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:

"How good to sleep and so get nearer death!"

But with the daybreak, what was the clear summons that seemed to pierce
her slumber?

". . . Up I sprang alive,
Light in me, light without me, everywhere
Change!"

The exquisite morning was there--the broad yellow sunbeams with their
"myriad merry motes," the glittering leaves of the wet weeds against the
lattice-panes, the birds--

"Always with one voice--where are two such joys?--
The blessed building-sparrow! I stepped forth,
Stood on the terrace--o'er the roofs such sky!
My heart sang, 'I too am to go away,
I too have something I must care about,
Carry away with me to Rome, to Rome!

* * * * *

Not to live now would be the wickedness.'"[137:1]

Pope Innocent XII--"the great good old Pope," as Browning calls him in
the summary of Book I--w