The Scaffold.
Three days later the moon that was just surmounting the buildings of
the piazza in front of the Old Palace within the hour of midnight, did
not make the usual broad lights and shadows on the pavement. Not a
hand’s-breadth of pavement was to be seen, but only the heads of an
eager struggling multitude. And instead of that background of silence
in which the pattering footsteps and buzzing voices, the lute-thrumming
or rapid scampering of the many night wanderers of Florence stood out
in obtrusive distinctness, there was the background of a roar from
mingled shouts and imprecations, tramplings and pushings, and
accidental clashing of weapons, across which nothing was
distinguishable but a darting shriek, or the heavy dropping toll of a
bell.
Almost all who could call themselves the public of Florence were awake
at that hour, and either enclosed within the limits of that piazza, or
struggling to enter it. Within the palace were still assembled in the
council-chamber all the chief magistracies, the eighty members of the
senate, and the other select citizens who had been in hot debate
through long hours of daylight and torchlight whether the Appeal should
be granted or whether the sentence of death should be executed on the
prisoners forthwith, to forestall the dangerous chances of delay. And
the debate had been so much like fierce quarrel that the noise from the
council-chamber had reached the crowd outside. Only within the last
hour had the question been decided: the Signoria had remained divided,
four of them standing out resolutely for the Appeal in spite of the
strong argument that if they did not give way their houses should be
sacked, until Francesco Valori, in brief and furious speech, made the
determination of his party more ominously distinct by declaring that if
the Signoria would not defend the liberties of the Florentine people by
executing those five perfidious citizens, there would not be wanting
others who would take that cause in hand to the peril of all who
opposed it. The Florentine Cato triumphed. When the votes were counted
again, the four obstinate white beans no longer appeared; the whole
nine were of the fatal affirmative black, deciding the death of the
five prisoners without delay—deciding also, only tacitly and with much
more delay, the death of Francesco Valori.
And now, while the judicial Eight were gone to the Bargello to prepare
for the execution, the five condemned men were being led barefoot and
in irons through the midst of the council. It was their friends who had
contrived this: would not Florentines be moved by the visible
association of such cruel ignominy with two venerable men like Bernardo
del Nero and Niccolò Ridolfi, who had taken their bias long before the
new order of things had come to make Mediceanism retrograde—with two
brilliant popular young men like Tornabuoni and Pucci, whose absence
would be felt as a haunting vacancy wherever there was a meeting of
chief Florentines? It was useless: such pity as could be awakened now
was of that hopeless sort which leads not to rescue, but to the tardier
action of revenge.
While this scene was passing upstairs Romola stood below against one of
the massive pillars in the court of the palace, expecting the moment
when her godfather would appear, on his way to execution. By the use of
strong interest she had gained permission to visit him in the evening
of this day, and remain with him until the result of the council should
be determined. And now she was waiting with his confessor to follow the
guard that would lead him to the Bargello. Her heart was bent on
clinging to the presence of the childless old man to the last moment,
as her father would have done; and she had overpowered all
remonstrances. Giovan Battista Ridolfi, a disciple of Savonarola, who
was going in bitterness to behold the death of his elder brother
Niccolò, had promised that she should be guarded, and now stood by her
side.
Tito, too, was in the palace; but Romola had not seen him. Since the
evening of the seventeenth they had avoided each other, and Tito only
knew by inference from the report of the Frate’s neutrality that her
pleading had failed. He was now surrounded with official and other
personages, both Florentine and foreign, who had been awaiting the
issue of the long-protracted council, maintaining, except when he was
directly addressed, the subdued air and grave silence of a man whom
actual events are placing in a painful state of strife between public
and private feeling. When an allusion was made to his wife in relation
to those events, he implied that, owing to the violent excitement of
her mind, the mere fact of his continuing to hold office under a
government concerned in her godfather’s condemnation, roused in her a
diseased hostility towards him; so that for her sake he felt it best
not to approach her.
“Ah, the old Bardi blood!” said Cennini, with a shrug. “I shall not be
surprised if this business shakes _her_ loose from the Frate, as well
as some others I could name.”
