Hastily he huddled his belongings into a parcel, and without looking up, passed out of the door. She heard his steps echoing down the stairway, and soon from out the lattice she saw him walk across the court and disappear. He did not look up!
She threw herself upon her couch, buried her face in the pillows and burst into tears.
In one short week word came to Sandro that Simonetta was dead—a mysterious quick fever of some kind—she had refused all food—the doctors could not understand it—the fever had just burned her life out!
Let Maurice Hewlett tell the rest:
"They carried dead Simonetta through the streets of Florence, with her pale face uncovered and a crown of myrtle in her hair. People thronging there held their breath, or wept to see such still loveliness; and her poor parted lips wore a patient little smile, and her eyelids were pale violet and lay heavy on her cheek. White, like a bride, with a nosegay of orange-blossoms, and syringa at her throat, she lay there on her bed, with lightly folded hands and the strange aloofness and preoccupation all the dead have. Only her hair burned about her like molten copper.
"The great procession swept forward; black brothers of Misericordia, shrouded and awful, bore the bed or stalked before it with torches that guttered and flared sootily in the dancing light of day.
"Santa Croce, the great church, stretched forward beyond her into the distances of gray mist and cold spaces of light. Its bare vastness was damp like a vault. And she lay in the midst listless, heavy-lidded, apart, with the half-smile, as it seemed, of some secret mirth. Round her the great candles smoked and flickered, and mass was sung at the High Altar for her soul's repose. Sandro stood alone, facing the shining altar, but looking fixedly at Simonetta on her couch. He was white and dry—parched lips and eyes that ached and smarted. Was this the end? Was it possible, my God! that the transparent, unearthly thing lying there so prone and pale was dead? Had such loveliness aught to do with life or death? Ah! sweet lady, dear heart, how tired she was, how deadly tired! From where he stood he could see with intolerable anguish the somber rings around her eyes and the violet shadows on the lids, her folded hands and the straight, meek line to the feet. And her poor wan face with its wistful, pitiful little smile was turned half-aside on the delicate throat, as if in a last appeal: Leave me now, O Florentines, to my rest. Poor child! Poor child! Sandro was on his knees with his face pressed against the pulpit and tears running through his fingers as he prayed.
"As he had seen her, so he painted. As at the beginning of life in a cold world, passively meeting the long trouble of it, he painted her a rapt Presence floating evenly to our earth. A gray, translucent sea laps silently upon a little creek, and in the hush of a still dawn the myrtles and sedges on the water's brim are quiet. It is a dream in halftones that he gives us, gray and green and steely blue; and just that, and some homely magic of his own, hint the commerce of another world with man's discarded domain. Men and women are asleep, and as in an early walk you may startle the hares at their play, or see the creatures of the darkness—owls and night-hawks and heavy moths—flit with fantastic purpose over the familiar scene, so here it comes upon you suddenly that you have surprised Nature's self at her mysteries; you are let into the secret; you have caught the spirit of the April woodland as she glides over the pasture to the copse. And that, indeed, was Sandro's fortune. He caught her in just such a propitious hour. He saw the sweet wild thing, pure and undefiled by touch of earth; caught her in that pregnant pause of time ere she had lighted. Another moment and a buxom nymph of the grove would fold her in a rosy mantle, colored as the earliest wood- anemones are. She would vanish, we know, into the daffodils or a bank of violets. And you might tell her presence there, or in the rustle of the myrtles, or coo of doves mating in the pines; you might feel her genius in the scent of the earth or the kiss of the west wind; but you could only see her in mid-April, and you should look for her over the sea. She always comes with the first warmth of the year. But daily, before he painted, Sandro knelt in a dark chapel in Santa Croce, while a priest said mass for the repose of Simonetta's soul."
George Eliot gives many a side-glimpse of the art life of Florence in the days of the luxury-loving Medici. She saturated herself in Italian literature and history; and the days of Fra Angelico, Fra Lippo Lippi and Fra Girolamo Savonarola are bodied forth from lines deeply etched upon her heart.
When you go to Florence carry "Romola" in your side-pocket, just as you take the "Marble Faun" to Rome. "Romola" will certainly make history live again and pass before your gaze. The story is unmistakably high art, for from the opening lines of the proem you hear the slow, measured wing of death; and after you have read the volume, forever, for you, will the smoke of martyr-fires hover about the Piazza Signoria, and from the gates of San Marco you will see emerge that little man in black robe and cowl—that homely, repulsive man with the curved nose, the protruding lower lip, the dark, leathery skin—that man who lured and fascinated by his poise and power, whose words were whips of scorpions that stung his enemies until they had to silence him with a rope; and as a warning to those whom he had hypnotized, they burned his swart, shrunken body in the public square, just as he had burned their books and pictures.