No Place for Repentance.
Messer Naldo came again sooner than was expected: he came on the
evening of the twenty-eighth of November, only eleven days after his
previous visit, proving that he had not gone far beyond the mountains;
and a scene which we have witnessed as it took place that evening in
the Via de’ Bardi may help to explain the impulse which turned his
steps towards the hill of San Giorgio.
When Tito had first found this home for Tessa, on his return from Rome,
more than a year and a half ago, he had acted, he persuaded himself,
simply under the constraint imposed on him by his own kindliness after
the unlucky incident which had made foolish little Tessa imagine him to
be her husband. It was true that the kindness was manifested towards a
pretty trusting thing whom it was impossible to be near without feeling
inclined to caress and pet her; but it was not less true that Tito had
movements of kindness towards her apart from any contemplated gain to
himself. Otherwise, charming as her prettiness and prattle were in a
lazy moment, he might have preferred to be free from her; for he was
not in love with Tessa—he was in love for the first time in his life
with an entirely different woman, whom he was not simply inclined to
shower caresses on, but whose presence possessed him so that the simple
sweep of her long tresses across his cheek seemed to vibrate through
the hours. All the young ideal passion he had in him had been stirred
by Romola, and his fibre was too fine, his intellect too bright, for
him to be tempted into the habits of a gross pleasure-seeker. But he
had spun a web about himself and Tessa, which he felt incapable of
breaking: in the first moments after the mimic marriage he had been
prompted to leave her under an illusion by a distinct calculation of
his own possible need, but since that critical moment it seemed to him
that the web had gone on spinning itself in spite of him, like a growth
over which he had no power. The elements of kindness and
self-indulgence are hard to distinguish in a soft nature like Tito’s;
and the annoyance he had felt under Tessa’s pursuit of him on the day
of his betrothal, the thorough intention of revealing the truth to her
with which he set out to fulfil his promise of seeing her again, were a
sufficiently strong argument to him that in ultimately leaving Tessa
under her illusion and providing a home for her, he had been overcome
by his own kindness. And in these days of his first devotion to Romola
he needed a self-justifying argument. He had learned to be glad that
she was deceived about some things. But every strong feeling makes to
itself a conscience of its own—has its own piety; just as much as the
feeling of the son towards the mother, which will sometimes survive
amid the worst fumes of depravation; and Tito could not yet be easy in
committing a secret offence against his wedded love.
But he was all the more careful in taking precautions to preserve the
secrecy of the offence. Monna Lisa, who, like many of her class, never
left her habitation except to go to one or two particular shops, and to
confession once a year, knew nothing of his real name and whereabout:
she only know that he paid her so as to make her very comfortable, and
minded little about the rest, save that she got fond of Tessa, and
found pleasure in the cares for which she was paid. There was some
mystery behind, clearly, since Tessa was a contadina, and Messer Naldo
was a signor; but, for aught Monna Lisa knew, he might be a real
husband. For Tito had thoroughly frightened Tessa into silence about
the circumstances of their marriage, by telling her that if she broke
that silence she would never see him again; and Monna Lisa’s deafness,
which made it impossible to say anything to her without some
premeditation, had saved Tessa from any incautious revelation to her,
such as had run off her tongue in talking with Baldassarre. For a long
while Tito’s visits were so rare, that it seemed likely enough he took
journeys between them. They were prompted chiefly by the desire to see
that all things were going on well with Tessa; and though he always
found his visit pleasanter than the prospect of it—always felt anew the
charm of that pretty ignorant lovingness and trust—he had not yet any
real need of it. But he was determined, if possible, to preserve the
simplicity on which the charm depended; to keep Tessa a genuine
contadina, and not place the small field-flower among conditions that
would rob it of its grace. He would have been shocked to see her in the
dress of any other rank than her own; the piquancy of her talk would be
all gone, if things began to have new relations for her, if her world
became wider, her pleasures less childish; and the squirrel-like
enjoyment of nuts at discretion marked the standard of the luxuries he
had provided for her. By this means, Tito saved Tessa’s charm from
being sullied; and he also, by a convenient coincidence, saved himself
from aggravating expenses that were already rather importunate to a man
whose money was all required for his avowed habits of life.
