Dawning Hopes.
When Maso opened the door again, and ushered in the two visitors,
Nello, first making a deep reverence to Romola, gently pushed Tito
before him, and advanced with him towards her father.
“Messer Bardo,” he said, in a more measured and respectful tone than
was usual with him, “I have the honour of presenting to you the Greek
scholar, who has been eager to have speech of you, not less from the
report I have made to him of your learning and your priceless
collections, than because of the furtherance your patronage may give
him under the transient need to which he has been reduced by shipwreck.
His name is Tito Melema, at your service.”
Romola’s astonishment could hardly have been greater if the stranger
had worn a panther-skin and carried a thyrsus; for the cunning barber
had said nothing of the Greek’s age or appearance; and among her
father’s scholarly visitors, she had hardly ever seen any but
middle-aged or grey-headed men. There was only one masculine face, at
once youthful and beautiful, the image of which remained deeply
impressed on her mind: it was that of her brother, who long years ago
had taken her on his knee, kissed her, and never come back again: a
fair face, with sunny hair, like her own. But the habitual attitude of
her mind towards strangers—a proud self-dependence and determination to
ask for nothing even by a smile—confirmed in her by her father’s
complaints against the world’s injustice, was like a snowy embankment
hemming in the rush of admiring surprise. Tito’s bright face showed its
rich-tinted beauty without any rivalry of colour above his black _sajo_
or tunic reaching to the knees. It seemed like a wreath of spring,
dropped suddenly in Romola’s young but wintry life, which had inherited
nothing but memories—memories of a dead mother, of a lost brother, of a
blind father’s happier time—memories of far-off light, love, and
beauty, that lay embedded in dark mines of books, and could hardly give
out their brightness again until they were kindled for her by the torch
of some known joy. Nevertheless, she returned Tito’s bow, made to her
on entering, with the same pale proud face as ever; but, as he
approached, the snow melted, and when he ventured to look towards her
again, while Nello was speaking, a pink flush overspread her face, to
vanish again almost immediately, as if her imperious will had recalled
it. Tito’s glance, on the contrary, had that gentle, beseeching
admiration in it which is the most propitiating of appeals to a proud,
shy woman, and is perhaps the only atonement a man can make for being
too handsome. The finished fascination of his air came chiefly from the
absence of demand and assumption. It was that of a fleet, soft-coated,
dark-eyed animal that delights you by not bounding away in indifference
from you, and unexpectedly pillows its chin on your palm, and looks up
at you desiring to be stroked—as if it loved you.
“Messere, I give you welcome,” said Bardo, with some condescension;
“misfortune wedded to learning, and especially to Greek learning, is a
letter of credit that should win the ear of every instructed
Florentine; for, as you are doubtless aware, since the period when your
countryman, Manuelo Crisolora, diffused the light of his teaching in
the chief cities of Italy, now nearly a century ago, no man is held
worthy of the name of scholar who has acquired merely the transplanted
and derivative literature of the Latins; rather, such inert students
are stigmatised as _opici_ or barbarians according to the phrase of the
Romans themselves, who frankly replenished their urns at the
fountain-head. I am, as you perceive, and as Nello has doubtless
forewarned you, totally blind: a calamity to which we Florentines are
held especially liable, whether owing to the cold winds which rush upon
us in spring from the passes of the Apennines, or to that sudden
transition from the cool gloom of our houses to the dazzling brightness
of our summer sun, by which the _lippi_ are said to have been made so
numerous among the ancient Romans; or, in fine, to some occult cause
which eludes our superficial surmises. But I pray you be seated: Nello,
my friend, be seated.”
Bardo paused until his fine ear had assured him that the visitors were
seating themselves, and that Romola was taking her usual chair at his
right-hand. Then he said—
“From what part of Greece do you come, Messere? I had thought that your
unhappy country had been almost exhausted of those sons who could
cherish in their minds any image of her original glory, though indeed
the barbarous Sultans have of late shown themselves not indisposed to
engraft on their wild stock the precious vine which their own fierce
bands have hewn down and trampled under foot. From what part of Greece
do you come?”
