Homeward.
In those silent wintry hours when Romola lay resting from her
weariness, her mind, travelling back over the past, and gazing across
the undefined distance of the future, saw all objects from a new
position. Her experience since the moment of her waking in the boat had
come to her with as strong an effect as that of the fresh seal on the
dissolving wax. She had felt herself without bonds, without motive;
sinking in mere egoistic complaining that life could bring her no
content; feeling a right to say, “I am tired of life, I want to die.”
That thought had sobbed within her as she fell asleep, but from the
moment after her waking when the cry had drawn her, she had not even
reflected, as she used to do in Florence, that she was glad to live
because she could lighten sorrow—she had simply lived, with so
energetic an impulse to share the life around her, to answer the call
of need and do the work which cried aloud to be done, that the reasons
for living, enduring, labouring, never took the form of argument.
The experience was like a new baptism to Romola. In Florence the
simpler relations of the human being to his fellow-men had been
complicated for her with all the special ties of marriage, the State,
and religious discipleship, and when these had disappointed her trust,
the shock seemed to have shaken her aloof from life and stunned her
sympathy. But now she said, “It was mere baseness in me to desire
death. If everything else is doubtful, this suffering that I can help
is certain; if the glory of the cross is an illusion, the sorrow is
only the truer. While the strength is in my arm I will stretch it out
to the fainting; while the light visits my eyes they shall seek the
forsaken.”
And then the past arose with a fresh appeal to her. Her work in this
green valley was done, and the emotions that were disengaged from the
people immediately around her rushed back into the old deep channels of
use and affection. That rare possibility of self-contemplation which
comes in any complete severance from our wonted life made her judge
herself as she had never done before: the compunction which is
inseparable from a sympathetic nature keenly alive to the possible
experience of others, began to stir in her with growing force. She
questioned the justness of her own conclusions, of her own deeds: she
had been rash, arrogant, always dissatisfied that others were not good
enough, while she herself had not been true to what her soul had once
recognised as the best. She began to condemn her flight: after all, it
had been cowardly self-care; the grounds on which Savonarola had once
taken her back were truer, deeper than the grounds she had had for her
second flight. How could she feel the needs of others and not feel,
above all, the needs of the nearest?
But then came reaction against such self-reproach. The memory of her
life with Tito, of the conditions which made their real union
impossible, while their external union imposed a set of false duties on
her which were essentially the concealment and sanctioning of what her
mind revolted from, told her that flight had been her only resource.
All minds, except such as are delivered from doubt by dulness of
sensibility, must be subject to this recurring conflict where the
many-twisted conditions of life have forbidden the fulfilment of a
bond. For in strictness there is no replacing of relations: the
presence of the new does not nullify the failure and breach of the old.
Life has lost its perfection: it has been maimed; and until the wounds
are quite scarred, conscience continually casts backward, doubting
glances.
Romola shrank with dread from the renewal of her proximity to Tito, and
yet she was uneasy that she had put herself out of reach of knowing
what was his fate—uneasy that the moment might yet come when he would
be in misery and need her. There was still a thread of pain within her,
testifying to those words of Fra Girolamo, that she could not cease to
be a wife. Could anything utterly cease for her that had once mingled
itself with the current of her heart’s blood?
Florence, and all her life there, had come back to her like hunger; her
feelings could not go wandering after the possible and the vague: their
living fibre was fed with the memory of familiar things. And the
thought that she had divided herself from them for ever became more and
more importunate in these hours that were unfilled with action. What if
Fra Girolamo had been wrong? What if the life of Florence was a web of
inconsistencies? Was she, then, something higher, that she should shake
the dust from off her feet, and say, “This world is not good enough for
me”? If she had been really higher, she would not so easily have lost
all her trust.
Her indignant grief for her godfather had no longer complete possession
of her, and her sense of debt to Savonarola was recovering
predominance. Nothing that had come, or was to come, could do away with
the fact that there had been a great inspiration in him which had waked
a new life in her. Who, in all her experience, could demand the same
gratitude from her as he? His errors—might they not bring calamities?
She could not rest. She hardly knew whether it was her strength
returning with the budding leaves that made her active again, or
whether it was her eager longing to get nearer Florence. She did not
imagine herself daring to enter Florence, but the desire to be near
enough to learn what was happening there urged itself with a strength
that excluded all other purposes.
And one March morning the people in the valley were gathered together
to see the blessed Lady depart. Jacopo had fetched a mule for her, and
was going with her over the mountains. The Padre, too, was going with
her to the nearest town, that he might help her in learning the safest
way by which she might get to Pistoja. Her store of trinkets and money,
untouched in this valley, was abundant for her needs.
If Romola had been less drawn by the longing that was taking her away,
it would have been a hard moment for her when she walked along the
village street for the last time, while the Padre and Jacopo, with the
mule, were awaiting her near the well. Her steps were hindered by the
wailing people, who knelt and kissed her hands, then clung to her
skirts and kissed the grey folds, crying, “Ah, why will you go, when
the good season is beginning and the crops will be plentiful? Why will
you go?”
“Do not be sorry,” said Romola, “you are well now, and I shall remember
you. I must go and see if my own people want me.”
“Ah, yes, if they have the pestilence!”
“Look at us again, Madonna!”
“Yes, yes, we will be good to the little Benedetto!”
At last Romola mounted her mule, but a vigorous screaming from
Benedetto as he saw her turn from him in this new position, was an
excuse for all the people to follow her and insist that he must ride on
the mule’s neck to the foot of the slope.
The parting must come at last, but as Romola turned continually before
she passed out of sight, she saw the little flock lingering to catch
the last waving of her hand.