Ariadne discrowns herself.
It was more than three weeks before the contents of the library were
all packed and carried away. And Romola, instead of shutting her eyes
and ears, had watched the process. The exhaustion consequent on violent
emotion is apt to bring a dreamy disbelief in the reality of its cause;
and in the evening, when the workmen were gone, Romola took her
hand-lamp and walked slowly round amongst the confusion of straw and
wooden cases, pausing at every vacant pedestal, every well-known object
laid prostrate, with a sort of bitter desire to assure herself that
there was a sufficient reason why her love was gone and the world was
barren for her. And still, as the evenings came, she went and went
again; no longer to assure herself, but because this vivifying of pain
and despair about her father’s memory was the strongest life left to
her affections. On the 23rd of December, she knew that the last
packages were going. She ran to the loggia at the top of the house that
she might not lose the last pang of seeing the slow wheels move across
the bridge.
It was a cloudy day, and nearing dusk. Arno ran dark and shivering; the
hills were mournful; and Florence with its girdling stone towers had
that silent, tomb-like look, which unbroken shadow gives to a city seen
from above. Santa Croce, where her father lay, was dark amidst that
darkness, and slowly crawling over the bridge, and slowly vanishing up
the narrow street, was the white load, like a cruel, deliberate Fate
carrying away her father’s lifelong hope to bury it in an unmarked
grave. Romola felt less that she was seeing this herself than that her
father was conscious of it as he lay helpless under the imprisoning
stones, where her hand could not reach his to tell him that he was not
alone.
She stood still even after the load had disappeared, heedless of the
cold, and soothed by the gloom which seemed to cover her like a
mourning garment and shut out the discord of joy. When suddenly the
great bell in the palace-tower rang out a mighty peal: not the
hammer-sound of alarm, but an agitated peal of triumph; and one after
another every other bell in every other tower seemed to catch the
vibration and join the chorus. And, as the chorus swelled and swelled
till the air seemed made of sound—little flames, vibrating too, as if
the sound had caught fire, burst out between the turrets of the palace
and on the girdling towers.
That sudden clang, that leaping light, fell on Romola like sharp
wounds. They were the triumph of demons at the success of her husband’s
treachery, and the desolation of her life. Little more than three weeks
ago she had been intoxicated with the sound of those very bells; and in
the gladness of Florence, she had heard a prophecy of her own gladness.
But now the general joy seemed cruel to her: she stood aloof from that
common life—that Florence which was flinging out its loud exultation to
stun the ears of sorrow and loneliness. She could never join hands with
gladness again, but only with those whom it was in the hard nature of
gladness to forget. And in her bitterness she felt that all rejoicing
was mockery. Men shouted paeans with their souls full of heaviness, and
then looked in their neighbours’ faces to see if there was really such
a thing as joy. Romola had lost her belief in the happiness she had
once thirsted for: it was a hateful, smiling, soft-handed thing, with a
narrow, selfish heart.
She ran down from the loggia, with her hands pressed against her ears,
and was hurrying across the antechamber, when she was startled by
unexpectedly meeting her husband, who was coming to seek her.
His step was elastic, and there was a radiance of satisfaction about
him not quite usual.
“What! the noise was a little too much for you?” he said; for Romola,
as she started at the sight of him, had pressed her hands all the
closer against her ears. He took her gently by the wrist, and drew her
arm within his, leading her into the saloon surrounded with the dancing
nymphs and fauns, and then went on speaking: “Florence is gone quite
mad at getting its Great Council, which is to put an end to all the
evils under the sun; especially to the vice of merriment. You may well
look stunned, my Romola, and you are cold. You must not stay so late
under that windy loggia without wrappings. I was coming to tell you
that I am suddenly called to Rome about some learned business for
Bernardo Rucellai. I am going away immediately, for I am to join my
party at San Gaggio to-night, that we may start early in the morning. I
need give you no trouble; I have had my packages made already. It will
not be very long before I am back again.”
