Under the Loggia.
The loggia at the top of Bardo’s house rose above the buildings on each
side of it, and formed a gallery round quadrangular walls. On the side
towards the street the roof was supported by columns; but on the
remaining sides, by a wall pierced with arched openings, so that at the
back, looking over a crowd of irregular, poorly-built dwellings towards
the hill of Bogoli, Romola could at all times have a walk sheltered
from observation. Near one of those arched openings, close to the door
by which he had entered the loggia, Tito awaited her, with a sickening
sense of the sunlight that slanted before him and mingled itself with
the ruin of his hopes. He had never for a moment relied on Romola’s
passion for him as likely to be too strong for the repulsion created by
the discovery of his secret; he had not the presumptuous vanity which
might have hindered him from feeling that her love had the same root
with her belief in him. But as he imagined her coming towards him in
her radiant beauty, made so loveably mortal by her soft hazel eyes, he
fell into wishing that she had been something lower, if it were only
that she might let him clasp her and kiss her before they parted. He
had had no real caress from her—nothing but now and then a long glance,
a kiss, a pressure of the hand; and he had so often longed that they
should be alone together. They were going to be alone now; but he saw
her standing inexorably aloof from him. His heart gave a great throb as
he saw the door move: Romola was there. It was all like a flash of
lightning: he felt, rather than saw, the glory about her head, the
tearful appealing eyes; he felt, rather than heard, the cry of love
with which she said, “Tito!”
And in the same moment she was in his arms, and sobbing with her face
against his.
How poor Romola had yearned through the watches of the night to see
that bright face! The new image of death; the strange bewildering doubt
infused into her by the story of a life removed from her understanding
and sympathy; the haunting vision, which she seemed not only to hear
uttered by the low gasping voice, but to live through, as if it had
been her own dream, had made her more conscious than ever that it was
Tito who had first brought the warm stream of hope and gladness into
her life, and who had first turned away the keen edge of pain in the
remembrance of her brother. She would tell Tito everything; there was
no one else to whom she could tell it. She had been restraining herself
in the presence of her father all the morning; but now, that
long-pent-up sob might come forth. Proud and self-controlled to all the
world beside, Romola was as simple and unreserved as a child in her
love for Tito. She had been quite contented with the days when they had
only looked at each other; but now, when she felt the need of clinging
to him, there was no thought that hindered her.
“My Romola! my goddess!” Tito murmured with passionate fondness, as he
clasped her gently, and kissed the thick golden ripples on her neck. He
was in paradise: disgrace, shame, parting—there was no fear of them any
longer. This happiness was too strong to be marred by the sense that
Romola was deceived in him; nay, he could only rejoice in her delusion;
for, after all, concealment had been wisdom. The only thing he could
regret was his needless dread; if, indeed, the dread had not been worth
suffering for the sake of this sudden rapture.
The sob had satisfied itself, and Romola raised her head. Neither of
them spoke; they stood looking at each other’s faces with that sweet
wonder which belongs to young love—she with her long white hands on the
dark-brown curls, and he with his dark fingers bathed in the streaming
gold. Each was so beautiful to the other; each was experiencing that
undisturbed mutual consciousness for the first time. The cold pressure
of a new sadness on Romola’s heart made her linger the more in that
silent soothing sense of nearness and love; and Tito could not even
seek to press his lips to hers, because that would be change.
“Tito,” she said at last, “it has been altogether painful, but I must
tell you everything. Your strength will help me to resist the
impressions that will not be shaken off by reason.”
“I know, Romola—I know he is dead,” said Tito; and the long lustrous
eyes told nothing of the many wishes that would have brought about that
death long ago if there had been such potency in mere wishes. Romola
only read her own pure thoughts in their dark depths, as we read
letters in happy dreams.
“So changed, Tito! It pierced me to think that it was Dino. And so
strangely hard: not a word to my father; nothing but a vision that he
wanted to tell me. And yet it was so piteous—the struggling breath, and
the eyes that seemed to look towards the crucifix, and yet not to see
it. I shall never forget it; it seems as if it would come between me
and everything I shall look at.”
