Drifting Away.
On the eighth day from that memorable night Romola was standing on the
brink of the Mediterranean, watching the gentle summer pulse of the sea
just above what was then the little fishing village of Viareggio.
Again she had fled from Florence, and this time no arresting voice had
called her back. Again she wore the grey religious dress; and this
time, in her heart-sickness, she did not care that it was a disguise. A
new rebellion had risen within her, a new despair. Why should she care
about wearing one badge more than another, or about being called by her
own name? She despaired of finding any consistent duty belonging to
that name. What force was there to create for her that supremely
hallowed motive which men call duty, but which can have no inward
constraining existence save through some form of believing love?
The bonds of all strong affection were snapped. In her marriage, the
highest bond of all, she had ceased to see the mystic union which is
its own guarantee of indissolubleness, had ceased even to see the
obligation of a voluntary pledge: had she not proved that the things to
which she had pledged herself were impossible? The impulse to set
herself free had risen again with overmastering force; yet the freedom
could only be an exchange of calamity. There is no compensation for the
woman who feels that the chief relation of her life has been no more
than a mistake. She has lost her crown. The deepest secret of human
blessedness has half whispered itself to her, and then for ever passed
her by.
And now Romola’s best support under that supreme woman’s sorrow had
slipped away from her. The vision of any great purpose, any end of
existence which could ennoble endurance and exalt the common deeds of a
dusty life with divine ardours, was utterly eclipsed for her now by the
sense of a confusion in human things which made all effort a mere
dragging at tangled threads; all fellowship, either for resistance or
advocacy, mere unfairness and exclusiveness. What, after all, was the
man who had represented for her the highest heroism: the heroism not of
hard, self-contained endurance, but of willing, self-offering love?
What was the cause he was struggling for? Romola had lost her trust in
Savonarola, had lost that fervour of admiration which had made her
unmindful of his aberrations, and attentive only to the grand curve of
his orbit. And now that her keen feeling for her godfather had thrown
her into antagonism with the Frate, she saw all the repulsive and
inconsistent details in his teaching with a painful lucidity which
exaggerated their proportions. In the bitterness of her disappointment
she said that his striving after the renovation of the Church and the
world was a striving after a mere name which told no more than the
title of a book: a name that had come to mean practically the measures
that would strengthen his own position in Florence; nay, often
questionable deeds and words, for the sake of saving his influence from
suffering by his own errors. And that political reform which had once
made a new interest in her life seemed now to reduce itself to narrow
devices for the safety of Florence, in contemptible contradiction with
the alternating professions of blind trust in the Divine care.
It was inevitable that she should judge the Frate unfairly on a
question of individual suffering, at which she looked with the eyes of
personal tenderness, and _he_ with the eyes of theoretic conviction. In
that declaration of his, that the cause of his party was the cause of
God’s kingdom, she heard only the ring of egoism. Perhaps such words
have rarely been uttered without that meaner ring in them; yet they are
the implicit formula of all energetic belief. And if such energetic
belief, pursuing a grand and remote end, is often in danger of becoming
a demon-worship, in which the votary lets his son and daughter pass
through the fire with a readiness that hardly looks like sacrifice;
tender fellow-feeling for the nearest has its danger too, and is apt to
be timid and sceptical towards the larger aims without which life
cannot rise into religion. In this way poor Romola was being blinded by
her tears.
No one who has ever known what it is thus to lose faith in a fellow-man
whom he has profoundly loved and reverenced, will lightly say that the
shock can leave the faith in the Invisible Goodness unshaken. With the
sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to
believe in our own better self, since that also is part of the common
nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of
the soul are dulled. Romola felt even the springs of her once active
pity drying up, and leaving her to barren egoistic complaining. Had not
_she_ had her sorrows too? And few had cared for her, while she had
cared for many. She had done enough; she had striven after the
impossible, and was weary of this stifling crowded life. She longed for
that repose in mere sensation which she had sometimes dreamed of in the
sultry afternoons of her early girlhood, when she had fancied herself
floating naïad-like in the waters.
The clear waves seemed to invite her: she wished she could lie down to
sleep on them and pass from sleep into death. But Romola could not
directly seek death; the fulness of young life in her forbade that. She
could only wish that death would come.
