“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as to have certain strong impressions inaccessible to reason: I cannot share those impressions, and you have withdrawn all trust from me in consequence.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 oncoming 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 anyone from danger, but to be raising scaffolds and setting houses on fire. You are not yet a sufficiently ardent Piagnone to believe that