This, in brief, had been the history of Tito’s relation to Tessa up to
a very recent date. It is true that once or twice before Bardo’s death,
the sense that there was Tessa up the hill, with whom it was possible
to pass an hour agreeably, had been an inducement to him to escape from
a little weariness of the old man, when, for lack of any positive
engagement, he might otherwise have borne the weariness patiently and
shared Romola’s burden. But the moment when he had first felt a real
hunger for Tessa’s ignorant lovingness and belief in _him_ had not come
till quite lately, and it was distinctly marked out by circumstances as
little to be forgotten as the oncoming of a malady that has permanently
vitiated the sight and hearing. It was the day when he had first seen
Baldassarre, and had bought the armour. Returning across the bridge
that night, with the coat of mail in his hands, he had felt an
unconquerable shrinking from an immediate encounter with Romola. She,
too, knew little of the actual world; she, too, trusted him; but he had
an uneasy consciousness that behind her frank eyes there was a nature
that could judge him, and that any ill-founded trust of hers sprang not
from pretty brute-like incapacity, but from a nobleness which might
prove an alarming touchstone. He wanted a little ease, a little repose
from self-control, after the agitation and exertions of the day; he
wanted to be where he could adjust his mind to the morrow, without
caring how he behaved at the present moment. And there was a sweet
adoring creature within reach whose presence was as safe and
unconstraining as that of her own kids,—who would believe any fable,
and remain quite unimpressed by public opinion. And so on that evening,
when Romola was waiting and listening for him, he turned his steps up
the hill.
No wonder, then, that the steps took the same course on this evening,
eleven days later, when he had had to recoil under Romola’s first
outburst of scorn. He could not wish Tessa in his wife’s place, or
refrain from wishing that his wife should be thoroughly reconciled to
him; for it was Romola, and not Tessa, that belonged to the world where
all the larger desires of a man who had ambition and effective
faculties must necessarily lie. But he wanted a refuge from a standard
disagreeably rigorous, of which he could not make himself independent
simply by thinking it folly; and Tessa’s little soul was that inviting
refuge.
It was not much more than eight o’clock when he went up the stone steps
to the door of Tessa’s room. Usually she heard his entrance into the
house, and ran to meet him, but not to-night; and when he opened the
door he saw the reason. A single dim light was burning above the dying
fire, and showed Tessa in a kneeling attitude by the head of the bed
where the baby lay. Her head had fallen aside on the pillow, and her
brown rosary, which usually hung above the pillow over the picture of
the Madonna and the golden palm-branches, lay in the loose grasp of her
right-hand. She had gone fast asleep over her beads. Tito stepped
lightly across the little room, and sat down close to her. She had
probably heard the opening of the door as part of her dream, for he had
not been looking at her two moments before she opened her eyes. She
opened them without any start, and remained quite motionless looking at
him, as if the sense that he was there smiling at her shut out any
impulse which could disturb that happy passiveness. But when he put his
hand under her chin, and stooped to kiss her, she said—
“I dreamed it, and then I said it was dreaming—and then I awoke, and it
was true.”
“Little sinner!” said Tito, pinching her chin, “you have not said half
your prayers. I will punish you by not looking at your baby; it is
ugly.”
Tessa did not like those words, even though Tito was smiling. She had
some pouting distress in her face, as she said, bending anxiously over
the baby—
“Ah, it is not true! He is prettier than anything. You do not think he
is ugly. You will look at him. He is even prettier than when you saw
him before—only he’s asleep, and you can’t see his eyes or his tongue,
and I can’t show you his hair—and it grows—isn’t that wonderful? Look
at him! It’s true his face is very much all alike when he’s asleep,
there is not so much to see as when he’s awake. If you kiss him very
gently, he won’t wake: you want to kiss him, is it not true?”
He satisfied her by giving the small mummy a butterfly kiss, and then
putting his hand on her shoulder and turning her face towards him,
said, “You like looking at the baby better than looking at your
husband, you false one!”
She was still kneeling, and now rested her hands on his knee, looking
up at him like one of Fra Lippo Lippi’s round-cheeked adoring angels.
“No,” she said, shaking her head; “I love you always best, only I want
you to look at the bambino and love him; I used only to want you to
love me.”
“And did you expect me to come again so soon?” said Tito, inclined to
make her prattle. He still felt the effects of the agitation he had
undergone—still felt like a man who has been violently jarred; and this
was the easiest relief from silence and solitude.
“Ah, no,” said Tessa, “I have counted the days—to-day I began at my
right thumb again—since you put on the beautiful chain-coat, that
Messer San Michele gave you to take care of you on your journey. And
you have got it on now,” she said, peeping through the opening in the
breast of his tunic. “Perhaps it made you come back sooner.”
“Perhaps it did, Tessa,” he said. “But don’t mind the coat now. Tell me
what has happened since I was here. Did you see the tents in the Prato,
and the soldiers and horsemen when they passed the bridges—did you hear
the drums and trumpets?”
