The Other Wife.
The morning warmth was already beginning to be rather oppressive to
Romola, when, after a walk along by the walls on her way from San
Marco, she turned towards the intersecting streets again at the gate of
Santa Croce.
The Borgo La Croce was so still, that she listened to her own footsteps
on the pavement in the sunny silence, until, on approaching a bend in
the street, she saw, a few yards before her, a little child not more
than three years old, with no other clothing than his white shirt,
pause from a waddling run and look around him. In the first moment of
coming nearer she could only see his back—a boy’s back, square and
sturdy, with a cloud of reddish-brown curls above it; but in the next
he turned towards her, and she could see his dark eyes wide with tears,
and his lower lip pushed up and trembling, while his fat brown fists
clutched his shirt helplessly. The glimpse of a tall black figure
sending a shadow over him brought his bewildered fear to a climax, and
a loud crying sob sent the big tears rolling.
Romola, with the ready maternal instinct which was one hidden source of
her passionate tenderness, instantly uncovered her head, and, stooping
down on the pavement, put her arms round him, and her cheeks against
his, while she spoke to him in caressing tones. At first his sobs were
only the louder, but he made no effort to get away, and presently the
outburst ceased with that strange abruptness which belongs to childish
joys and griefs: his face lost its distortion, and was fixed in an
open-mouthed gaze at Romola.
“You have lost yourself, little one,” she said, kissing him. “Never
mind! we will find the house again. Perhaps mamma will meet us.”
She divined that he had made his escape at a moment when the mother’s
eyes were turned away from him, and thought it likely that he would
soon be followed.
“Oh, what a heavy, heavy boy!” she said, trying to lift him. “I cannot
carry you. Come, then, you must toddle back by my side.”
The parted lips remained motionless in awed silence, and one brown fist
still clutched the shirt with as much tenacity as ever; but the other
yielded itself quite willingly to the wonderful white hand, strong but
soft.
“You _have_ a mamma?” said Romola, as they set out, looking down at the
boy with a certain yearning. But he was mute. A girl under those
circumstances might perhaps have chirped abundantly; not so this
square-shouldered little man with the big cloud of curls.
He was awake to the first sign of his whereabout, however. At the
turning by the front of San Ambrogio he dragged Romola towards it,
looking up at her.
“Ah, that is the way home, is it?” she said, smiling at him. He only
thrust his head forward and pulled, as an admonition that they should
go faster.
There was still another turning that he had a decided opinion about,
and then Romola found herself in a short street leading to open garden
ground. It was in front of a house at the end of this street that the
little fellow paused, pulling her towards some stone stairs. He had
evidently no wish for her to loose his hand, and she would not have
been willing to leave him without being sure that she was delivering
him to his friends. They mounted the stairs, seeing but dimly in that
sudden withdrawal from the sunlight, till, at the final landing-place,
an extra stream of light came from an open doorway. Passing through a
small lobby, they came to another open door, and there Romola paused.
Her approach had not been heard.
On a low chair at the farther end of the room, opposite the light, sat
Tessa, with one hand on the edge of the cradle, and her head hanging a
little on one side, fast asleep. Near one of the windows, with her back
turned towards the door, sat Monna Lisa at her work of preparing salad,
in deaf unconsciousness. There was only an instant for Romola’s eyes to
take in that still scene; for Lillo snatched his hand away from her and
ran up to his mother’s side, not making any direct effort to wake her,
but only leaning his head back against her arm, and surveying Romola
seriously from that distance.
As Lillo pushed against her, Tessa opened her eyes, and looked up in
bewilderment; but her glance had no sooner rested on the figure at the
opposite doorway than she started up, blushed deeply, and began to
tremble a little, neither speaking nor moving forward.
“Ah! we have seen each other before,” said Romola, smiling, and coming
forward. “I am glad it was _your_ little boy. He was crying in the
street; I suppose he had run away. So we walked together a little way,
and then he knew where he was, and brought me here. But you had not
missed him? That is well, else you would have been frightened.”
The shock of finding that Lillo had run away overcame every other
feeling in Tessa for the moment. Her colour went again, and, seizing
Lillo’s arm, she ran with him to Monna Lisa, saying, with a half sob,
loud in the old woman’s ear—
“Oh, Lisa, you are wicked! Why will you stand with your back to the
door? Lillo ran away ever so far into the street.”
“Holy Mother!” said Monna Lisa, in her meek, thick tone, letting the
spoon fall from her hands. “Where were _you_, then? I thought you were
there, and had your eye on him.”
