“The hill is steep,” said Romola, with compassionate gentleness, seating herself by him. “And I fear you have been weakened by want?”
He turned his head and fixed his eyes on her in silence, unable, now the moment of speech was come, to seize the words that would convey the thought he wanted to utter: and she remained as motionless as she could, lest he should suppose her impatient. He looked like nothing higher than a common-bred, neglected old man; but she was used now to be very near to such people, and to think a great deal about their troubles. Gradually his glance gathered a more definite expression, and at last he said with abrupt emphasis—
“Ah! you would have been my daughter!”
The swift flush came in Romola’s face and went back again as swiftly, leaving her with white lips a little apart, like a marble image of horror. For her mind, the revelation was made. She divined the facts that lay behind that single word, and in the first moment there could be no check to the impulsive belief which sprang from her keen experience of Tito’s nature. The sensitive response of her face was a stimulus to Baldassarre; for the first time his words had wrought their right effect. He went on with gathering eagerness and firmness, laying his hand on her arm.
“You are a woman of proud blood—is it not true? You go to hear the preacher; you hate baseness—baseness that smiles and triumphs. You hate your husband?”
“Oh God! were you really his father?” said Romola, in a low voice, too entirely possessed by the images of the past to take any note of Baldassarre’s question. “Or was it as he said? Did you take him when he was little?”
“Ah, you believe me—you know what he is!” said Baldassarre, exultingly, tightening the pressure on her arm, as if the contact gave him power. “You will help me?”
“Yes,” said Romola, not interpreting the words as he meant them. She laid her palm gently on the rough hand that grasped her arm, and the tears came to her eyes as she looked at him. “Oh, it is piteous! Tell me—you were a great scholar; you taught him. How is it?”
She broke off. Tito’s allegation of this man’s madness had come across her; and where were the signs even of past refinement? But she had the self-command not to move her hand. She sat perfectly still, waiting to listen with new caution.
“It is gone!—it is all gone!” said Baldassarre; “and they would not believe me, because he lied, and said I was mad; and they had me dragged to prison. And I am old—my mind will not come back. And the world is against me.”
He paused a moment, and his eyes sank as if he were under a wave of despondency. Then he looked up at her again, and said with renewed eagerness—“But you are not against me. He made you love him, and he has been false to you; and you hate him. Yes, he made me love him: he was beautiful and gentle, and I was a lonely man. I took him when they were beating him. He slept in my bosom when he was little, and I watched him as he grew, and gave him all my knowledge, and everything that was mine I meant to be his. I had many things; money, and books, and gems. He had my gems—he sold them; and he left me in slavery. He never came to seek me, and when I came back poor and in misery, he denied me. He said I was a madman.”
“He told us his father was dead—was drowned,” said Romola, faintly. “Surely he must have believed it then. Oh! he could not have been so base then!”
A vision had risen of what Tito was to her in those first days when she thought no more of wrong in him than a child thinks of poison in flowers. The yearning regret that lay in that memory brought some relief from the tension of horror. With one great sob the tears rushed forth.
“Ah, you are young, and the tears come easily,” said Baldassarre, with some impatience. “But tears are no good; they only put out the fire within, and it is the fire that works. Tears will hinder us. Listen to me.”
Romola turned towards him with a slight start. Again the possibility of his madness had darted through her mind, and checked the rush of belief. If, after all, this man were only a mad assassin? But her deep belief in this story still lay behind, and it was more in sympathy than in fear that she avoided the risk of paining him by any show of doubt.
“Tell me,” she said, as gently as she could, “how did you lose your memory—your scholarship?”
“I was ill. I can’t tell how long—it was a blank. I remember nothing, only at last I was sitting in the sun among the stones, and everything else was darkness. And slowly, and by degrees, I felt something besides that: a longing for something—I did not know what—that never came. And when I was in the ship on the waters I began to know what I longed for; it was for the Boy to come back—it was to find all my thoughts again, for I was locked away outside them all. And I am outside now. I feel nothing but a wall and darkness.”
Baldassarre had become dreamy again, and sank into silence, resting his head between his hands; and again Romola’s belief in him had submerged all cautioning doubts. The pity with which she dwelt on his words seemed like the revival of an old pang. Had she not daily seen how her father missed Dino and the future he had dreamed of in that son?
“It all came back once,” Baldassarre went on presently. “I was master of everything. I saw all the world again, and my gems, and my books; and I thought
