Browning, Robert, 1812-1889 -- Characters -- Women
"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] . . .
But now Caponsacchi himself grew restless, nervous: here was
Castelnuovo, as good as Rome:
"Say you are saved, sweet lady!"
She awoke. The sky was fierce with the sunset colours--suddenly she
cried out that she must not die:
"'Take me no farther, I should die: stay here!
I have more life to save than mine!' She swooned.
We seemed safe: what was it foreboded so?"
He carried her,
"Against my heart, beneath my head bowed low,
As we priests carry the paten,"
into the little inn and to a couch, where he laid her, sleeping deeply.
The host urged him to leave her in peace till morn.
"Oh, my foreboding! But I could not choose."
All night he paced the passage, throbbing with fear from head to foot,
"filled with a sense of such impending woe" . . . and at the first pause
of night went to the courtyard, ordered the horses--the last moment
came, he must awaken her--he turned to go:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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