An Arresting Voice.
When Romola sat down on the stone under the cypress, all things
conspired to give her the sense of freedom and solitude: her escape
from the accustomed walls and streets; the widening distance from her
husband, who was by this time riding towards Siena, while every hour
would take her farther on the opposite way; the morning stillness; the
great dip of ground on the roadside making a gulf between her and the
sombre calm of the mountains. For the first time in her life she felt
alone in the presence of the earth and sky, with no human presence
interposing and making a law for her.
Suddenly a voice close to her said—
“You are Romola de’ Bardi, the wife of Tito Melema.”
She knew the voice: it had vibrated through her more than once before;
and because she knew it, she did not turn round or look up. She sat
shaken by awe, and yet inwardly rebelling against the awe. It was one
of those black-skirted monks who was daring to speak to her, and
interfere with her privacy: that was all. And yet she was shaken, as if
that destiny which men thought of as a sceptred deity had come to her,
and grasped her with fingers of flesh.
“You are fleeing from Florence in disguise. I have a command from God
to stop you. You are not permitted to flee.”
Romola’s anger at the intrusion mounted higher at these imperative
words. She would not turn round to look at the speaker, whose examining
gaze she resented. Sitting quite motionless, she said—
“What right have you to speak to me, or to hinder me?”
“The right of a messenger. You have put on a religious garb, and you
have no religious purpose. You have sought the garb as a disguise. But
you were not suffered to pass me without being discerned. It was
declared to me who you were: it is declared to me that you are seeking
to escape from the lot God has laid upon you. You wish your true name
and your true place in life to be hidden, that you may choose for
yourself a new name and a new place, and have no rule but your own
will. And I have a command to call you back. My daughter, you must
return to your place.”
Romola’s mind rose in stronger rebellion with every sentence. She was
the more determined not to show any sign of submission, because the
consciousness of being inwardly shaken made her dread lest she should
fall into irresolution. She spoke with more irritation than before.
“I will not return. I acknowledge no right of priests and monks to
interfere with my actions. You have no power over me.”
“I know—I know you have been brought up in scorn of obedience. But it
is not the poor monk who claims to interfere with you: it is the truth
that commands you. And you cannot escape it. Either you must obey it,
and it will lead you; or you must disobey it, and it will hang on you
with the weight of a chain which you will drag for ever. But you will
obey it, my daughter. Your old servant will return to you with the
mules; my companion is gone to fetch him; and you will go back to
Florence.”
She started up with anger in her eyes, and faced the speaker. It was
Fra Girolamo: she knew that well enough before. She was nearly as tall
as he was, and their faces were almost on a level. She had started up
with defiant words ready to burst from her lips, but they fell back
again without utterance. She had met Fra Girolamo’s calm glance, and
the impression from it was so new to her, that her anger sank ashamed
as something irrelevant.
There was nothing transcendent in Savonarola’s face. It was not
beautiful. It was strong-featured, and owed all its refinement to
habits of mind and rigid discipline of the body. The source of the
impression his glance produced on Romola was the sense it conveyed to
her of interest in her and care for her apart from any personal
feeling. It was the first time she had encountered a gaze in which
simple human fellowship expressed itself as a strongly-felt bond. Such
a glance is half the vocation of the priest or spiritual guide of men,
and Romola felt it impossible again to question his authority to speak
to her. She stood silent, looking at him. And he spoke again.
“You assert your freedom proudly, my daughter. But who is so base as
the debtor that thinks himself free?”
There was a sting in those words, and Romola’s countenance changed as
if a subtle pale flash had gone over it.
“And you are flying from your debts: the debt of a Florentine woman;
the debt of a wife. You are turning your back on the lot that has been
appointed for you—you are going to choose another. But can man or woman
choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace or their
father and mother. My daughter, you are fleeing from the presence of
God into the wilderness.”