He knew he had nothing to expect from her but quiet endurance of what
he said and did. He could not even venture to kiss her brow this
evening, but just pressed her hand to his lips, and left her. Tito felt
that Romola was a more unforgiving woman than he had imagined; her love
was not that sweet clinging instinct, stronger than all judgments,
which, he began to see now, made the great charm of a wife. Still, this
petrified coldness was better than a passionate, futile opposition. Her
pride and capability of seeing where resistance was useless had their
convenience.
But when the door had closed on Tito, Romola lost the look of cold
immobility which came over her like an inevitable frost whenever he
approached her. Inwardly she was very far from being in a state of
quiet endurance, and the days that had passed since the scene which had
divided her from Tito had been days of active planning and preparation
for the fulfilment of a purpose.
The first thing she did now was to call old Maso to her.
“Maso,” she said, in a decided tone, “we take our journey to-morrow
morning. We shall be able now to overtake that first convoy of cloth,
while they are waiting at San Piero. See about the two mules to-night,
and be ready to set off with them at break of day, and wait for me at
Trespiano.”
She meant to take Maso with her as far as Bologna, and then send him
back with letters to her godfather and Tito, telling them that she was
gone and never meant to return. She had planned her departure so that
its secrecy might be perfect, and her broken love and life be hidden
away unscanned by vulgar eyes. Bernardo del Nero had been absent at his
villa, willing to escape from political suspicions to his favourite
occupation of attending to his land, and she had paid him the debt
without a personal interview. He did not even know that the library was
sold, and was left to conjecture that some sudden piece of good fortune
had enabled Tito to raise this sum of money. Maso had been taken into
her confidence only so far that he knew her intended journey was a
secret; and to do just what she told him was the thing he cared most
for in his withered wintry age.
Romola did not mean to go to bed that night. When she had fastened the
door she took her taper to the carved and painted chest which contained
her wedding-clothes. The white silk and gold lay there, the long white
veil and the circlet of pearls. A great sob rose as she looked at them:
they seemed the shroud of her dead happiness. In a tiny gold loop of
the circlet a sugar-plum had lodged—a pink hailstone from the shower of
sweets: Tito had detected it first, and had said that it should always
remain there. At certain moments—and this was one of them—Romola was
carried, by a sudden wave of memory, back again into the time of
perfect trust, and felt again the presence of the husband whose love
made the world as fresh and wonderful to her as to a little child that
sits in stillness among the sunny flowers: heard the gentle tones and
saw the soft eyes without any lie in them, and breathed again that
large freedom of the soul which comes from the faith that the being who
is nearest to us is greater than ourselves. And in those brief moments
the tears always rose: the woman’s lovingness felt something akin to
what the bereaved mother feels when the tiny fingers seem to lie warm
on her bosom, and yet are marble to her lips as she bends over the
silent bed.
But there was something else lying in the chest besides the
wedding-clothes: it was something dark and coarse, rolled up in a close
bundle. She turned away her eyes from the white and gold to the dark
bundle, and as her hands touched the serge, her tears began to be
checked. That coarse roughness recalled her fully to the present, from
which love and delight were gone. She unfastened the thick white cord
and spread the bundle out on the table. It was the grey serge dress of
a sister belonging to the third order of Saint Francis, living in the
world but especially devoted to deeds of piety—a personage whom the
Florentines were accustomed to call a Pinzochera. Romola was going to
put on this dress as a disguise, and she determined to put it on at
once, so that, if she needed sleep before the morning, she might wake
up in perfect readiness to be gone. She put off her black garment, and
as she thrust her soft white arms into the harsh sleeves of the serge
mantle and felt the hard girdle of rope hurt her fingers as she tied
it, she courted those rude sensations: they were in keeping with her
new scorn of that thing called pleasure which made men base—that
dexterous contrivance for selfish ease, that shrinking from endurance
and strain, when others were bowing beneath burdens too heavy for them,
which now made one image with her husband. Then she gathered her long
hair together, drew it away tight from her face, bound it in a great
hard knot at the back of her head, and taking a square piece of black
silk, tied it in the fashion of a kerchief close across her head and
under her chin; and over that she drew the cowl. She lifted the candle
to the mirror. Surely her disguise would be complete to any one who had
not lived very near to her. To herself she looked strangely like her
brother Dino: the full oval of the cheek had only to be wasted; the
eyes, already sad, had only to become a little sunken. Was she getting
more like him in anything else? Only in this, that she understood now
how men could be prompted to rush away for ever from earthly delights,
how they could be prompted to dwell on images of sorrow rather than of
beauty and joy.