“It is excusable in a woman, who is doubtless beautiful, since she is
the wife of Messer Tito,” said a young French envoy, smiling and bowing
to Tito, “to think that her affections must overrule the good of the
State, and that nobody is to be beheaded who is anybody’s cousin; but
such a view is not to be encouraged in the male population. It seems to
me your Florentine polity is much weakened by it.”
“That is true,” said Niccolò Macchiavelli; “but where personal ties are
strong, the hostilities they raise must be taken due account of. Many
of these half-way severities are mere hot-headed blundering. The only
safe blows to be inflicted on men and parties are the blows that are
too heavy to be avenged.”
“Niccolò,” said Cennini, “there is a clever wickedness in thy talk
sometimes that makes me mistrust thy pleasant young face as if it were
a mask of Satan.”
“Not at all, my good Domenico,” said Macchiavelli, smiling, and laying
his hand on the elder’s shoulder. “Satan was a blunderer, an introducer
of _novita_, who made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we
should all have been worshipping him, and his portrait would have been
more flattered.”
“Well, well,” said Cennini, “I say not thy doctrine is not too clever
for Satan: I only say it is wicked enough for him.”
“I tell you,” said Macchiavelli, “my doctrine is the doctrine of all
men who seek an end a little farther off than their own noses. Ask our
Frate, our prophet, how his universal renovation is to be brought
about: he will tell you, first, by getting a free and pure government;
and since it appears that this cannot be done by making all Florentines
love each other, it must be done by cutting off every head that happens
to be obstinately in the way. Only if a man incurs odium by sanctioning
a severity that is not thorough enough to be final, he commits a
blunder. And something like that blunder, I suspect, the Frate has
committed. It was an occasion on which he might have won some lustre by
exerting himself to maintain the Appeal; instead of that, he has lost
lustre, and has gained no strength.”
Before any one else could speak, there came the expected announcement
that the prisoners were about to leave the council-chamber; and the
majority of those who were present hurried towards the door, intent on
securing the freest passage to the Bargello in the rear of the
prisoners’ guard; for the scene of the execution was one that drew
alike those who were moved by the deepest passions and those who were
moved by the coldest curiosity.
Tito was one of those who remained behind. He had a native repugnance
to sights of death and pain, and five days ago whenever he had thought
of this execution as a possibility he had hoped that it would not take
place, and that the utmost sentence would be exile: his own safety
demanded no more. But now he felt that it would be a welcome guarantee
of his security when he had learned that Bernardo del Nero’s head was
off the shoulders. The new knowledge and new attitude towards him
disclosed by Romola on the day of his return, had given him a new dread
of the power she possessed to make his position insecure. If any act of
hers only succeeded in making him an object of suspicion and odium, he
foresaw not only frustration, but frustration under unpleasant
circumstances. Her belief in Baldassarre had clearly determined her
wavering feelings against further submission, and if her godfather
lived she would win him to share her belief without much trouble.
Romola seemed more than ever an unmanageable fact in his destiny. But
if Bernardo del Nero were dead, the difficulties that would beset her
in placing herself in opposition to her husband would probably be
insurmountable to her shrinking pride. Therefore Tito had felt easier
when he knew that the Eight had gone to the Bargello to order the
instant erection of the scaffold. Four other men—his intimates and
confederates—were to die, besides Bernardo del Nero. But a man’s own
safety is a god that sometimes makes very grim demands. Tito felt them
to be grim: even in the pursuit of what was agreeable, this paradoxical
life forced upon him the desire for what was disagreeable. But he had
had other experience of this sort, and as he heard through the open
doorway the shuffle of many feet and the clanking of metal on the
stairs, he was able to answer the questions of the young French envoy
without showing signs of any other feeling than that of sad resignation
to State necessities.