As the anger melted from Romola’s mind, it had given place to a new
presentiment of the strength there might be in submission, if this man,
at whom she was beginning to look with a vague reverence, had some
valid law to show her. But no—it was impossible; he could not know what
determined her. Yet she could not again simply refuse to be guided; she
was constrained to plead; and in her new need to be reverent while she
resisted, the title which she had never given him before came to her
lips without forethought, “My father, you cannot know the reasons which
compel me to go. None can know them but myself. None can judge for me.
I have been driven by great sorrow. I am resolved to go.”
“I know enough, my daughter: my mind has been so far illuminated
concerning you, that I know enough. You are not happy in your married
life; but I am not a confessor, and I seek to know nothing that should
be reserved for the seal of confession. I have a divine warrant to stop
you, which does not depend on such knowledge. You were warned by a
message from heaven, delivered in my presence—you were warned before
marriage, when you might still have lawfully chosen to be free from the
marriage-bond. But you chose the bond; and in wilfully breaking it—I
speak to you as a pagan, if the holy mystery of matrimony is not sacred
to you—you are breaking a pledge. Of what wrongs will you complain, my
daughter, when you yourself are committing one of the greatest wrongs a
woman and a citizen can be guilty of—withdrawing in secrecy and
disguise from a pledge which you have given in the face of God and your
fellow-men? Of what wrongs will you complain, when you yourself are
breaking the simplest law that lies at the foundation of the trust
which binds man to man—faithfulness to the spoken word? This, then, is
the wisdom you have gained by scorning the mysteries of the Church?—not
to see the bare duty of integrity, where the Church would have taught
you to see, not integrity only, but religion.”
The blood had rushed to Romola’s face, and she shrank as if she had
been stricken. “I would not have put on a disguise,” she began; but she
could not go on,—she was too much shaken by the suggestion in the
Frate’s words of a possible affinity between her own conduct and
Tito’s.
“And to break that pledge you fly from Florence: Florence, where there
are the only men and women in the world to whom you owe the debt of a
fellow-citizen.”
“I should never have quitted Florence,” said Romola, tremulously, “as
long as there was any hope of my fulfilling a duty to my father there.”
“And do you own no tie but that of a child to her father in the flesh?
Your life has been spent in blindness, my daughter. You have lived with
those who sit on a hill aloof, and look down on the life of their
fellow-men. I know their vain discourse. It is of what has been in the
times which they fill with their own fancied wisdom, while they scorn
God’s work in the present. And doubtless you were taught how there were
pagan women who felt what it was to live for the Republic; yet you have
never felt that you, a Florentine woman, should live for Florence. If
your own people are wearing a yoke, will you slip from under it,
instead of struggling with them to lighten it? There is hunger and
misery in our streets, yet you say, ‘I care not; I have my own sorrows;
I will go away, if peradventure I can ease them.’ The servants of God
are struggling after a law of justice, peace, and charity, that the
hundred thousand citizens among whom you were born may be governed
righteously; but you think no more of this than if you were a bird,
that may spread its wings and fly whither it will in search of food to
its liking. And yet you have scorned the teaching of the Church, my
daughter. As if you, a wilful wanderer, following your own blind
choice, were not below the humblest Florentine woman who stretches
forth her hands with her own people, and craves a blessing for them;
and feels a close sisterhood with the neighbour who kneels beside her
and is not of her own blood; and thinks of the mighty purpose that God
has for Florence; and waits and endures because the promised work is
great, and she feels herself little.”
“I was not going away to ease and self-indulgence,” said Romola,
raising her head again, with a prompting to vindicate herself. “I was
going away to hardship. I expect no joy: it is gone from my life.”
“You are seeking your own will, my daughter. You are seeking some good
other than the law you are bound to obey. But how will you find good?
It is not a thing of choice: it is a river that flows from the foot of
the Invisible Throne, and flows by the path of obedience. I say again,
man cannot choose his duties. You may choose to forsake your duties,
and choose not to have the sorrow they bring. But you will go forth;
and what will you find, my daughter? Sorrow without duty—bitter herbs,
and no bread with them.”
