A Prophetess.
The incidents of that Carnival day seemed to Romola to carry no other
personal consequences to her than the new care of supporting poor
cousin Brigida in her fluctuating resignation to age and grey hairs;
but they introduced a Lenten time in which she was kept at a high pitch
of mental excitement and active effort.
Bernardo del Nero had been elected Gonfaloniere. By great exertions the
Medicean party had so far triumphed, and that triumph had deepened
Romola’s presentiment of some secretly-prepared scheme likely to ripen
either into success or betrayal during these two months of her
godfather’s authority. Every morning the dim daybreak as it peered into
her room seemed to be that haunting fear coming back to her. Every
morning the fear went with her as she passed through the streets on her
way to the early sermon in the Duomo: but there she gradually lost the
sense of its chill presence, as men lose the dread of death in the
clash of battle.
In the Duomo she felt herself sharing in a passionate conflict which
had wider relations than any enclosed within the walls of Florence. For
Savonarola was preaching—preaching the last course of Lenten sermons he
was ever allowed to finish in the Duomo: he knew that excommunication
was imminent, and he had reached the point of defying it. He held up
the condition of the Church in the terrible mirror of his unflinching
speech, which called things by their right names and dealt in no polite
periphrases; he proclaimed with heightening confidence the advent of
renovation—of a moment when there would be a general revolt against
corruption. As to his own destiny, he seemed to have a double and
alternating prevision: sometimes he saw himself taking a glorious part
in that revolt, sending forth a voice that would be heard through all
Christendom, and making the dead body of the Church tremble into new
life, as the body of Lazarus trembled when the Divine voice pierced the
sepulchre; sometimes he saw no prospect for himself but persecution and
martyrdom:—this life for him was only a vigil, and only after death
would come the dawn.
The position was one which must have had its impressiveness for all
minds that were not of the dullest order, even if they were inclined,
as Macchiavelli was, to interpret the Frate’s character by a key that
presupposed no loftiness. To Romola, whose kindred ardour gave her a
firm belief in Savonarola’s genuine greatness of purpose, the crisis
was as stirring as if it had been part of her personal lot. It blent
itself as an exalting memory with all her daily labours; and those
labours were calling not only for difficult perseverance, but for new
courage. Famine had never yet taken its flight from Florence, and all
distress, by its long continuance, was getting harder to bear; disease
was spreading in the crowded city, and the Plague was expected. As
Romola walked, often in weariness, among the sick, the hungry, and the
murmuring, she felt it good to be inspired by something more than her
pity—by the belief in a heroism struggling for sublime ends, towards
which the daily action of her pity could only tend feebly, as the dews
that freshen the weedy ground to-day tend to prepare an unseen harvest
in the years to come.
But that mighty music which stirred her in the Duomo was not without
its jarring notes. Since those first days of glowing hope when the
Frate, seeing the near triumph of good in the reform of the Republic
and the coming of the French deliverer, had preached peace, charity,
and oblivion of political differences, there had been a marked change
of conditions: political intrigue had been too obstinate to allow of
the desired oblivion; the belief in the French deliverer, who had
turned his back on his high mission, seemed to have wrought harm; and
hostility, both on a petty and on a grand scale, was attacking the
Prophet with new weapons and new determination.
It followed that the spirit of contention and self-vindication pierced
more and more conspicuously in his sermons; that he was urged to meet
the popular demands not only by increased insistence and detail
concerning visions and private revelations, but by a tone of defiant
confidence against objectors; and from having denounced the desire for
the miraculous, and declared that miracles had no relation to true
faith, he had come to assert that at the right moment the Divine power
would attest the truth of his prophetic preaching by a miracle. And
continually, in the rapid transitions of excited feeling, as the vision
of triumphant good receded behind the actual predominance of evil, the
threats of coming vengeance against vicious tyrants and corrupt priests
gathered some impetus from personal exasperation, as well as from
indignant zeal.
In the career of a great public orator who yields himself to the
inspiration of the moment, that conflict of selfish and unselfish
emotion which in most men is hidden in the chamber of the soul, is
brought into terrible evidence: the language of the inner voices is
written out in letters of fire.
But if the tones of exasperation jarred on Romola, there was often
another member of Fra Girolamo’s audience to whom they were the only
thrilling tones, like the vibration of deep bass notes to the deaf.
