“O great, just, good God!  Miserable me!” (vol. ix. p. 166.)

The third speaker is POMPILIA.  Her evidence is the story of her life.  It is given from her deathbed; and its half-dreamy reminiscences are uttered with the childlike simplicity with which she may have opened her heart to her priest.  She is full of strange pathetic wonder at the mystery of existence; at the manner in which the thing we seem to grasp eludes us, and the seemingly impossible comes to pass.  “Husbands are supposed to love their wives and guard them.  See how it has been with her!  That other man—­that friend—­they say he loves her; his kindness was all love!  She is a wife and he a priest, and yet they go on saying it!  Her boy, she imagined, would be hers for life:  and he is taken from her.  He, too, becomes a dream; and in that dream she sees him grown tall and strong, and tutoring his mother as an imprudent child, for venturing out of the safe street into the lonely house where no help could reach her.  It all reminds her of the day when she and a child-friend played at finding each other out in the figures on the tapestry; and Tisbe recognized her in a tree with a rough trunk for body, and her five fingers blossoming into leaves.  Things are, and are not at the same time.”

One thing, however, is real amidst the unreality:  her joy and pride in finding herself a mother.  The event proved that when she left Arezzo the hope of maternity was already dawning upon her; and Mr. Browning has combined this fact with the latent maternal sentiment of all true women, and read it into every impulse of her remaining life.  She was wretched.  She had vainly sought for help.  She had resigned herself to the inevitable.  She had lain down at night with the old thought—­

                             “...  ’Done, another day! 
       How good to sleep and so get nearer death!’—­
       When, what, first thing at day-break, pierced the sleep
       With a summons to me?  Up I sprang alive,
       Light in me, light without me, everywhere
       Change!” (vol. ix. p. 216.)

From this moment, as she tells us, everything was transformed.  For days, for weeks, Caponsacchi’s name had been ringing in her ears:  in jealous explosions on her husband’s part; in corrupting advice on the part of the waiting-woman who brought letters supposed to be sent to her by him; in declarations of love which her first glance at his face told her he could not have written.  This, too, has all seemed a grotesquely painful dream.  But when she awoke on the April morning in that bounding of the spirit towards an unknown joy, the name assumed a new meaning for her, and she said, “Let Caponsacchi come.”