"Then who fired the shot that killed his Excellency, Signora?"
"I did," said Roma.
Instinctively the man removed his hat.
Within half-an-hour Roma had repeated her statement at the Regina
C[oe]li, and the Carabineers, to prevent a public scandal, had smuggled
the body of the Baron, under the cover of night, to his office in the
Palazzo Braschi, on the opposite side of the piazza.
X
One thought was supreme in David Rossi's mind when he left the Piazza
Navona--that the world in which he had lived was shaken to its
foundations and his life was at an end. The unhappy man wandered about
the streets without asking himself where he was going or what was to
become of him.
Many feelings tore his heart, but the worst of them was anger. He had
taken the life of the Baron. The man deserved his death, and he felt no
pity for his victim and no remorse for his crime. But that he should
have killed the Minister, he who had twice stood between him and death,
he who had resisted the doctrine of violence and all his life preached
the gospel of peace, this was a degradation too shameful and abject.
The woman had been the beginning and end of everything. "How I hate
her!" he thought. He was telling himself for the hundredth time that he
had never hated anybody so much before, when he became aware that he had
returned to the neighbourhood of the Piazza Navona. Without knowing what
he was doing, he had been walking round and round it.
He began to picture Roma as he had seen her that night. The beautiful,
mournful, pleading face, which he had not really seen while his eyes
looked on it, now rose before the eye of his mind. This caused a wave of
tenderness to pass over him against his will, and his heart, so full of
hatred, began to melt with love.
All the cruel words he had spoken at parting returned to his memory, and
he told himself that he had been too hasty. Instead of bearing her down
he should have listened to her explanation. Before the Baron entered
the room she had been at the point of swearing that her love, and
nothing but her love, had caused her to betray him.
He told himself she had lied, but the thought was hell, and to escape
from it he made for the bank of the river again. This time he crossed
the bridge of St. Angelo, and passed up the Borgo to the piazza of St.
Peter's. But the piazza itself awakened a crowd of memories. It was
there in a balcony that he had first seen Roma, not plainly, but vaguely
in a summer cloud of lace and sunshades.