“I sailed last from Nauplia,” said Tito; “but I have resided both at
Constantinople and Thessalonica, and have travelled in various parts
little visited by Western Christians since the triumph of the Turkish
arms. I should tell you, however, Messere, that I was not born in
Greece, but at Bari. I spent the first sixteen years of my life in
Southern Italy and Sicily.”
While Tito was speaking, some emotion passed, like a breath on the
waters, across Bardo’s delicate features; he leaned forward, put out
his right-hand towards Romola, and turned his head as if about to speak
to her; but then, correcting himself, turned away again, and said, in a
subdued voice—
“Excuse me; is it not true—you are young?”
“I am three-and-twenty,” said Tito.
“Ah,” said Bardo, still in a tone of subdued excitement, “and you had,
doubtless, a father who cared for your early instruction—who, perhaps,
was himself a scholar?”
There was a slight pause before Tito’s answer came to the ear of Bardo;
but for Romola and Nello it began with a slight shock that seemed to
pass through him, and cause a momentary quivering of the lip; doubtless
at the revival of a supremely painful remembrance.
“Yes,” he replied, “at least a father by adoption. He was a Neapolitan,
and of accomplished scholarship, both Latin and Greek. But,” added
Tito, after another slight pause, “he is lost to me—was lost on a
voyage he too rashly undertook to Delos.”
Bardo sank backward again, too delicate to ask another question that
might probe a sorrow which he divined to be recent. Romola, who knew
well what were the fibres that Tito’s voice had stirred in her father,
felt that this new acquaintance had with wonderful suddenness got
within the barrier that lay between them and the alien world. Nello,
thinking that the evident check given to the conversation offered a
graceful opportunity for relieving himself from silence, said—
“In truth, it is as clear as Venetian glass that this fine young man
has had the best training; for the two Cennini have set him to work at
their Greek sheets already, and it seems to me they are not men to
begin cutting before they have felt the edge of their tools; they
tested him well beforehand, we may be sure, and if there are two things
not to be hidden—love and a cough—I say there is a third, and that is
ignorance, when once a man is obliged to do something besides wagging
his head. The _tonsor inequalis_ is inevitably betrayed when he takes
the shears in his hand; is it not true, Messer Bardo? I speak after the
fashion of a barber, but, as Luigi Pulci says—
“‘Perdonimi s’io fallo: chi m’ascolta
Intenda il mio volgar col suo latino.’”
“Nay, my good Nello,” said Bardo, with an air of friendly severity,
“you are not altogether illiterate, and might doubtless have made a
more respectable progress in learning if you had abstained somewhat
from the _cicalata_ and gossip of the street-corner, to which our
Florentines are excessively addicted; but still more if you had not
clogged your memory with those frivolous productions of which Luigi
Pulci has furnished the most peccant exemplar—a compendium of
extravagances and incongruities the farthest removed from the models of
a pure age, and resembling rather the _grylli_ or conceits of a period
when mystic meaning was held a warrant for monstrosity of form; with
this difference, that while the monstrosity is retained, the mystic
meaning is absent; in contemptible contrast with the great poem of
Virgil, who, as I long held with Filelfo, before Landino had taken upon
him to expound the same opinion, embodied the deepest lessons of
philosophy in a graceful and well-knit fable. And I cannot but regard
the multiplication of these babbling, lawless productions, albeit
countenanced by the patronage, and in some degree the example of
Lorenzo himself, otherwise a friend to true learning, as a sign that
the glorious hopes of this century are to be quenched in gloom; nay,
that they have been the delusive prologue to an age worse than that of
iron—the age of tinsel and gossamer, in which no thought has substance
enough to be moulded into consistent and lasting form.”