But she did not linger at the mirror: she set about collecting and
packing all the relics of her father and mother that were too large to
be carried in her small travelling-wallet. They were all to be put in
the chest along with her wedding-clothes, and the chest was to be
committed to her godfather when she was safely gone. First she laid in
the portraits; then one by one every little thing that had a sacred
memory clinging to it was put into her wallet or into the chest.
She paused. There was still something else to be stript away from her,
belonging to that past on which she was going to turn her back for
ever. She put her thumb and her forefinger to her betrothal ring; but
they rested there, without drawing it off. Romola’s mind had been
rushing with an impetuous current towards this act, for which she was
preparing: the act of quitting a husband who had disappointed all her
trust, the act of breaking an outward tie that no longer represented
the inward bond of love. But that force of outward symbols by which our
active life is knit together so as to make an inexorable external
identity for us, not to be shaken by our wavering consciousness, gave a
strange effect to this simple movement towards taking off her ring—a
movement which was but a small sequence of her energetic resolution. It
brought a vague but arresting sense that she was somehow violently
rending her life in two: a presentiment that the strong impulse which
had seemed to exclude doubt and make her path clear might after all be
blindness, and that there was something in human bonds which must
prevent them from being broken with the breaking of illusions.
If that beloved Tito who had placed the betrothal ring on her finger
was not in any valid sense the same Tito whom she had ceased to love,
why should she return to him the sign of their union, and not rather
retain it as a memorial? And this act, which came as a palpable
demonstration of her own and his identity, had a power unexplained to
herself, of shaking Romola. It is the way with half the truth amidst
which we live, that it only haunts us and makes dull pulsations that
are never born into sound. But there was a passionate voice speaking
within her that presently nullified all such muffled murmurs.
“It cannot be! I cannot be subject to him. He is false. I shrink from
him. I despise him!”
She snatched the ring from her finger and laid it on the table against
the pen with which she meant to write. Again she felt that there could
be no law for her but the law of her affections. That tenderness and
keen fellow-feeling for the near and the loved which are the main
outgrowth of the affections, had made the religion of her life: they
had made her patient in spite of natural impetuosity: they would have
sufficed to make her heroic. But now all that strength was gone, or,
rather, it was converted into the strength of repulsion. She had
recoiled from Tito in proportion to the energy of that young belief and
love which he had disappointed, of that lifelong devotion to her father
against which he had committed an irredeemable offence. And it seemed
as if all motive had slipped away from her, except the indignation and
scorn that made her tear herself asunder from him.
She was not acting after any precedent, or obeying any adopted maxims.
The grand severity of the stoical philosophy in which her father had
taken care to instruct her, was familiar enough to her ears and lips,
and its lofty spirit had raised certain echoes within her; but she had
never used it, never needed it as a rule of life. She had endured and
forborne because she loved: maxims which told her to feel less, and not
to cling close lest the onward course of great Nature should jar her,
had been as powerless on her tenderness as they had been on her
father’s yearning for just fame. She had appropriated no theories: she
had simply felt strong in the strength of affection, and life without
that energy came to her as an entirely new problem.
