Romeward, until I found the wayside inn
By Castelnuovo's few mean hut-like homes
Huddled together on the hill-foot bleak,
Bare, broken only by that tree or two
Against the sudden bloody splendour poured
Cursewise in his departure by the day
On the low house-roof of that squalid inn
Where they three for the first time and the last,
Husband and wife and priest, met face to face.
Whence I went on again, the end was near.
Step by step, missing none and marking all,
Till Rome itself, the ghastly goal, I reached.
Why, all the while,—how could it otherwise? —
The life in me abolished the death of things,
Deep calling unto deep: as then and there
Acted itself over again once more
The tragic piece. I saw with my own eyes
In Florence as I trod the terrace, breathed
The beauty and the fearfulness of night.
How it had run, this round from Rome to Rome."
For the supposed parents of the young wife Ponipilia lived at Rome, whence Guido, having married her for their money, took her and them to his native Arezzo. They, finding how they had been trapped, contrived somehow to escape to Rome, leaving Pompilia to the tender mercies of Guido and his satyr-family.
"These I saw,
In recrudescency of baffled hate,
Prepared to wring the uttermost revenge
From body and soul thus left them: all was sure,
Fire laid and cauldron set, the obscene ring traced,
The victim stripped and prostrate: what of God?
The cleaving of a cloud, a cry, a crash.
Quenched lay their cauldron, cowered i' the dust the crew,
As in a glory of armour like St. George,
Out again sprang the young good beauteous priest,
Bearing away the lady in his arms,
Saved for a splendid minute and no more."