Baldassarre had found out that the wonderful Frate was preaching again,
and as often as he could, he went to hear the Lenten sermon, that he
might drink in the threats of a voice which seemed like a power on the
side of justice. He went the more because he had seen that Romola went
too; for he was waiting and watching for a time when not only outward
circumstances, but his own varying mental state, would mark the right
moment for seeking an interview with her. Twice Romola had caught sight
of his face in the Duomo—once when its dark glance was fixed on hers.
She wished not to see it again, and yet she looked for it, as men look
for the reappearance of a portent. But any revelation that might be yet
to come about this old man was a subordinate fear now: it referred, she
thought, only to the past, and her anxiety was almost absorbed by the
present.
Yet the stirring Lent passed by; April, the second and final month of
her godfather’s supreme authority, was near its close; and nothing had
occurred to fulfil her presentiment. In the public mind, too, there had
been fears, and rumours had spread from Rome of a menacing activity on
the part of Piero de’ Medici; but in a few days the suspected Bernardo
would go out of power.
Romola was trying to gather some courage from the review of her futile
fears, when on the twenty-seventh, as she was walking out on her usual
errands of mercy in the afternoon, she was met by a messenger from
Camilla Rucellai, chief among the feminine seers of Florence, desiring
her presence forthwith on matters of the highest moment. Romola, who
shrank with unconquerable repulsion from the shrill volubility of those
illuminated women, and had just now a special repugnance towards
Camilla because of a report that she had announced revelations hostile
to Bernardo del Nero, was at first inclined to send back a flat
refusal. Camilla’s message might refer to public affairs, and Romola’s
immediate prompting was to close her ears against knowledge that might
only make her mental burden heavier. But it had become so thoroughly
her habit to reject her impulsive choice, and to obey passively the
guidance of outward claims, that, reproving herself for allowing her
presentiments to make her cowardly and selfish, she ended by
compliance, and went straight to Camilla.
She found the nervous grey-haired woman in a chamber arranged as much
as possible like a convent cell. The thin fingers clutching Romola as
she sat, and the eager voice addressing her at first in a loud whisper,
caused her a physical shrinking that made it difficult for her to keep
her seat.
Camilla had a vision to communicate—a vision in which it had been
revealed to her by Romola’s Angel, that Romola knew certain secrets
concerning her godfather, Bernardo del Nero, which, if disclosed, might
save the Republic from peril. Camilla’s voice rose louder and higher as
she narrated her vision, and ended by exhorting Romola to obey the
command of her Angel, and separate herself from the enemy of God.
Romola’s impetuosity was that of a massive nature, and, except in
moments when she was deeply stirred, her manner was calm and
self-controlled. She had a constitutional disgust for the shallow
excitability of women like Camilla, whose faculties seemed all wrought
up into fantasies, leaving nothing for emotion and thought. The
exhortation was not yet ended when she started up and attempted to
wrench her arm from Camilla’s tightening grasp. It was of no use. The
prophetess kept her hold like a crab, and, only incited to more eager
exhortation by Romola’s resistance, was carried beyond her own
intention into a shrill statement of other visions which were to
corroborate this. Christ himself had appeared to her and ordered her to
send his commands to certain citizens in office that they should throw
Bernardo del Nero from the window of the Palazzo Vecchio. Fra Girolamo
himself knew of it, and had not dared this time to say that the vision
was not of Divine authority.
“And since then,” said Camilla, in her excited treble, straining upward
with wild eyes towards Romola’s face, “the Blessed Infant has come to
me and laid a wafer of sweetness on my tongue in token of his pleasure
that I had done his will.”
“Let me go!” said Romola, in a deep voice of anger. “God grant you are
mad! else you are detestably wicked!”
The violence of her effort to be free was too strong for Camilla now.
She wrenched away her arm and rushed out of the room, not pausing till
she had hurriedly gone far along the street, and found herself close to
the church of the Badia. She had but to pass behind the curtain under
the old stone arch, and she would find a sanctuary shut in from the
noise and hurry of the street, where all objects and all uses suggested
the thought of an eternal peace subsisting in the midst of turmoil.
She turned in, and sinking down on the step of the altar in front of
Filippino Lippi’s serene Virgin appearing to Saint Bernard, she waited
in hope that the inward tumult which agitated her would by-and-by
subside.
