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The Eternal City, a novel by Hall Caine |
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Part 8. The King - Chapter 8 |
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_ PART EIGHT. THE KING CHAPTER VIII 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. _ |
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