At the spot where she had paused there was a deep bend in the shore,
and a small boat with a sail was moored there. In her longing to glide
over the waters that were getting golden with the level sun-rays, she
thought of a story which had been one of the things she had loved to
dwell on in Boccaccio, when her father fell asleep and she glided from
her stool to sit on the floor and read the ‘Decamerone.’ It was the
story of that fair Gostanza who in her lovelorn-ness desired to live no
longer, but not having the courage to attack her young life, had put
herself into a boat and pushed off to sea; then, lying down in the
boat, had wrapt her mantle round her head, hoping to be wrecked, so
that her fear would be helpless to flee from death. The memory had
remained a mere thought in Romola’s mind, without budding into any
distinct wish; but now, as she paused again in her walking to and fro,
she saw gliding black against the red gold another boat with one man in
it, making towards the bend where the first and smaller boat was
moored. Walking on again, she at length saw the man land, pull his boat
ashore and begin to unload something from it. He was perhaps the owner
of the smaller boat also: he would be going away soon, and her
opportunity would be gone with him—her opportunity of buying that
smaller boat. She had not yet admitted to herself that she meant to use
it, but she felt a sudden eagerness to secure the possibility of using
it, which disclosed the half-unconscious growth of a thought into a
desire.
“Is that little boat yours also?” she said to the fisherman, who had
looked up, a little startled by the tall grey figure, and had made a
reverence to this holy Sister wandering thus mysteriously in the
evening solitude.
It _was_ his boat; an old one, hardly seaworthy, yet worth repairing to
any man who would buy it. By the blessing of San Antonio, whose chapel
was in the village yonder, his fishing had prospered, and he had now a
better boat, which had once been Gianni’s who died. But he had not yet
sold the old one. Romola asked him how much it was worth, and then,
while he was busy, thrust the price into a little satchel lying on the
ground and containing the remnant of his dinner. After that, she
watched him furling his sail and asked him how he should set it if he
wanted to go out to sea, and then pacing up and down again, waited to
see him depart.
The imagination of herself gliding away in that boat on the darkening
waters was growing more and more into a longing, as the thought of a
cool brook in sultriness becomes a painful thirst. To be freed from the
burden of choice when all motive was bruised, to commit herself,
sleeping, to destiny which would either bring death or else new
necessities that might rouse a new life in her!—it was a thought that
beckoned her the more because the soft evening air made her long to
rest in the still solitude, instead of going back to the noise and heat
of the village.
At last the slow fisherman had gathered up all his movables and was
walking away. Soon the gold was shrinking and getting duskier in sea
and sky, and there was no living thing in sight, no sound but the
lulling monotony of the lapping waves. In this sea there was no tide
that would help to carry her away if she waited for its ebb; but Romola
thought the breeze from the land was rising a little. She got into the
boat, unfurled the sail, and fastened it as she had learned in that
first brief lesson. She saw that it caught the light breeze, and this
was all she cared for. Then she loosed the boat from its moorings, and
tried to urge it with an oar, till she was far out from the land, till
the sea was dark even to the west, and the stars were disclosing
themselves like a palpitating life over the wide heavens. Resting at
last, she threw back her cowl, and, taking off the kerchief underneath,
which confined her hair, she doubled them both under her head for a
pillow on one of the boat’s ribs. The fair head was still very young
and could bear a hard pillow.
And so she lay, with the soft night air breathing on her while she
glided on the water and watched the deepening quiet of the sky. She was
alone now: she had freed herself from all claims, she had freed herself
even from that burden of choice which presses with heavier and heavier
weight when claims have loosed their guiding hold.
Had she found anything like the dream of her girlhood? No. Memories
hung upon her like the weight of broken wings that could never be
lifted—memories of human sympathy which even in its pains leaves a
thirst that the Great Mother has no milk to still. Romola felt orphaned
in those wide spaces of sea and sky. She read no message of love for
her in that far-off symbolic writing of the heavens, and with a great
sob she wished that she might be gliding into death.
She drew the cowl over her head again and covered her face, choosing
darkness rather than the light of the stars, which seemed to her like
the hard light of eyes that looked at her without seeing her. Presently
she felt that she was in the grave, but not resting there: she was
touching the hands of the beloved dead beside her, and trying to wake
them.