The Blind Scholar and his Daughter.
The Via de’ Bardi, a street noted in the history of Florence, lies in
Oltrarno, or that portion of the city which clothes the southern bank
of the river. It extends from the Ponte Vecchio to the Piazza de’ Mozzi
at the head of the Ponte alle Grazie; its right-hand line of houses and
walls being backed by the rather steep ascent which in the fifteenth
century was known as the hill of Bogoli, the famous stone-quarry whence
the city got its pavement—of dangerously unstable consistence when
penetrated by rains; its left-hand buildings flanking the river and
making on their northern side a length of quaint, irregularly-pierced
façade, of which the waters give a softened loving reflection as the
sun begins to decline towards the western heights. But quaint as these
buildings are, some of them seem to the historical memory a too modern
substitute for the famous houses of the Bardi family, destroyed by
popular rage in the middle of the fourteenth century.
They were a proud and energetic stock, these Bardi; conspicuous among
those who clutched the sword in the earliest world-famous quarrels of
Florentines with Florentines, when the narrow streets were darkened
with the high towers of the nobles, and when the old tutelar god Mars,
as he saw the gutters reddened with neighbours’ blood, might well have
smiled at the centuries of lip-service paid to his rival, the Baptist.
But the Bardi hands were of the sort that not only clutch the
sword-hilt with vigour, but love the more delicate pleasure of
fingering minted metal: they were matched, too, with true Florentine
eyes, capable of discerning that power was to be won by other means
than by rending and riving, and by the middle of the fourteenth century
we find them risen from their original condition of _popolani_ to be
possessors, by purchase, of lands and strongholds, and the feudal
dignity of Counts of Vernio, disturbing to the jealousy of their
republican fellow-citizens. These lordly purchases are explained by our
seeing the Bardi disastrously signalised only a few years later as
standing in the very front of European commerce—the Christian
Rothschilds of that time—undertaking to furnish specie for the wars of
our Edward the Third, and having revenues “in kind” made over to them;
especially in wool, most precious of freights for Florentine galleys.
Their august debtor left them with an august deficit, and alarmed
Sicilian creditors made a too sudden demand for the payment of
deposits, causing a ruinous shock to the credit of the Bardi and of
associated houses, which was felt as a commercial calamity along all
the coasts of the Mediterranean. But, like more modern bankrupts, they
did not, for all that, hide their heads in humiliation; on the
contrary, they seemed to have held them higher than ever, and to have
been among the most arrogant of those grandees, who under certain
noteworthy circumstances, open to all who will read the honest pages of
Giovanni Villani, drew upon themselves the exasperation of the armed
people in 1343. The Bardi, who had made themselves fast in their street
between the two bridges, kept these narrow inlets, like panthers at
bay, against the oncoming gonfalons of the people, and were only made
to give way by an assault from the hill behind them. Their houses by
the river, to the number of twenty-two (_palagi e case grandi_), were
sacked and burnt, and many among the chief of those who bore the Bardi
name were driven from the city. But an old Florentine family was
many-rooted, and we find the Bardi maintaining importance and rising
again and again to the surface of Florentine affairs in a more or less
creditable manner, implying an untold family history that would have
included even more vicissitudes and contrasts of dignity and disgrace,
of wealth and poverty, than are usually seen on the background of wide
kinship.[1] But the Bardi never resumed their proprietorship in the old
street on the banks of the river, which in 1492 had long been
associated with other names of mark, and especially with the Neri, who
possessed a considerable range of houses on the side towards the hill.
[1] A sign that such contrasts were peculiarly frequent in Florence,
is the fact that Saint Antonine, Prior of San Marco, and afterwards
archbishop, in the first half of this fifteenth century, founded the
society of Buonuomini di San Martino (Good Men of Saint Martin) with
the main object of succouring the _poveri vergognosi_—in other words,
paupers of good family. In the records of the famous Panciatichi
family we find a certain Girolamo in this century who was reduced to
such a state of poverty that he was obliged to seek charity for the
mere means of sustaining life, though other members of his family were
enormously wealthy.