“But if you knew,” said Romola, clasping her hands and pressing them
tight, as she looked pleadingly at Fra Girolamo; “if you knew what it
was to me—how impossible it seemed to me to bear it.”
“My daughter,” he said, pointing to the cord round Romola’s neck, “you
carry something within your mantle; draw it forth, and look at it.”
Romola gave a slight start, but her impulse now was to do just what
Savonarola told her. Her self-doubt was grappled by a stronger will and
a stronger conviction than her own. She drew forth the crucifix. Still
pointing towards it, he said—
“There, my daughter, is the image of a Supreme Offering, made by
Supreme Love, because the need of man was great.”
He paused, and she held the crucifix trembling—trembling under a sudden
impression of the wide distance between her present and her past self.
What a length of road she had travelled through since she first took
that crucifix from the Frate’s hands! Had life as many secrets before
her still as it had for her then, in her young blindness? It was a
thought that helped all other subduing influences; and at the sound of
Fra Girolamo’s voice again, Romola, with a quick involuntary movement,
pressed the crucifix against her mantle and looked at him with more
submission than before.
“Conform your life to that image, my daughter; make your sorrow an
offering: and when the fire of Divine charity burns within you, and you
behold the need of your fellow-men by the light of that flame, you will
not call your offering great. You have carried yourself proudly, as one
who held herself not of common blood or of common thoughts; but you
have been as one unborn to the true life of man. What! you say your
love for your father no longer tells you to stay in Florence? Then,
since that tie is snapped, you are without a law, without religion: you
are no better than a beast of the field when she is robbed of her
young. If the yearning of a fleshly love is gone, you are without love,
without obligation. See, then, my daughter, how you are below the life
of the believer who worships that image of the Supreme Offering, and
feels the glow of a common life with the lost multitude for whom that
offering was made, and beholds the history of the world as the history
of a great redemption in which he is himself a fellow-worker, in his
own place and among his own people! If you held that faith, my beloved
daughter, you would not be a wanderer flying from suffering, and
blindly seeking the good of a freedom which is lawlessness. You would
feel that Florence was the home of your soul as well as your
birthplace, because you would see the work that was given you to do
there. If you forsake your place, who will fill it? You ought to be in
your place now, helping in the great work by which God will purify
Florence, and raise it to be the guide of the nations. What! the earth
is full of iniquity—full of groans—the light is still struggling with a
mighty darkness, and you say, ‘I cannot bear my bonds; I will burst
them asunder; I will go where no man claims me’? My daughter, every
bond of your life is a debt: the right lies in the payment of that
debt; it can lie nowhere else. In vain will you wander over the earth;
you will be wandering for ever away from the right.”
Romola was inwardly struggling with strong forces: that immense
personal influence of Savonarola, which came from the energy of his
emotions and beliefs: and her consciousness, surmounting all prejudice,
that his words implied a higher law than any she had yet obeyed. But
the resisting thoughts were not yet overborne.
“How, then, could Dino be right? He broke ties. He forsook his place.”
“That was a special vocation. He was constrained to depart, else he
could not have attained the higher life. It would have been stifled
within him.”
“And I too,” said Romola, raising her hands to her brow, and speaking
in a tone of anguish, as if she were being dragged to some torture.
“Father, you may be wrong.”
“Ask your conscience, my daughter. You have no vocation such as your
brother had. You are a wife. You seek to break your ties in self-will
and anger, not because the higher life calls upon you to renounce them.
The higher life begins for us, my daughter, when we renounce our own
will to bow before a Divine law. That seems hard to you. It is the
portal of wisdom, and freedom, and blessedness. And the symbol of it
hangs before you. That wisdom is the religion of the Cross. And you
stand aloof from it: you are a pagan; you have been taught to say, ‘I
am as the wise men who lived before the time when the Jew of Nazareth
was crucified.’ And that is your wisdom! To be as the dead whose eyes
are closed, and whose ear is deaf to the work of God that has been
since their time. What has your dead wisdom done for you, my daughter?