The thought which pressed on her the most acutely was that Camilla
could allege Savonarola’s countenance of her wicked folly. Romola did
not for a moment believe that he had sanctioned the throwing of
Bernardo del Nero from the window as a Divine suggestion; she felt
certain that there was falsehood or mistake in that allegation.
Savonarola had become more and more severe in his views of resistance
to malcontents; but the ideas of strict law and order were fundamental
to all his political teaching. Still, since he knew the possibly fatal
effects of visions like Camilla’s, since he had a marked distrust of
such spirit-seeing women, and kept aloof from them as much as possible,
why, with his readiness to denounce wrong from the pulpit, did he not
publicly denounce these pretended revelations which brought new
darkness instead of light across the conception of a Supreme Will? Why?
The answer came with painful clearness: he was fettered inwardly by the
consciousness that such revelations were not, in their basis,
distinctly separable from his own visions; he was fettered outwardly by
the foreseen consequence of raising a cry against himself even among
members of his own party, as one who would suppress all Divine
inspiration of which he himself was not the vehicle—he or his
confidential and supplementary seer of visions, Fra Salvestro.
Romola, kneeling with buried face on the altar-step, was enduring one
of those sickening moments, when the enthusiasm which had come to her
as the only energy strong enough to make life worthy, seemed to be
inevitably bound up with vain dreams and wilful eye-shutting. Her mind
rushed back with a new attraction towards the strong worldly sense, the
dignified prudence, the untheoretic virtues of her godfather, who was
to be treated as a sort of Agag because he held that a more restricted
form of government was better than the Great Council, and because he
would not pretend to forget old ties to the banished family.
But with this last thought rose the presentiment of some plot to
restore the Medici; and then again she felt that the popular party was
half justified in its fierce suspicion. Again she felt that to keep the
Government of Florence pure, and to keep out a vicious rule, was a
sacred cause; the Frate was right there, and had carried her
understanding irrevocably with him. But at this moment the assent of
her understanding went alone; it was given unwillingly. Her heart was
recoiling from a right allied to so much narrowness; a right apparently
entailing that hard systematic judgment of men which measures them by
assents and denials quite superficial to the manhood within them. Her
affection and respect were clinging with new tenacity to her godfather,
and with him to those memories of her father which were in the same
opposition to the division of men into sheep and goats by the easy mark
of some political or religious symbol.
After all has been said that can be said about the widening influence
of ideas, it remains true that they would hardly be such strong agents
unless they were taken in a solvent of feeling. The great
world-struggle of developing thought is continually foreshadowed in the
struggle of the affections, seeking a justification for love and hope.
If Romola’s intellect had been less capable of discerning the
complexities in human things, all the early loving associations of her
life would have forbidden her to accept implicitly the denunciatory
exclusiveness of Savonarola. She had simply felt that his mind had
suggested deeper and more efficacious truth to her than any other, and
the large breathing-room she found in his grand view of human duties
had made her patient towards that part of his teaching which she could
not absorb, so long as its practical effect came into collision with no
strong force in her. But now a sudden insurrection of feeling had
brought about that collision. Her indignation, once roused by Camilla’s
visions, could not pause there, but ran like an illuminating fire over
all the kindred facts in Savonarola’s teaching, and for the moment she
felt what was true in the scornful sarcasms she heard continually flung
against him, more keenly than she felt what was false.
But it was an illumination that made all life look ghastly to her.
Where were the beings to whom she could cling, with whom she could work
and endure, with the belief that she was working for the right? On the
side from which moral energy came lay a fanaticism from which she was
shrinking with newly-startled repulsion; on the side to which she was
drawn by affection and memory, there was the presentiment of some
secret plotting, which her judgment told her would not be unfairly
called crime. And still surmounting every other thought was the dread
inspired by Tito’s hints, lest that presentiment should be converted
into knowledge, in such a way that she would be torn by irreconcilable
claims.
Calmness would not come even on the altar-steps; it would not come from
looking at the serene picture where the saint, writing in the rocky
solitude, was being visited by faces with celestial peace in them.
Romola was in the hard press of human difficulties, and that rocky
solitude was too far off. She rose from her knees that she might hasten
to her sick people in the courtyard, and by some immediate beneficent
action, revive that sense of worth in life which at this moment was
unfed by any wider faith. But when she turned round, she found herself
face to face with a man who was standing only two yards off her. The
man was Baldassarre.