Counter-Check.
It was late in the afternoon when Tito returned home. Romola, seated
opposite the cabinet in her narrow room, copying documents, was about
to desist from her work because the light was getting dim, when her
husband entered. He had come straight to this room to seek her, with a
thoroughly defined intention, and there was something new to Romola in
his manner and expression as he looked at her silently on entering,
and, without taking off his cap and mantle, leaned one elbow on the
cabinet, and stood directly in front of her.
Romola, fully assured during the day of the Frate’s safety, was feeling
the reaction of some penitence for the access of distrust and
indignation which had impelled her to address her husband publicly on a
matter that she knew he wished to be private. She told herself that she
had probably been wrong. The scheming duplicity which she had heard
even her godfather allude to as inseparable from party tactics might be
sufficient to account for the connection with Spini, without the
supposition that Tito had ever meant to further the plot. She wanted to
atone for her impetuosity by confessing that she had been too hasty,
and for some hours her mind had been dwelling on the possibility that
this confession of hers might lead to other frank words breaking the
two years’ silence of their hearts. The silence had been so complete,
that Tito was ignorant of her having fled from him and come back again;
they had never approached an avowal of that past which, both in its
young love and in the shock that shattered the love, lay locked away
from them like a banquet-room where death had once broken the feast.
She looked up at him with that submission in her glance which belonged
to her state of self-reproof; but the subtle change in his face and
manner arrested her speech. For a few moments they remained silent,
looking at each other.
Tito himself felt that a crisis was come in his married life. The
husband’s determination to mastery, which lay deep below all blandness
and beseechingness, had risen permanently to the surface now, and
seemed to alter his face, as a face is altered by a hidden muscular
tension with which a man is secretly throttling or stamping out the
life from something feeble, yet dangerous.
“Romola,” he began, in the cool liquid tone that made her shiver, “it
is time that we should understand each other.” He paused.
“That is what I most desire, Tito,” she said, faintly. Her sweet pale
face; with all its anger gone and nothing but the timidity of
self-doubt in it, seemed to give a marked predominance to her husband’s
dark strength.
“You took a step this morning,” Tito went on, “which you must now
yourself perceive to have been useless—which exposed you to remark and
may involve me in serious practical difficulties.”
“I acknowledge that I was too hasty; I am sorry for any injustice I may
have done you.” Romola spoke these words in a fuller and firmer tone;
Tito, she hoped, would look less hard when she had expressed her
regret, and then she could say other things.
“I wish you once for all to understand,” he said, without any change of
voice, “that such collisions are incompatible with our position as
husband and wife. I wish you to reflect on the mode in which you were
led to that step, that the process may not be repeated.”
“That depends chiefly on you, Tito,” said Romola, taking fire slightly.
It was not at all what she had thought of saying, but we see a very
little way before us in mutual speech.
“You would say, I suppose,” answered Tito, “that nothing is to occur in
future which can excite your unreasonable suspicions. You were frank
enough to say last night that you have no belief in me. I am not
surprised at any exaggerated conclusion you may draw from slight
premises, but I wish to point out to you what is likely to be the fruit
of your making such exaggerated conclusions a ground for interfering in
affairs of which you are ignorant. Your attention is thoroughly awake
to what I am saying?”
He paused for a reply.
“Yes,” said Romola, flushing in irrepressible resentment at this cold
tone of superiority.
“Well, then, it may possibly not be very long before some other chance
words or incidents set your imagination at work devising crimes for me,
and you may perhaps rush to the Palazzo Vecchio to alarm the Signoria
and set the city in an uproar. Shall I tell you what may be the result?
Not simply the disgrace of your husband, to which you look forward with
so much courage, but the arrest and ruin of many among the chief men in
Florence, including Messer Bernardo del Nero.”
Tito had meditated a decisive move, and he had made it. The flush died
out of Romola’s face, and her very lips were pale—an unusual effect
with her, for she was little subject to fear. Tito perceived his
success.
“You would perhaps flatter yourself,” he went on, “that you were
performing a heroic deed of deliverance; you might as well try to turn
locks with fine words as apply such notions to the politics of
Florence. The question now is, not whether you can have any belief in
me, but whether, now you have been warned, you will dare to rush, like
a blind man with a torch in his hand, amongst intricate affairs of
which you know nothing.”
Romola felt as if her mind were held in a vice by Tito’s: the
possibilities he had indicated were rising before her with terrible
clearness.
“I am too rash,” she said. “I will try not to be rash.”
“Remember,” said Tito, with unsparing insistence, “that your act of
distrust towards me this morning might, for aught you knew, have had
more fatal effects than that sacrifice of your husband which you have
learned to contemplate without flinching.”
“Tito, it is not so,” Romola burst forth in a pleading tone, rising and
going nearer to him, with a desperate resolution to speak out. “It is
false that I would willingly sacrifice you. It has been the greatest
effort of my life to cling to you. I went away in my anger two years
ago, and I came back again because I was more bound to you than to
anything else on earth. But it is useless. You shut me out from your
mind. You affect to think of me as a being too unreasonable to share in
the knowledge of your affairs. You will be open with me about nothing.”
She looked like his good angel pleading with him, as she bent her face
towards him with dilated eyes, and laid her hand upon his arm. But
Romola’s touch and glance no longer stirred any fibre of tenderness in
her husband. The good-humoured, tolerant Tito, incapable of hatred,
incapable almost of impatience, disposed always to be gentle towards
the rest of the world, felt himself becoming strangely hard towards
this wife whose presence had once been the strongest influence he had
known. With all his softness of disposition, he had a masculine
effectiveness of intellect and purpose which, like sharpness of edge,
is itself an energy, working its way without any strong momentum.
