The Eternal City - Page 354/385

Then it occurred to him that it must have been on this spot that Roma

was inspired with the plot which had ended with his betrayal. At that

thought all the bitterness of his soul returned. He told himself she

deserved every word he had said to her, and blamed himself for the

humiliation he had gone through in his attempt to make excuses for what

she had done. To the curse he had hurled at her at the last moment he

added words of fiercer anger, and though they were spoken only in his

brain, or to the dark night and the rolling river, they intensified his

fury.

"Oh, how I hate her!" he thought.

The piazza, was quiet. There was a light in the Pope's windows, and a

Swiss Guard was patrolling behind the open wicket of the bronze gate to

the Vatican. A porter in gorgeous livery was yawning by the door of the

Prime Minister's palace. The man was waiting for his master. He would

have to wait.

The clock of St. Peter's struck one, and the silent place began to be

peopled with many shadows. The scene of the Pope's jubilee returned to

Rossi's mind. He saw and heard everything over again. The crowd, the

gorgeous procession, the Pope, and last of all his own speech. A

sardonic smile crossed his face in the darkness as he thought of what he

had said.

"Is it possible that I can ever have believed those fables?"

He was tramping down the Trastevere, picturing his trial for the murder

of the Baron, with Roma in the witness-box and himself in the dock. The

cold horror of it all was insupportable, and he told himself that there

was only one place in which he could escape from despair.

The unhappy man had begun to think of taking his own life. He had always

condemned suicide. He had even condemned it in Bruno. But it was the

death grip of a man utterly borne down, and there was nothing else to

hold on to.

The day began to break, and he turned back towards the piazza of St.

Peter's, thinking of what he intended to do and where he would do it. By

the end of the Hospital of Santo Spirito there was a little blind alley

bounded by a low wall. Below was the quick turn of the Tiber, and no

swimmer was strong enough to live long in the turbulent waters at that

point. He would do it there.

The streets were silent, and in the grey dawn, that mystic hour of

parturition when the day is being born and things are seen in places

where they do not exist, when ships sail in the sky and mountains rise

around lowland cities, David Rossi became aware in a moment that a woman

was walking on the pavement in front of him. He could almost have

believed that it was Roma, the figure was so tall and full and upright.

But the woman's dress was poorer, and she was carrying a bundle in her

arms. When he looked again he saw that her bundle was a child, and that

she was weeping over it.