The Visible Madonna.
The crowd had no sooner passed onward than Romola descended to the
street, and hastened to the steps of San Stefano. Cecco had been
attracted with the rest towards the Piazza, and she found Baldassarre
standing alone against the church-door, with the horn-cup in his hand,
waiting for her. There was a striking change in him: the blank, dreamy
glance of a half-returned consciousness had given place to a fierceness
which, as she advanced and spoke to him, flashed upon her as if she had
been its object. It was the glance of caged fury that sees its prey
passing safe beyond the bars.
Romola started as the glance was turned on her, but her immediate
thought was that he had seen Tito. And as she felt the look of hatred
grating on her, something like a hope arose that this man might be the
criminal, and that her husband might not have been guilty towards him.
If she could learn that now, by bringing Tito face to face with him,
and have her mind set at rest!
“If you will come with me,” she said, “I can give you shelter and food
until you are quite rested and strong. Will you come?”
“Yes,” said Baldassarre, “I shall be glad to get my strength. I want to
get my strength,” he repeated, as if he were muttering to himself,
rather than speaking to her.
“Come!” she said, inviting him to walk by her side, and taking the way
by the Arno towards the Ponte Rubaconte as the more private road.
“I think you are not a Florentine,” she said, presently, as they turned
on to the bridge.
He looked round at her without speaking. His suspicious caution was
more strongly upon him than usual, just now that the fog of confusion
and oblivion was made denser by bodily feebleness. But she was looking
at him too, and there was something in her gentle eyes which at last
compelled him to answer her. But he answered cautiously—
“No, I am no Florentine; I am a lonely man.”
She observed his reluctance to speak to her, and dared not question him
further, lest he should desire to quit her. As she glanced at him from
time to time, her mind was busy with thoughts which quenched the faint
hope that there was nothing painful to be revealed about her husband.
If this old man had been in the wrong, where was the cause for dread
and secrecy!
They walked on in silence till they reached the entrance into the Via
de’ Bardi, and Romola noticed that he turned and looked at her with a
sudden movement as if some shock had passed through him. A few moments
after, she paused at the half-open door of the court and turned towards
him.
“Ah!” he said, not waiting for her to speak, “you are his wife.”
“Whose wife?” said Romola.
It would have been impossible for Baldassarre to recall any name at
that moment. The very force with which the image of Tito pressed upon
him seemed to expel any verbal sign. He made no answer, but looked at
her with strange fixedness.
She opened the door wide and showed the court covered with straw, on
which lay four or five sick people, while some little children crawled
or sat on it at their ease—tiny pale creatures, biting straws and
gurgling.
“If you will come in,” said Romola, tremulously, “I will find you a
comfortable place, and bring you some more food.”
“No, I will not come in,” said Baldassarre. But he stood still,
arrested by the burden of impressions under which his mind was too
confused to choose a course.
“Can I do nothing for you?” said Romola. “Let me give you some money
that you may buy food. It will be more plentiful soon.”
She had put her hand into her scarsella as she spoke, and held out her
palm with several _grossi_ in it. She purposely offered him more than
she would have given to any other man in the same circumstances. He
looked at the coins a little while, and then said—
“Yes, I will take them.”
She poured the coins into his palm, and he grasped them tightly.
“Tell me,” said Romola, almost beseechingly. “What shall you—”
But Baldassarre had turned away from her, and was walking again towards
the bridge. Passing from it, straight on up the Via del Fosso, he came
upon the shop of Niccolò Caparra, and turned towards it without a
pause, as if it had been the very object of his search. Niccolò was at
that moment in procession with the armourers of Florence, and there was
only one apprentice in the shop. But there were all sorts of weapons in
abundance hanging there, and Baldassarre’s eyes discerned what he was
more hungry for than for bread. Niccolò himself would probably have
refused to sell anything that might serve as a weapon to this man with
signs of the prison on him; but the apprentice, less observant and
scrupulous, took three _grossi_ for a sharp hunting-knife without any
hesitation. It was a conveniently small weapon, which Baldassarre could
easily thrust within the breast of his tunic, and he walked on, feeling
stronger. That sharp edge might give deadliness to the thrust of an
aged arm: at least it was a companion, it was a power in league with
him, even if it failed. It would break against armour, but was the
armour sure to be always there? In those long months while vengeance
had lain in prison, baseness had perhaps become forgetful and secure.
The knife had been bought with the traitor’s own money. That was just.
Before he took the money, he had felt what he should do with it—buy a
weapon. Yes, and if possible, food too; food to nourish the arm that
would grasp the weapon, food to nourish the body which was the temple
of vengeance. When he had had enough bread, he should be able to think
and act—to think first how he could hide himself, lest Tito should have
him dragged away again.
With that idea of hiding in his mind, Baldassarre turned up the
narrowest streets, bought himself some meat and bread, and sat down
under the first loggia to eat. The bells that swung out louder and
louder peals of joy, laying hold of him and making him vibrate along
with all the air, seemed to him simply part of that strong world which
was against him.
Romola had watched Baldassarre until he had disappeared round the
turning into the Piazza de’ Mozzi, half feeling that his departure was
a relief, half reproaching herself for not seeking with more decision
to know the truth about him, for not assuring herself whether there
were any guiltless misery in his lot which she was not helpless to
relieve. Yet what could she have done if the truth had proved to be the
burden of some painful secret about her husband, in addition to the
anxieties that already weighed upon her? Surely a wife was permitted to
desire ignorance of a husband’s wrong-doing, since she alone must not
protest and warn men against him. But that thought stirred too many
intricate fibres of feeling to be pursued now in her weariness. It was
a time to rejoice, since help had come to Florence; and she turned into
the court to tell the good news to her patients on their straw beds.