In one of these Neri houses there lived, however, a descendant of the
Bardi, and of that very branch which a century and a half before had
become Counts of Vernio: a descendant who had inherited the old family
pride and energy, the old love of pre-eminence, the old desire to leave
a lasting track of his footsteps on the fast-whirling earth. But the
family passions lived on in him under altered conditions: this
descendant of the Bardi was not a man swift in street warfare, or one
who loved to play the signor, fortifying strongholds and asserting the
right to hang vassals, or a merchant and usurer of keen daring, who
delighted in the generalship of wide commercial schemes: he was a man
with a deep-veined hand cramped by much copying of manuscripts, who ate
sparing dinners, and wore threadbare clothes, at first from choice and
at last from necessity; who sat among his books and his marble
fragments of the past, and saw them only by the light of those far-off
younger days which still shone in his memory: he was a moneyless, blind
old scholar—the Bardo de’ Bardi to whom Nello, the barber, had promised
to introduce the young Greek, Tito Melema.
The house in which Bardo lived was situated on the side of the street
nearest the hill, and was one of those large sombre masses of stone
building pierced by comparatively small windows, and surmounted by what
may be called a roofed terrace or loggia, of which there are many
examples still to be seen in the venerable city. Grim doors, with
conspicuous scrolled hinges, having high up on each side of them a
small window defended by iron bars, opened on a groined entrance-court,
empty of everything but a massive lamp-iron suspended from the centre
of the groin. A smaller grim door on the left-hand admitted to the
stone staircase, and the rooms on the ground-floor. These last were
used as a warehouse by the proprietor; so was the first floor; and both
were filled with precious stores, destined to be carried, some perhaps
to the banks of the Scheldt, some to the shores of Africa, some to the
isles of the Aegean, or to the banks of the Euxine. Maso, the old
serving-man, when he returned from the Mercato with the stock of cheap
vegetables, had to make his slow way up to the second storey before he
reached the door of his master, Bardo, through which we are about to
enter only a few mornings after Nello’s conversation with the Greek.
We follow Maso across the ante-chamber to the door on the left-hand,
through which we pass as he opens it. He merely looks in and nods,
while a clear young voice says, “Ah, you are come back, Maso. It is
well. We have wanted nothing.”
The voice came from the farther end of a long, spacious room,
surrounded with shelves, on which books and antiquities were arranged
in scrupulous order. Here and there, on separate stands in front of the
shelves, were placed a beautiful feminine torso; a headless statue,
with an uplifted muscular arm wielding a bladeless sword; rounded,
dimpled, infantine limbs severed from the trunk, inviting the lips to
kiss the cold marble; some well-preserved Roman busts; and two or three
vases from Magna Grecia. A large table in the centre was covered with
antique bronze lamps and small vessels in dark pottery. The colour of
these objects was chiefly pale or sombre: the vellum bindings, with
their deep-ridged backs, gave little relief to the marble, livid with
long burial; the once splendid patch of carpet at the farther end of
the room had long been worn to dimness; the dark bronzes wanted
sunlight upon them to bring out their tinge of green, and the sun was
not yet high enough to send gleams of brightness through the narrow
windows that looked on the Via de’ Bardi.
The only spot of bright colour in the room was made by the hair of a
tall maiden of seventeen or eighteen, who was standing before a carved
_leggio_, or reading-desk, such as is often seen in the choirs of
Italian churches. The hair was of a reddish gold colour, enriched by an
unbroken small ripple, such as may be seen in the sunset clouds on
grandest autumnal evenings. It was confined by a black fillet above her
small ears, from which it rippled forward again, and made a natural
veil for her neck above her square-cut gown of black _rascia_, or
serge. Her eyes were bent on a large volume placed before her: one long
white hand rested on the reading-desk, and the other clasped the back
of her father’s chair.
