The Baron pushed out an easy-chair for Roma and twisted his own to face
it.
"How are you, my child?"
"One lives," said Roma, with a sigh.
"What is the matter, my dear? You are ill and unhappy."
She eluded the question and said, "You sent for me--what do you wish to
say?"
He told her the printer of certain seditious proclamations had been
arrested, and in the judicial inquiry preparatory to his trial he had
mentioned the name of the person who had employed and paid him.
"You cannot but be aware, my dear, that you have rendered yourself
liable to prosecution, and that nothing--nothing whatever--could have
saved you from public exposure but the good offices of a powerful
friend."
Roma drew her lips tightly together and made no answer.
"But what a situation for a Minister! To find himself ruled by his
feelings for a friend, and thus weakened in the eyes of his servants,
who ought to have no possible hold on him."
Roma's gloomy face began to be compressed with scorn.
"You have perhaps not realised the full measure of the indignity that
might have befallen you. For instance--a cruel necessity--the police
would have been making a domiciliary visitation in your apartment at
this moment."
Roma made a faint, involuntary cry, and half rose from her seat.
"Your letters and most secret papers would by this time be exposed to
the eyes of the police.... No, no, my child; calm yourself, be seated;
thanks to my intervention, this will not occur."
Roma looked at him, and found him more repulsive to her at that moment
than he had ever been before. Even his daintiness repelled her--the
modified perfume about his clothes, his waxed moustache, his rounded
finger-nails, and all the other refinements of the man who loves himself
and sets out to please the senses of women.
"You will allow, my dear, that I have had sufficient to humiliate me
without this further experience. A ward who persistently disregards the
laws of propriety and exposes herself to criticism in the most ordinary
acts of life was surely a sufficient trial. But that was not enough.
Almost as soon as you have passed out of my legal control you join with
those who are talking and conspiring against me."
Roma continued to sit with a gloomy and defiant face.
"How am I to defend myself against the humiliations you put upon me in
your own mind? You give me no chance to defend myself. I cannot know
what others have told you. I know no more than you repeat to me, and
that is nothing at all."
Roma was biting her compressed lips and breathing audibly.
"How am I to defend myself against the humiliations I suffer in the
minds of the public? There is only one way, and that is to allow it to
be believed that, in spite of all appearances, you are still playing a
part, that you are going to all lengths to punish the enemy who traduced
you and publicly degraded you."
Roma tried to laugh, but the laugh was broken in her throat by a rising
sob.
"I have only to whisper that, dear friend, and society, at all events,
will credit it. Already it knows the very minute details of your life,
and it will believe that when you threw away every shred of propriety
and went to live in that man's apartment, it was only in order to play
the old part--shall I say the Scriptural part?--of possessing yourself
of _the inmost secrets of his soul_."
The clear, sharp whisper in which the Baron spoke his last words cut
Roma like a knife. She threw up her head with scorn.
"Let it believe what it likes," she said. "If society cares to think
that I have allowed my life to be turned upside down for the sake of
hatred, let it do so."
The Baron's secretary interrupted by opening the door.
"Nazzareno, Excellency," said the secretary.
"Ah! Let him come in," said the Baron. "You remember Nazzareno, Roma? My
steward at Albano?"
An elderly man with a bronzed face and shaggy eyebrows, bringing an
odour of the fields and the farmyard, was ushered into the room.
"Come in, Nazzareno! You've not forgotten Donna Roma? You planted a
rosebush on her first Roman birthday, you remember. It's a great tree by
this time, perhaps."
"It is, Excellency," said the steward, bowing and smiling, "and nearly
as full of bloom as the Signorina herself."
"Well, what news from Albano?"
The steward told a long story of operations on the estates--planting
birch in the top fields, and eucalyptus in the low meadow, fencing,
draining, and sowing.
"And ... and the Baroness?" said the Baron, turning over some papers.
"Ah! her Excellency is worse," said the old man. "The nurse and the
doctor thought you had better be told exactly, and that is the object of
my errand."
"Yes?" The papers rustled in the Baron's fingers as he shuffled and
sorted them.
The steward told another long story. Her Excellency was weaker, or she
would be quite ungovernable. And so changed! When he was called in
yesterday she was so much altered that he would not have known her. It
was a question of days, and all the servants were saying prayers to Mary
Magdalene.
"Have some dinner downstairs before you return, Nazzareno," said the
Baron. "And when you see the doctor this evening, say I'll come out
some time this week if I can. Good-morning!"
The repulsion the Baron had inspired in Roma deepened to loathing when
he began to speak affectionately the moment the door had closed on the
steward.
"Look at this, dearest. It's from his Majesty."
She did not look at the letter he put before her, so he told her what it
contained. It offered him the Collar of the Annunziata, the highest
order in Italy, making him a cousin to the King.
She could not contain herself any longer. "I want to tell you
something," she said, "so that you may know once for all that it is
useless to waste further thought on me."
He looked at her with an indulgent smile.
"I am married to Mr. Rossi," she said.
"But that is impossible. There was no time."
"We were married religiously, in the parish church, on the morning he
left Rome."
The indulgent smile gave way to a sarcastic one.
"Then why did he leave you behind? If he thought _that_ was a good
marriage, why didn't he take you with him? But perhaps he had his own
reason, and the denunciation of the poor man in prison was not so far
amiss."
"That was an official lie, a cowardly lie," said Roma, and her eyes
burned with anger.
"Was it? Perhaps it was. But I have just heard something else about Mr.
Rossi that is undoubtedly true. I have heard from the Prefect of Paris
that he is organising a conspiracy for the assassination of the King."
A look of fear which she could not restrain crossed Roma's face.
"More than that, and stranger than that, I have just heard also that the
Pope has some knowledge of the plot."
Roma felt terror seizing her, and she said in a constrained voice, "Why?
What has the Pope told you?"
"Only that an insurrection is impending. It seems that his informant is
a woman.... Who can she be, I wonder?"
The Baron was fixing his eyes on her and she tried to elude his gaze.
"Whoever she is she must know more," he said in a severe voice, "and
whatever it is she must reveal it."
Roma got up, looking very pale, and feeling very feeble. When she
reached the door the Baron was smiling and holding out his hand.
"Will you not shake hands with me?" he said.
"What is the use?" she answered. "When people shake hands it means that
they wish each other well. You do not wish me well. You are trying to
force me to betray my husband.... _But I'll die first_," she said, and
then turned and fled.
When Roma was gone the Baron wrote a letter to the Pope:
"YOUR HOLINESS,--Providential accident, as your chamberlain would
tell you, has enabled his Majesty's Government to judge for itself
of that source of your Holiness's information which your Holiness
very properly refused to reveal. At the same time official
channels have disclosed to his Majesty's Government the nature of
the conspiracy of which your Holiness so patriotically forewarned
them. This conspiracy appears to be no less serious than an
attempt to assassinate the King, but as detailed knowledge of so
vile a plot is necessary in order to save the life of our august
sovereign, his Majesty's Government asks you to grant the Prime
Minister the honour of an audience with your Holiness in the cause
of order and public security. Hoping to hear of your Holiness's
convenience, and trusting that your Holiness will not disappoint
the hopes of those who are dreaming even yet of a reconciliation
of Church and State, I am, with all reverence, your Holiness's
faithful son and servant, BONELLI."