“Once more, pardon,” said Nello, opening his palms outwards, and
shrugging his shoulders, “I find myself knowing so many things in good
Tuscan before I have time to think of the Latin for them; and Messer
Luigi’s rhymes are always slipping off the lips of my customers:—that
is what corrupts me. And, indeed, talking of customers, I have left my
shop and my reputation too long in the custody of my slow Sandro, who
does not deserve even to be called a _tonsor inequalis_, but rather to
be pronounced simply a bungler in the vulgar tongue. So with your
permission, Messer Bardo, I will take my leave—well understood that I
am at your service whenever Maso calls upon me. It seems a thousand
years till I dress and perfume the damigella’s hair, which deserves to
shine in the heavens as a constellation, though indeed it were a pity
for it ever to go so far out of reach.”
Three voices made a fugue of friendly farewells to Nello, as he
retreated with a bow to Romola and a beck to Tito. The acute barber saw
that the pretty youngster, who had crept into his liking by some strong
magic, was well launched in Bardo’s favourable regard; and satisfied
that his introduction had not miscarried so far, he felt the propriety
of retiring.
The little burst of wrath, called forth by Nello’s unlucky quotation,
had diverted Bardo’s mind from the feelings which had just before been
hemming in further speech, and he now addressed Tito again with his
ordinary calmness.
“Ah! young man, you are happy in having been able to unite the
advantages of travel with those of study, and you will be welcome among
us as a bringer of fresh tidings from a land which has become sadly
strange to us, except through the agents of a now restricted commerce
and the reports of hasty pilgrims. For those days are in the far
distance which I myself witnessed, when men like Aurispa and Guarino
went out to Greece as to a storehouse, and came back laden with
manuscripts which every scholar was eager to borrow—and, be it owned
with shame, not always willing to restore; nay, even the days when
erudite Greeks flocked to our shores for a refuge, seem far-off
now—farther off than the on-coming of my blindness. But doubtless,
young man, research after the treasures of antiquity was not alien to
the purpose of your travels?”
“Assuredly not,” said Tito. “On the contrary, my companion—my
father—was willing to risk his life in his zeal for the discovery of
inscriptions and other traces of ancient civilisation.”
“And I trust there is a record of his researches and their results,”
said Bardo, eagerly, “since they must be even more precious than those
of Ciriaco, which I have diligently availed myself of, though they are
not always illuminated by adequate learning.”
“There _was_ such a record,” said Tito, “but it was lost, like
everything else, in the shipwreck I suffered below Ancona. The only
record left is such as remains in our—in my memory.”
“You must lose no time in committing it to paper, young man,” said
Bardo, with growing interest. “Doubtless you remember much, if you
aided in transcription; for when I was your age, words wrought
themselves into my mind as if they had been fixed by the tool of the
graver; wherefore I constantly marvel at the capriciousness of my
daughter’s memory, which grasps certain objects with tenacity, and lets
fall all those minutiae whereon depends accuracy, the very soul of
scholarship. But I apprehend no such danger with you, young man, if
your will has seconded the advantages of your training.”
When Bardo made this reference to his daughter, Tito ventured to turn
his eyes towards her, and at the accusation against her memory his face
broke into its brightest smile, which was reflected as inevitably as
sudden sunbeams in Romola’s. Conceive the soothing delight of that
smile to her! Romola had never dreamed that there was a scholar in the
world who would smile at a deficiency for which she was constantly made
to feel herself a culprit. It was like the dawn of a new sense to
her—the sense of comradeship. They did not look away from each other
immediately, as if the smile had been a stolen one; they looked and
smiled with frank enjoyment.
“She is not really so cold and proud,” thought Tito.
“Does _he_ forget too, I wonder?” thought Romola, “Yet I hope not, else
he will vex my father.”
But Tito was obliged to turn away, and answer Bardo’s question.
“I have had much practice in transcription,” he said; “but in the case
of inscriptions copied in memorable scenes, rendered doubly impressive
by the sense of risk and adventure, it may have happened that my
retention of written characters has been weakened. On the plain of the
Eurotas, or among the gigantic stones of Mycenae and Tyrins—especially
when the fear of the Turk hovers over one like a vulture—the mind
wanders, even though the hand writes faithfully what the eye dictates.