The blind father sat with head uplifted and turned a little aside
towards his daughter, as if he were looking at her. His delicate
paleness, set off by the black velvet cap which surmounted his drooping
white hair, made all the more perceptible the likeness between his aged
features and those of the young maiden, whose cheeks were also without
any tinge of the rose. There was the same refinement of brow and
nostril in both, counterbalanced by a full though firm mouth and
powerful chin, which gave an expression of proud tenacity and latent
impetuousness: an expression carried out in the backward poise of the
girl’s head, and the grand line of her neck and shoulders. It was a
type of face of which one could not venture to say whether it would
inspire love or only that unwilling admiration which is mixed with
dread: the question must be decided by the eyes, which often seem
charged with a more direct message from the soul. But the eyes of the
father had long been silent, and the eyes of the daughter were bent on
the Latin pages of Politian’s ‘Miscellanea,’ from which she was reading
aloud at the eightieth chapter, to the following effect:—
“There was a certain nymph of Thebes named Chariclo, especially dear to
Pallas; and this nymph was the mother of Teiresias. But once when in
the heat of summer, Pallas, in company with Chariclo, was bathing her
disrobed limbs in the Heliconian Hippocrene, it happened that Teiresias
coming as a hunter to quench his thirst at the same fountain,
inadvertently beheld Minerva unveiled, and immediately became blind.
For it is declared in the Saturnian laws, that he who beholds the gods
against their will, shall atone for it by a heavy penalty... When
Teiresias had fallen into this calamity, Pallas, moved by the tears of
Chariclo, endowed him with prophecy and length of days, and even caused
his prudence and wisdom to continue after he had entered among the
shades, so that an oracle spake from his tomb: and she gave him a
staff, wherewith, as by a guide, he might walk without stumbling... And
hence, Nonnus, in the fifth book of the ‘Dionysiaca,’ introduces
Actreon exclaiming that he calls Teiresias happy, since, without dying,
and with the loss of his eyesight merely, he had beheld Minerva
unveiled, and thus, though blind, could for evermore carry her image in
his soul.”
At this point in the reading, the daughter’s hand slipped from the back
of the chair and met her father’s, which he had that moment uplifted;
but she had not looked round, and was going on, though with a voice a
little altered by some suppressed feeling, to read the Greek quotation
from Nonnus, when the old man said—
“Stay, Romola; reach me my own copy of Nonnus. It is a more correct
copy than any in Poliziano’s hands, for I made emendations in it which
have not yet been communicated to any man. I finished it in 1477, when
my sight was fast failing me.”
Romola walked to the farther end of the room, with the queenly step
which was the simple action of her tall, finely-wrought frame, without
the slightest conscious adjustment of herself.
“Is it in the right place, Romola?” asked Bardo, who was perpetually
seeking the assurance that the outward fact continued to correspond
with the image which lived to the minutest detail in his mind.
“Yes, father; at the west end of the room, on the third shelf from the
bottom, behind the bust of Hadrian, above Apollonius Rhodius and
Callimachus, and below Lucan and Silius Italicus.”
As Romola said this, a fine ear would have detected in her clear voice
and distinct utterance, a faint suggestion of weariness struggling with
habitual patience. But as she approached her father and saw his arms
stretched out a little with nervous excitement to seize the volume, her
hazel eyes filled with pity; she hastened to lay the book on his lap,
and kneeled down by him, looking up at him as if she believed that the
love in her face must surely make its way through the dark obstruction
that shut out everything else. At that moment the doubtful
attractiveness of Romola’s face, in which pride and passion seemed to
be quivering in the balance with native refinement and intelligence,
was transfigured to the most lovable womanliness by mingled pity and
affection: it was evident that the deepest fount of feeling within her
had not yet wrought its way to the less changeful features, and only
found its outlet through her eyes.
But the father, unconscious of that soft radiance, looked flushed and
agitated as his hand explored the edges and back of the large book.
“The vellum is yellowed in these thirteen years, Romola.”
“Yes, father,” said Romola, gently; “but your letters at the back are
dark and plain still—fine Roman letters; and the Greek character,” she
continued, laying the book open on her father’s knee, “is more
beautiful than that of any of your bought manuscripts.”