“Yes, and I was rather frightened, because I thought the soldiers might
come up here. And Monna Lisa was a little afraid too, for she said they
might carry our kids off; she said it was their business to do
mischief. But the Holy Madonna took care of us, for we never saw one of
them up here. But something has happened, only I hardly dare tell you,
and that is what I was saying more Aves for.”
“What do you mean, Tessa?” said Tito, rather anxiously. “Make haste and
tell me.”
“Yes, but will you let me sit on your knee? because then I think I
shall not be so frightened.”
He took her on his knee, and put his arm round her, but looked grave:
it seemed that something unpleasant must pursue him even here.
“At first I didn’t mean to tell you,” said Tessa, speaking almost in a
whisper, as if that would mitigate the offence; “because we thought the
old man would be gone away before you came again, and it would be as if
it had not been. But now he is there, and you are come, and I never did
anything you told me not to do before. And I want to tell you, and then
you will perhaps forgive me, for it is a long while before I go to
confession.”
“Yes, tell me everything, my Tessa.” He began to hope it was after all
a trivial matter.
“Oh, you will be sorry for him: I’m afraid he cries about something
when I don’t see him. But that was not the reason I went to him first;
it was because I wanted to talk to him and show him my baby, and he was
a stranger that lived nowhere, and I thought you wouldn’t care so much
about my talking to him. And I think he is not a bad old man, and he
wanted to come and sleep on the straw next to the goats, and I made
Monna Lisa say, ‘Yes, he might,’ and he’s away all the day almost, but
when he comes back I talk to him, and take him something to eat.”
“Some beggar, I suppose. It was naughty of you, Tessa, and I am angry
with Monna Lisa. I must have him sent away.”
“No, I think he is not a beggar, for he wanted to pay Monna Lisa, only
she asked him to do work for her instead. And he gets himself shaved,
and his clothes are tidy: Monna Lisa says he is a decent man. But
sometimes I think he is not in his right mind: Lupo, at Peretola, was
not in his right mind, and he looks a little like Lupo sometimes, as if
he didn’t know where he was.”
“What sort of face has he?” said Tito, his heart beginning to beat
strangely. He was so haunted by the thought of Baldassarre, that it was
already he whom he saw in imagination sitting on the straw not many
yards from him. “Fetch your stool, my Tessa, and sit on it.”
“Shall you not forgive me?” she said, timidly, moving from his knee.
“Yes, I will not be angry—only sit down, and tell me what sort of old
man this is.”
“I can’t think how to tell you: he is not like my stepfather Nofri, or
anybody. His face is yellow, and he has deep marks in it; and his hair
is white, but there is none on the top of his head: and his eyebrows
are black, and he looks from under them at me, and says, ‘Poor thing!’
to me, as if he thought I was beaten as I used to be; and that seems as
if he couldn’t be in his right mind, doesn’t it? And I asked him his
name once, but he couldn’t tell it me: yet everybody has a name—is it
not true? And he has a book now, and keeps looking at it ever so long,
as if he were a Padre. But I think he is not saying prayers, for his
lips never move;—ah, you are angry with me, or is it because you are
sorry for the old man?”
Tito’s eyes were still fixed on Tessa; but he had ceased to see her,
and was only seeing the objects her words suggested. It was this absent
glance which frightened her, and she could not help going to kneel at
his side again. But he did not heed her, and she dared not touch him,
or speak to him: she knelt, trembling and wondering; and this state of
mind suggesting her beads to her, she took them from the floor, and
began to tell them again, her pretty lips moving silently, and her blue
eyes wide with anxiety and struggling tears.
Tito was quite unconscious of her movements—unconscious of his own
attitude: he was in that wrapt state in which a man will grasp painful
roughness, and press and press it closer, and never feel it. A new
possibility had risen before him, which might dissolve at once the
wretched conditions of fear and suppression that were marring his life.
Destiny had brought within his reach an opportunity of retrieving that
moment on the steps of the Duomo, when the Past had grasped him with
living quivering hands, and he had disowned it. A few steps, and he
might be face to face with his father, with no witness by; he might
seek forgiveness and reconciliation; and there was money now, from the
sale of the library, to enable them to leave Florence without
disclosure, and go into Southern Italy, where under the probable French
rule, he had already laid a foundation for patronage. Romola need never
know the whole truth, for she could have no certain means of
identifying that prisoner in the Duomo with Baldassarre, or of learning
what had taken place on the steps, except from Baldassarre himself; and
if his father forgave, he would also consent to bury, that offence.
