“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 highborn 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