It has left you without a heart for the neighbours among whom you
dwell, without care for the great work by which Florence is to be
regenerated and the world made holy; it has left you without a share in
the Divine life which quenches the sense of suffering Self in the
ardours of an ever-growing love. And now, when the sword has pierced
your soul, you say, ‘I will go away; I cannot bear my sorrow.’ And you
think nothing of the sorrow and the wrong that are within the walls of
the city where you dwell: you would leave your place empty, when it
ought to be filled with your pity and your labour. If there is
wickedness in the streets, your steps should shine with the light of
purity; if there is a cry of anguish, you, my daughter, because you
know the meaning of the cry, should be there to still it. My beloved
daughter, sorrow has come to teach you a new worship: the sign of it
hangs before you.”
Romola’s mind was still torn by conflict. She foresaw that she should
obey Savonarola and go back: his words had come to her as if they were
an interpretation of that revulsion from self-satisfied ease, and of
that new fellowship with suffering, which had already been awakened in
her. His arresting voice had brought a new condition into her life,
which made it seem impossible to her that she could go on her way as if
she had not heard it; yet she shrank as one who sees the path she must
take, but sees, too, that the hot lava lies there. And the instinctive
shrinking from a return to her husband brought doubts. She turned away
her eyes from Fra Girolamo, and stood for a minute or two with her
hands hanging clasped before her, like a statue. At last she spoke, as
if the words were being wrung from her, still looking on the ground.
“My husband... he is not... my love is gone!”
“My daughter, there is the bond of a higher love. Marriage is not
carnal only, made for selfish delight. See what that thought leads you
to! It leads you to wander away in a false garb from all the
obligations of your place and name. That would not have been, if you
had learned that it is a sacramental vow, from which none but God can
release you. My daughter, your life is not as a grain of sand, to be
blown by the winds; it is a thing of flesh and blood, that dies if it
be sundered. Your husband is not a malefactor?”
Romola started. “Heaven forbid! No; I accuse him of nothing.”
“I did not suppose he was a malefactor. I meant, that if he were a
malefactor, your place would be in the prison beside him. My daughter,
if the cross comes to you as a wife, you must carry it as a wife. You
may say, ‘I will forsake my husband,’ but you cannot cease to be a
wife.”
“Yet if—oh, how could I bear—” Romola had involuntarily begun to say
something which she sought to banish from her mind again.
“Make your marriage-sorrows an offering too, my daughter: an offering
to the great work by which sin and sorrow are being made to cease. The
end is sure, and is already beginning. Here in Florence it is
beginning, and the eyes of faith behold it. And it may be our
blessedness to die for it: to die daily by the crucifixion of our
selfish will—to die at last by laying our bodies on the altar. My
daughter, you are a child of Florence; fulfil the duties of that great
inheritance. Live for Florence—for your own people, whom God is
preparing to bless the earth. Bear the anguish and the smart. The iron
is sharp—I know, I know—it rends the tender flesh. The draught is
bitterness on the lips. But there is rapture in the cup—there is the
vision which makes all life below it dross for ever. Come, my daughter,
come back to your place!”
While Savonarola spoke with growing intensity, his arms tightly folded
before him still, as they had been from the first, but his face alight
as from an inward flame, Romola felt herself surrounded and possessed
by the glow of his passionate faith. The chill doubts all melted away;
she was subdued by the sense of something unspeakably great to which
she was being called by a strong being who roused a new strength within
herself. In a voice that was like a low, prayerful cry, she said—
“Father, I will be guided. Teach me! I will go back.”
Almost unconsciously she sank on her knees. Savonarola stretched out
his hands over her; but feeling would no longer pass through the
channel of speech, and he was silent.