Everybody knelt except Roma. She alone was standing, but her heart was
on its knees and her whole soul was prostrate.
The priest put a crucifix in the Countess's hand and she kissed it
fervently, pronouncing all the time with gasping breath the name, "Gesù,
Gesù, Gesù!"
The passing bell of the parish church was tolling in slow strokes, and
the priest was praying fast and loud:
"May Christ who called thee receive thee, and let angels lead thee into
the bosom of Abraham."
At one moment the crucifix dropped from the dying woman's hands, and her
diamond rings, now too large for the shrivelled fingers, fell on to the
counterpane. A little later her wig fell off, and for an instant her
head was bald. Her forehead was perspiring; her breath was rattling in
her chest. At last she became delirious.
"It's a lie!" she cried. "Everything I've said is a lie! I didn't kill
it!" Then she rolled aside, and the crucifix fell on to the floor.
The priest, who had been praying faster and faster every moment, rose to
his feet and said in an altered tone, "We commend to Thee, O Lord, the
soul of Thy handmaiden, Elizabeth, that being dead to the world she may
live to Thee, and those sins which through the frailty of human life
she has committed Thou by the indulgence of Thy loving kindness may wipe
out, through Christ our Lord, Amen."
The priest's voice died down to an inarticulate murmur and then stopped.
A moment afterwards the curtains were drawn back, the shutters parted,
and the windows thrown open. A flood of sunset light streamed into the
room. The candles burnt yellow and went out. The mystic rites were at an
end.
Roma fled back to her own room. Her storm-tossed soul was foundering.
The band was still playing on the Pincio, and the sun was going down
behind St. Peter's, when Roma took up her pen to write.
"She is dead! The life she clung to so desperately has left her at last.
How she held on to it! And now she has gone to give an account of the
deeds done in this body. Yet who am I to talk like this? Only a poor,
unhappy fellow-sinner.
"After confession she thought she was forgiven. She imagined she was
pure, sinless, soulful. Perhaps she was so, and only the pains of death
made her seem to fall away. But what a power in confession! Oh, the joy
in her poor face when she had lifted the burden of her sins and secrets
off her soul! Forgiveness! What a thing it must be to feel one's self
forgiven!...