"This one heart" (she said on her death-bed):
"This one heart gave me all the spring!
I could believe himself by his strong will
Had woven around me what I thought the world
We went along in . . .
For, through the journey, was it natural
Such comfort should arise from first to last?"
As she looks back, new stars bud even while she seeks for old, and all is Caponsacchi:
"Him I now see make the shine everywhere."
Best of all her memories—"oh, the heart in that!"—was the descent at a little wayside inn. He tells of it thus. When the day was broad, he begged her to descend at the post-house of a village. He told the woman of the house that Pompilia was his sister, married and unhappy—would she comfort her as women can? And then he left them together:
"I spent a good half-hour, paced to and fro
The garden; just to leave her free awhile . . .
I might have sat beside her on the bench
Where the children were: I wish the thing had been,
Indeed: the event could not be worse, you know:
One more half-hour of her saved! She's dead now, Sirs!"
As they again drove forward, she asked him if, supposing she were to die now, he would account it to be in sin? The woman at the inn had told her about the trees that turn away from the north wind with the nests they hold; she thought she might be like those trees. . . . But soon, half-sleeping again, and restless now with returning fears, she seemed to wander in her mind; once she addressed him as "Gaetano." . . . Afterwards he knew that this name (the name of a newly-made saint) was that which she destined for her child, if she was given a son:
"One who has only been made a saint—how long?
Twenty-five years: so, carefuller, perhaps,
To guard a namesake than those old saints grow,
Tired out by this time—see my own five saints!"[146:1]
For "little Pompilia" had been given five names by her pretended parents:
". . . so many names for one poor child
—Francesca Camilla Vittoria Angela
Pompilia Comparini—laughable!"[146:1] . . .