But something doubtless I have retained,” added Tito, with a modesty
which was not false, though he was conscious that it was politic,
“something that might be of service if illustrated and corrected by a
wider learning than my own.”
“That is well spoken, young man,” said Bardo, delighted. “And I will
not withhold from you such aid as I can give, if you like to
communicate with me concerning your recollections. I foresee a work
which will be a useful supplement to the ‘Isolario’ of Christoforo
Buondelmonte, and which may take rank with the ‘Itineraria’ of Ciriaco
and the admirable Ambrogio Traversari. But we must prepare ourselves
for calumny, young man,” Bardo went on with energy, as if the work were
already growing so fast that the time of trial was near; “if your book
contains novelties you will be charged with forgery; if my elucidations
should clash with any principles of interpretation adopted by another
scholar, our personal characters will be attacked, we shall be
impeached with foul actions; you must prepare yourself to be told that
your mother was a fish-woman, and that your father was a renegade
priest or a hanged malefactor. I myself, for having shown error in a
single preposition, had an invective written against me wherein I was
taxed with treachery, fraud, indecency, and even hideous crimes. Such,
my young friend—such are the flowers with which the glorious path of
scholarship is strewed! But tell me, then: I have learned much
concerning Byzantium and Thessalonica long ago from Demetrio
Calcondila, who has but lately departed from Florence; but you, it
seems, have visited less familiar scenes?”
“Yes; we made what I may call a pilgrimage full of danger, for the sake
of visiting places which have almost died out of the memory of the
West, for they lie away from the track of pilgrims; and my father used
to say that scholars themselves hardly imagine them to have any
existence out of books. He was of opinion that a new and more glorious
era would open for learning when men should begin to look for their
commentaries on the ancient writers in the remains of cities and
temples, nay, in the paths of the rivers, and on the face of the
valleys and the mountains.”
“Ah!” said Bardo, fervidly, “your father, then, was not a common man.
Was he fortunate, may I ask? Had he many friends?” These last words
were uttered in a tone charged with meaning.
“No; he made enemies—chiefly, I believe, by a certain impetuous
candour; and they hindered his advancement, so that he lived in
obscurity. And he would never stoop to conciliate: he could never
forget an injury.”
“Ah!” said Bardo again, with a long, deep intonation.
“Among our hazardous expeditions,” continued Tito, willing to prevent
further questions on a point so personal, “I remember with particular
vividness a hastily snatched visit to Athens. Our hurry, and the double
danger of being seized as prisoners by the Turks, and of our galley
raising anchor before we could return, made it seem like a fevered
vision of the night—the wide plain, the girdling mountains, the ruined
porticos and columns, either standing far aloof, as if receding from
our hurried footsteps, or else jammed in confusedly among the dwellings
of Christians degraded into servitude, or among the forts and turrets
of their Moslem conquerors, who have their stronghold on the
Acropolis.”
“You fill me with surprise,” said Bardo. “Athens, then, is not utterly
destroyed and swept away, as I had imagined?”
“No wonder you should be under that mistake, for few even of the Greeks
themselves, who live beyond the mountain boundary of Attica, know
anything about the present condition of Athens, or _Setine_, as the
sailors call it. I remember, as we were rounding the promontory of
Sunium, the Greek pilot we had on board our Venetian galley pointed to
the mighty columns that stand on the summit of the rock—the remains, as
you know well, of the great temple erected to the goddess Athena, who
looked down from that high shrine with triumph at her conquered rival
Poseidon;—well, our Greek pilot, pointing to those columns, said, ‘That
was the school of the great philosopher Aristotle.’ And at Athens
itself, the monk who acted as our guide in the hasty view we snatched,
insisted most on showing us the spot where Saint Philip baptised the
Ethiopian eunuch, or some such legend.”
“Talk not of monks and their legends, young man!” said Bardo,
interrupting Tito impetuously. “It is enough to overlay human hope and
enterprise with an eternal frost to think that the ground which was
trodden by philosophers and poets is crawled over by those
insect-swarms of besotted fanatics or howling hypocrites.”
