When Roma regained consciousness, there was not a sound in the
apartment. Even the piazza outside was quiet. Somebody was playing a
mandoline a long way off, and the thin notes were trembling through the
still night. A dog was barking in the distance. Save for these sounds
everything was still.
Roma lay for some minutes in a state of semi-consciousness. Her head was
swimming with vague memories, and she was unable at first to disentangle
the thread of them. At length she remembered all that had happened, and
she wept bitterly.
But when the first tenderness was over the one feeling which seized and
held her was hatred of the Baron. Rossi had told her the man was dead,
and she felt no pity. The Baron deserved his death, and if Rossi had
killed him it was no crime.
She was still lying where she had fallen when a noise as of some one
moving came from the adjoining room. Then a voice called to her:
"Roma!"
It was the Baron's voice, broken and feeble. A great terror took hold of
her. Then came a sense of shame, and finally a feeling of relief. The
Baron was not dead. Thank God! O thank God!
She got up and went into the dining-room. The Baron was on his knees
struggling to climb to the couch. His shirt front was partly dragged out
of his breast, and the Order of the Annunziata was torn away. There was
a streak of blood over his left eyebrow, and no other sign of injury.
But his eyes themselves were glassy, and his face was pale as death.
"I'm dying, Roma."
"I'll run for a doctor," she said.
"No. Don't do that. I don't want to be found here. Besides, it's
useless. In five minutes a clot of blood will have covered the lacerated
brain, and I shall lose consciousness again. Stupid, isn't it?"
"Let me call for a priest," said Roma.
"Don't do that either. You can do me more good yourself, Roma. Give me a
drink."
Roma was fighting with an almost unconquerable repugnance, but she
brought the Baron a drink of water, and with shaking hands held the
glass to his trembling lips.
"How do you feel?" she asked.
"Worse," he answered.
He looked into her eyes with evident contrition, and said, "I wonder if
it would be fair to ask you to forgive me? Would it?"
She did not answer, and he stretched himself and sighed. His breathing
became laboured and stertorous, his skin hot, and his eyes dilated.
"How do you feel now?" asked Roma.
"I'm going," he replied, and he smiled again.
The human soul was gleaming out of the wretched man at the last, and he
was looking at her now with pleading eyes which plainly could not see.
"Are you there, Roma?"
"Yes."
"Promise that you will not leave me."
"I will not leave you now," she answered in a low voice.
After a moment he roused himself with an effort and said, "And this is
the end! How absurd! They'll find me here in any case, and what a
chatter there'll be! The Chamber--the journals--all the scribblers and
speechifiers. What will Europe say? Another Boulanger, perhaps! But I'm
sorry for Italy. Nobody can say I did not love my country. Where her
interest lay I let nothing interfere. And just when everything seemed to
triumph...."
He attempted to laugh. Roma shuddered.
"It was the star of the Annunziata that did it. The man threw it with
such force. To think that it's been the aim of my life to win that Order
and now it kills me! Ridiculous, isn't it?"
Again he attempted to laugh.
"There's a side of justice in that, though, and I'm not going to whine.
The Pope tried to paint an awful end, but his nightmare didn't frighten
me. We must all bow our heads to the law of compensation--the Pope as
well as everybody else. But to die stupidly like this..."
He was speaking with difficulty, and dragging at his shirt front. Roma
opened it at the neck, and something dropped on to the floor. It was a
lock of glossy black hair tied with a red ribbon such as lawyers used to
bind documents together. Dull as his sight was, he saw it.
"Yours, Roma! You were ill with fever when you first came to Rome, you
remember. The doctors cut off your beautiful hair. This was some of it.
I've worn it ever since. Silly, wasn't it?"
Tears began to shine in Roma's eyes. The cynical man who laughed at
sentiment had carried the tenderest badge of it in his breast.
"I used to wear some of my mother's in the same place when I was
younger. She was a good woman, too. When she put me to bed she used to
repeat something: 'Hold Thou my hands,' I think.... May I hold your
hands, Roma?"
Roma turned away her head, but she held out her hand, and the dying man
kissed it.
"What a beautiful hand it is! I think I should know it among all the
hands in the world. How stupid! People have been afraid of me all my
life, Roma; even my mother was afraid of me when I was a child; but to
die without once having known what it was to have some one to love
you.... I believe I'm beginning to rave."
The mournful irony of the words was belied by the tremulous voice.
"My little comedy is played out, I suppose, and when the curtain is down
it is time to go home. Death is a solemn sort of homegoing, Roma, and if
those we've injured cannot forgive us before we go...."
But the battle of hate in Roma's heart was over. She had remembered
Rossi and that had swept away all her bitterness. As the Baron stood to
her, so she stood to her husband. They were two unforgiven ones, both
guilty and ashamed.
"Indeed, indeed I do forgive you, as I hope to be forgiven," she said,
whereupon he laughed again, but with a different note altogether.
Then he asked her to lift up his head. She placed a cushion under it,
but still he called on her to lift his head higher.
"Can you lift me in your arms, Roma?... Higher still. So!... Can you
hold me there?"
"How do you feel now?" she asked.
"It won't be long," he answered. His respirations came in whiffs.
Roma began to repeat as much as she could remember of the prayers for
the dying which she had heard at the deathbed of her aunt. The dying man
smiled an indulgent smile into the young woman's beautiful and mournful
face and allowed her to go on. As she prayed faster and faster, saying
the same words over and over again, she felt his breathing grow more
faint and irregular. At length it seemed to stop, and thinking it was
gone altogether, she made the sign of the cross and said:
"We commend to Thee, O Lord, the soul of Thy servant Gabriel, that being
dead to the world he may live to Thee, and those sins which through the
frailty of human life he has committed, Thou by the indulgence of Thy
most merciful loving-kindness may wipe out, through Christ our Lord.
Amen."
Then the glazed eyes opened wide and lighted up with a pitiful smile.
"I'm dying in your arms, Roma."
Then a long breath, and then:
"Adieu!"
He had tried to subdue all men to his will, and there was one man he had
subdued above all others--himself. There is a greater man than the great
man--the man who is too great to be great.