Waiting.
The lengthening sunny days went on without bringing either what Romola
most desired or what she most dreaded. They brought no sign from
Baldassarre, and, in spite of special watch on the part of the
Government, no revelation of the suspected conspiracy. But they brought
other things which touched her closely, and bridged the phantom-crowded
space of anxiety with active sympathy in immediate trial. They brought
the spreading Plague and the Excommunication of Savonarola.
Both these events tended to arrest her incipient alienation from the
Frate, and to rivet again her attachment to the man who had opened to
her the new life of duty, and who seemed now to be worsted in the fight
for principle against profligacy. For Romola could not carry from day
to day into the abodes of pestilence and misery the sublime excitement
of a gladness that, since such anguish existed, she too existed to make
some of the anguish less bitter, without remembering that she owed this
transcendent moral life to Fra Girolamo. She could not witness the
silencing and excommunication of a man whose distinction from the great
mass of the clergy lay, not in any heretical belief, not in his
superstitions, but in the energy with which he sought to make the
Christian life a reality, without feeling herself drawn strongly to his
side.
Far on in the hot days of June the Excommunication, for some weeks
arrived from Rome, was solemnly published in the Duomo. Romola went to
witness the scene, that the resistance it inspired might invigorate
that sympathy with Savonarola which was one source of her strength. It
was in memorable contrast with the scene she had been accustomed to
witness there.
Instead of upturned citizen-faces filling the vast area under the
morning light, the youngest rising amphitheatre-wise towards the walls,
and making a garland of hope around the memories of age—instead of the
mighty voice thrilling all hearts with the sense of great things,
visible and invisible, to be struggled for—there were the bare walls at
evening made more sombre by the glimmer of tapers; there was the black
and grey flock of monks and secular clergy with bent, unexpectant
faces; there was the occasional tinkling of little bells in the pauses
of a monotonous voice reading a sentence which had already been long
hanging up in the churches; and at last there was the extinction of the
tapers, and the slow, shuffling tread of monkish feet departing in the
dim silence.
Romola’s ardour on the side of the Frate was doubly strengthened by the
gleeful triumph she saw in hard and coarse faces, and by the
fear-stricken confusion in the faces and speech of many among his
strongly-attached friends. The question where the duty of obedience
ends, and the duty of resistance begins, could in no case be an easy
one; but it was made overwhelmingly difficult by the belief that the
Church was—not a compromise of parties to secure a more or less
approximate justice in the appropriation of funds, but—a living
organism, instinct with Divine power to bless and to curse. To most of
the pious Florentines, who had hitherto felt no doubt in their
adherence to the Frate, that belief in the Divine potency of the Church
was not an embraced opinion, it was an inalienable impression, like the
concavity of the blue firmament; and the boldness of Savonarola’s
written arguments that the Excommunication was unjust, and that, being
unjust, it was not valid, only made them tremble the more, as a
defiance cast at a mystic image, against whose subtle immeasurable
power there was neither weapon nor defence.
But Romola, whose mind had not been allowed to draw its early
nourishment from the traditional associations of the Christian
community in which her father had lived a life apart, felt her relation
to the Church only through Savonarola; his moral force had been the
only authority to which she had bowed; and in his excommunication she
only saw the menace of hostile vice: on one side she saw a man whose
life was devoted to the ends of public virtue and spiritual purity, and
on the other the assault of alarmed selfishness, headed by a lustful,
greedy, lying, and murderous old man, once called Rodrigo Borgia, and
now lifted to the pinnacle of infamy as Pope Alexander the Sixth. The
finer shades of fact which soften the edge of such antitheses are not
apt to be seen except by neutrals, who are not distressed to discern
some folly in martyrs and some judiciousness in the men who burnt them.
But Romola required a strength that neutrality could not give; and this
Excommunication, which simplified and ennobled the resistant position
of Savonarola by bringing into prominence its wider relations, seemed
to come to her like a rescue from the threatening isolation of
criticism and doubt. The Frate was now withdrawn from that smaller
antagonism against Florentine enemies into which he continually fell in
the unchecked excitement of the pulpit, and presented himself simply as
appealing to the Christian world against a vicious exercise of
ecclesiastical power. He was a standard-bearer leaping into the breach.
Life never seems so clear and easy as when the heart is beating faster
at the sight of some generous self-risking deed. We feel no doubt then
what is the highest prize the soul can win; we almost believe in our
own power to attain it. By a new current of such enthusiasm Romola was
helped through these difficult summer days. She had ventured on no
words to Tito that would apprise him of her late interview with
Baldassarre, and the revelation he had made to her. What would such
agitating, difficult words win from him? No admission of the truth;
nothing, probably, but a cool sarcasm about her sympathy with his
assassin. Baldassarre was evidently helpless: the thing to be feared
was, not that he should injure Tito, but that Tito, coming upon his
traces, should carry out some new scheme for ridding himself of the
injured man who was a haunting dread to him. Romola felt that she could
do nothing decisive until she had seen Baldassarre again, and learned
the full truth about that “other wife”—learned whether she were the
wife to whom Tito was first bound.
The possibilities about that other wife, which involved the worst wound
to her hereditary pride, mingled themselves as a newly-embittering
suspicion with the earliest memories of her illusory love, eating away
the lingering associations of tenderness with the past image of her
husband; and her irresistible belief in the rest of Baldassarre’s
revelation made her shrink from Tito with a horror which would perhaps
have urged some passionate speech in spite of herself if he had not
been more than usually absent from home. Like many of the wealthier
citizens in that time of pestilence, he spent the intervals of business
chiefly in the country: the agreeable Melema was welcome at many
villas, and since Romola had refused to leave the city, he had no need
to provide a country residence of his own.
But at last, in the later days of July, the alleviation of those public
troubles which had absorbed her activity and much of her thought, left
Romola to a less counteracted sense of her personal lot. The Plague had
almost disappeared, and the position of Savonarola was made more
hopeful by a favourable magistracy, who were writing urgent vindicatory
letters to Rome on his behalf, entreating the withdrawal of the
Excommunication.
Romola’s healthy and vigorous frame was undergoing the reaction of
languor inevitable after continuous excitement and over-exertion; but
her mental restlessness would not allow her to remain at home without
peremptory occupation, except during the sultry hours. In the cool of
the morning and evening she walked out constantly, varying her
direction as much as possible, with the vague hope that if Baldassarre
were still alive she might encounter him. Perhaps some illness had
brought a new paralysis of memory, and he had forgotten where she
lived—forgotten even her existence. That was her most sanguine
explanation of his non-appearance. The explanation she felt to be most
probable was, that he had died of the Plague.