Browning's Heroines

by Ethel Colburn Mayne

"Thinking moreover . . . oh, thinking, if you like,
How utterly dissociated was I
A priest and celibate, from the sad strange wife
Of Guido . . .
. . . I had a whole store of strengths
Eating into my heart, which craved employ,
And she, perhaps, need of a finger's help—
And yet there was no way in the wide world
To stretch out mine."

Her smile kept glowing out of the devotional book he was trying to read, and he sat thus—when suddenly there came a tap at the door, and on his summons, there glided in "a masked muffled mystery," who laid a letter on the open book, and stood back demurely waiting.

It was Margherita, the "kind of maid" of Count Guido, and the letter purported to be from Pompilia, offering her love. Caponsacchi saw through the trick at once: the letter was written by Guido. He answered it in such a way that it would save her from all anger, and at the same time infuriate the "jealous miscreant" who had written it:

". . . What made you—may one ask?—
Marry your hideous husband?"

But henceforth such letters came thick and fast. Caponsacchi was met in the street, signed to in church; slips were found in his prayer-book, they dropped from the window if he passed. . . . At length there arrived a note in a different manner. This warned him not to come, to avoid the window for his life. At once he answered that the street was free—he should go to the window if he chose, and he would go that evening at the Ave. His conviction was that he should find the husband there, not the wife—for though he had seen through the trick, it did not occur to him that it was more than a device of jealousy to trap them, already suspected after that mutual gaze at the theatre. What it really was, he never guessed at all.

Meanwhile—turning now to Pompilia's dying speech to the nuns who nursed her—the companion persecution had been going on at the castle. Day after day, Margherita had dinned the name of Caponsacchi into the wife's ears. How he loved her, what a paragon he was, how little she owed fidelity to the Count who used her, Margherita, as his pastime—ought she not at least to see the priest and warn him, if nothing more? Guido might kill him! Here was a letter from him; and she began to impart it:

"I know you cannot read—therefore, let me!
'My idol'" . . .

The letter was not from Caponsacchi, and Pompilia, divining this as surely as she had divined that he did not throw the comfits, took it from the woman's hands and tore it into shreds. . . . Day after day such moments added themselves to all the rest of the misery, and at last, at end of her strength, she swooned away. As she was coming to again, Margherita stooped and whispered Caponsacchi. But still, though the sound of his name was to the broken girl as if, drowning, she had looked up through the waves and seen a star . . . still she repudiated the servant's report of him: had she not that once beheld him?

"Therefore while you profess to show him me,
I ever see his own face. Get you gone!"

But the swoon had portended something; and on "one vivid daybreak," half through April, Pompilia learned what that something was. . . . Going to bed the previous night, the last sound in her ears had been Margherita's prattle. "Easter was over; everyone was on the wing for Rome—even Caponsacchi, out of heart and hope, was going there." Pompilia had heard it, as she might have heard rain drop, thinking only that another day was done: