A moment afterwards the door was broken open and four Carabineers were
in the dining-room. Roma awaited their irruption without a word. She
continued to stand in the middle of the sitting-room looking straight
before her.
"Holy saints, what's this?" cried the voice she had heard first, and she
knew that the Carabineers were bending over the body on the couch.
"His Excellency!"
"Lord save us!"
Roma's head was dizzy, and something more was said which she did not
follow. At the next moment the Carabineers had entered the sitting-room;
she was standing face to face with them, and they were questioning her.
"The Honourable Rossi is here, isn't he?"
"No," she answered in a timid voice.
"But he has been here, hasn't he?"
"No," she answered more boldly.
"Do you mean to say that the Honourable Rossi has not been here
to-night?"
"I do," she said, with exaggerated emphasis.
The marshal of the Carabineers, who had been speaking, looked
attentively at her for a moment, and then he called on his men to search
the rooms.
"What's this?" said the marshal, taking up a sealed letter from the
bureau and reading the superscription: "L'on, Davide Rossi, Carceri
Giudiziarie, di Milano."
"That's a letter I wrote to my husband and haven't yet posted," said
Roma.
"But what's this?" cried a voice from the dining-room. "Presented to the
Honourable David Rossi by the Italian colony in Zürich."
Roma sank into a seat. It was the revolver. She had forgotten it.
"That's all right," said the marshal, with the same chuckle as before.
Dizzy and almost blind in her terror, Roma struggled to her feet. "The
revolver belongs to me," she said. "Mr. Rossi left it in my keeping
when he went away two months ago, and since that time he has never
touched it."
"Then who fired the shot that killed his Excellency, Signora?"
"_I_ did," said Roma.
Instinctively the man removed his hat.
Within half-an-hour Roma had repeated her statement at the Regina
C[oe]li, and the Carabineers, to prevent a public scandal, had smuggled
the body of the Baron, under the cover of night, to his office in the
Palazzo Braschi, on the opposite side of the piazza.
X
One thought was supreme in David Rossi's mind when he left the Piazza
Navona--that the world in which he had lived was shaken to its
foundations and his life was at an end. The unhappy man wandered about
the streets without asking himself where he was going or what was to
become of him.
Many feelings tore his heart, but the worst of them was anger. He had
taken the life of the Baron. The man deserved his death, and he felt no
pity for his victim and no remorse for his crime. But that he should
have killed the Minister, he who had twice stood between him and death,
he who had resisted the doctrine of violence and all his life preached
the gospel of peace, this was a degradation too shameful and abject.
The woman had been the beginning and end of everything. "How I hate
her!" he thought. He was telling himself for the hundredth time that he
had never hated anybody so much before, when he became aware that he had
returned to the neighbourhood of the Piazza Navona. Without knowing what
he was doing, he had been walking round and round it.
He began to picture Roma as he had seen her that night. The beautiful,
mournful, pleading face, which he had not really seen while his eyes
looked on it, now rose before the eye of his mind. This caused a wave of
tenderness to pass over him against his will, and his heart, so full of
hatred, began to melt with love.
All the cruel words he had spoken at parting returned to his memory, and
he told himself that he had been too hasty. Instead of bearing her down
he should have listened to her explanation. Before the Baron entered
the room she had been at the point of swearing that her love, and
nothing but her love, had caused her to betray him.
He told himself she had lied, but the thought was hell, and to escape
from it he made for the bank of the river again. This time he crossed
the bridge of St. Angelo, and passed up the Borgo to the piazza of St.
Peter's. But the piazza itself awakened a crowd of memories. It was
there in a balcony that he had first seen Roma, not plainly, but vaguely
in a summer cloud of lace and sunshades.
Then it occurred to him that it must have been on this spot that Roma
was inspired with the plot which had ended with his betrayal. At that
thought all the bitterness of his soul returned. He told himself she
deserved every word he had said to her, and blamed himself for the
humiliation he had gone through in his attempt to make excuses for what
she had done. To the curse he had hurled at her at the last moment he
added words of fiercer anger, and though they were spoken only in his
brain, or to the dark night and the rolling river, they intensified his
fury.
"Oh, how I hate her!" he thought.
The _piazza_, was quiet. There was a light in the Pope's windows, and a
Swiss Guard was patrolling behind the open wicket of the bronze gate to
the Vatican. A porter in gorgeous livery was yawning by the door of the
Prime Minister's palace. The man was waiting for his master. He would
_have_ to wait.
The clock of St. Peter's struck one, and the silent place began to be
peopled with many shadows. The scene of the Pope's jubilee returned to
Rossi's mind. He saw and heard everything over again. The crowd, the
gorgeous procession, the Pope, and last of all his own speech. A
sardonic smile crossed his face in the darkness as he thought of what he
had said.
"Is it possible that I can ever have believed those fables?"
He was tramping down the Trastevere, picturing his trial for the murder
of the Baron, with Roma in the witness-box and himself in the dock. The
cold horror of it all was insupportable, and he told himself that there
was only one place in which he could escape from despair.
The unhappy man had begun to think of taking his own life. He had always
condemned suicide. He had even condemned it in Bruno. But it was the
death grip of a man utterly borne down, and there was nothing else to
hold on to.
The day began to break, and he turned back towards the piazza of St.
Peter's, thinking of what he intended to do and where he would do it. By
the end of the Hospital of Santo Spirito there was a little blind alley
bounded by a low wall. Below was the quick turn of the Tiber, and no
swimmer was strong enough to live long in the turbulent waters at that
point. He would do it there.
The streets were silent, and in the grey dawn, that mystic hour of
parturition when the day is being born and things are seen in places
where they do not exist, when ships sail in the sky and mountains rise
around lowland cities, David Rossi became aware in a moment that a woman
was walking on the pavement in front of him. He could almost have
believed that it was Roma, the figure was so tall and full and upright.
But the woman's dress was poorer, and she was carrying a bundle in her
arms. When he looked again he saw that her bundle was a child, and that
she was weeping over it.
"Taking her little one to the hospital," he thought.
But on turning into the little Borgo he saw that the woman went up to
the Rota, knelt before it, kissed the child again and again, put it in
the cradle, pulled the bell, and then, crying bitterly, hastened away.
Rossi remembered his own mother, and a great tide of simple human
tenderness swept over him. What he had seen the woman do was what his
mother had done thirty-five years before. He saw it all as by a mystic
flash of light, which looked back into the past.
Suddenly it occurred to him that the Rota had been long since closed,
and therefore it was physically impossible that anybody could have put a
child into the cradle. Then he remembered that he had not heard the
bell, or the woman's footsteps, or the sound of her voice when she wept.
He stopped and looked back. The woman was returning in the direction of
the piazza of St. Peter's. By an impulse which he could not resist he
followed her, overtook her, and looked into her face.
Again he thought he was looking at Roma. There was the same nobility in
the beautiful features, the same sweetness in the tremulous mouth, the
same grandeur in the great dark eyes. But he knew perfectly who it was.
It was his mother.
It did not seem strange that his mother should be there. From her home
in heaven she had come down to watch over her son on earth. She had
always been watching over him. And now that he too was betrayed and
lost, now that he too was broken-hearted and alone....
He was utterly unmanned. "Mother! Mother! I am coming to you! Every door
is closed against me, and I have nowhere to go to for refuge. I am
coming!... I am coming!"
Then the spirit paused, and pointing to the bronze gate of the Vatican,
said, with infinite tenderness:
"Go there!"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------