BOOK III., THE OTHER HALF ROME.--Little Pompilia lies dying in the

hospital, stabbed through and through again. She had prayed that she might live long enough for confession and absolution. "Never before successful in a prayer," this had been answered. She has overplus of life to speak and right herself from first to last, to pardon her husband and make arrangements for the welfare of her child. The lawyers came and took her depositions; the priests, also, to shrive her soul. The other half Rome make excuses for Pietro and Violante. Their lives wanted completion in a child: Violante's fault was not an unnatural one. Her husband was acquiescent--natural too. Violante's confession was but right and proper; and if she wronged an heir, who was he? As for the wooing, it was all done by the Count: a wife was necessary alike for himself, his mother, and his palace; and so he dazzled the child Pompilia with a vision of greatness. The crowd said she might become a lady, but the bargain was but a poor one at best. Pompilia, aged thirteen years and five months, was secretly married to the Count one dim December day. Pietro was told when it was too late, and had to surrender all his property in favour of Guido, who was to support his wife's belongings. Four months' insolence and penury they had to endure at Arezzo, and then Pietro went back to beg help from his Roman friends, who laughed and said things had turned out just as they expected. Violante went to God, told her sin, and reaped the Jubilee's benefit. Restitution, however, said the Church, must be made: the sin must be published and amends forthcoming. Pompilia's husband must be told that his contract was null and void. Pietro's heart leaped for joy at the prospect of recovering all his surrendered estate. Guido naturally pronounced the whole tale "one long lie"--lying for robbery and revenge--and threw himself on the courts. The courts held the child to be a changeling. Pietro's renunciation they made null: he was no party to the cheat; but Guido is to retain the dowry! More proceedings naturally followed this strange decision. Then the Count forms the diabolical plan to drive his girl-wife, by his cruelty, into the sin which will enable him to be rid of her without parting with her money. Guido concocts a pencilled letter to his brother the Abate, which he makes his wife trace over with ink, he guiding her hand because she could not write, wherein she states--not knowing a word she pens--that the Comparini advised her, before they left Arezzo, to find a paramour, carry off what spoil she could, and then burn the house down. The Abate took care to scatter this information all over Rome. At Arezzo Guido set himself to make his wife's life there intolerable, at the same time setting a trap into which she could not avoid falling. The Other Half Rome thinks it probable that the priest Caponsacchi pitied and loved Pompilia, who wept and looked out of window all day long; for there were passionate letters (prayers, rather), addressed to him by the suffering wife; though it is true she avers she never wrote a letter in her life, still she abjured him, in the name of God, to help her to escape to Rome. If not love, this was love's simulation, and calculated to deceive the Canon. Pompilia, however, protested that she had never even learned to write or read; nor had she ever spoken to the priest till the evening when she implored him to assist her to escape. On the other hand, the priest admitted having received the letters purporting to come from Pompilia. He did write to her: as she could not read she burned the letters--never bade him come to her, yet accepted him when Heaven seemed to send him. When Guido's cruelty first sprang on Pompilia, she had appealed to the secular Governor and the Archbishop; but both were friends of Guido, and both refused to interfere between husband and wife, so she went to confess to a simple friar, told him how suicide had tempted her, begged him to write to her pretended parents to come and save her. He promised; but by nightfall was more discreet, and withdrew from the dangerous business. So the woman, thus hard-beset, looked out to see if God would help, and saw Caponsacchi; called him to her--she at her window, he in the street below--and at nightfall fled with him for Rome. The world sees nothing but the simple fact of the flight. The implicated persons protest that the course they took, though strange, was justified for life and honour's sake. Absorbed in the sense of the blessedness of the flight, she had said little to her preserver through the long night. As daybreak came they reached an inn: he whispered, "Next stage, Rome!" Prostrate with fatigue, she could go no farther; stayed to rest at the osteria, fell asleep, and awoke with Count Guido once more standing betwixt heaven and her