“_Perdio_, I have no affection for them,” said Tito, with a shrug;
“servitude agrees well with a religion like theirs, which lies in the
renunciation of all that makes life precious to other men. And they
carry the yoke that befits them: their matin chant is drowned by the
voice of the muezzin, who, from the gallery of the high tower on the
Acropolis, calls every Mussulman to his prayers. That tower springs
from the Parthenon itself; and every time we paused and directed our
eyes towards it, our guide set up a wail, that a temple which had once
been won from the diabolical uses of the pagans to become the temple of
another virgin than Pallas—the Virgin Mother of God—was now again
perverted to the accursed ends of the Moslem. It was the sight of those
walls of the Acropolis, which disclosed themselves in the distance as
we leaned over the side of our galley when it was forced by contrary
winds to anchor in the Piraeus, that fired my father’s mind with the
determination to see Athens at all risks, and in spite of the sailors’
warnings that if we lingered till a change of wind, they would depart
without us: but, after all, it was impossible for us to venture near
the Acropolis, for the sight of men eager in examining ‘old stones’
raised the suspicion that we were Venetian spies, and we had to hurry
back to the harbour.”
“We will talk more of these things,” said Bardo, eagerly. “You must
recall everything, to the minutest trace left in your memory. You will
win the gratitude of after-times by leaving a record of the aspect
Greece bore while yet the barbarians had not swept away every trace of
the structures that Pausanias and Pliny described: you will take those
great writers as your models; and such contribution of criticism and
suggestion as my riper mind can supply shall not be wanting to you.
There will be much to tell; for you have travelled, you said, in the
Peloponnesus?”
“Yes; and in Boeotia also: I have rested in the groves of Helicon, and
tasted of the fountain Hippocrene. But on every memorable spot in
Greece conquest after conquest has set its seal, till there is a
confusion of ownership even in ruins, that only close study and
comparison could unravel. High over every fastness, from the plains of
Lacedaemon to the straits of Thermopylae, there towers some huge
Frankish fortress, once inhabited by a French or Italian marquis, now
either abandoned or held by Turkish bands.”
“Stay!” cried Bardo, whose mind was now too thoroughly preoccupied by
the idea of the future book to attend to Tito’s further narration. “Do
you think of writing in Latin or Greek? Doubtless Greek is the more
ready clothing for your thoughts, and it is the nobler language. But,
on the other hand, Latin is the tongue in which we shall measure
ourselves with the larger and more famous number of modern rivals. And
if you are less at ease in it, I will aid you—yes, I will spend on you
that long-accumulated study which was to have been thrown into the
channel of another work—a work in which I myself was to have had a
helpmate.”
Bardo paused a moment, and then added—
“But who knows whether that work may not be executed yet? For you, too,
young man, have been brought up by a father who poured into your mind
all the long-gathered stream of his knowledge and experience. Our aid
might be mutual.”
Romola, who had watched her father’s growing excitement, and divined
well the invisible currents of feeling that determined every question
and remark, felt herself in a glow of strange anxiety: she turned her
eyes on Tito continually, to watch the impression her father’s words
made on him, afraid lest he should be inclined to dispel these visions
of co-operation which were lighting up her father’s face with a new
hope. But no! He looked so bright and gentle: he must feel, as she did,
that in this eagerness of blind age there was piteousness enough to
call forth inexhaustible patience. How much more strongly he would feel
this if he knew about her brother! A girl of eighteen imagines the
feelings behind the face that has moved her with its sympathetic youth,
as easily as primitive people imagined the humours of the gods in fair
weather: what is she to believe in, if not in this vision woven from
within?
And Tito was really very far from feeling impatient. He delighted in
sitting there with the sense that Romola’s attention was fixed on him,
and that he could occasionally look at her. He was pleased that Bardo
should take an interest in him; and he did not dwell with enough
seriousness on the prospect of the work in which he was to be aided, to
feel moved by it to anything else than that easy, good-humoured
acquiescence which was natural to him.