“Assuredly, child,” said Bardo, passing his finger across the page, as
if he hoped to discriminate line and margin. “What hired amanuensis can
be equal to the scribe who loves the words that grow under his hand,
and to whom an error or indistinctness in the text is more painful than
a sudden darkness or obstacle across his path? And even these
mechanical printers who threaten to make learning a base and vulgar
thing—even they must depend on the manuscript over which we scholars
have bent with that insight into the poet’s meaning which is closely
akin to the _mens divinior_ of the poet himself; unless they would
flood the world with grammatical falsities and inexplicable anomalies
that would turn the very fountain of Parnassus into a deluge of
poisonous mud. But find the passage in the fifth book, to which
Poliziano refers—I know it very well.”
Seating herself on a low stool, close to her father’s knee, Romola took
the book on her lap and read the four verses containing the exclamation
of Actreon.
“It is true, Romola,” said Bardo, when she had finished; “it is a true
conception of the poet; for what is that grosser, narrower light by
which men behold merely the petty scene around them, compared with that
far-stretching, lasting light which spreads over centuries of thought,
and over the life of nations, and makes clear to us the minds of the
immortals who have reaped the great harvest and left us to glean in
their furrows? For me, Romola, even when I could see, it was with the
great dead that I lived; while the living often seemed to me mere
spectres—shadows dispossessed of true feeling and intelligence; and
unlike those Lamiae, to whom Poliziano, with that superficial ingenuity
which I do not deny to him, compares our inquisitive Florentines,
because they put on their eyes when they went abroad, and took them off
when they got home again, I have returned from the converse of the
streets as from a forgotten dream, and have sat down among my books,
saying with Petrarca, the modern who is least unworthy to be named
after the ancients, ‘Libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur,
consulunt, et viva quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate junguntur.’”
“And in one thing you are happier than your favourite Petrarca,
father,” said Romola, affectionately humouring the old man’s
disposition to dilate in this way; “for he used to look at his copy of
Homer and think sadly that the Greek was a dead letter to him: so far,
he had the inward blindness that you feel is worse than your outward
blindness.”
“True, child; for I carry within me the fruits of that fervid study
which I gave to the Greek tongue under the teaching of the younger
Crisolora, and Filelfo, and Argiropulo; though that great work in which
I had desired to gather, as into a firm web, all the threads that my
research had laboriously disentangled, and which would have been the
vintage of my life, was cut off by the failure of my sight and my want
of a fitting coadjutor. For the sustained zeal and unconquerable
patience demanded from those who would tread the unbeaten paths of
knowledge are still less reconcilable with the wandering, vagrant
propensity of the feminine mind than with the feeble powers of the
feminine body.”
“Father,” said Romola, with a sudden flush and in an injured tone, “I
read anything you wish me to read; and I will look out any passages for
you, and make whatever notes you want.”
Bardo shook his head, and smiled with a bitter sort of pity. “As well
try to be a pentathlos and perform all the five feats of the palaestra
with the limbs of a nymph. Have I forgotten thy fainting in the mere
search for the references I needed to explain a single passage of
Callimachus?”
“But, father, it was the weight of the books, and Maso can help me; it
was not want of attention and patience.”
Bardo shook his head again. “It is not mere bodily organs that I want:
it is the sharp edge of a young mind to pierce the way for my somewhat
blunted faculties. For blindness acts like a dam, sending the streams
of thought backward along the already-travelled channels and hindering
the course onward. If my son had not forsaken me, deluded by debasing
fanatical dreams, worthy only of an energumen whose dwelling is among
tombs, I might have gone on and seen my path broadening to the end of
my life; for he was a youth of great promise. But it has closed in
now,” the old man continued, after a short pause; “it has closed in
now;—all but the narrow track he has left me to tread—alone in my
blindness.”