soul--awoke to find her room full of roaring men, her preserver a prisoner. Then she sprang up, seized the sword which hung at the Count's side, and would have slain him, but men interposed. The priest avers that the flight had no pretext but to get Pompilia free: how should it be otherwise? If they were guilty, as Guido would have the world believe, what need to fly? or, if they must, why halt with Rome in sight? He vindicates Pompilia's fame. Guido's tale was to the effect that he and his whole household had been drugged by the wife, which gave the fugitives time to get thus far on their way. He expected easy execution probably; thought he would find his wife cowering under her shame. When she turned upon him, and would have slain him he had to invent another story; produce love letters from a woman who could not write, replies from the priest, who could happily defend his character and prove the forgery. Then the story of the investigation before the courts was told: how Pompilia owned she caught at the sole hand stretched out to snatch her from hell; how Caponsacchi proudly declared that as man, and much more as priest, he was bound to help weak innocence; how he exposed the trap set by Guido for them both; how he had never touched her lip, nor she his hand, from first to last, nor spoken a word the Virgin might not hear. Then they discussed the decision of the court--the sentence, the relegation of the priest, the seclusion of the wife in the convent at Guido's expense. They discussed the five months' peace which Pompilia passed with the nuns, the application made by the sisters on behalf of Pompilia's waning health, and her residence with Pietro and his wife at their villa. They tell of the determination of Guido, after the birth of his child, to avail himself of the propitious minute and rid himself of his wife and her putative parents, that the child remaining might inherit all and repair his losses. The sympathisers with Pompilia dwelt on the fact that, while the bells were chiming good-will on earth and peace to man, the dreadful five stole by back slums and blind cuts to the villa, asking admission in Caponsacchi's name. Then follow the murders. Violante was stabbed first, Pietro next; and then came Pompilia's turn. It was told how the murderers escaped, till at Baccano they were overtaken and cast red-handed into prison.

NOTES.--Line 59, _Maratta_: Carlo Maratti was the most celebrated of the later Roman painters of the seventeenth century. He was born 1625. The great number of his pictures of the Virgin procured him the name of "Carlo delle Madonne." l. 95, "_That doctrine of the Philosophic Sin_": "Philosophical Sin," is a breach of the dignity of man's rational nature. Theological Sin offends against the Supreme Reason. (See Rickaby's _Moral Philosophy_, p. 119.) l. 385, "_Hesperian ball, ordained for Hercules to taste and pluck_": the golden apples of the Hesperides plucked by Hercules, were probably oranges. l. 439, _Danae_, the daughter of Acrisius, and mother of Perseus by Jupiter. l. 555, "_The Holy Year_": the Jubilee at Rome, first instituted by Boniface VIII., elected Pope 1294. The Jubilee occurs every twenty-five years, and is a time of special indulgences. l. 556, "_Bound to rid sinners of sin_": no indulgence forgives sin, nor gives permission to commit sin; but it is "the remission, through the merits of Jesus Christ, of the whole or part of the debt of temporal punishment due to a sin, the guilt and everlasting punishment of which sin has, through the merits of Jesus Christ, been already forgiven in the Sacrament of penance" (_Catholic Belief_, by J. Bruno, D.D., p. 183). l. 567. "_The great door, new-broken for the nonce_": according to the special ritual, the Pope, at the commencement of the Jubilee year goes in solemn procession to a particular walled-up door (the Porta Aurea, or golden door of St. Peter's), and knocks three times, using the words of Psalm cxviii. 19, "Open to me the gates of righteousness." The doors are then opened and sprinkled with holy water, and the Pope passes through. When the Jubilee closes, the special doorway is again built up, with appropriate solemnities (_Encyc. Brit._). l. 572, "_Poor repugnant Penitentiary_": a penitentiary is an "officer in some cathedrals, vested with power from the bishop to absolve in cases reserved to him. The Pope has a _grand penitentiary_, who is a Cardinal, and is chief of the other _penitentiaries_" (_Webster's Dict._). That this particular ecclesiastic was "repugnant" is a gratuitous assumption of the poet: he probably took as much interest in his business as any other clergyman takes in his. 1413, _Civita_, Civita Vecchia, a seaport near Rome. 1445, "_Hundred Merry Tales_": the tales or novels of Franco Sacchetti. 1450, _Vulcan_, the god of fire and furnaces, son of Jupiter and Juno.