“I shall be proud and happy,” he said, in answer to Bardo’s last words,
“if my services can be held a meet offering to the matured scholarship
of Messere. But doubtless,”—here he looked towards Romola—“the lovely
damigella, your daughter, makes all other aid superfluous; for I have
learned from Nello that she has been nourished on the highest studies
from her earliest years.”
“You are mistaken,” said Romola; “I am by no means sufficient to my
father: I have not the gifts that are necessary for scholarship.”
Romola did not make this self-depreciatory statement in a tone of
anxious humility, but with a proud gravity.
“Nay, my Romola,” said her father, not willing that the stranger should
have too low a conception of his daughter’s powers; “thou art not
destitute of gifts; rather, thou art endowed beyond the measure of
women; but thou hast withal the woman’s delicate frame, which ever
craves repose and variety, and so begets a wandering imagination. My
daughter,”—turning to Tito—“has been very precious to me, filling up to
the best of her power the place of a son. For I had once a son...”
Bardo checked himself: he did not wish to assume an attitude of
complaint in the presence of a stranger, and he remembered that this
young man, in whom he had unexpectedly become so much interested, was
still a stranger, towards whom it became him rather to keep the
position of a patron. His pride was roused to double activity by the
fear that he had forgotten his dignity.
“But,” he resumed, in his original tone of condescension, “we are
departing from what I believe is to you the most important business.
Nello informed me that you had certain gems which you would fain
dispose of, and that you desired a passport to some man of wealth and
taste who would be likely to become a purchaser.”
“It is true; for, though I have obtained employment, as a corrector
with the Cennini, my payment leaves little margin beyond the provision
of necessaries, and would leave less but that my good friend Nello
insists on my hiring a lodging from him, and saying nothing about the
rent till better days.”
“Nello is a good-hearted prodigal,” said Bardo; “and though, with that
ready ear and ready tongue of his, he is too much like the ill-famed
Margites—knowing many things and knowing them all badly, as I hinted to
him but now—he is nevertheless ‘abnormis sapiens,’ after the manner of
our born Florentines. But have you the gems with you? I would willingly
know what they are—yet it is useless: no, it might only deepen regret.
I cannot add to my store.”
“I have one or two intaglios of much beauty,” said Tito, proceeding to
draw from his wallet a small case.
But Romola no sooner saw the movement than she looked at him with
significant gravity, and placed her finger on her lips—
“Con viso che tacendo dicea, Taci.”
If Bardo were made aware that the gems were within reach, she knew well
he would want a minute description of them, and it would become pain to
him that they should go away from him, even if he did not insist on
some device for purchasing them in spite of poverty. But she had no
sooner made this sign than she felt rather guilty and ashamed at having
virtually confessed a weakness of her father’s to a stranger. It seemed
that she was destined to a sudden confidence and familiarity with this
young Greek, strangely at variance with her deep-seated pride and
reserve; and this consciousness again brought the unwonted colour to
her cheeks.
Tito understood her look and sign, and immediately withdrew his hand
from the case, saying, in a careless tone, so as to make it appear that
he was merely following up his last words, “But they are usually in the
keeping of Messer Domenico Cennini, who has strong and safe places for
these things. He estimates them as worth at least five hundred ducats.”
“Ah, then, they are fine intagli,” said Bardo. “Five hundred ducats!
Ah, more than a man’s ransom!”
Tito gave a slight, almost imperceptible start, and opened his long
dark eyes with questioning surprise at Bardo’s blind face, as if his
words—a mere phrase of common parlance, at a time when men were often
being ransomed from slavery or imprisonment—had had some special
meaning for him. But the next moment he looked towards Romola, as if
her eyes must be her father’s interpreters. She, intensely preoccupied
with what related to her father, imagined that Tito was looking to her
again for some guidance, and immediately spoke.
“Alessandra Scala delights in gems, you know, father; she calls them
her winter flowers; and the Segretario would be almost sure to buy any
gems that she wished for. Besides, he himself sets great store by rings
and sigils, which he wears as a defence against pains in the joints.”
