the lengthening sunny days went on without bringing either what romola most desired or what she most dreaded. they brought no sign from baldassarre, and, in spite of special watch on the part of the government, no revelation of the suspected conspiracy. but they brought other things which touched her closely, and bridged the phantom-crowded space of anxiety with active sympathy in immediate trial. they brought the spreading plague and the excommunication of savonarola.
both these events tended to arrest her incipient alienation from the frate, and to rivet again her attachment to the man who had opened to her the new life of duty, and who seemed now to be worsted in the fight for principle against profligacy. for romola could not carry from day to day into the abodes of pestilence and misery the sublime excitement of a gladness that, since such anguish existed, she too existed to make some of the anguish less bitter, without remembering that she owed this transcendent moral life to fra girolamo. she could not witness the silencing and excommunication of a man whose distinction from the great mass of the clergy lay, not in any heretical belief, not in his superstitions, but in the energy with which he sought to make the christian life a reality, without feeling herself drawn strongly to his side.
far on in the hot days of june the excommunication, for some weeks arrived from rome, was solemnly published in the duomo. romola went to witness the scene, that the resistance it inspired might invigorate that sympathy with savonarola which was one source of her strength. it was in memorable contrast with the scene she had been accustomed to witness there.
instead of upturned citizen-faces filling the vast area under the morning light, the youngest rising amphitheatrewise towards the walls, and making a garland of hope around the memories of age — instead of the mighty voice thrilling all hearts with the sense of great things, visible and invisible, to be struggled for — there were the bare walls at evening made more sombre by the glimmer of tapers; there was the black and grey flock of monks and secular clergy with bent, unexpectant faces; there was the occasional tinkling of little bells in the pauses of a monotonous voice reading a sentence which had already been long hanging up in the churches; and at last there was the extinction of the tapers, and the slow, shuffling tread of monkish feet departing in the dim silence.
romola’s ardour on the side of the frate was doubly strengthened by the gleeful triumph she saw in hard and coarse faces, and by the fear-stricken confusion in the faces and speech of many among his strongly-attached friends. the question where the duty of obedience ends, and the duty of resistance begins, could in no case be an easy one; but it was made overwhelmingly difficult by the belief that the church was — not a compromise of parties to secure a more or less approximate justice in the appropriation of funds, but — a living organism, instinct with divine power to bless and to curse. to most of the pious florentines, who had hitherto felt no doubt in their adherence to the frate, that belief in the divine potency of the church was not an embraced opinion, it was an inalienable impression, like the concavity of the blue firmament; and the boldness of savonarola’s written arguments that the excommunication was unjust, and that, being unjust, it was not valid, only made them tremble the more, as a defiance cast at a mystic image, against whose subtle immeasurable power there was neither weapon nor defence.
but romola, whose mind had not been allowed to draw its early nourishment from the traditional associations of the christian community in which her father had lived a life apart, felt her relation to the church only through savonarola; his moral force had been the only authority to which she had bowed; and in his excommunication she only saw the menace of hostile vice: on one side she saw a man whose life was devoted to the ends of public virtue and spiritual purity, and on the other the assault of alarmed selfishness, headed by a lustful, greedy, lying, and murderous old man, once called rodrigo borgia, and now lifted to the pinnacle of infamy as pope alexander the sixth. the finer shades of fact which soften the edge of such antitheses are not apt to be seen except by neutrals, who are not distressed to discern some folly in martyrs and some judiciousness in the men who burnt them.
but romola required a strength that neutrality could not give; and this excommunication, which simplified and ennobled the resistant position of savonarola by bringing into prominence its wider relations, seemed to come to her like a rescue from the threatening isolation of criticism and doubt. the frate was now withdrawn from that smaller antagonism against florentine enemies into which he continually fell in the unchecked excitement of the pulpit, and presented himself simply as appealing to the christian world against a vicious exercise of ecclesiastical power. he was a standard-bearer leaping into the breach. life never seems so clear and easy as when the heart is beating faster at the sight of some generous self-risking deed. we feel no doubt then what is the highest prize the soul can win; we almost believe in our own power to attain it. by a new current of such enthusiasm romola was helped through these difficult summer days. she had ventured on no words to tito that would apprise him of her late interview with baldassarre, and the revelation he had made to her. what would such agitating, difficult words win from him? no admission of the truth; nothing, probably, but a cool sarcasm about her sympathy with his assassin. baldassarre was evidently helpless: the thing to be feared was, not that he should injure tito, but that tito, coming upon his traces, should carry out some new scheme for ridding himself of the injured man who was a haunting dread to him. romola felt that she could do nothing decisive until she had seen baldassarre again, and learned the full truth about that ‘other wife’ — learned whether she were the wife to whom tito was first bound.
the possibilities about that other wife, which involved the worst wound to her hereditary pride, mingled themselves as a newly-embittering suspicion with the earliest memories of her illusory love, eating away the lingering associations of tenderness with the past image of her husband; and her irresistible belief in the rest of baldassarre’s revelation made her shrink from tito with a horror which would perhaps have urged some passionate speech in spite of herself if he had not been more than usually absent from home. like many of the wealthier citizens in that time of pestilence, he spent the intervals of business chiefly in the country: the agreeable melema was welcome at many villas, and since romola had refused to leave the city, he had no need to provide a country residence of his own.
but at last, in the later days of july, the alleviation of those public troubles which had absorbed her activity and much of her thought, left romola to a less counteracted sense of her personal lot. the plague had almost disappeared, and the position of savonarola was made more hopeful by a favourable magistracy, who were writing urgent vindicatory letters to rome on his behalf, entreating the withdrawal of the excommunication.
romola’s healthy and vigorous frame was undergoing the reaction of languor inevitable after continuous excitement and over-exertion; but her mental restlessness would not allow her to remain at home without peremptory occupation, except during the sultry hours. in the cool of the morning and evening she walked out constantly, varying her direction as much as possible, with the vague hope that if baldassarre were still alive she might encounter him. perhaps some illness had brought a new paralysis of memory, and he had forgotten where she lived — forgotten even her existence. that was her most sanguine explanation of his non-appearance. the explanation she felt to be most probable was, that he had died of the plague.
