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The Eternal City, a novel by Hall Caine |
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Part 4. David Rossi - Chapter 7 |
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_ PART FOUR. DAVID ROSSI CHAPTER VII Next day Rossi's editorial assistant came with a troubled face. There was bad news from the office. The morning's edition of the _Sunrise_ had been confiscated by the police owing to the article on the King's speech and procession. The proprietors of the paper were angry with their editor, and demanded to see him immediately. "Tell them I'll be at the office at four o'clock, as usual," said Rossi, and he sat down to write a letter. It was to Roma. The moment he took up the pen to write to her the air of the room seemed to fill with a sweet feminine presence that banished everything else. It was like talking to her. She was beside him. He could hear her soft replies.
"In my own case, the selfishness, if I yielded to it, would be greater far than anybody else could be guilty of, and of all men who have sacrificed women's lives to their own career, I should feel myself to be the most guilty and inexcusable. My dear and beloved girl is nobly born, and lives in wealth and luxury, while I am poor--poor by choice, and therefore poor for ever, brought up as a foundling, and without a name that I dare call my own. "What then? Shall such a man as I am ask such a woman as she is to come into the circle of his life, to exchange her riches for his poverty, her comfort for his suffering? No. "Besides, what woman could do it if I did? Women can be unselfish, they can be faithful, they can be true; but--don't ask me to say things I do not want to say--women love wealth and luxury and ease, and shrink from pain and poverty and the forced marches of a hunted life. And why shouldn't they? Heaven spare them all such sufferings as men alone should bear! "Yet all this is still outside the greater obstacle which stands between me and the dear girl from whom I must separate myself now, whatever it may cost me, as an inexorable duty. I entreat you to spare me the pain of explaining further. Believe that for her sake my resolution, in spite of all your sweet and charming pleading, is strong and unalterable. "Only one thing more. If it is as you say it may be, that she loves me, though I had no right to believe so, that will only add to my unhappiness in thinking of the wrench that she must suffer. But she is strong, she is brave, she is the daughter of her father, and I have faith in the natural power of her mind, in her youth and the chances of life for one so beautiful and so gifted, to remove the passing impression that may have been made. "Good-bye yet again! And God bless you! D. "P. S.--I am not afraid of M----, and come when he may, I shall certainly stand my ground. There is only one person in Rome who could be used against me in the direction you indicate, and I could trust her with my heart's blood." _ |