Browning's Heroines Part 18

"You must know that a man gets drunk with truth Stagnant inside him. Oh, they've killed her, Sirs!

Can I be calm?"

But he must be calm: he must show them that soul.

"The glory of life, the beauty of the world, The splendour of heaven . . . well, Sirs, does no one move?

Do I speak ambiguously? The glory, I say, And the beauty, I say, and splendour, still say I" . . .

--for thus he flings defiance at them. Why do they not smile as they smiled at the earlier adultery-trial, when they gave him "the jocular piece of punishment," now that he stands before them "in this sudden smoke from h.e.l.l"?

"Men, for the last time, what do you want with me?"

For if they had but seen _then_ what Guido Franceschini was! If they would but have been serious! Pompilia would not now be

"Gasping away the latest breath of all, This minute, while I talk--not while you laugh?"

How can the end of this deed surprise them? Pompilia and he had shown them what its beginning meant--but all in vain. He, the priest, had left her to "law's watch and ward," and now she is dying--"there and thus she lies!" Do they understand _now_ that he was not unworthy of Christ when he tried to save her? His part is done--all that he had been able to do; he wants no more with earth, except to "show Pompilia who was true"--

"The snow-white soul that angels fear to take Untenderly . . . Sirs, Only seventeen!"

Then he begins his story of

". . . Our flight from dusk to clear, Through day and night and day again to night Once more, and to last dreadful dawn of all."

Thinking how they sat in silence, both so fearless and so safe, waking but now and then to consciousness of the wonder of it, he cries:

"You know this is not love, Sirs--it is faith, The feeling that there's G.o.d."

By morning they had pa.s.sed Perugia; a.s.sisi was opposite. He met her look for the first time since they had started. . . . At Foligno he urged her to take a brief rest, but with eyes like a fawn's,

"Tired to death in the thicket, when she feels The probing spear o' the huntsman,"

she had cried, "On, on to Rome, on, on"--and they went on. During the night she had a troubled dream, waving away something with wild arms; and Caponsacchi prayed (thinking "Why, in my life I never prayed before!") that the dream might go, and soon she slept peacefully. . . .

When she woke, he answered her first look with the a.s.surance that Rome was within twelve hours; no more of the terrible journey. But she answered that she wished it could last for ever: to be "with no dread"--

"Never to see a face nor hear a voice-- Yours is no voice; you speak when you are dumb; Nor face, I see it in the dark" . . .

--such tranquillity was such heaven to her!

"This one heart" (she said on her death-bed):

"This one heart gave me all the spring!

I could believe himself by his strong will Had woven around me what I thought the world We went along in . . .

For, through the journey, was it natural Such comfort should arise from first to last?"

As she looks back, new stars bud even while she seeks for old, and all is Caponsacchi:

"Him I now see make the shine everywhere."

Best of all her memories--"oh, the heart in that!"--was the descent at a little wayside inn. He tells of it thus. When the day was broad, he begged her to descend at the post-house of a village. He told the woman of the house that Pompilia was his sister, married and unhappy--would she comfort her as women can? And then he left them together:

"I spent a good half-hour, paced to and fro The garden; just to leave her free awhile . . .

I might have sat beside her on the bench Where the children were: I wish the thing had been, Indeed: the event could not be worse, you know: One more half-hour of her saved! She's dead now, Sirs!"

As they again drove forward, she asked him if, supposing she were to die now, he would account it to be in sin? The woman at the inn had told her about the trees that turn away from the north wind with the nests they hold; she thought she might be like those trees. . . . But soon, half-sleeping again, and restless now with returning fears, she seemed to wander in her mind; once she addressed him as "Gaetano." . . .

Afterwards he knew that this name (the name of a newly-made saint) was that which she destined for her child, if she was given a son:

"One who has only been made a saint--how long?

Twenty-five years: so, carefuller, perhaps, To guard a namesake than those old saints grow, Tired out by this time--see my own five saints!"[146:1]

For "little Pompilia" had been given five names by her pretended parents:

". . . so many names for one poor child --Francesca Camilla Vittoria Angela Pompilia Comparini--laughable!"[146:1] . . .

But now Caponsacchi himself grew restless, nervous: here was Castelnuovo, as good as Rome:

"Say you are saved, sweet lady!"

She awoke. The sky was fierce with the sunset colours--suddenly she cried out that she must not die:

"'Take me no farther, I should die: stay here!

I have more life to save than mine!' She swooned.

We seemed safe: what was it foreboded so?"

He carried her,

"Against my heart, beneath my head bowed low, As we priests carry the paten,"

into the little inn and to a couch, where he laid her, sleeping deeply.

The host urged him to leave her in peace till morn.

"Oh, my foreboding! But I could not choose."

All night he paced the pa.s.sage, throbbing with fear from head to foot, "filled with a sense of such impending woe" . . . and at the first pause of night went to the courtyard, ordered the horses--the last moment came, he must awaken her--he turned to go:

". . . And there Faced me Count Guido."

Oh, if he had killed him then! if he had taken the throat in "one great good satisfying gripe," and abolished Guido with his lie! . . . But while he mused on the irony of such a miscreant calling _her_ his wife,

"The minute, oh the misery, was gone;"

--two police-officers stood beside, and Guido was ordering them to take her.

Caponsacchi insisted that _he_ should lead them to the room where she was sleeping. He was a priest and privileged; when they came there, if the officer should detect

"Guilt on her face when it meets mine, then judge Between us and the mad dog howling there!"

They all went up together. There she lay,