She was going to solve the problem in a way that seemed to her very
simple. Her mind had never yet bowed to any obligation apart from
personal love and reverence; she had no keen sense of any other human
relations, and all she had to obey now was the instinct to sever
herself from the man she loved no longer.
Yet the unswerving resolution was accompanied with continually varying
phases of anguish. And now that the active preparation for her
departure was almost finished, she lingered: she deferred writing the
irrevocable words of parting from all her little world. The emotions of
the past weeks seemed to rush in again with cruel hurry, and take
possession even of her limbs. She was going to write, and her hand
fell. Bitter tears came now at the delusion which had blighted her
young years, tears very different from the sob of remembered happiness
with which she had looked at the circlet of pearls and the pink
hailstone. And now she felt a tingling shame at the words of ignominy
she had cast, at Tito—“Have you robbed some one else who is _not_
dead?” To have had such words wrung from her—to have uttered them to
her husband seemed a degradation of her whole life. Hard speech between
those who have loved is hideous in the memory, like the sight of
greatness and beauty sunk into vice and rags.
That heart-cutting comparison of the present with the past urged itself
upon Romola till it even transformed itself into wretched sensations:
she seemed benumbed to everything but inward throbbings, and began to
feel the need of some hard contact. She drew her hands tight along the
harsh knotted cord that hung from her waist. She started to her feet
and seized the rough lid of the chest: there was nothing else to go in?
No. She closed the lid, pressing her hand upon the rough carving, and
locked it.
Then she remembered that she had still to complete her equipment as a
Pinzochera. The large leather purse or scarsella, with small coin in
it, had to be hung on the cord at her waist (her florins and small
jewels, presents from her godfather and cousin Brigida, were safely
fastened within her serge mantle)—and on the other side must hang the
rosary.
It did not occur to Romola, as she hung that rosary by her side, that
something else besides the mere garb would perhaps be necessary to
enable her to pass as a Pinzochera, and that her whole air and
expression were as little as possible like those of a sister whose
eyelids were used to be bent, and whose lips were used to move in
silent iteration. Her inexperience prevented her from picturing distant
details, and it helped her proud courage in shutting out any foreboding
of danger and insult. She did not know that any Florentine woman had
ever done exactly what she was going to do: unhappy wives often took
refuge with their friends, or in the cloister, she knew, but both those
courses were impossible to her; she had invented a lot for herself—to
go to the most learned woman in the world, Cassandra Fedele, at Venice,
and ask her how an instructed woman could support herself in a lonely
life there.
She was not daunted by the practical difficulties in the way or the
dark uncertainty at the end. Her life could never be happy any more,
but it must not, could not, be ignoble. And by a pathetic mixture of
childish romance with her woman’s trials, the philosophy which had
nothing to do with this great decisive deed of hers had its place in
her imagination of the future: so far as she conceived her solitary
loveless life at all, she saw it animated by a proud stoical heroism,
and by an indistinct but strong purpose of labour, that she might be
wise enough to write something which would rescue her father’s name
from oblivion. After all, she was only a young girl—this poor Romola,
who had found herself at the end of her joys.
There were other things yet to be done. There was a small key in a
casket on the table—but now Romola perceived that her taper was dying
out, and she had forgotten to provide herself with any other light. In
a few moments the room was in total darkness. Feeling her way to the
nearest chair, she sat down to wait for the morning.
Her purpose in seeking the key had called up certain memories which had
come back upon her during the past week with the new vividness that
remembered words always have for us when we have learned to give them a
new meaning. Since the shock of the revelation which had seemed to
divide her for ever from Tito, that last interview with Dino had never
been for many hours together out of her mind. And it solicited her all
the more, because while its remembered images pressed upon her almost
with the imperious force of sensations, they raised struggling thoughts
which resisted their influence. She could not prevent herself from
hearing inwardly the dying prophetic voice saying again and again,—“The
man whose face was a blank loosed thy hand and departed; and as he
went, I could see his face, and it was the face of the great Tempter...
