XLIII
E son quasi a l'estremo.
Luce degli anni miei, dove se' gita?
Carducci.
If I were to be asked to name the darkest hour of my dark life, well do I know which of all my gloomy memories would raise its spectral face.
Not the terror-haunted hours of madness and crime, not the anguish-stricken nights passed at the bedside of those I loved, not my own life-struggles with the monsters of disease and dementia, tearing at the very roots of my life—no, the darkest hour of my life was that glorious summer morning in Venice, when I was brought from the prison of La Giudecca to attend my trial at the Criminal Court. The sun flung a sparkling net of diamonds athwart the blue waters of the lagoon, and the gondola bore me with peaceful splash of oar over the dancing waters. The gondolier steadied the swaying skiff at the wave-kissed steps, and I rose, drawing my veil about me, to disembark.
As I placed my foot on the steps—how often before, in happier days, had I thus stepped from my gondola, greeted and smiled upon by the kindly Venetian idlers!—I lifted my eyes. A crowd had assembled at the top of the steps and thronged the piazza. They stood in serried ranks, menacing and silent, leaving a narrow pathway for me to pass. I faltered and would have stepped back, but the carabinieri at my side held my arms and impelled me forward. At that moment some one in the crowd—a woman—laughed. As if that sound had shattered the spell that held them mute, the mob broke into a tumult of noise, a storm of hisses and cries, shrieks and jeers, hootings and maledictions, while, rising above it and more cruel than all, was the laughter, the strident, mocking laughter that accompanied my every step and gesture.
And there, tall and motionless in the midst of the laughing, hissing, shrieking mob, stood my father, his white hair stirring in the breeze, his eyes—the proud blue O'Rourke eyes—fixed upon me.
Oh, father, father whose heart I have broken, in that hour I paid the wages of my sin. Not these dark years of imprisonment, not the mantle of ignominy that clothes me with eternal defilement, not the gloomy solitude in which I see the gradual fading of my youth, not the horror of the past, nor the hopelessness of the future—not these are the deadliest of my punishments; but the memory of your white hair in the crowd that hissed its hatred, and laughed its contempt of your daughter, and the jeers that greeted you, and the rude hands that jostled you when you stepped forward and laid your hand in blessing on my degraded head.
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Marie Tarnowska is silent. Her story is told.