Romola started from her seat, and carried away the large volume to its
place again, stung too acutely by her father’s last words to remain
motionless as well as silent; and when she turned away from the shelf
again, she remained standing at some distance from him, stretching her
arms downwards and clasping her fingers tightly as she looked with a
sad dreariness in her young face at the lifeless objects around her—the
parchment backs, the unchanging mutilated marble, the bits of obsolete
bronze and clay.
Bardo, though usually susceptible to Romola’s movements and eager to
trace them, was now too entirely preoccupied by the pain of rankling
memories to notice her departure from his side.
“Yes,” he went on, “with my son to aid me, I might have had my due
share in the triumphs of this century: the names of the Bardi, father
and son, might have been held reverently on the lips of scholars in the
ages to come; not on account of frivolous verses or philosophical
treatises, which are superfluous and presumptuous attempts to imitate
the inimitable, such as allure vain men like Panhormita, and from which
even the admirable Poggio did not keep himself sufficiently free; but
because we should have given a lamp whereby men might have studied the
supreme productions of the past. For why is a young man like Poliziano
(who was not yet born when I was already held worthy to maintain a
discussion with Thomas of Sarzana) to have a glorious memory as a
commentator on the Pandects—why is Ficino, whose Latin is an offence to
me, and who wanders purblind among the superstitious fancies that
marked the decline at once of art, literature, and philosophy, to
descend to posterity as the very high priest of Platonism, while I, who
am more than their equal, have not effected anything but scattered
work, which will be appropriated by other men? Why? but because my son,
whom I had brought up to replenish my ripe learning with young
enterprise, left me and all liberal pursuits that he might lash himself
and howl at midnight with besotted friars—that he might go wandering on
pilgrimages befitting men who know of no past older than the missal and
the crucifix?—left me when the night was already beginning to fall on
me.”
In these last words the old man’s voice, which had risen high in
indignant protest, fell into a tone of reproach so tremulous and
plaintive that Romola, turning her eyes again towards the blind aged
face, felt her heart swell with forgiving pity. She seated herself by
her father again, and placed her hand on his knee—too proud to obtrude
consolation in words that might seem like a vindication of her own
value, yet wishing to comfort him by some sign of her presence.
“Yes, Romola,” said Bardo, automatically letting his left-hand, with
its massive prophylactic rings, fall a little too heavily on the
delicate blue-veined back of the girl’s right, so that she bit her lip
to prevent herself from starting. “If even Florence only is to remember
me, it can but be on the same ground that it will remember Niccolò
Niccoli—because I forsook the vulgar pursuit of wealth in commerce that
I might devote myself to collecting the precious remains of ancient art
and wisdom, and leave them, after the example of the munificent Romans,
for an everlasting possession to my fellow-citizens. But why do I say
Florence only? If Florence remembers me, will not the world remember
me? ... Yet,” added Bardo, after a short pause, his voice falling again
into a saddened key, “Lorenzo’s untimely death has raised a new
difficulty. I had his promise—I should have had his bond—that my
collection should always bear my name and should never be sold, though
the harpies might clutch everything else; but there is enough for
them—there is more than enough—and for thee, too, Romola, there will be
enough. Besides, thou wilt marry; Bernardo reproaches me that I do not
seek a fitting _parentado_ for thee, and we will delay no longer, we
will think about it.”
“No, no, father; what could you do? besides, it is useless: wait till
some one seeks me,” said Romola, hastily.
“Nay, my child, that is not the paternal duty. It was not so held by
the ancients, and in this respect Florentines have not degenerated from
their ancestral customs.”
“But I will study diligently,” said Romola, her eyes dilating with
anxiety. “I will become as learned as Cassandra Fedele: I will try and
be as useful to you as if I had been a boy, and then perhaps some great
scholar will want to marry me, and will not mind about a dowry; and he
will like to come and live with you, and he will be to you in place of
my brother... and you will not be sorry that I was a daughter.”
There was a rising sob in Romola’s voice as she said the last words,
which touched the fatherly fibre in Bardo. He stretched his hand upward
a little in search of her golden hair, and as she placed her head under
his hand, he gently stroked it, leaning towards her as if his eyes
discerned some glimmer there.
