Tito’s chief hope now was that Dolfo Spini had not caught sight of him, and the hope would have been well founded if Spini had had no clearer view of him than he had caught of Spini. But, himself in shadow, he had seen Tito illuminated for an instant by the direct rays of the lamp, and Tito in his way was as strongly marked a personage as the captain of the Compagnacci. Romola’s black-shrouded figure had escaped notice, and she now stood behind her husband’s shoulder in the corner of the loggia. Tito was not left to hope long.
“Ha! my carrier-pigeon!” grated Spini’s harsh voice, in what he meant to be an undertone, while his hand grasped Tito’s shoulder; “what did you run into hiding for? You didn’t know it was comrades who were coming. It’s well I caught sight of you; it saves time. What of the chase tomorrow morning? Will the bald-headed game rise? Are the falcons to be got ready?”
If it had been in Tito’s nature to feel an access of rage, he would have felt it against this bull-faced accomplice, unfit either for a leader or a tool. His lips turned white, but his excitement came from the pressing difficulty of choosing a safe device. If he attempted to hush Spini, that would only deepen Romola’s suspicion, and he knew her well enough to know that if some strong alarm were roused in her, she was neither to be silenced nor hoodwinked: on the other hand, if he repelled Spini angrily the wine-breathing Compagnaccio might become savage, being more ready at resentment than at the divination of motives. He adopted a third course, which proved that Romola retained one sort of power over him—the power of dread.
He pressed her hand, as if intending a hint to her, and said in a good-humoured tone of comradeship—
“Yes, my Dolfo, you may prepare in all security. But take no trumpets with you.”
“Don’t be afraid,” said Spini, a little piqued. “No need to play Ser Saccente with me. I know where the devil keeps his tail as well as you do. What! he swallowed the bait whole? The prophetic nose didn’t scent the hook at all?” he went on, lowering his tone a little, with a blundering sense of secrecy.
“The brute will not be satisfied till he has emptied the bag,” thought Tito: but aloud he said—“Swallowed all as easily as you swallow a cup of Trebbiano. Ha! I see torches: there must be a dead body coming. The pestilence has been spreading, I hear.”
“Santiddio! I hate the sight of those biers. Good night,” said Spini, hastily moving off.
The torches were really coming, but they preceded a church dignitary who was returning homeward; the suggestion of the dead body and the pestilence was Tito’s device for getting rid of Spini without telling him to go. The moment he had moved away, Tito turned to Romola, and said, quietly—
“Do not be alarmed by anything that bestia has said, my Romola. We will go on now: I think the rain has not increased.”
She was quivering with indignant resolution; it was of no use for Tito to speak in that unconcerned way. She distrusted every word he could utter.
“I will not go on,” she said. “I will not move nearer home until I have some security against this treachery being perpetrated.”
“Wait, at least, until these torches have passed,” said Tito, with perfect self-command, but with a new rising of dislike to a wife who this time, he foresaw, might have the power of thwarting him in spite of the husband’s predominance.
The torches passed, with the Vicario dell’ Arcivescovo, and due reverence was done by Tito, but Romola saw nothing outward. If for the defeat of this treachery, in which she believed with all the force of long presentiment, it had been necessary at that moment for her to spring on her husband and hurl herself with him down a precipice, she felt as if she could have done it. Union with this man! At that moment the self-quelling discipline of two years seemed to be nullified: she felt nothing but that they were divided.
They were nearly in darkness again, and could only see each other’s faces dimly.
“Tell me the truth, Tito—this time tell me the truth,” said Romola, in a low quivering voice. “It will be safer for you.”
“Why should I desire to tell you anything else, my angry saint?” said Tito, with a slight touch of contempt, which was the vent of his annoyance; “since the truth is precisely that over which you have most reason to rejoice—namely, that my knowing a plot of Spini’s enables me to secure the Frate from falling a victim to it.”
“What is the plot?”
“That I decline to tell,” said Tito. “It is enough that the Frate’s safety will be secured.”
“It is a plot for drawing him outside the gates that Spini may murder him.”
“There has been no intention of murder. It is simply a plot for compelling him to obey the Pope’s summons to Rome. But as I serve the popular government, and think the Frate’s presence here is a necessary means of maintaining it at present, I choose to prevent his departure. You may go to sleep with entire ease of mind tonight.”
For a moment Romola was silent. Then she said, in a voice of anguish, “Tito, it is of no use: I have no belief in you.”
She could just discern his action as he shrugged his shoulders, and spread out his palms in silence. That cold dislike which is the anger of unimpassioned beings was hardening within him.
“If the Frate leaves the city—if any harm happens to him,” said Romola, after a slight pause, in a new tone of indignant resolution—“I will declare what I
