Meeting Again.
On the fourteenth of April Romola was once more within the walls of
Florence. Unable to rest at Pistoja, where contradictory reports
reached her about the Trial by Fire, she had gone on to Prato; and was
beginning to think that she should be drawn on to Florence in spite of
dread, when she encountered that monk of San Spirito who had been her
godfather’s confessor. From him she learned the full story of
Savonarola’s arrest, and of her husband’s death. This Augustinian monk
had been in the stream of people who had followed the waggon with its
awful burthen into the Piazza, and he could tell her what was generally
known in Florence—that Tito had escaped from an assaulting mob by
leaping into the Arno, but had been murdered on the bank by an old man
who had long had an enmity against him. But Romola understood the
catastrophe as no one else did. Of Savonarola the monk told her, in
that tone of unfavourable prejudice which was usual in the Black
Brethren (Frati Neri) towards the brother who showed white under his
black, that he had confessed himself a deceiver of the people.
Romola paused no longer. That evening she was in Florence, sitting in
agitated silence under the exclamations of joy and wailing, mingled
with exuberant narrative, which were poured into her ears by Monna
Brigida, who had backslided into false hair in Romola’s absence, but
now drew it off again and declared she would not mind being grey, if
her dear child would stay with her.
Romola was too deeply moved by the main events which she had known
before coming to Florence, to be wrought upon by the doubtful gossiping
details added in Brigida’s narrative. The tragedy of her husband’s
death, of Fra Girolamo’s confession of duplicity under the coercion of
torture, left her hardly any power of apprehending minor circumstances.
All the mental activity she could exert under that load of awe-stricken
grief, was absorbed by two purposes which must supersede every other;
to try and see Savonarola, and to learn what had become of Tessa and
the children.
“Tell me, cousin,” she said abruptly, when Monna Brigida’s tongue had
run quite away from troubles into projects of Romola’s living with her,
“has anything been seen or said since Tito’s death of a young woman
with two little children?”
Brigida started, rounded her eyes, and lifted up her hands.
“Cristo! no. What! was he so bad as that, my poor child? Ah, then, that
was why you went away, and left me word only that you went of your own
free will. Well, well; if I’d known that, I shouldn’t have thought you
so strange and flighty. For I did say to myself, though I didn’t tell
anybody else, ‘What was she to go away from her husband for, leaving
him to mischief, only because they cut poor Bernardo’s head off? She’s
got her father’s temper,’ I said, ‘that’s what it is.’ Well, well;
never scold me, child: Bardo _was_ fierce, you can’t deny it. But if
you had only told me the truth, that there was a young hussey and
children, I should have understood it all. Anything seen or said of
her? No; and the less the better. They say enough of ill about him
without that. But since that was the reason you went—”
“No, dear cousin,” said Romola, interrupting her earnestly, “pray do
not talk so. I wish above all things to find that young woman and her
children, and to take care of them. They are quite helpless. Say
nothing against it; that is the thing I shall do first of all.”
“Well,” said Monna Brigida, shrugging her shoulders and lowering her
voice with an air of puzzled discomfiture, “if that’s being a Piagnone,
I’ve been taking peas for paternosters. Why, Fra Girolamo said as good
as that widows ought not to marry again. Step in at the door and it’s a
sin and a shame, it seems; but come down the chimney and you’re
welcome. _Two_ children—Santiddio!”
“Cousin, the poor thing has done no conscious wrong: she is ignorant of
everything. I will tell you—but not now.”
Early the next morning Romola’s steps were directed to the house beyond
San Ambrogio where she had once found Tessa; but it was as she had
feared: Tessa was gone. Romola conjectured that Tito had sent her away
beforehand to some spot where he had intended to join her, for she did
not believe that he would willingly part with those children. It was a
painful conjecture, because, if Tessa were out of Florence, there was
hardly a chance of finding her, and Romola pictured the childish
creature waiting and waiting at some wayside spot in wondering,
helpless misery. Those who lived near could tell her nothing except
that old deaf Lisa had gone away a week ago with her goods, but no one
knew where Tessa had gone. Romola saw no further active search open to
her; for she had no knowledge that could serve as a starting-point for
inquiry, and not only her innate reserve but a more noble sensitiveness
made her shrink from assuming an attitude of generosity in the eyes of
others by publishing Tessa’s relation to Tito, along with her own
desire to find her. Many days passed in anxious inaction. Even under
strong solicitation from other thoughts Romola found her heart
palpitating if she caught sight of a pair of round brown legs, or of a
short woman in the contadina dress.