She closed the door after her, lest the bells should drown her voice,
and then throwing the black drapery from her head, that the women might
see her better, she stood in the midst and told them that corn was
coming, and that the bells were ringing for gladness at the news. They
all sat up to listen, while the children trotted or crawled towards
her, and pulled her black skirts, as if they were impatient at being
all that long way off her face. She yielded to them, weary as she was,
and sat down on the straw, while the little pale things peeped into her
basket and pulled her hair down, and the feeble voices around her said,
“The Holy Virgin be praised!”
“It was the procession!”
“The Mother of God has had pity on us!”
At last Romola rose from the heap of straw, too tired to try and smile
any longer, saying as she turned up the stone steps—
“I will come by-and-by, to bring you your dinner.”
“Bless you, madonna! bless you!” said the faint chorus, in much the
same tone as that in which they had a few minutes before praised and
thanked the unseen Madonna.
Romola cared a great deal for that music. She had no innate taste for
tending the sick and clothing the ragged, like some women to whom the
details of such work are welcome in themselves, simply as an
occupation. Her early training had kept her aloof from such womanly
labours; and if she had not brought to them the inspiration of her
deepest feelings, they would have been irksome to her. But they had
come to be the one unshaken resting-place of her mind, the one narrow
pathway on which the light fell clear. If the gulf between herself and
Tito which only gathered a more perceptible wideness from her attempts
to bridge it by submission, brought a doubt whether, after all, the
bond to which she had laboured to be true might not itself be false—if
she came away from her confessor, Fra Salvestro, or from some contact
with the disciples of Savonarola amongst whom she worshipped, with a
sickening sense that these people were miserably narrow, and with an
almost impetuous reaction towards her old contempt for their
superstition—she found herself recovering a firm footing in her works
of womanly sympathy. Whatever else made her doubt, the help she gave to
her fellow-citizens made her sure that Fra Girolamo had been right to
call her back. According to his unforgotten words, her place had not
been empty: it had been filled with her love and her labour. Florence
had had need of her, and the more her own sorrow pressed upon her, the
more gladness she felt in the memories, stretching through the two long
years, of hours and moments in which she had lightened the burden of
life to others. All that ardour of her nature which could no longer
spend itself in the woman’s tenderness for father and husband, had
transformed itself into an enthusiasm of sympathy with the general
life. She had ceased to think that her own lot could be happy—had
ceased to think of happiness at all: the one end of her life seemed to
her to be the diminishing of sorrow.
Her enthusiasm was continually stirred to fresh vigour by the influence
of Savonarola. In spite of the wearisome visions and allegories from
which she recoiled in disgust when they came as stale repetitions from
other lips than his, her strong affinity for his passionate sympathy
and the splendour of his aims had lost none of its power. His burning
indignation against the abuses and oppression that made the daily story
of the Church and of States had kindled the ready fire in her too. His
special care for liberty and purity of government in Florence, with his
constant reference of this immediate object to the wider end of a
universal regeneration, had created in her a new consciousness of the
great drama of human existence in which her life was a part; and
through her daily helpful contact with the less fortunate of her
fellow-citizens this new consciousness became something stronger than a
vague sentiment; it grew into a more and more definite motive of
self-denying practice. She thought little about dogmas, and shrank from
reflecting closely on the Frate’s prophecies of the immediate scourge
and closely following regeneration. She had submitted her mind to his
and had entered into communion with the Church, because in this way she
had found an immediate satisfaction for moral needs which all the
previous culture and experience of her life had left hungering. Fra
Girolamo’s voice had waked in her mind a reason for living, apart from
personal enjoyment and personal affection; but it was a reason that
seemed to need feeding with greater forces than she possessed within
herself, and her submissive use of all offices of the Church was simply
a watching and waiting if by any means fresh strength might come. The
pressing problem for Romola just then was not to settle questions of
controversy, but to keep alive that flame of unselfish emotion by which
a life of sadness might still be a life of active love.
Her trust in Savonarola’s nature as greater than her own made a large
part of the strength she had found. And the trust was not to be lightly
shaken. It is not force of intellect which causes ready repulsion from
the aberration and eccentricities of greatness, any more than it is
force of vision that causes the eye to explore the warts on a face
bright with human expression; it is simply the negation of high
sensibilities. Romola was so deeply moved by the grand energies of
Savonarola’s nature, that she found herself listening patiently to all
dogmas and prophecies, when they came in the vehicle of his ardent
faith and believing utterance.[1]
No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can
feel trust and reverence. Romola’s trust in Savonarola was something
like a rope suspended securely by her path, making her step elastic
while she grasped it; if it were suddenly removed, no firmness of the
ground she trod could save her from staggering, or perhaps from
falling.
[1] He himself had had occasion enough to note the efficacy of that
vehicle. “If,” he says in the _Compendium Revelationum_, “you speak of
such as have not heard these things from me, I admit that they who
disbelieve are more than they who believe, because it is one thing to
hear him who inwardly feels these things, and another to hear him who
feels them not; ... and, therefore, it is well said by Saint Jerome,
‘Habet nescio quid latentis energiae vivae vocis actus, et in aures
discipuli de auctoris ore transfusa fortis sonat.’”