And thou, Romola, didst wring thy hands and seek for water, and there
was none... and the plain was bare and stony again, and thou wast alone
in the midst of it. And then it seemed that the night fell, and I saw
no more.” She could not prevent herself from dwelling with a sort of
agonised fascination on the wasted face; on the straining gaze at the
crucifix; on the awe which had compelled her to kneel; on the last
broken words and then the unbroken silence—on all the details of the
death-scene, which had seemed like a sudden opening into a world apart
from that of her lifelong knowledge.
But her mind was roused to resistance of impressions that, from being
obvious phantoms, seemed to be getting solid in the daylight. As a
strong body struggles against fumes with the more violence when they
begin to be stifling, a strong soul struggles against phantasies with
all the more alarmed energy when they threaten to govern in the place
of thought.
What had the words of that vision to do with her real sorrows? That
fitting of certain words was a mere chance; the rest was all vague—nay,
those words themselves were vague; they were determined by nothing but
her brother’s memories and beliefs. He believed there was something
fatal in pagan learning; he believed that celibacy was more holy than
marriage; he remembered their home, and all the objects in the library;
and of these threads the vision was woven. What reasonable warrant
could she have had for believing in such a vision and acting on it?
None. True as the voice of foreboding had proved, Romola saw with
unshaken conviction that to have renounced Tito in obedience to a
warning like that, would have been meagre-hearted folly. Her trust had
been delusive, but she would have chosen over again to have acted on it
rather than be a creature led by phantoms and disjointed whispers in a
world where there was the large music of reasonable speech, and the
warm grasp of living hands.
But the persistent presence of these memories, linking themselves in
her imagination with her actual lot, gave her a glimpse of
understanding into the lives which had before lain utterly aloof from
her sympathy—the lives of the men and women who were led by such inward
images and voices.
“If they were only a little stronger in me,” she said to herself, “I
should lose the sense of what that vision really was, and take it for a
prophetic light. I might in time get to be a seer of visions myself,
like the Suora Maddalena, and Camilla Rucellai, and the rest.”
Romola shuddered at the possibility. All the instruction, all the main
influences of her life had gone to fortify her scorn of that sickly
superstition which led men and women, with eyes too weak for the
daylight, to sit in dark swamps and try to read human destiny by the
chance flame of wandering vapours.
And yet she was conscious of something deeper than that coincidence of
words which made the parting contact with her dying brother live anew
in her mind, and gave a new sisterhood to the wasted face. If there
were much more of such experience as his in the world, she would like
to understand it—would even like to learn the thoughts of men who sank
in ecstasy before the pictured agonies of martyrdom. There seemed to be
something more than madness in that supreme fellowship with suffering.
The springs were all dried up around her; she wondered what other
waters there were at which men drank and found strength in the desert.
And those moments in the Duomo when she had sobbed with a mysterious
mingling of rapture and pain, while Fra Girolamo offered himself a
willing sacrifice for the people, came back to her as if they had been
a transient taste of some such far-off fountain. But again she shrank
from impressions that were alluring her within the sphere of visions
and narrow fears which compelled men to outrage natural affections as
Dino had done.
This was the tangled web that Romola had in her mind as she sat weary
in the darkness. No radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear
message for her. In those times, as now, there were human beings who
never saw angels or heard perfectly clear messages. Such truth as came
to them was brought confusedly in the voices and deeds of men not at
all like the seraphs of unfailing wing and piercing vision—men who
believed falsities as well as truths, and did the wrong as well as the
right. The helping hands stretched out to them were the hands of men
who stumbled and often saw dimly, so that these beings unvisited by
angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along
the path of reliance and action which is the path of life, or else to
pause in loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, but the arrest of
inaction and death.
And so Romola, seeing no ray across the darkness, and heavy with
conflict that changed nothing, sank at last to sleep.