“But you _know_ I go to sleep when I am rocking,” said Tessa, in
pettish remonstrance.
“Well, well, we must keep the outer door shut, or else tie him up,”
said Monna Lisa, “for he’ll be as cunning as Satan before long, and
that’s the holy truth. But how came he back, then?”
This question recalled Tessa to the consciousness of Romola’s presence.
Without answering, she turned towards her, blushing and timid again,
and Monna Lisa’s eyes followed her movement. The old woman made a low
reverence, and said—
“Doubtless the most noble lady brought him back.” Then, advancing a
little nearer to Romola, she added, “It’s my shame for him to have been
found with only his shirt on; but he kicked, and wouldn’t have his
other clothes on this morning, and the mother, poor thing, will never
hear of his being beaten. But what’s an old woman to do without a stick
when the lad’s legs get so strong? Let your nobleness look at his
legs.”
Lillo, conscious that his legs were in question, pulled his shirt up a
little higher, and looked down at their olive roundness with a
dispassionate and curious air. Romola laughed, and stooped to give him
a caressing shake and a kiss, and this action helped the reassurance
that Tessa had already gathered from Monna Lisa’s address to Romola.
For when Naldo had been told about the adventure at the Carnival, and
Tessa had asked him who the heavenly lady that had come just when she
was wanted, and had vanished so soon, was likely to be—whether she
could be the Holy Madonna herself?—he had answered, “Not exactly, my
Tessa; only one of the saints,” and had not chosen to say more. So that
in the dreamlike combination of small experience which made up Tessa’s
thought, Romola had remained confusedly associated with the pictures in
the churches, and when she reappeared, the grateful remembrance of her
protection was slightly tinctured with religious awe—not deeply, for
Tessa’s dread was chiefly of ugly and evil beings. It seemed unlikely
that good beings would be angry and punish her, as it was the nature of
Nofri and the devil to do. And now that Monna Lisa had spoken freely
about Lillo’s legs and Romola had laughed, Tessa was more at her ease.
“Ninna’s in the cradle,” she said. “_She’s_ pretty too.”
Romola went to look at the sleeping Ninna, and Monna Lisa, one of the
exceptionally meek deaf, who never expect to be spoken to, returned to
her salad.
“Ah! she is waking: she has opened her blue eyes,” said Romola. “You
must take her up, and I will sit down in this chair—may I?—and nurse
Lillo. Come, Lillo!”
She sat down in Tito’s chair, and put out her arms towards the lad,
whose eyes had followed her. He hesitated: and, pointing his small
fingers at her with a half-puzzled, half-angry feeling, said, “That’s
Babbo’s chair,” not seeing his way out of the difficulty if Babbo came
and found Romola in his place.
“But Babbo is not here, and I shall go soon. Come, let me nurse you as
he does,” said Romola, wondering to herself for the first time what
sort of Babbo he was whose wife was dressed in contadina fashion, but
had a certain daintiness about her person that indicated idleness and
plenty. Lillo consented to be lifted up, and, finding the lap
exceedingly comfortable, began to explore her dress and hands, to see
if there were any ornaments beside the rosary.
Tessa, who had hitherto been occupied in coaxing Ninna out of her
waking peevishness, now sat down in her low chair, near Romola’s knee,
arranging Ninna’s tiny person to advantage, jealous that the strange
lady too seemed to notice the boy most, as Naldo did.
“Lillo was going to be angry with me, because I sat in Babbo’s chair,”
said Romola, as she bent forward to kiss Ninna’s little foot. “Will he
come soon and want it?”
“Ah, no!” said Tessa, “you can sit in it a long while. I shall be sorry
when you go. When you first came to take care of me at the Carnival, I
thought it was wonderful; you came and went away again so fast. And
Naldo said, perhaps you were a saint, and that made me tremble a
little, though the saints are very good, I know; and you were good to
me, and now you have taken care of Lillo. Perhaps you will always come
and take care of me. That was how Naldo did a long while ago; he came
and took care of me when I was frightened, one San Giovanni. I couldn’t
think where he came from—he was so beautiful and good. And so are you,”
ended Tessa, looking up at Romola with devout admiration.
“Naldo is your husband. His eyes are like Lillo’s,” said Romola,
looking at the boy’s darkly-pencilled eyebrows, unusual at his age. She
did not speak interrogatively, but with a quiet certainty of inference
which was necessarily mysterious to Tessa.
“Ah! you know him!” she said, pausing a little in wonder. “Perhaps you
know Nofri and Peretola, and our house on the hill, and everything.