“It is true,” said Bardo. “Bartolommeo has overmuch confidence in the
efficacy of gems—a confidence wider than what is sanctioned by Pliny,
who clearly shows that he regards many beliefs of that sort as idle
superstitions; though not to the utter denial of medicinal virtues in
gems. Wherefore, I myself, as you observe, young man, wear certain
rings, which the discreet Camillo Leonardi prescribed to me by letter
when two years ago I had a certain infirmity of sudden numbness. But
thou hast spoken well, Romola. I will dictate a letter to Bartolommeo,
which Maso shall carry. But it were well that Messere should notify to
thee what the gems are, together with the intagli they bear, as a
warrant to Bartolommeo that they will be worthy of his attention.”
“Nay, father,” said Romola, whose dread lest a paroxysm of the
collector’s mania should seize her father, gave her the courage to
resist his proposal. “Your word will be sufficient that Messere is a
scholar and has travelled much. The Segretario will need no further
inducement to receive him.”
“True, child,” said Bardo, touched on a chord that was sure to respond.
“I have no need to add proofs and arguments in confirmation of my word
to Bartolommeo. And I doubt not that this young man’s presence is in
accord with the tones of his voice, so that, the door being once
opened, he will be his own best advocate.”
Bardo paused a few moments, but his silence was evidently charged with
some idea that he was hesitating to express, for he once leaned forward
a little as if he were going to speak, then turned his head aside
towards Romola and sank backward again. At last, as if he had made up
his mind, he said in a tone which might have become a prince giving the
courteous signal of dismissal—
“I am somewhat fatigued this morning, and shall prefer seeing you again
to-morrow, when I shall be able to give you the secretary’s answer,
authorising you to present yourself to him at some given time. But
before you go,”—here the old man, in spite of himself, fell into a more
faltering tone—“you will perhaps permit me to touch your hand? It is
long since I touched the hand of a young man.”
Bardo had stretched out his aged white hand, and Tito immediately
placed his dark but delicate and supple fingers within it. Bardo’s
cramped fingers closed over them, and he held them for a few minutes in
silence. Then he said—
“Romola, has this young man the same complexion as thy brother—fair and
pale?”
“No, father,” Romola answered, with determined composure, though her
heart began to beat violently with mingled emotions. “The hair of
Messere is dark—his complexion is dark.” Inwardly she said, “Will he
mind it? will it be disagreeable? No, he looks so gentle and
good-natured.” Then aloud again—
“Would Messere permit my father to touch his hair and face?”
Her eyes inevitably made a timid entreating appeal while she asked
this, and Tito’s met them with soft brightness as he said, “Assuredly,”
and, leaning forward, raised Bardo’s hand to his curls, with a
readiness of assent, which was the greater relief to her, because it
was unaccompanied by any sign of embarrassment.
Bardo passed his hand again and again over the long curls and grasped
them a little, as if their spiral resistance made his inward vision
clearer; then he passed his hand over the brow and cheek, tracing the
profile with the edge of his palm and fourth finger, and letting the
breadth of his hand repose on the rich oval of the cheek.
“Ah,” he said, as his hand glided from the face and rested on the young
man’s shoulder. “He must be very unlike thy brother, Romola: and it is
the better. You see no visions, I trust, my young friend?”
At this moment the door opened, and there entered, unannounced, a tall
elderly man in a handsome black silk lucco, who, unwinding his
becchetto from his neck and taking off his cap, disclosed a head as
white as Bardo’s. He cast a keen glance of surprise at the group before
him—the young stranger leaning in that filial attitude, while Bardo’s
hand rested on his shoulder, and Romola sitting near with eyes dilated
by anxiety and agitation. But there was an instantaneous change: Bardo
let fall his hand, Tito raised himself from his stooping posture, and
Romola rose to meet the visitor with an alacrity which implied all the
greater intimacy, because it was unaccompanied by any smile.
