by George Eliot
CHAPTER FIFTY FIVE.
WAITING.
The lengthening sunny days went on without bringing either what Romolamost desired or what she most dreaded. They brought no sign fromBaldassarre, and, in spite of special watch on the part of theGovernment, no revelation of the suspected conspiracy. But they broughtother things which touched her closely, and bridged the phantom-crowdedspace of anxiety with active sympathy in immediate trial. They broughtthe spreading Plague and the Excommunication of Savonarola.
Both these events tended to arrest her incipient alienation from theFrate, and to rivet again her attachment to the man who had opened toher the new life of duty, and who seemed now to be worsted in the fightfor principle against profligacy. For Romola could not carry from dayto day into the abodes of pestilence and misery the sublime excitementof a gladness that, since such anguish existed, she too existed to makesome of the anguish less bitter, without remembering that she owed thistranscendent moral life to Fra Girolamo. She could not witness thesilencing and excommunication of a man whose distinction from the greatmass of the clergy lay, not in any heretical belief, not in hissuperstitions, but in the energy with which he sought to make theChristian life a reality, without feeling herself drawn strongly to hisside.
Far on in the hot days of June the Excommunication, for some weeksarrived from Rome, was solemnly published in the Duomo. Romola went towitness the scene, that the resistance it inspired might invigorate thatsympathy with Savonarola which was one source of her strength. It wasin memorable contrast with the scene she had been accustomed to witnessthere.
Instead of upturned citizen-faces filling the vast area under themorning light, the youngest rising amphitheatre-wise towards the walls,and making a garland of hope around the memories of age--instead of themighty voice thrilling all hearts with the sense of great things,visible and invisible, to be struggled for--there were the bare walls atevening made more sombre by the glimmer of tapers; there was the blackand grey flock of monks and secular clergy with bent, unexpectant faces;there was the occasional tinkling of little bells in the pauses of amonotonous voice reading a sentence which had already been long hangingup in the churches; and at last there was the extinction of the tapers,and the slow, shuffling tread of monkish feet departing in the dimsilence.
Romola's ardour on the side of the Frate was doubly strengthened by thegleeful triumph she saw in hard and coarse faces, and by thefear-stricken confusion in the faces and speech of many among hisstrongly-attached friends. The question where the duty of obedienceends, and the duty of resistance begins, could in no case be an easyone; but it was made overwhelmingly difficult by the belief that theChurch was--not a compromise of parties to secure a more or lessapproximate justice in the appropriation of funds, but--a livingorganism, instinct with Divine power to bless and to curse. To most ofthe pious Florentines, who had hitherto felt no doubt in their adherenceto the Frate, that belief in the Divine potency of the Church was not anembraced opinion, it was an inalienable impression, like the concavityof the blue firmament; and the boldness of Savonarola's writtenarguments that the Excommunication was unjust, and that, being unjust,it was not valid, only made them tremble the more, as a defiance cast ata mystic image, against whose subtle immeasurable power there wasneither weapon nor defence.
But Romola, whose mind had not been allowed to draw its earlynourishment from the traditional associations of the Christian communityin which her father had lived a life apart, felt her relation to theChurch only through Savonarola; his moral force had been the onlyauthority to which she had bowed; and in his excommunication she onlysaw the menace of hostile vice: on one side she saw a man whose life wasdevoted to the ends of public virtue and spiritual purity, and on theother the assault of alarmed selfishness, headed by a lustful, greedy,lying, and murderous old man, once called Rodrigo Borgia, and now liftedto the pinnacle of infamy as Pope Alexander the Sixth. The finer shadesof fact which soften the edge of such antitheses are not apt to be seenexcept by neutrals, who are not distressed to discern some folly inmartyrs and some judiciousness in the men who burnt them. But Romolarequired a strength that neutrality could not give; and thisExcommunication, which simplified and ennobled the resistant position ofSavonarola by bringing into prominence its wider relations, seemed tocome to her like a rescue from the threatening isolation of criticismand doubt. The Frate was now withdrawn from that smaller antagonismagainst Florentine enemies into which he continually fell in theunchecked excitement of the pulpit, and presented himself simply asappealing to the Christian world against a vicious exercise ofecclesiastical power. He was a standard-bearer leaping into the breach.Life never seems so clear and easy as when the heart is beating fasterat the sight of some generous self-risking deed. We feel no doubt thenwhat is the highest prize the soul can win; we almost believe in our ownpower to attain it. By a new current of such enthusiasm Romola washelped through these difficult summer days. She had ventured on nowords to Tito that would apprise him of her late interview withBaldassarre, and the revelation he had made to her. What would suchagitating, difficult words win from him? No admission of the truth;nothing, probably, but a cool sarcasm about her sympathy with hisassassin. Baldassarre was evidently helpless: the thing to be fearedwas, not that he should injure Tito, but that Tito, coming upon histraces, should carry out some new scheme for ridding himself of theinjured man who was a haunting dread to him. Romola felt that she coulddo nothing decisive until she had seen Baldassarre again, and learnedthe full truth about that "other wife"--learned whether she were thewife to whom Tito was first bound.
The possibilities about that other wife, which involved the worst woundto her hereditary pride, mingled themselves as a newly-embitteringsuspicion with the earliest memories of her illusory love, eating awaythe lingering associations of tenderness with the past image of herhusband; and her irresistible belief in the rest of Baldassarre'srevelation made her shrink from Tito with a horror which would perhapshave urged some passionate speech in spite of herself if he had not beenmore than usually absent from home. Like many of the wealthier citizensin that time of pestilence, he spent the intervals of business chieflyin the country: the agreeable Melema was welcome at many villas, andsince Romola had refused to leave the city, he had no need to provide acountry residence of his own.
But at last, in the later days of July, the alleviation of those publictroubles which had absorbed her activity and much of her thought, leftRomola to a less counteracted sense of her personal lot. The Plague hadalmost disappeared, and the position of Savonarola was made more hopefulby a favourable magistracy, who were writing urgent vindicatory lettersto Rome on his behalf, entreating the withdrawal of the Excommunication.
Romola's healthy and vigorous frame was undergoing the reaction oflanguor inevitable after continuous excitement and over-exertion; buther mental restlessness would not allow her to remain at home withoutperemptory occupation, except during the sultry hours. In the cool ofthe morning and evening she walked out constantly, varying her directionas much as possible, with the vague hope that if Baldassarre were stillalive she might encounter him. Perhaps some illness had brought a newparalysis of memory, and he had forgotten where she lived--forgotteneven her existence. That was her most sanguine explanation of hisnon-appearance. The explanation she felt to be most probable was, thathe had died of the Plague.