Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 335
At this there was a terrific clamour. The square resounded with confused voices. “Bravo!” “Dog!” “Dog’s murderer!” “Traitor!” “Long live David Rossi!” “Down with the Vampire!”
The ladies had fled from the balcony back to the room with cries of alarm. “There will be a riot.” “The man is inciting the people to rebellion!” “This house will be first to be attacked!”
“Calm yourselves, ladies. No harm shall come to you,” said the Baron, and he rang the bell.
There came from below a babel of shouts and screams.
“Madonna mia! What is that?” cried the Princess, wringing her hands; and the American Ambassador, who had remained on the balcony, said:
“The Carabineers have charged the crowd and arrested David Rossi.”
“Thank God!”
“They’re going through the Borgo,” said Don Camillo, “and kicking and cuffing and jostling and hustling all the way.”
“Don’t be alarmed! There’s the Hospital of Santo Spirito round the corner, and stations of the Red Cross Society everywhere,” said the Baron, and then Felice answered the bell.
“See our friends out by the street at the back, Felice. Good-bye, ladies! Have no fear! The Government does not mean to blunt the weapons it uses against the malefactors who insult the doctrines of the State.”
“Excellent Minister!” said the Princess. “Such canaglia are not fit to have their liberty, and I would lock them all up in prison.”
And then Don Camillo offered his arm to the little lady with the white plumes, and they came almost face to face with Roma, who was standing by the door hung with curtains, fanning herself with her handkerchief, and parting from the English Ambassador.
“Donna Roma,” he was saying, “if I can ever be of use to you, either now or in the future, I beg of you to command me.”
“Look at her!” whispered the Princess. “How agitated she is! A moment ago she was finding it cold in the Loggia! I’m so happy!”
At the next instant she ran up to Roma and kissed her. “Poor child! How sorry I am! You have my sympathy, my dear! But didn’t I tell you the man was a public nuisance, and ought to be put down by the police?”
“Shameful, isn’t it?” said Don Camillo. “Calumny is a little wind, but it raises such a terrible tempest.”
“Nobody likes to be talked about,” said the Princess, “especially in Rome, where it is the end of everything.”
“But what matter? Perhaps the young man has learned freedom of speech in a free country!” said Don Camillo.
“And then he is so interesting and so handsome,” said the Princess.
Roma made no answer. There was a slight drooping of the lovely eyes and a trembling of the lips and nostrils. For a moment she stood absolutely impassive, and then with a flash of disdain she flung round into the inner room.
VIII
Roma had taken refuge in the council-room. There had been much business that morning, and a copy of the constitutional statute lay open on a large table, which had a plate-glass top with photographs under the surface.
In this passionless atmosphere, so little accustomed to such scenes, Roma sat in her wounded pride and humiliation, with her head down, and her beautiful white hands over her face.
She heard measured footsteps approaching, and then a hand touched her on the shoulder. She looked up and drew back as if the touch stung her. Her lips closed sternly, and she got up and began to walk about the room, and then she burst into a torrent of anger.
“Did you hear them? The cats! How they loved to claw me, and still purr and purr! Before the sun is set the story will be all over Rome! It has run off already on the hoofs of that woman’s English horses. To-morrow morning it will be in every newspaper in the kingdom. Olga and Lena and every woman of them all who lives in a glass house will throw stones. ‘The new Pompadour! Who is she?’ Oh, I could die of vexation and shame!”
The Baron leaned against the table and listened, twisting the ends of his moustache.
“The Court will turn its back on me now. They only wanted a good excuse to put their humiliations upon me. It’s horrible! I can’t bear it. I won’t. I tell you, I won’t!”
But the lips, compressed with scorn, began to quiver visibly, and she threw herself into a chair, took out her handkerchief, and hid her face on the table.
At that moment Felice came into the room to say that the Commendatore Angelelli had returned and wished to speak with his Excellency.
“I will see him presently,” said the Baron, with an impassive expression, and Felice went out silently, as one who had seen nothing.
The Baron’s calm dignity was wounded. “Be so good as to have some regard for me in the presence of my servants,” he said. “I understand your feelings, but you are much too excited to see things in their proper light. You have been publicly insulted and degraded, but you must not talk to me as if it were my fault.”
“Then whose is it? If it is not your fault, whose fault is it?” she said, and the Baron thought her red eyes flashed up at him with an expression of hate. He took the blow full in the face, but made no reply, and his silence broke her answer.
“No, no, that was too bad,” she said, and she reached over to him, and he kissed her and then sat down beside her and took her hand and held it. At the next moment her brilliant eyes had filled with tears and her head was down and the hot drops were falling on to the back of his hand.
“I suppose it is all over,” she said.
“Don’t say that,” he answered. “We don’t know what a day may bring forth. Before long I may have it in my power to silence every slander and justify you in the eyes of all.”
At that she raised her head with a smile and seemed to look beyond the Baron at something in the vague distance, while the glass top of the table, which had been clouded by her breath, cleared gradually, and revealed a large house almost hidden among trees. It was a photograph of the Baron’s castle in the Alban hills.
