and the Other Half-Rome thus images the moment in which she resolved to appeal to him.

"If then, all outlets thus secured save one, At last she took to the open, stood and stared With her wan face to see where G.o.d might wait-- And there found Caponsacchi wait as well For the precious something at perdition's edge, He only was predestinate to save . . .

Whatever way in this strange world it was, Pompilia and Caponsacchi met, in fine, She at her window, he i' the street beneath, And understood each other at first look."

For suddenly (she tells us) on that morning of Annunciation, she turned on Margherita, ever at her ear, and said, "Tell Caponsacchi he may come!" "How plainly" (says Pompilia)--

"How plainly I perceived h.e.l.l flash and fade O' the face of her--the doubt that first paled joy, Then final rea.s.surance I indeed Was caught now, never to be free again!"

But she cared not; she felt herself strong for everything.

"After the Ave Maria, at first dark, I will be standing on the terrace, say!"

She knew he would come, and prayed to G.o.d all day. At "an intense throe of the dusk" she started up--she "dared to say," in her dying speech, that she was divinely pushed out on the terrace--and there he waited her, with the same silent and solemn face, "at watch to save me."

He had come, as he defiantly had said, and not the husband met him, but, at the window, with a lamp in her hand, "Our Lady of all the Sorrows."

He knelt, but even as he knelt she vanished, only to reappear on the terrace, so close above him that she could almost touch his head if she bent down--"and she did bend, while I stood still as stone, all eye, all ear."

First she told him that she could neither read nor write, but that the letters said to be from him had been read to her, and seemed to say that he loved her. She did not believe that he meant that as Margherita meant it; but "good true love would help me now so much" that at last she had resolved to see him. Her whole life was so strange that this but belonged to the rest: that an utter stranger should be able to help her--he, and he alone! She told him her story. There was a reason now at last why she must fly from "this fell house of hate," and she would take from Caponsacchi's love what she needed: enough to save her life with--

". . . Take me to Rome!

Take me as you would take a dog, I think, Masterless left for strangers to maltreat: Take me home like that--leave me in the house Where the father and mother are" . . .

She tells his answer thus:

"He replied-- The first word I heard ever from his lips, All himself in it--an eternity Of speech, to match the immeasurable depth O' the soul that then broke silence--'I am yours.'"

But when he had left her, irresolution swept over him. First, the Church seemed to rebuke--the Church who had smiled on his silly intrigues! Now she changed her tone, it appeared:--

"Now, when I found out first that life and death Are means to an end, that pa.s.sion uses both, Indisputably mistress of the man Whose form of wors.h.i.+p is self-sacrifice."

But that soon pa.s.sed: the word was G.o.d's; this was the true self-sacrifice. . . . But might it not injure her--scandal would hiss about her name. Would not G.o.d choose His own way to save her? And _he_ might pray. . . . Two days pa.s.sed thus. But he must go to counsel and to comfort her--was he not a priest? He went. She was there, leaning over the terrace; she reproached him: why did he delay the help his heart yearned to give? He answered with his fears for her, but she broke in, never doubting him though he should doubt himself:

"'I know you: when is it that you will come?'"

"To-morrow at the day's dawn," he replied; and all was arranged--the place, the time; she came, she did not speak, but glided into the carriage, while he cried to the driver:

". . . 'By San Spirito, To Rome, as if the road burned underneath!'"

When she was dying of Guido's twenty-two dagger-thrusts, this was how Pompilia thought of that long flight:

"I did pray, do pray, in the prayer shall die: 'Oh, to have Caponsacchi for my guide!'

Ever the face upturned to mine, the hand Holding my hand across the world . . ."

And he, telling the judges of it at the murder-trial, cried that he never could lie quiet in his grave unless he "mirrored them plain the perfect soul Pompilia."