The night was far gone, and the city lay still, while Rossi replied to
Roma.
"MY DEAR R.,--You have nothing to reproach yourself with in regard
to my poor doings, or tryings-to-do. They were necessary, and if
the penalties had been worse a hundredfold I should not chew the
cud of my bargain now. Besides your wish, I had another motive, a
secret motive, and perhaps, if I were a good Catholic, I should
confess too, although not with a view to penance. Apparently, it
has come out well, and now that it seems to be all over, both your
scheme and mine, now that the wrong I did you is to some extent
undone, and my own object is in some measure achieved, I find
myself face to face with a position in which it is my duty to you
as well as to myself to bring our intercourse to an end.
"The truth is that we cannot be friends any longer, for the reason
that I love some one in whom you are, unhappily, too much
interested, and because there are obstacles between that person
and myself which are decisive and insurmountable. This alone puts
it on me as a point of honour that you and I should never see each
other again. Each of my visits adds to my embarrassment, to the
feeling that I am doing wrong in paying them, and to the certainty
that I must give them up altogether.
"Thank you again and again for the more than pleasant hours we
have spent together. It is not your fault that I must bury the
memory of them in oblivion. This does not mean that it is any part
of the painful but unavoidable result of circumstances I cannot
explain, that we should not write to each other as occasion may
arise. Continue to think of me as your brother--your brother far
away--to be called upon for counsel in your hour of need and
necessity. And whenever you call, be sure I shall be there.
"What you say of an important matter suggests that something has
come to your knowledge which concerns myself and the authorities;
but when a man has spent all his life on the edge of a precipice,
the most urgent perils are of little moment, and I beg of you not
to be alarmed for my sake. Whatever it is, it is only a part of
the atmosphere of danger I have always lived in--the glacier I
have always walked upon--and 'if it is not now, it is to come; if
it is not to come, it will be now--the
readiness is all.' Good-bye!--Yours, dear R----, D."