Yes, like Lillo’s; but not his hair. His hair is dark and long—” she
went on, getting rather excited. “Ah! if you know it, ecco!”
She had put her hand to a thin red silk cord that hung round her neck,
and drew from her bosom the tiny old parchment _Breve_, the horn of red
coral, and a long dark curl carefully tied at one end and suspended
with those mystic treasures. She held them towards Romola, away from
Ninna’s snatching hand.
“It is a fresh one. I cut it lately. See how bright it is!” she said,
laying it against the white background of Romola’s fingers. “They get
dim, and then he lets me cut another when his hair is grown; and I put
it with the _Breve_, because sometimes he is away a long while, and
then I think it helps to take care of me.”
A slight shiver passed through Romola as the curl was laid across her
fingers. At Tessa’s first mention of her husband as having come
mysteriously she knew not whence, a possibility had risen before Romola
that made her heart beat faster; for to one who is anxiously in search
of a certain object the faintest suggestions have a peculiar
significance. And when the curl was held towards her, it seemed for an
instant like a mocking phantasm of the lock she herself had cut to wind
with one of her own five years ago. But she preserved her outward
calmness, bent not only on knowing the truth, but also on coming to
that knowledge in a way that would not pain this poor, trusting,
ignorant thing, with the child’s mind in the woman’s body. “Foolish and
helpless:” yes; so far she corresponded to Baldassarre’s account.
“It is a beautiful curl,” she said, resisting the impulse to withdraw
her hand. “Lillo’s curls will be like it, perhaps, for _his_ cheek,
too, is dark. And you never know where your husband goes to when he
leaves you?”
“No,” said Tessa, putting back her treasures out of the children’s way.
“But I know Messer San Michele takes care of him, for he gave him a
beautiful coat, all made of little chains; and if he puts that on,
nobody can kill him. And perhaps, if—”
Tessa hesitated a little, under a recurrence of that original dreamy
wonder about Romola which had been expelled by chatting contact—“if you
_were_ a saint, you would take care of him, too, because you have taken
care of me and Lillo.”
An agitated flush came over Romola’s face in the first moment of
certainty, but she had bent her cheek against Lillo’s head. The feeling
that leaped out in that flush was something like exultation at the
thought that the wife’s burden might be about to slip from her
overladen shoulders; that this little ignorant creature might prove to
be Tito’s lawful wife. A strange exultation for a proud and high-born
woman to have been brought to! But it seemed to Romola as if that were
the only issue that would make duty anything else for her than an
insoluble problem. Yet she was not deaf to Tessa’s last appealing
words; she raised her head, and said, in her clearest tones—
“I will always take care of you if I see you need me. But that
beautiful coat? your husband did not wear it when you were first
married? Perhaps he used not to be so long away from you then?”
“Ah, yes! he was. Much—much longer. So long, I thought he would never
come back. I used to cry. Oh me! I was beaten then; a long, long while
ago at Peretola, where we had the goats and mules.”
“And how long had you been married before your husband had that
chain-coat?” said Romola, her heart beating faster and faster.
Tessa looked meditative, and began to count on her fingers, and Romola
watched the fingers as if they would tell the secret of her destiny.
“The chestnuts were ripe when we were married,” said Tessa, marking off
her thumb and fingers again as she spoke; “and then again they were
ripe at Peretola before he came back, and then again, after that, on
the hill. And soon the soldiers came, and we heard the trumpets, and
then Naldo had the coat.”
“You had been married more than two years. In which church were you
married?” said Romola, too entirely absorbed by one thought to put any
question that was less direct. Perhaps before the next morning she
might go to her godfather and say that she was not Tito Melema’s lawful
wife—that the vows which had bound her to strive after an impossible
union had been made void beforehand.
Tessa gave a slight start at Romola’s new tone of inquiry, and looked
up at her with a hesitating expression. Hitherto she had prattled on
without consciousness that she was making revelations, any more than
when she said old things over and over again to Monna Lisa.
“Naldo said I was never to tell about that,” she said, doubtfully. “Do
you think he would not be angry if I told you?”
“It is right that you should tell me. Tell me everything,” said Romola,
looking at her with mild authority.
If the impression from Naldo’s command had been much more recent than
it was, the constraining effect of Romola’s mysterious authority would
have overcome it. But the sense that she was telling what she had never
told before made her begin with a lowered voice.