“Well, god-daughter,” said the stately man, as he touched Romola’s
shoulder; “Maso said you had a visitor, but I came in nevertheless.”
“It is thou, Bernardo,” said Bardo. “Thou art come at a fortunate
moment. This, young man,” he continued, while Tito rose and bowed, “is
one of the chief citizens of Florence, Messer Bernardo del Nero, my
oldest, I had almost said my only friend—whose good opinion, if you can
win it, may carry you far. He is but three-and-twenty, Bernardo, yet he
can doubtless tell thee much which thou wilt care to hear; for though a
scholar, he has already travelled far, and looked on other things
besides the manuscripts for which thou hast too light an esteem.”
“Ah, a Greek, as I augur,” said Bernardo, returning Tito’s reverence
but slightly, and surveying him with that sort of glance which seems
almost to cut like fine steel. “Newly arrived in Florence, it appears.
The name of Messere—or part of it, for it is doubtless a long one?”
“On the contrary,” said Tito, with perfect good-humour, “it is most
modestly free from polysyllabic pomp. My name is Tito Melema.”
“Truly?” said Bernardo, rather scornfully, as he took a seat; “I had
expected it to be at least as long as the names of a city, a river, a
province, and an empire all put together. We Florentines mostly use
names as we do prawns, and strip them of all flourishes before we trust
them to our throats.”
“Well, Bardo,” he continued, as if the stranger were not worth further
notice, and changing his tone of sarcastic suspicion for one of
sadness, “we have buried him.”
“Ah!” replied Bardo, with corresponding sadness, “and a new epoch has
come for Florence—a dark one, I fear. Lorenzo has left behind him an
inheritance that is but like the alchemist’s laboratory when the wisdom
of the alchemist is gone.”
“Not altogether so,” said Bernardo. “Piero de’ Medici has abundant
intelligence; his faults are only the faults of hot blood. I love the
lad—lad he will always be to me, as I have always been ‘little father’
to him.”
“Yet all who want a new order of things are likely to conceive new
hopes,” said Bardo. “We shall have the old strife of parties, I fear.”
“If we could have a new order of things that was something else than
knocking down one coat of arms to put up another,” said Bernardo, “I
should be ready to say, ‘I belong to no party: I am a Florentine.’ But
as long as parties are in question, I am a Medicean, and will be a
Medicean till I die. I am of the same mind as Farinata degli Uberti: if
any man asks me what is meant by siding with a party, I say, as he did,
‘To wish ill or well, for the sake of past wrongs or kindnesses.’”
During this short dialogue, Tito had been standing, and now took his
leave.
“But come again at the same hour to-morrow,” said Bardo, graciously,
before Tito left the room, “that I may give you Bartolommeo’s answer.”
“From what quarter of the sky has this pretty Greek youngster alighted
so close to thy chair, Bardo?” said Bernardo del Nero, as the door
closed. He spoke with dry emphasis, evidently intended to convey
something more to Bardo than was implied by the mere words.
“He is a scholar who has been shipwrecked and has saved a few gems, for
which he wants to find a purchaser. I am going to send him to
Bartolommeo Scala, for thou knowest it were more prudent in me to
abstain from further purchases.”
Bernardo shrugged his shoulders and said, “Romola, wilt thou see if my
servant is without? I ordered him to wait for me here.” Then, when
Romola was at a sufficient distance, he leaned forward and said to
Bardo in a low, emphatic tone—
“Remember, Bardo, thou hast a rare gem of thy own; take care no one
gets it who is not likely to pay a worthy price. That pretty Greek has
a lithe sleekness about him, that seems marvellously fitted for
slipping easily into any nest he fixes his mind on.”
Bardo was startled: the association of Tito with the image of his lost
son had excluded instead of suggesting the thought of Romola. But
almost immediately there seemed to be a reaction which made him grasp
the warning as if it had been a hope.
“But why not, Bernardo? If the young man approved himself worthy—he is
a scholar—and—and there would be no difficulty about the dowry, which
always makes thee gloomy.”