"How do you feel now?" asked Roma.
"I'm going," he replied, and he smiled again.
The human soul was gleaming out of the wretched man at the last, and he
was looking at her now with pleading eyes which plainly could not see.
"Are you there, Roma?"
"Yes."
"Promise that you will not leave me."
"I will not leave you now," she answered in a low voice.
After a moment he roused himself with an effort and said, "And this is
the end! How absurd! They'll find me here in any case, and what a
chatter there'll be! The Chamber--the journals--all the scribblers and
speechifiers. What will Europe say? Another Boulanger, perhaps! But I'm
sorry for Italy. Nobody can say I did not love my country. Where her
interest lay I let nothing interfere. And just when everything seemed to
triumph...."
He attempted to laugh. Roma shuddered.
"It was the star of the Annunziata that did it. The man threw it with
such force. To think that it's been the aim of my life to win that Order
and now it kills me! Ridiculous, isn't it?"
Again he attempted to laugh.
"There's a side of justice in that, though, and I'm not going to whine.
The Pope tried to paint an awful end, but his nightmare didn't frighten
me. We must all bow our heads to the law of compensation--the Pope as
well as everybody else. But to die stupidly like this..."
He was speaking with difficulty, and dragging at his shirt front. Roma
opened it at the neck, and something dropped on to the floor. It was a
lock of glossy black hair tied with a red ribbon such as lawyers used to
bind documents together. Dull as his sight was, he saw it.
"Yours, Roma! You were ill with fever when you first came to Rome, you
remember. The doctors cut off your beautiful hair. This was some of it.
I've worn it ever since. Silly, wasn't it?"
Tears began to shine in Roma's eyes. The cynical man who laughed at
sentiment had carried the tenderest badge of it in his breast.
"I used to wear some of my mother's in the same place when I was
younger. She was a good woman, too. When she put me to bed she used to
repeat something: 'Hold Thou my hands,' I think.... May I hold your
hands, Roma?"
Roma turned away her head, but she held out her hand, and the dying man
kissed it.