She never for a moment told herself that it was heroism or exalted
charity in her to seek these beings; she needed something that she was
bound specially to care for; she yearned to clasp the children and to
make them love her. This at least would be some sweet result, for
others as well as herself, from all her past sorrow. It appeared there
was much property of Tito’s to which she had a claim; but she
distrusted the cleanness of that money, and she had determined to make
it all over to the State, except so much as was equal to the price of
her father’s library. This would be enough for the modest support of
Tessa and the children. But Monna Brigida threw such planning into the
background by clamorously insisting that Romola must live with her and
never forsake her till she had seen her safe in Paradise—else why had
she persuaded her to turn Piagnone?—and if Romola wanted to rear other
people’s children, she, Monna Brigida, must rear them too. Only they
must be found first.
Romola felt the full force of that innuendo. But strong feeling
unsatisfied is never without its superstition, either of hope or
despair. Romola’s was the superstition of hope: _somehow_ she was to
find that mother and the children. And at last another direction for
active inquiry suggested itself. She learned that Tito had provided
horses and mules to await him in San Gallo; he was therefore going to
leave Florence by the gate of San Gallo, and she determined, though
without much confidence in the issue, to try and ascertain from the
gatekeepers if they had observed any one corresponding to the
description of Tessa with her children, to have passed the gates before
the morning of the ninth of April. Walking along the Via San Gallo, and
looking watchfully about her through her long widow’s veil, lest she
should miss any object that might aid her, she descried Bratti
chaffering with a customer. That roaming man, she thought, might aid
her: she would not mind talking of Tessa to _him_. But as she put aside
her veil and crossed the street towards him, she saw something hanging
from the corner of his basket which made her heart leap with a much
stronger hope.
“Bratti, my friend,” she said abruptly, “where did you get that
necklace?”
“Your servant, madonna,” said Bratti, looking round at her very
deliberately, his mind not being subject to surprise. “It’s a necklace
worth money, but I shall get little by it, for my heart’s too tender
for a trader’s; I have promised to keep it in pledge.”
“Pray tell me where you got it;—from a little woman named Tessa, is it
not true?”
“Ah! if you know her,” said Bratti, “and would redeem it of me at a
small profit, and give it her again, you’d be doing a charity, for she
cried at parting with it—you’d have thought she was running into a
brook. It’s a small profit I’ll charge you. You shall have it for a
florin, for I don’t like to be hard-hearted.”
“Where is she?” said Romola, giving him the money, and unclasping the
necklace from the basket in joyful agitation.
“Outside the gate there, at the other end of the Borgo, at old Sibilla
Manetti’s: anybody will tell you which is the house.”
Romola went along with winged feet, blessing that incident of the
Carnival which had made her learn by heart the appearance of this
necklace. Soon she was at the house she sought. The young woman and the
children were in the inner room—were to have been fetched away a
fortnight ago and more—had no money, only their clothes, to pay a poor
widow with for their food and lodging. But since madonna knew them—
Romola waited to hear no more, but opened the door.
Tessa was seated on the low bed: her crying had passed into tearless
sobs, and she was looking with sad blank eyes at the two children, who
were playing in an opposite corner—Lillo covering his head with his
skirt and roaring at Ninna to frighten her, then peeping out again to
see how she bore it. The door was a little behind Tessa, and she did
not turn round when it opened, thinking it was only the old woman:
expectation was no longer alive. Romola had thrown aside her veil and
paused a moment, holding the necklace in sight. Then she said, in that
pure voice that used to cheer her father—
“Tessa!”
Tessa started to her feet and looked round.
“See,” said Romola, clasping the beads on Tessa’s neck, “God has sent
me to you again.”
The poor thing screamed and sobbed, and clung to the arms that fastened
the necklace. She could not speak. The two children came from their
corner, laid hold of their mother’s skirts, and looked up with wide
eyes at Romola.
That day they all went home to Monna Brigida’s, in the Borgo degli
Albizzi. Romola had made known to Tessa, by gentle degrees, that Naldo
could never come to her again: not because he was cruel, but because he
was dead.
“But be comforted, my Tessa,” said Romola. “I am come to take care of
you always. And we have got Lillo and Ninna.”
Monna Brigida’s mouth twitched in the struggle between her awe of
Romola and the desire to speak unseasonably.
“Let be, for the present,” she thought; “but it seems to me a thousand
years till I tell this little contadina, who seems not to know how many
fingers she’s got on her hand, who Romola is. And I _will_ tell her
some day, else she’ll never know her place. It’s all very well for
Romola;—nobody will call their souls their own when she’s by; but if
I’m to have this puss-faced minx living in my house she must be humble
to me.”
However, Monna Brigida wanted to give the children too many sweets for
their supper, and confessed to Romola, the last thing before going to
bed, that it would be a shame not to take care of such cherubs.
“But you must give up to me a little, Romola, about their eating, and
those things. For you have never had a baby, and I had twins, only they
died as soon as they were born.”