After-Thoughts.
“You are easily frightened, though,” said Piero, with another scornful
laugh. “My portrait is not as good as the original. But the old fellow
_had_ a tiger look: I must go into the Duomo and see him again.”
“It is not pleasant to be laid hold of by a madman, if madman he be,”
said Lorenzo Tornabuoni, in polite excuse of Tito, “but perhaps he is
only a ruffian. We shall hear. I think we must see if we have authority
enough to stop this disturbance between our people and your
countrymen,” he added, addressing the Frenchman.
They advanced toward the crowd with their swords drawn, all the quiet
spectators making an escort for them. Tito went too: it was necessary
that he should know what others knew about Baldassarre, and the first
palsy of terror was being succeeded by the rapid devices to which
mortal danger will stimulate the timid.
The rabble of men and boys, more inclined to hoot at the soldier and
torment him than to receive or inflict any serious wounds, gave way at
the approach of signori with drawn swords, and the French soldier was
interrogated. He and his companions had simply brought their prisoners
into the city that they might beg money for their ransom: two of the
prisoners were Tuscan soldiers taken in Lunigiana; the other, an
elderly man, was with a party of Genoese, with whom the French foragers
had come to blows near Fivizzano. He might be mad, but he was harmless.
The soldier knew no more, being unable to understand a word the old man
said. Tito heard so far, but he was deaf to everything else till he was
specially addressed. It was Tornabuoni who spoke.
“Will you go back with us, Melema? Or, since Messere is going off to
Signa now, will you wisely follow the fashion of the times and go to
hear the Frate, who will be like the torrent at its height this
morning? It’s what we must all do, you know, if we are to save our
Medicean skins. _I_ should go if I had the leisure.”
Tito’s face had recovered its colour now, and he could make an effort
to speak with gaiety.
“Of course I am among the admirers of the inspired orator,” he said,
smilingly; “but, unfortunately, I shall be occupied with the Segretario
till the time of the procession.”
“_I_ am going into the Duomo to look at that savage old man again,”
said Piero.
“Then have the charity to show him to one of the hospitals for
travellers, Piero mio,” said Tornabuoni. “The monks may find out
whether he wants putting into a cage.”
The party separated, and Tito took his way to the Palazzo Vecchio,
where he was to find Bartolommeo Scala. It was not a long walk, but,
for Tito, it was stretched out like the minutes of our morning dreams:
the short spaces of street and piazza held memories, and previsions,
and torturing fears, that might have made the history of months. He
felt as if a serpent had begun to coil round his limbs. Baldassarre
living, and in Florence, was a living revenge, which would no more rest
than a winding serpent would rest until it had crushed its prey. It was
not in the nature of that man to let an injury pass unavenged: his love
and his hatred were of that passionate fervour which subjugates all the
rest of the being, and makes a man sacrifice himself to his passion as
if it were a deity to be worshipped with self-destruction. Baldassarre
had relaxed his hold, and had disappeared. Tito knew well how to
interpret that: it meant that the vengeance was to be studied that it
might be sure. If he had not uttered those decisive words—“He is a
madman”—if he could have summoned up the state of mind, the courage,
necessary for avowing his recognition of Baldassarre, would not the
risk have been less? He might have declared himself to have had what he
believed to be positive evidence of Baldassarre’s death; and the only
persons who could ever have had positive knowledge to contradict him,
were Fra Luca, who was dead, and the crew of the companion galley, who
had brought him the news of the encounter with the pirates. The chances
were infinite against Baldassarre’s having met again with any one of
that crew, and Tito thought with bitterness that a timely, well-devised
falsehood might have saved him from any fatal consequences. But to have
told that falsehood would have required perfect self-command in the
moment of a convulsive shock: he seemed to have spoken without any
preconception: the words had leaped forth like a sudden birth that had
been begotten and nourished in the darkness.
Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we
prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or
evil which gradually determines character.
There was but one chance for him now; the chance of Baldassarre’s
failure in finding his revenge. And—Tito grasped at a thought more
actively cruel than any he had ever encouraged before: might not his
own unpremeditated words have some truth in them? Enough truth, at
least, to bear him out in his denial of any declaration Baldassarre
might make about him? The old man looked strange and wild; with his
eager heart and brain, suffering was likely enough to have produced
madness. If it were so, the vengeance that strove to inflict disgrace
might be baffled.
But there was another form of vengeance not to be baffled by ingenious
lying. Baldassarre belonged to a race to whom the thrust of the dagger
seems almost as natural an impulse as the outleap of the tiger’s
talons. Tito shrank with shuddering dread from disgrace; but he had
also that physical dread which is inseparable from a soft
pleasure-loving nature, and which prevents a man from meeting wounds
and death as a welcome relief from disgrace. His thoughts flew at once
to some hidden defensive armour that might save him from a vengeance
which no subtlety could parry.
He wondered at the power of the passionate fear that possessed him. It
was as if he had been smitten with a blighting disease that had
suddenly turned the joyous sense of young life into pain.
There was still one resource open to Tito. He might have turned back,
sought Baldassarre again, confessed everything to him—to Romola—to all
the world. But he never thought of that. The repentance which cuts off
all moorings to evil, demands something more than selfish fear. He had
no sense that there was strength and safety in truth; the only strength
he trusted to lay in his ingenuity and his dissimulation. Now that the
first shock, which had called up the traitorous signs of fear, was well
past, he hoped to be prepared for all emergencies by cool deceit—and
defensive armour.
It was a characteristic fact in Tito’s experience at this crisis, that
no direct measures for ridding himself of Baldassarre ever occurred to
him. All other possibilities passed through his mind, even to his own
flight from Florence; but he never thought of any scheme for removing
his enemy. His dread generated no active malignity, and he would still
have been glad not to give pain to any mortal. He had simply chosen to
make life easy to himself—to carry his human lot, if possible, in such
a way that it should pinch him nowhere; and the choice had, at various
times, landed him in unexpected positions. The question now was, not
whether he should divide the common pressure of destiny with his
suffering fellow-men; it was whether all the resources of lying would
save him from being crushed by the consequences of that habitual
choice.