The Eternal City - Page 190/385

"The tombs are uncovered,

The dead arise,

The martyrs are rising

Before our eyes."

The old Garibaldian threw up his head like a warhorse at the call of

battle, and his rickety limbs were going towards the door.

"Stay here, father," said Rossi, and the old man obeyed him.

Elena was quieter by this time. She was sitting by the child and

stroking his little icy hand.

David Rossi, who had hardly spoken, went into his bedroom. His lips were

tightly pressed together, his eyes were bloodshot, and his breath was

labouring hard in his heaving breast.

He took up his dagger paper-knife, tried its point on his palm with two

or three reckless thrusts and threw it back on the desk. Then he went

down on his hands and knees and rummaged among the newspapers lying in

heaps under the window. At last he found what he looked for. It was the

six-chambered revolver which had been sent to him as a present. "I'll

kill the man like a dog," he thought.

He loaded the revolver, put it in his breast-pocket, went back to the

sitting-room, and made ready to go out.

X

Ten was striking on the different clocks of the city. Felice had lit the

stove in the boudoir and the wood was burning in fitful blue and red

flames. There was no other light in the room, and Roma lay with her body

on the floor, and her face buried in the couch.

The world outside was full of fearful and unusual noises. Snow was still

falling, and the voices heard through it had a peculiar sound of

sobbing. The soft rolling of thunder came from a long way off, like the

boom of a slow wave on a distant beach. At intervals there was the

crackle of musketry, like the noise of rockets sent up in the night, and

sometimes there were pitiful cries, smothered by the unreverberating

snow, like the cries of a drowning man on a foundering ship at sea.

Roma, face downward, heard these sounds in the lapses of a terrible

memory. She was seeing, as in a nightmare, the incidents of a night that

was hardly six weeks past. One by one the facts flashed back upon her

with a burning sense of shame, and she felt herself to be a sinner and a

criminal.

It was the night of the royal ball at the Quirinal. The blaze of lights,

the glitter of jewels, the brilliant throng of handsome men and lovely

women, the clash of music, the whirl of dancing, and finally the smiles

and compliments of the King. Then going home in the carriage in the

early morning, swathed in furs over her thin white silk, with the

Baron, in his decorations worn diagonally over his white breast, and

through the glass the waning moon, the silent stars, the empty streets.