But with this possibility of relief, by an easy spring, from present
evil, there rose the other possibility, that the fierce-hearted man
might refuse to be propitiated. Well—and if he did, things would only
be as they had been before; for there would be _no witness by_. It was
not repentance with a white sheet round it and taper in hand,
confessing its hated sin in the eyes of men, that Tito was preparing
for: it was a repentance that would make all things pleasant again, and
keep all past unpleasant things secret. And Tito’s soft-heartedness,
his indisposition to feel himself in harsh relations with any creature,
was in strong activity towards his father, now his father was brought
near to him. It would be a state of ease that his nature could not but
desire, if the poisonous hatred in Baldassarre’s glance could be
replaced by something of the old affection and complacency.
Tito longed to have his world once again completely cushioned with
goodwill, and longed for it the more eagerly because of what he had
just suffered from the collision with Romola. It was not difficult to
him to smile pleadingly on those whom he had injured, and offer to do
them much kindness: and no quickness of intellect could tell him
exactly the taste of that honey on the lips of the injured. The
opportunity was there, and it raised an inclination which hemmed in the
calculating activity of his thought. He started up, and stepped towards
the door; but Tessa’s cry, as she dropped her beads, roused him from
his absorption. He turned and said—
“My Tessa, get me a lantern; and don’t cry, little pigeon, I am not
angry.”
They went down the stairs, and Tessa was going to shout the need of the
lantern in Monna Lisa’s ear, when Tito, who had opened the door, said,
“Stay, Tessa—no, I want no lantern: go upstairs again, and keep quiet,
and say nothing to Monna Lisa.”
In half a minute he stood before the closed door of the outhouse, where
the moon was shining white on the old paintless wood.
In this last decisive moment, Tito felt a tremor upon him—a sudden
instinctive shrinking from a possible tiger-glance, a possible
tiger-leap. Yet why should he, a young man, be afraid of an old one? a
young man with armour on, of an old man without a weapon? It was but a
moment’s hesitation, and Tito laid his hand on the door. Was his father
asleep? Was there nothing else but the door that screened him from the
voice and the glance which no magic could turn into ease?
Baldassarre was not asleep. There was a square opening high in the wall
of the hovel, through which the moonbeams sent in a stream of pale
light; and if Tito could have looked through the opening, he would have
seen his father seated on the straw, with something that shone like a
white star in his hand. Baldassarre was feeling the edge of his
poniard, taking refuge in that sensation from a hopeless blank of
thought that seemed to lie like a great gulf between his passion and
its aim.
He was in one of his most wretched moments of conscious helplessness:
he had been poring, while it was light, over the book that lay open
beside him; then he had been trying to recall the names of his jewels,
and the symbols engraved on them; and though at certain other times he
had recovered some of those names and symbols, to-night they were all
gone into darkness. And this effort at inward seeing had seemed to end
in utter paralysis of memory. He was reduced to a sort of mad
consciousness that he was a solitary pulse of just rage in a world
filled with defiant baseness. He had clutched and unsheathed his
dagger, and for a long while had been feeling its edge, his mind
narrowed to one image, and the dream of one sensation—the sensation of
plunging that dagger into a base heart, which he was unable to pierce
in any other way.
Tito had his hand on the door and was pulling it: it dragged against
the ground as such old doors often do, and Baldassarre, startled out of
his dreamlike state, rose from his sitting posture in vague amazement,
not knowing where he was. He had not yet risen to his feet, and was
still kneeling on one knee, when the door came wide open and he saw,
dark against the moonlight, with the rays falling on one bright mass of
curls and one rounded olive cheek, the image of his reverie—not
shadowy—close and real like water at the lips after the thirsty dream
of it. No thought could come athwart that eager thirst. In one moment,
before Tito could start back, the old man, with the preternatural force
of rage in his limbs, had sprung forward, and the dagger had flashed
out. In the next moment the dagger had snapped in two, and Baldassarre,
under the parrying force of Tito’s arm, had fallen back on the straw,
clutching the hilt with its bit of broken blade. The pointed end lay
shining against Tito’s feet.
Tito had felt one great heart-leap of terror as he had staggered under
the weight of the thrust: he felt now the triumph of deliverance and
safety. His armour had been proved, and vengeance lay helpless before
him. But the triumph raised no devilish impulse; on the contrary, the
sight of his father close to him and unable to injure him, made the
effort at reconciliation easier. He was free from fear, but he had only
the more unmixed and direct want to be free from the sense that he was
hated. After they had looked at each other a little while, Baldassarre
lying motionless in despairing rage, Tito said in his soft tones, just
as they had sounded before the last parting on the shores of Greece—
“_Padre mio_!” There was a pause after those words, but no movement or
sound till he said—
“I came to ask your forgiveness!”