Romola’s heart swelled again, so that she was forced to break off. But
the need she felt to disburden her mind to Tito urged her to repress
the rising anguish. When she began to speak again, her thoughts had
travelled a little.
“It was strange, Tito. The vision was about our marriage, and yet he
knew nothing of you.”
“What was it, my Romola? Sit down and tell me,” said Tito, leading her
to the bench that stood near. A fear had come across him lest the
vision should somehow or other relate to Baldassarre; and this sudden
change of feeling prompted him to seek a change of position.
Romola told him all that had passed, from her entrance into San Marco,
hardly leaving out one of her brother’s words, which had burnt
themselves into her memory as they were spoken. But when she was at the
end of the vision, she paused; the rest came too vividly before her to
be uttered, and she sat looking at the distance, almost unconscious for
the moment that Tito was near her. _His_ mind was at ease now; that
vague vision had passed over him like white mist, and left no mark. But
he was silent, expecting her to speak again.
“I took it,” she went on, as if Tito had been reading her thoughts; “I
took the crucifix; it is down below in my bedroom.”
“And now, my Romola,” said Tito, entreatingly, “you will banish these
ghastly thoughts. The vision was an ordinary monkish vision, bred of
fasting and fanatical ideas. It surely has no weight with you.”
“No, Tito; no. But poor Dino, _he_ believed it was a divine message. It
is strange,” she went on meditatively, “this life of men possessed with
fervid beliefs that seem like madness to their fellow-beings. Dino was
not a vulgar fanatic; and that Fra Girolamo—his very voice seems to
have penetrated me with a sense that there is some truth in what moves
them: some truth of which I know nothing.”
“It was only because your feelings were highly wrought, my Romola. Your
brother’s state of mind was no more than a form of that theosophy which
has been the common disease of excitable dreamy minds in all ages; the
same ideas that your father’s old antagonist, Marsilio Ficino, pores
over in the New Platonists; only your brother’s passionate nature drove
him to act out what other men write and talk about. And for Fra
Girolamo, he is simply a narrow-minded monk, with a gift of preaching
and infusing terror into the multitude. Any words or any voice would
have shaken you at that moment. When your mind has had a little repose,
you will judge of such things as you have always done before.”
“Not about poor Dino,” said Romola. “I was angry with him; my heart
seemed to close against him while he was speaking; but since then I
have thought less of what was in my own mind and more of what was in
his. Oh, Tito! it was very piteous to see his young life coming to an
end in that way. That yearning look at the crucifix when he was gasping
for breath—I can never forget it. Last night I looked at the crucifix a
long while, and tried to see that it would help him, until at last it
seemed to me by the lamplight as if the suffering face shed pity.”
“My Romola, promise me to resist such thoughts; they are fit for sickly
nuns, not for my golden-tressed Aurora, who looks made to scatter all
such twilight fantasies. Try not to think of them now; we shall not
long be alone together.”
The last words were uttered in a tone of tender beseeching, and he
turned her face towards him with a gentle touch of his right-hand.
Romola had had her eyes fixed absently on the arched opening, but she
had not seen the distant hill; she had all the while been in the
chapter house, looking at the pale images of sorrow and death.
Tito’s touch and beseeching voice recalled her; and now in the warm
sunlight she saw that rich dark beauty which seemed to gather round it
all images of joy—purple vines festooned between the elms, the strong
corn perfecting itself under the vibrating heat, bright winged
creatures hurrying and resting among the flowers, round limbs beating
the earth in gladness with cymbals held aloft, light melodies chanted
to the thrilling rhythm of strings—all objects and all sounds that tell
of Nature revelling in her force. Strange, bewildering transition from
those pale images of sorrow and death to this bright youthfulness, as
of a sun-god who knew nothing of night! What thought could reconcile
that worn anguish in her brother’s face—that straining after something
invisible—with this satisfied strength and beauty, and make it
intelligible that they belonged to the same world? Or was there never
any reconciling of them, but only a blind worship of clashing deities,
first in mad joy and then in wailing? Romola for the first time felt
this questioning need like a sudden uneasy dizziness and want of
something to grasp; it was an experience hardly longer than a sigh, for
the eager theorising of ages is compressed, as in a seed, in the
momentary want of a single mind. But there was no answer to meet the
need, and it vanished before the returning rush of young sympathy with
the glad loving beauty that beamed upon her in new radiance, like the
dawn after we have looked away from it to the grey west.