“Nay, Romola mia, I said not so; if I have pronounced an anathema on a
degenerate and ungrateful son, I said not that I could wish thee other
than the sweet daughter thou hast been to me. For what son could have
tended me so gently in the frequent sickness I have had of late? And
even in learning thou art not, according to thy measure, contemptible.
Something perhaps were to be wished in thy capacity of attention and
memory, not incompatible even with the feminine mind. But as Calcondila
bore testimony, when he aided me to teach thee, thou hast a ready
apprehension, and even a wide-glancing intelligence. And thou hast a
man’s nobility of soul: thou hast never fretted me with thy petty
desires as thy mother did. It is true, I have been careful to keep thee
aloof from the debasing influence of thy own sex, with their
sparrow-like frivolity and their enslaving superstition, except,
indeed, from that of our cousin Brigida, who may well serve as a
scarecrow and a warning. And though—since I agree with the divine
Petrarca, when he declares, quoting the ‘Aulularia’ of Plautus, who
again was indebted for the truth to the supreme Greek intellect,
‘Optimam foeminam nullam esse, alia licet alia pejor sit’—I cannot
boast that thou art entirely lifted out of that lower category to which
Nature assigned thee, nor even that in erudition thou art on a par with
the more learned women of this age; thou art, nevertheless—yes, Romola
mia,” said the old man, his pedantry again melting into tenderness,
“thou art my sweet daughter, and thy voice is as the lower notes of the
flute, ‘dulcis, durabilis, clara, pura, secans aëra et auribus sedens,’
according to the choice words of Quintilian; and Bernardo tells me thou
art fair, and thy hair is like the brightness of the morning, and
indeed it seems to me that I discern some radiance from thee. Ah! I
know how all else looks in this room, but thy form I only guess at.
Thou art no longer the little woman six years old, that faded for me
into darkness; thou art tall, and thy arm is but little below mine. Let
us walk together.”
The old man rose, and Romola, soothed by these beams of tenderness,
looked happy again as she drew his arm within hers, and placed in his
right-hand the stick which rested at the side of his chair. While Bardo
had been sitting, he had seemed hardly more than sixty: his face,
though pale, had that refined texture in which wrinkles and lines are
never deep; but now that he began to walk he looked as old as he really
was—rather more than seventy; for his tall spare frame had the
student’s stoop of the shoulders, and he stepped with the undecided
gait of the blind.
“No, Romola,” he said, pausing against the bust of Hadrian, and passing
his stick from the right to the left that he might explore the familiar
outline with a “seeing hand.” “There will be nothing else to preserve
my memory and carry down my name as a member of the great republic of
letters—nothing but my library and my collection of antiquities. And
they are choice,” continued Bardo, pressing the bust and speaking in a
tone of insistence. “The collections of Niccolò I know were larger; but
take any collection which is the work of a single man—that of the great
Boccaccio even—mine will surpass it. That of Poggio was contemptible
compared with mine. It will be a great gift to unborn scholars. And
there is nothing else. For even if I were to yield to the wish of Aldo
Manuzio when he sets up his press at Venice, and give him the aid of my
annotated manuscripts, I know well what would be the result: some other
scholar’s name would stand on the title-page of the edition—some
scholar who would have fed on my honey, and then declared in his
preface that he had gathered it all himself fresh from Hymettus. Else,
why have I refused the loan of many an annotated codex? why have I
refused to make public any of my translations? why? but because
scholarship is a system of licenced robbery, and your man in scarlet
and furred robe who sits in judgment on thieves, is himself a thief of
the thoughts and the fame that belong to his fellows. But against that
robbery Bardo de’ Bardi shall struggle—though blind and forsaken, he
shall struggle. I too have a right to be remembered—as great a right as
Pontanus or Merula, whose names will be foremost on the lips of
posterity, because they sought patronage and found it; because they had
tongues that could flatter, and blood that was used to be nourished
from the client’s basket. I have a right to be remembered.”