“It was not in a church—it was at the Nativita, when there was a fair,
and all the people went overnight to see the Madonna in the Nunziata,
and my mother was ill and couldn’t go, and I took the bunch of cocoons
for her; and then he came to me in the church and I heard him say,
‘Tessa!’ I knew him because he had taken care of me at the San
Giovanni, and then we went into the piazza where the fair was, and I
had some _berlingozzi_, for I was hungry and he was very good to me;
and at the end of the piazza there was a holy father, and an altar like
what they have at the processions outside the churches. So he married
us, and then Naldo took me back into the church and left me; and I went
home, and my mother died, and Nofri began to beat me more, and Naldo
never came back. And I used to cry, and once at the Carnival I saw him
and followed him, and he was angry, and said he would come some time, I
must wait. So I went and waited; but, oh! it was a long while before he
came; but he would have come if he could, for he was good; and then he
took me away, because I cried and said I could not bear to stay with
Nofri. And, oh! I was so glad, and since then I have been always happy,
for I don’t mind about the goats and mules, because I have Lillo and
Ninna now; and Naldo is never angry, only I think he doesn’t love Ninna
so well as Lillo, and she _is_ pretty.”
Quite forgetting that she had thought her speech rather momentous at
the beginning, Tessa fell to devouring Ninna with kisses, while Romola
sat in silence with absent eyes. It was inevitable that in this moment
she should think of the three beings before her chiefly in their
relation to her own lot, and she was feeling the chill of
disappointment that her difficulties were not to be solved by external
law. She had relaxed her hold of Lillo, and was leaning her cheek
against her hand, seeing nothing of the scene around her. Lillo was
quick in perceiving a change that was not agreeable to him; he had not
yet made any return to her caresses, but he objected to their
withdrawal, and putting up both his brown arms to pull her head towards
him, he said, “Play with me again!”
Romola, roused from her self-absorption, clasped the lad anew, and
looked from him to Tessa, who had now paused from her shower of kisses,
and seemed to have returned to the more placid delight of contemplating
the heavenly lady’s face. That face was undergoing a subtle change,
like the gradual oncoming of a warmer, softer light. Presently Romola
took her scissors from her scarsella, and cut off one of her long wavy
locks, while the three pair of wide eyes followed her movements with
kitten-like observation.
“I must go away from you now,” she said, “but I will leave this lock of
hair that it may remind you of me, because if you are ever in trouble
you can think that perhaps God will send me to take care of you again.
I cannot tell you where to find me, but if I ever know that you want
me, I will come to you. Addio!”
She had set down Lillo hurriedly, and held out her hand to Tessa, who
kissed it with a mixture of awe and sorrow at this parting. Romola’s
mind was oppressed with thoughts; she needed to be alone as soon as
possible, but with her habitual care for the least fortunate, she
turned aside to put her hand in a friendly way on Monna Lisa’s shoulder
and make her a farewell sign. Before the old woman had finished her
deep reverence, Romola had disappeared.
Monna Lisa and Tessa moved towards each other by simultaneous impulses,
while the two children stood clinging to their mother’s skirts as if
they, too, felt the atmosphere of awe.
“Do you think she _was_ a saint?” said Tessa, in Lisa’s ear, showing
her the lock.
Lisa rejected that notion very decidedly by a backward movement of her
fingers, and then stroking the rippled gold, said—
“She’s a great and noble lady. I saw such in my youth.”
Romola went home and sat alone through the sultry hours of that day
with the heavy certainty that her lot was unchanged. She was thrown
back again on the conflict between the demands of an outward law, which
she recognised as a widely-ramifying obligation, and the demands of
inner moral facts which were becoming more and more peremptory. She had
drunk in deeply the spirit of that teaching by which Savonarola had
urged her to return to her place. She felt that the sanctity attached
to all close relations, and, therefore, pre-eminently to the closest,
was but the expression in outward law of that result towards which all
human goodness and nobleness must spontaneously tend; that the light
abandonment of ties, whether inherited or voluntary, because they had
ceased to be pleasant, was the uprooting of social and personal virtue.
What else had Tito’s crime towards Baldassarre been but that
abandonment working itself out to the most hideous extreme of falsity
and ingratitude?
And the inspiring consciousness breathed into her by Savonarola’s
influence that her lot was vitally united with the general lot had
exalted even the minor details of obligation into religion. She was
marching with a great army; she was feeling the stress of a common
life. If victims were needed, and it was uncertain on whom the lot
might fall, she would stand ready to answer to her name. She had stood
long; she had striven hard to fulfil the bond, but she had seen all the
conditions which made the fulfilment possible gradually forsaking her.