Romola had an energy of her own which thwarted his, and no man, who is
not exceptionally feeble, will endure being thwarted by his wife.
Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.
No emotion darted across his face as he heard Romola for the first time
speak of having gone away from him. His lips only looked a little
harder as he smiled slightly and said—
“My Romola, when certain conditions are ascertained, we must make up
our minds to them. No amount of wishing will fill the Arno, as your
people say, or turn a plum into an orange. I have not observed even
that prayers have much efficacy that way. You are so constituted as to
have certain strong impressions inaccessible to reason: I cannot share
those impressions, and you have withdrawn all trust from me in
consequence. You have changed towards me; it has followed that I have
changed towards you. It is useless to take any retrospect. We have
simply to adapt ourselves to altered conditions.”
“Tito, it would not be useless for us to speak openly,” said Romola,
with the sort of exasperation that comes from using living muscle
against some lifeless insurmountable resistance. “It was the sense of
deception in you that changed me, and that has kept us apart. And it is
not true that I changed first. You changed towards me the night you
first wore that chain-armour. You had some secret from me—it was about
that old man—and I saw him again yesterday. Tito,” she went on, in a
tone of agonised entreaty, “if you would once tell me everything, let
it be what it may—I would not mind pain—that there might be no wall
between us! Is it not possible that we could begin a new life?”
This time there was a flash of emotion across Tito’s face. He stood
perfectly still; but the flash seemed to have whitened him. He took no
notice of Romola’s appeal, but after a moment’s pause, said quietly—
“Your impetuosity about trifles, Romola, has a freezing influence that
would cool the baths of Nero.” At these cutting words, Romola shrank
and drew herself up into her usual self-sustained attitude. Tito went
on. “If by ‘that old man’ you mean the mad Jacopo di Nola who attempted
my life and made a strange accusation against me, of which I told you
nothing because it would have alarmed you to no purpose, he, poor
wretch, has died in prison. I saw his name in the list of dead.”
“I know nothing about his accusation,” said Romola. “But I know he is
the man whom I saw with the rope round his neck in the Duomo—the man
whose portrait Piero di Cosimo painted, grasping your arm as he saw him
grasp it the day the French entered, the day you first wore the
armour.”
“And where is he now, pray?” said Tito, still pale, but governing
himself.
“He was lying lifeless in the street from starvation,” said Romola. “I
revived him with bread and wine. I brought him to our door, but he
refused to come in. Then I gave him some money, and he went away
without telling me anything. But he had found out that I was your wife.
Who is he?”
“A man, half mad, half imbecile, who was once my father’s servant in
Greece, and who has a rancorous hatred towards me because I got him
dismissed for theft. Now you have the whole mystery, and the further
satisfaction of knowing that I am again in danger of assassination. The
fact of my wearing the armour, about which you seem to have thought so
much, must have led you to infer that I was in danger from this man.
Was that the reason you chose to cultivate his acquaintance and invite
him into the house?”
Romola was mute. To speak was only like rushing with bare breast
against a shield.
Tito moved from his leaning posture, slowly took off his cap and
mantle, and pushed back his hair. He was collecting himself for some
final words. And Romola stood upright looking at him as she might have
looked at some on-coming deadly force, to be met only by silent
endurance.
“We need not refer to these matters again, Romola,” he said, precisely
in the same tone as that in which he had spoken at first. “It is enough
if you will remember that the next time your generous ardour leads you
to interfere in political affairs, you are likely, not to save any one
from danger, but to be raising scaffolds and setting houses on fire.
You are not yet a sufficiently ardent Piagnone to believe that Messer
Bernardo del Nero is the prince of darkness, and Messer Francesco
Valori the archangel Michael. I think I need demand no promise from
you?”
“I have understood you too well, Tito.”
“It is enough,” he said, leaving the room.
Romola turned round with despair in her face and sank into her seat. “O
God, I have tried—I cannot help it. We shall always be divided.” Those
words passed silently through her mind. “Unless,” she said aloud, as if
some sudden vision had startled her into speech—“unless misery should
come and join us!”
Tito, too, had a new thought in his mind after he had closed the door
behind him. With the project of leaving Florence as soon as his life
there had become a high enough stepping-stone to a life elsewhere,
perhaps at Rome or Milan, there was now for the first time associated a
desire to be free from Romola, and to leave her behind him. She had
ceased to belong to the desirable furniture of his life: there was no
possibility of an easy relation between them without genuineness on his
part. Genuineness implied confession of the past, and confession
involved a change of purpose. But Tito had as little bent that way as a
leopard has to lap milk when its teeth are grown. From all relations
that were not easy and agreeable, we know that Tito shrank: why should
he cling to them?
And Romola had made his relations difficult with others besides
herself. He had had a troublesome interview with Dolfo Spini, who had
come back in a rage after an ineffectual soaking with rain and long
waiting in ambush, and that scene between Romola and himself at Nello’s
door, once reported in Spini’s ear, might be a seed of something more
unmanageable than suspicion. But now, at least, he believed that he had
mastered Romola by a terror which appealed to the strongest forces of
her nature. He had alarmed her affection and her conscience by the
shadowy image of consequences; he had arrested her intellect by hanging
before it the idea of a hopeless complexity in affairs which defied any
moral judgment.
Yet Tito was not at ease. The world was not yet quite cushioned with
velvet, and, if it had been, he could not have abandoned himself to
that softness with thorough enjoyment; for before he went out again
this evening he put on his coat of chain-armour.