“Only,” continued the Baron, “you must get rid of that man Bruno.”
“I will discharge him this very day — I will! I will! I will!”
There was an intense bitterness in the thought that what David Rossi had said must have come of what her own servant told him — that Bruno had watched her in her own house day by day, and that time after time the two men had discussed her between them.
“I could kill him,” she said.
“Bruno Rocco?”
“No, David Rossi.”
“Have patience; he shall be punished,” said the Baron.
“How?”
“He shall be put on his trial.”
“What for?”
“Sedition. The law allows a man to say what he will about a Prime Minister, but he must not foretell the overthrow of the King. The fellow has gone too far at last. He shall go to Santo Stefano.”
“What good will that do?”
“He will be silenced — and crushed.”
She looked at the Baron with a sidelong smile, and something in her heart, which she did not understand, made her laugh at him.
“Do you imagine you can crush a man like that by trying and condemning him?” she said. “He has insulted and humiliated me, but I’m not silly enough to deceive myself. Try him, condemn him, and he will be greater in his prison than the King on his throne.”
The Baron twisted the ends of his moustache again.
“Besides,” she said, “what benefit will it be to me if you put him on trial for inciting the people to rebellion against the King? The public will say it was for insulting yourself, and everybody will think he was punished for telling the truth.”
The Baron continued to twist the ends of his moustache.
“Benefit!” She laughed ironically. “It will be a double injury. The insult will be repeated in public again and again. First the advocate for the crown will read it aloud, then the advocate for the defence will quote it, and then it will be discussed and dissected and telegraphed until everybody in court knows it by heart and all Europe has heard of it.”
The Baron made no answer, but watched the beautiful face, now very pale, behind which conflicting thoughts seemed to wriggle like a knot of vipers. Suddenly she leaped up with a spring.
“I know!” she cried. “I know! I know! I know!”
“Well?”
“Give the man to me, and I will show you how to escape from this humiliating situation.”
“Roma?” said the Baron, but he had read her thought already.
“If you punish him for this speech you will injure both of us and do no good to the King.”
“It’s true.”
“Take him in a serious conspiracy, and you will be doing us no harm and the King some service.”
“No doubt.”
“You say there is a mystery about David Rossi, and you want to know who he is, who his father was, and where he spent the years he was away from Rome.”
“I would certainly give a good deal to know.”
“You want to know what vile refugee in London filled him with his fancies, what conspiracies he is hatching, what secret societies he belongs to, and, above all, what his plans and schemes are, and whether he is in league with the Vatican.”
She spoke so rapidly that the words sputtered out of her quivering lips.
“Well?”
“Well, I will find it all out for you.”
“My dear Roma!”
“Leave him to me, and within a month you shall know” — she laughed, a little ashamed— “the inmost secrets of his soul.”
She was walking to and fro again, to prevent the Baron from looking into her face, which was now red over its white, like a rose moon in a stormy sky.
The Baron thought. “She is going to humble the man by her charms — to draw him on and then fling him away, and thus pay him back for what he has done to-day. So much the better for me if I may stand by and do nothing. A strong Minister should be unmoved by personal attacks. He should appear to regard them with contempt.”
He looked at her, and the brilliancy of her eyes set his heart on fire. The terrible attraction of her face at that moment stirred in him the only love he had for her. At the same time it awakened the first spasm of jealousy.
“I understand you, Roma,” he said. “You are splendid! You are irresistible! But remember — the man is one of the incorruptible.”
She laughed.
“No woman who has yet crossed his path seems to have touched him, and it is the pride of all such men that no woman ever can.”
“I’ve seen him,” she said.
“Take care! As you say, he is young and handsome.”
She tossed her head and laughed again.
The Baron thought: “Certainly he has wounded her in a way no woman can forgive.”
“And what about Bruno?” he said.
“He shall stay,” she answered. “Such men are easy enough to manage.”
“You wish me to liberate David Rossi and leave you to deal with him?”
“I do! Oh, for the day when I can turn the laugh against him as he has turned the laugh against me! At the top of his hopes, at the height of his ambitions, at the moment when he says to himself, ‘It is done’ — he shall fall.”
The Baron touched the bell. “Very well!” he said. “One can sometimes catch more flies with a spoonful of honey than with a hogshead of vinegar. We shall see.”
A moment later the Chief of Police entered the room. “The Honourable Rossi is safely lodged in prison,” he said.
“Commendatore,” said the Baron, pointing to the book lying open on the table, “I have been looking again at the statute, and now I am satisfied that a Deputy can be arrested by the authorisation of Parliament alone.”
“But, Excellency, if he is taken in the act, according to the forty-fifth article, the parliamentary immunity ceases.”
“Commendatore, I have given you my opinion, and now it is my wish that the Honourable David Rossi should be set at liberty.”
“Excellency!”
“Be so good as to liberate him instantly, and let your officers see him safely through the streets to his home in the Piazza Navona.”