Those sounds fell on Romola as if her power of hearing had been exalted
along with every other sensibility of her nature. She needed no arm to
support her; she shed no tears. She felt that intensity of life which
seems to transcend both grief and joy—in which the mind seems to itself
akin to elder forces that wrought out existence before the birth of
pleasure and pain. Since her godfather’s fate had been decided, the
previous struggle of feeling in her had given way to an identification
of herself with him in these supreme moments: she was inwardly
asserting for him that, if he suffered the punishment of treason, he
did not deserve the name of traitor; he was the victim to a collision
between two kinds of faithfulness. It was not given him to die for the
noblest cause, and yet he died because of his nobleness. He might have
been a meaner man and found it easier not to incur this guilt. Romola
was feeling the full force of that sympathy with the individual lot
that is continually opposing itself to the formulae by which actions
and parties are judged. She was treading the way with her second father
to the scaffold, and nerving herself to defy ignominy by the
consciousness that it was not deserved.
The way was fenced in by three hundred armed men, who had been placed
as a guard by the orders of Francesco Valori, for among the apparent
contradictions that belonged to this event, not the least striking was
the alleged alarm on the one hand at the popular rage against the
conspirators, and the alleged alarm on the other lest there should be
an attempt to rescue them in the midst of a hostile crowd. When they
had arrived within the court of the Bargello, Romola was allowed to
approach Bernardo with his confessor for a moment of farewell. Many
eyes were bent on them even in that struggle of an agitated throng, as
the aged man, forgetting that his hands were bound with irons, lifted
them towards the golden head that was bent towards him, and then,
checking that movement, leaned to kiss her. She seized the fettered
hands that were hung down again, and kissed them as if they had been
sacred things.
“My poor Romola,” said Bernardo, in a low voice, “I have only to die,
but thou hast to live—and I shall not be there to help thee.”
“Yes,” said Romola, hurriedly, “you _will_ help me—always—because I
shall remember you.”
She was taken away and conducted up the flight of steps that led to the
loggia surrounding the grand old court. She took her place there,
determined to look till the moment when her godfather laid his head on
the block. Now while the prisoners were allowed a brief interval with
their confessor, the spectators were pressing into court until the
crowd became dense around the black scaffold, and the torches fixed in
iron rings against the pillars threw a varying startling light at one
moment on passionless stone carvings, at another on some pale face
agitated with suppressed rage or suppressed grief—the face of one among
the many near relatives of the condemned, who were presently to receive
their dead and carry them home.
Romola’s face looked like a marble image against the dark arch as she
stood watching for the moment when her godfather would appear at the
foot of the scaffold. He was to suffer first, and Battista Ridolfi, who
was by her side, had promised to take her away through a door behind
them when she would have seen the last look of the man who alone in all
the world had shared her pitying love for her father. And still, in the
background of her thought, there was the possibility striving to be a
hope, that some rescue might yet come, something that would keep that
scaffold unstained by blood.
For a long while there was constant movement, lights flickering, heads
swaying to and fro, confused voices within the court, rushing waves of
sound through the entrance from without. It seemed to Romola as if she
were in the midst of a storm-troubled sea, caring nothing about the
storm, caring only to hold out a signal till the eyes that looked for
it could seek it no more.
Suddenly there was stillness, and the very tapers seemed to tremble
into quiet. The executioner was ready on the scaffold, and Bernardo del
Nero was seen ascending it with a slow firm step. Romola made no
visible movement, uttered not even a suppressed sound: she stood more
firmly, caring for _his_ firmness. She saw him pause, saw the white
head kept erect, while he said, in a voice distinctly audible—
“It is but a short space of life that my fellow-citizens have taken
from me.”
She perceived that he was gazing slowly round him as he spoke. She felt
that his eyes were resting on her, and that she was stretching out her
arms towards him. Then she saw no more till—a long while after, as it
seemed—a voice said, “My daughter, all is peace now. I can conduct you
to your house.”
She uncovered her head and saw her godfather’s confessor standing by
her, in a room where there were other grave men talking in subdued
tones.
“I am ready,” she said, starting up. “Let us lose no time.”
She thought all clinging was at an end for her: all her strength now
should be given to escape from a grasp under which she shuddered.