The old man’s voice had become at once loud and tremulous, and a pink
flush overspread his proud, delicately-cut features, while the
habitually raised attitude of his head gave the idea that behind the
curtain of his blindness he saw some imaginary high tribunal to which
he was appealing against the injustice of Fame.
Romola was moved with sympathetic indignation, for in her nature too
there lay the same large claims, and the same spirit of struggle
against their denial. She tried to calm her father by a still prouder
word than his.
“Nevertheless, father, it is a great gift of the gods to be born with a
hatred and contempt of all injustice and meanness. Yours is a higher
lot, never to have lied and truckled, than to have shared honours won
by dishonour. There is strength in scorn, as there was in the martial
fury by which men became insensible to wounds.”
“It is well said, Romola. It is a Promethean word thou hast uttered,”
answered Bardo, after a little interval in which he had begun to lean
on his stick again, and to walk on. “And I indeed am not to be pierced
by the shafts of Fortune. My armour is the _aes triplex_ of a clear
conscience, and a mind nourished by the precepts of philosophy. ‘For
men,’ says Epictetus, ‘are disturbed not by things themselves, but by
their opinions or thoughts concerning those things.’ And again,
‘whosoever will be free, let him not desire or dread that which it is
in the power of others either to deny or inflict: otherwise, he is a
slave.’ And of all such gifts as are dependent on the caprice of
fortune or of men, I have long ago learned to say, with Horace—who,
however, is too wavering in his philosophy, vacillating between the
precepts of Zeno and the less worthy maxims of Epicurus, and
attempting, as we say, ‘duabus sellis sedere’—concerning such
accidents, I say, with the pregnant brevity of the poet—
‘Sunt qui non habeant, est qui non curat habere.’
“He is referring to gems, and purple, and other insignia of wealth; but
I may apply his words not less justly to the tributes men pay us with
their lips and their pens, which are also matters of purchase, and
often with base coin. Yes, ‘_inanis_’—hollow, empty—is the epithet
justly bestowed on Fame.”
They made the tour of the room in silence after this; but Bardo’s
lip-born maxims were as powerless over the passion which had been
moving him, as if they had been written on parchment and hung round his
neck in a sealed bag; and he presently broke forth again in a new tone
of insistence.
“_Inanis_? yes, if it is a lying fame; but not if it is the just meed
of labour and a great purpose. I claim my right: it is not fair that
the work of my brain and my hands should not be a monument to me—it is
not just that my labour should bear the name of another man. It is but
little to ask,” the old man went on, bitterly, “that my name should be
over the door—that men should own themselves debtors to the Bardi
Library in Florence. They will speak coldly of me, perhaps: ‘a diligent
collector and transcriber,’ they will say, ‘and also of some critical
ingenuity, but one who could hardly be conspicuous in an age so
fruitful in illustrious scholars. Yet he merits our pity, for in the
latter years of his life he was blind, and his only son, to whose
education he had devoted his best years—’ Nevertheless, my name will be
remembered, and men will honour me: not with the breath of flattery,
purchased by mean bribes, but because I have laboured, and because my
labours will remain. Debts! I know there are debts; and there is thy
dowry, Romola, to be paid. But there must be enough—or, at least, there
can lack but a small sum, such as the Signoria might well provide. And
if Lorenzo had not died, all would have been secured and settled. But
now...”
At this moment Maso opened the door, and advancing to his master,
announced that Nello, the barber, had desired him to say, that he was
come with the Greek scholar whom he had asked leave to introduce.
“It is well,” said the old man. “Bring them in.”
Bardo, conscious that he looked more dependent when he was walking,
liked always to be seated in the presence of strangers, and Romola,
without needing to be told, conducted him to his chair. She was
standing by him at her full height, in quiet majestic self-possession,
when the visitors entered; and the most penetrating observer would
hardly have divined that this proud pale face, at the slightest touch
on the fibres of affection or pity, could become passionate with
tenderness, or that this woman, who imposed a certain awe on those who
approached her, was in a state of girlish simplicity and ignorance
concerning the world outside her father’s books.