“Your mind lingers apart from our love, my Romola,” Tito said, with a
soft reproachful murmur. “It seems a forgotten thing to you.”
She looked at the beseeching eyes in silence, till the sadness all
melted out of her own.
“My joy!” she said, in her full clear voice.
“Do you really care for me enough, then, to banish those chill fancies,
or shall you always be suspecting me as the Great Tempter?” said Tito,
with his bright smile.
“How should I not care for you more than for everything else?
Everything I had felt before in all my life—about my father, and about
my loneliness—was a preparation to love you. You would laugh at me,
Tito, if you knew what sort of man I used to think I should marry—some
scholar with deep lines in his face, like Alamanno Rinuccini, and with
rather grey hair, who would agree with my father in taking the side of
the Aristotelians, and be willing to live with him. I used to think
about the love I read of in the poets, but I never dreamed that
anything like that could happen to me here in Florence in our old
library. And then _you_ came, Tito, and were so much to my father, and
I began to believe that life could be happy for me too.”
“My goddess! is there any woman like you?” said Tito, with a mixture of
fondness and wondering admiration at the blended majesty and simplicity
in her.
“But, dearest,” he went on, rather timidly, “if you minded more about
our marriage, you would persuade your father and Messer Bernardo not to
think of any more delays. But you seem not to mind about it.”
“Yes, Tito, I will, I do mind. But I am sure my godfather will urge
more delay now, because of Dino’s death. He has never agreed with my
father about disowning Dino, and you know he has always said that we
ought to wait until you have been at least a year in Florence. Do not
think hardly of my godfather. I know he is prejudiced and narrow, but
yet he is very noble. He has often said that it is folly in my father
to want to keep his library apart, that it may bear his name; yet he
would try to get my father’s wish carried out. That seems to me very
great and noble—that power of respecting a feeling which he does not
share or understand.”
“I have no rancour against Messer Bernardo for thinking you too
precious for me, my Romola,” said Tito: and that was true. “But your
father, then, knows of his son’s death?”
“Yes, I told him—I could not help it. I told him where I had been, and
that I had seen Dino die; but nothing else; and he has commanded me not
to speak of it again. But he has been very silent this morning, and has
had those restless movements which always go to my heart; they look as
if he were trying to get outside the prison of his blindness. Let us go
to him now. I had persuaded him to try to sleep, because he slept
little in the night. Your voice will soothe him, Tito: it always does.”
“And not one kiss? I have not had one,” said Tito, in his gentle
reproachful tone, which gave him an air of dependence very charming in
a creature with those rare gifts that seem to excuse presumption.
The sweet pink blush spread itself with the quickness of light over
Romola’s face and neck as she bent towards him. It seemed impossible
that their kisses could ever become common things.
“Let us walk once round the loggia,” said Romola, “before we go down.”
“There is something grim and grave to me always about Florence,” said
Tito, as they paused in the front of the house, where they could see
over the opposite roofs to the other side of the river, “and even in
its merriment there is something shrill and hard—biting rather than
gay. I wish we lived in Southern Italy, where thought is broken, not by
weariness, but by delicious languors such as never seem to come over
the ‘ingenia acerrima Florentina.’ I should like to see you under that
southern sun, lying among the flowers, subdued into mere enjoyment,
while I bent over you and touched the lute and sang to you some little
unconscious strain that seemed all one with the light and the warmth.
You have never known that happiness of the nymphs, my Romola.”
“No; but I have dreamed of it often since you came. I am very thirsty
for a deep draught of joy—for a life all bright like you. But we will
not think of it now, Tito; it seems to me as if there would always be
pale sad faces among the flowers, and eyes that look in vain. Let us
go.”