Again he paused, that the healing balm of those words might have time
to work. But there was no sign of change in Baldassarre: he lay as he
had fallen, leaning on one arm: he was trembling, but it was from the
shock that had thrown him down.
“I was taken by surprise that morning. I wish now to be a son to you
again. I wish to make the rest of your life happy, that you may forget
what you have suffered.”
He paused again. He had used the clearest and strongest words he could
think of. It was useless to say more, until he had some sign that
Baldassarre understood him. Perhaps his mind was too distempered or too
imbecile even for that: perhaps the shock of his fall and his
disappointed rage might have quite suspended the use of his faculties.
Presently Baldassarre began to move. He threw away the broken dagger,
and slowly and gradually, still trembling, began to raise himself from
the ground. Tito put out his hand to help him, and so strangely quick
are men’s souls that in this moment, when he began to feel his
atonement was accepted, he had a darting thought of the irksome efforts
it entailed. Baldassarre clutched the hand that was held out, raised
himself and clutched it still, going close up to Tito till their faces
were not a foot off each other. Then he began to speak, in a deep
trembling voice—
“I saved you—I nurtured you—I loved you. You forsook me—you robbed
me—you denied me. What can you give me? You have made the world
bitterness to me; but there is one draught of sweetness left—_that you
shall know agony_.”
He let fall Tito’s hand, and going backwards a little, first rested his
arm on a projecting stone in the wall, and then sank again in a sitting
posture on the straw. The outleap of fury in the dagger-thrust had
evidently exhausted him.
Tito stood silent. If it had been a deep yearning emotion which had
brought him to ask his father’s forgiveness, the denial of it might
have caused him a pang which would have excluded the rushing train of
thought that followed those decisive words. As it was, though the
sentence of unchangeable hatred grated on him and jarred him terribly,
his mind glanced round with a self-preserving instinct to see how far
those words could have the force of a substantial threat. When he had
come down to speak to Baldassarre, he had said to himself that if his
effort at reconciliation failed, things would only be as they had been
before. The first glance of his mind was backward to that thought
again, but the future possibilities of danger that were conjured up
along with it brought the perception that things were _not_ as they had
been before, and the perception came as a triumphant relief. There was
not only the broken dagger, there was the certainty, from what Tessa
had told him, that Baldassarre’s mind was broken too, and had no edge
that could reach him. Tito felt he had no choice now: he must defy
Baldassarre as a mad, imbecile old man; and the chances were so
strongly on his side that there was hardly room for fear. No; except
the fear of having to do many unpleasant things in order to save
himself from what was yet more unpleasant. And one of those unpleasant
things must be done immediately: it was very difficult.
“Do you mean to stay here?” he said.
“No,” said Baldassarre, bitterly, “you mean to turn me out.”
“Not so,” said Tito; “I only ask.”
“I tell you, you have turned me out. If it is your straw, you turned me
off it three years ago.”
“Then you mean to leave this place?” said Tito, more anxious about this
certainty than the ground of it.
“I have spoken,” said Baldassarre.
Tito turned and re-entered the house. Monna Lisa was nodding; he went
up to Tessa, and found her crying by the side of her baby.
“Tessa,” he said, sitting down and taking her head between his hands;
“leave off crying, little goose, and listen to me.”
He lifted her chin upward, that she might look at him, while he spoke
very distinctly and emphatically.
“You must never speak to that old man again. He is a mad old man, and
he wants to kill me. Never speak to him or listen to him again.”
Tessa’s tears had ceased, and her lips were pale with fright.
“Is he gone away?” she whispered.
“He will go away. Remember what I have said to you.”
“Yes; I will never speak to a stranger any more,” said Tessa, with a
sense of guilt.
He told her, to comfort her, that he would come again to-morrow; and
then went down to Monna Lisa to rebuke her severely for letting a
dangerous man come about the house.
Tito felt that these were odious tasks; they were very evil-tasted
morsels, but they were forced upon him. He heard Monna Lisa fasten the
door behind him, and turned away, without looking towards the open door
of the hovel. He felt secure that Baldassarre would go, and he could
not wait to see him go. Even _his_ young frame and elastic spirit were
shattered by the agitations that had been crowded into this single
evening.
Baldassarre was still sitting on the straw when the shadow of Tito
passed by. Before him lay the fragments of the broken dagger; beside
him lay the open book, over which he had pored in vain. They looked
like mocking symbols of his utter helplessness; and his body was still
too trembling for him to rise and walk away.
But the next morning, very early, when Tessa peeped anxiously through
the hole in her shutter, the door of the hovel was open, and the
strange old man was gone.