Roma raised her hands to her head as if to avert a blow.
"Stop! stop!" she cried in a choking voice, and lifting her face,
distorted with suffering, tears rose in her eyes. To see Roma cry
touched the only tenderness of which his iron nature was capable. He
patted the beautiful head at his feet, and said in a caressing tone:
"Why will you make me seem so hard, my child? There is really no need to
talk of these things. They will not occur. How can I have any desire to
degrade you since I must degrade myself at the same time? I have no wish
to tell any one the secret which belongs only to you and me. In that
matter you were not to blame either. It was all my doing. I was
sweltering under the shameful law which tied me to a dead body, and I
tried to attach you to me. And then your beauty--your loveliness...."
At that moment Felice announced Commendatore Angelelli. Roma walked over
to the window and leaned her face against the glass. Snow was still
falling, and there were some rumblings of thunder. Sheets of light shone
here and there in the darkness, but the world outside was dark and
drear. Would David Rossi come to-night? She almost hoped he would not.
VIII Behind her the Prime Minister, who had apologised for turning her house
into a temporary Ministry of the Interior, was talking to his Chief of
Police.
"You were there yourself?"
"I was, Excellency. I went up into a high part and looked down. It was a
strange and wild sight."
"How many would there be?"
"Impossible to guess. Inside and outside, Romans, country people,
perhaps a hundred thousand."
"And Rossi's speech?"
"The usual appeal to the passions of the people, Excellency. An
extraordinary exhibition of the art of flying between wind and water. We
couldn't have found a word that was distinctly seditious, even if we
hadn't had your Excellency's order to let the man go on."
"You have stopped the telegraph wires?"
"Yes."
"When the meeting was over, Rossi went home?"
"He did, Excellency."
"And the hundred thousand?"
"In their excitement they began to sing and to march through the
streets. They are still doing so. After going down to the Piazza Navona,
they are coming up by the Piazza del Popolo and along the Babuino with
banners and torches."
"Men only?"
"Men, women, and children."