The little head like a hen’s went down like a hatchet, and Commendatore Angelelli backed out of the room.
PART TWO — THE REPUBLIC OF MAN
I
The Piazza Navona is the heart and soul of old Rome. In other quarters of the living city you feel tempted to ask: “Is this London?” or, “Is this Paris?” or, “Is this New York or Berlin?” but in the Piazza Navona you can only tell yourself, “This is Rome!”
In an apartment-house of the Piazza Navona, David Rossi had lived during the seven years since he became Member of Parliament for Rome. The ground floor is a Trattoria, half eating-house and half wine-shop, with rude frescoes on its distempered walls, representing the Bay of Naples with Vesuvius in eruption. A passage running by the side of the Trattoria leads to the apartments overhead, and at the foot of the staircase there is a porter’s lodge, a closet always lighted by a lamp, which burns down the dark passage day and night, like a bloodshot eye.
In this lodge lived a veteran Garibaldian, in his red shirt and pork-pie hat, with his old wife, wrinkled like a turkey, and wearing a red handkerchief over her head, fastened by a silver pin. David Rossi’s apartments consisted of three rooms on the fourth floor, two to the front, the third to the back, and a lead flat opening out of them on to the roof.
In one of the front rooms on the afternoon of the Pope’s Jubilee, a young woman sat knitting with an open book on her lap, while a boy of six knelt by her side, and pretended to learn his lesson. She was a comely but timid creature, with liquid eyes and a soft voice, and he was a shock-headed little giant, like the cub of a young lion.
“Go on, Joseph,” said the woman, pointing with her knitting-needle to the line on the page. “‘And it came to pass....’”
But Joseph’s little eyes were peering first at the clock on the mantel-piece, and then out at the window and down the square.
“Didn’t you say they were to be here at two, mamma?”
“Yes, dear. Mr. Rossi was to be set free immediately, and papa, who ran home with the good news, has gone back to fetch him.”
“Oh! ‘And it came to pass afterward that he loved a woman in the Valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah. And the lords of the Philistines came unto her, and said unto her, Entice him and see wherein his great strength lieth....’ But, mamma....”
“Go on with your lesson, Joseph. ‘And she made him sleep....’”
“‘And she made him sleep upon her knees, and she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head....’”
At that moment there came a knock at the door, whereupon the boy uttered a cry of delight, and with a radiant face went plunging and shouting out of the room.
“Uncle David! It’s Uncle David!”
The tumultuous voice rolled like baby thunder through the apartment until it reached the door, and then it dropped to a dead silence.
“Who is it, Joseph?”
“A gentleman,” said the boy.
II
It was the fashionable young Roman with the watchful eyes and twirled-up moustache, who had stood by the old Frenchman’s carriage in the Piazza of St. Peter.
“I wish to speak with Mr. Rossi. I bring him an important message from abroad. He is coming along with the people, but to make sure of an interview I hurried ahead. May I wait?”
“Certainly! Come in, sir! You say he is coming? Yes? Then he is free?”
The woman’s liquid eyes were glistening visibly, and the man’s watchful ones seemed to notice everything.
“Yes, madam, he is free. I saw him arrested, and I also saw him set at liberty.”
“Really? Then you can tell me all about it? That’s good! I have heard so little of all that happened, and my boy and I have not been able to think of anything else. Sit down, sir!”
“As the police were taking him to the station-house in the Borgo,” said the stranger, “the people made an attempt to rescue him, and it seemed as if they must certainly have succeeded if it had not been for his own intervention.”
“He stopped them, didn’t he? I’m sure he stopped them!”
“He did. The delegate had given his three warnings, and the Brigadier was on the point of ordering his men to fire, when the prisoner threw up his hands before the crowd.”
“I knew it! Well?”
“‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘let no blood be shed for my sake. We are in God’s hands. Go home!’”
“How like him! And then, sir?”
“Then the crowd broke up like a bubble, and the officer who was in charge of him uncovered his head. ‘Room for the Honourable Rossi!’ he cried, and the prisoner went into the prison.”
The liquid eyes were running over by this time, and the soft voice was trembling: “You say you saw him set at liberty?”
“Yes! I was in the public service myself until lately, so they allowed me to enter the police station, and when the order for release came I was present and heard all. ‘Deputy,’ said the officer, ‘I have the honour to inform you that you are free.’ ‘But before I go I must say something,’ said the Deputy. ‘My only orders are that you are to be set at liberty,’ said the officer. ‘Nevertheless, I must see the Minister,’ said Mr. Rossi. But the crowd had pressed in and surrounded him, and in a moment the flood had carried him out into the street, with shouts and the waving of hats and a whirlwind of enthusiasm. And now he is being drawn by force through the city in a mad, glad, wild procession.”
“But he deserves it all, and more — far, far more!”
The stranger looked at the woman’s beaming eyes, and said, “You are not his wife — no?”
“Oh, no! I’m only the wife of one of his friends,” she answered.
“But you live here?”
“We live in the rooms on the roof.”
“Perhaps you keep house for the Deputy?”