The one effect of her marriage-tie seemed to be the stifling
predominance over her of a nature that she despised. All her efforts at
union had only made its impossibility more palpable, and the relation
had become for her simply a degrading servitude. The law was sacred.
Yes, but rebellion might be sacred too. It flashed upon her mind that
the problem before her was essentially the same as that which had lain
before Savonarola—the problem where the sacredness of obedience ended,
and where the sacredness of rebellion began. To her, as to him, there
had come one of those moments in life when the soul must dare to act on
its own warrant, not only without external law to appeal to, but in the
face of a law which is not unarmed with Divine lightnings—lightnings
that may yet fall if the warrant has been false.
Before the sun had gone down she had adopted a resolve. She would ask
no counsel of her godfather or of Savonarola until she had made one
determined effort to speak freely with Tito and obtain his consent that
she should live apart from him. She desired not to leave him
clandestinely again, or to forsake Florence. She would tell him that if
he ever felt a real need of her, she would come back to him. Was not
that the utmost faithfulness to her bond that could be required of her?
A shuddering anticipation came over her that he would clothe a refusal
in a sneering suggestion that she should enter a convent as the only
mode of quitting him that would not be scandalous. He knew well that
her mind revolted from that means of escape, not only because of her
own repugnance to a narrow rule, but because all the cherished memories
of her father forbade that she should adopt a mode of life which was
associated with his deepest griefs and his bitterest dislike.
Tito had announced his intention of coming home this evening. She would
wait for him, and say what she had to say at once, for it was difficult
to get his ear during the day. If he had the slightest suspicion that
personal words were coming, he slipped away with an appearance of
unpremeditated ease. When she sent for Maso to tell him that she would
wait for his master, she observed that the old man looked at her and
lingered with a mixture of hesitation and wondering anxiety; but
finding that she asked him no question, he slowly turned away. Why
should she ask questions? Perhaps Maso only knew or guessed something
of what she knew already.
It was late before Tito came. Romola had been pacing up and down the
long room which had once been the library, with the windows open, and a
loose white linen robe on instead of her usual black garment. She was
glad of that change after the long hours of heat and motionless
meditation; but the coolness and exercise made her more intensely
wakeful, and as she went with the lamp in her hand to open the door for
Tito, he might well have been startled by the vividness of her eyes and
the expression of painful resolution, which was in contrast with her
usual self-restrained quiescence before him. But it seemed that this
excitement was just what he expected.
“Ah! it is you, Romola. Maso is gone to bed,” he said, in a grave,
quiet tone, interposing to close the door for her. Then, turning round,
he said, looking at her more fully than he was wont, “You have heard it
all, I see.”
Romola quivered. _He_ then was inclined to take the initiative. He had
been to Tessa. She led the way through the nearest door, set down her
lamp, and turned towards him again.
“You must not think despairingly of the consequences,” said Tito, in a
tone of soothing encouragement, at which Romola stood wondering, until
he added, “The accused have too many family ties with all parties not
to escape; and Messer Bernardo del Nero has other things in his favour
besides his age.”
Romola started, and gave a cry as if she had been suddenly stricken by
a sharp weapon.
“What! you did not know it?” said Tito, putting his hand under her arm
that he might lead her to a seat; but she seemed to be unaware of his
touch.
“Tell me,” she said, hastily—“tell me what it is.”
“A man, whose name you may forget—Lamberto dell’ Antella—who was
banished, has been seized within the territory: a letter has been found
on him of very dangerous import to the chief Mediceans, and the
scoundrel, who was once a favourite hound of Piero de’ Medici, is ready
now to swear what any one pleases against him or his friends. Some have
made their escape, but five are now in prison.”
“My godfather?” said Romola, scarcely above a whisper, as Tito made a
slight pause.
“Yes: I grieve to say it. But along with him there are three, at least,
whose names have a commanding interest even among the popular
party—Niccolò Ridolfi, Lorenzo Tornabuoni, and Giannozzo Pucci.”
The tide of Romola’s feelings had been violently turned into a new
channel. In the tumult of that moment there could be no check to the
words which came as the impulsive utterance of her long-accumulating
horror. When Tito had named the men of whom she felt certain he was the
confederate, she said, with a recoiling gesture and low-toned
bitterness—
“And _you_—you are safe?”
“You are certainly an amiable wife, my Romola,” said Tito, with the
coldest irony. “Yes; I am safe.”
They turned away from each other in silence.