And unpaid yet, is never now to pay?
Then the girl's self, my pale Pompilia child
That used to be my own with her great eyes--
Will she come back, with nothing changed at all?"

He repudiated Pompilia publicly, and with her, of course, all claims
from her husband. Taken into Court, the case (also bound up in the
square yellow book) was, after appeals and counter-appeals, left
undecided.

It was this which loosed all Guido's fury on Pompilia. He had already
learned to hate her for her shrinking from him; now, while he still
controlled her person, and wreaked the vilest cruelties and basenesses
upon it, he at the same time resolved to rid himself of her in any
fashion whatsoever which should leave him still a legal claimant to the
disputed dowry.[130:1] There was only one way thus to rid himself, and
that was to prove her guilty of adultery. He concentrated on it. First,
his brother, the young Canon Girolamo, who lived at the castle, was
incited to pursue her with vile solicitations. She fled to the
Archbishop of Arezzo and implored his succour. He gave none. Then she
went to the Governor: he also "pushed her back." She sought out a poor
friar, and confessed her "despair in God"; he promised to write to her
parents for her, but afterwards flinched, and did nothing. . . . Guido's
plan was nevertheless hanging fire; a supplementary system of
persecution must be set up. She was hourly accused of "looking
love-lures at theatre and church, in walk, at window"; but this, in the
apathy which was descending on her, she baffled by "a new game of giving
up the game."[131:1] She abandoned theatre, church, walk, and window;
she "confounded him with her gentleness and worth," he "saw the same
stone strength of white despair":

"How does it differ in aught, save degree,
From the terrible patience of God?"

--and more and more he hated her.

But at last, at the theatre one night, Pompilia--

"Brought there I knew not why, but now know well"[131:2]

--saw, for the first time, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, "the young frank
personable priest"[131:3]--and seeing him as rapt he gazed at her, felt

". . . Had there been a man like that,
To lift me with his strength out of all strife
Into the calm! . . .
Suppose that man had been instead of this?"

* * * * *

Caponsacchi had hitherto been very much "the courtly spiritual Cupid"
that Browning c