“Your mind lingers apart from our love, my Romola,” Tito said, with a soft reproachful murmur. “It seems a forgotten thing to you.”
She looked at the beseeching eyes in silence, till the sadness all melted out of her own.
“My joy!” she said, in her full clear voice.
“Do you really care for me enough, then, to banish those chill fancies, or shall you always be suspecting me as the Great Tempter?” said Tito, with his bright smile.
“How should I not care for you more than for everything else? Everything I had felt before in all my life—about my father, and about my loneliness—was a preparation to love you. You would laugh at me, Tito, if you knew what sort of man I used to think I should marry—some scholar with deep lines in his face, like Alamanno Rinuccini, and with rather grey hair, who would agree with my father in taking the side of the Aristotelians, and be willing to live with him. I used to think about the love I read of in the poets, but I never dreamed that anything like that could happen to me here in Florence in our old library. And then you came, Tito, and were so much to my father, and I began to believe that life could be happy for me too.”
“My goddess! is there any woman like you?” said Tito, with a mixture of fondness and wondering admiration at the blended majesty and simplicity in her.
“But, dearest,” he went on, rather timidly, “if you minded more about our marriage, you would persuade your father and Messer Bernardo not to think of any more delays. But you seem not to mind about it.”
“Yes, Tito, I will, I do mind. But I am sure my godfather will urge more delay now, because of Dino’s death. He has never agreed with my father about disowning Dino, and you know he has always said that we ought to wait until you have been at least a year in Florence. Do not think hardly of my godfather. I know he is prejudiced and narrow, but yet he is very noble. He has often said that it is folly in my father to want to keep his library apart, that it may bear his name; yet he would try to get my father’s wish carried out. That seems to me very great and noble—that power of respecting a feeling which he does not share or understand.”
“I have no rancour against Messer Bernardo for thinking you too precious for me, my Romola,” said Tito: and that was true. “But your father, then, knows of his son’s death?”
“Yes, I told him—I could not help it. I told him where I had been, and that I had seen Dino die; but nothing else; and he has commanded me not to speak of it again. But he has been very silent this morning, and has had those restless movements which always go to my heart; they look as if he were trying to get outside the prison of his blindness. Let us go to him now. I had persuaded him to try to sleep, because he slept little in the night. Your voice will soothe him, Tito: it always does.”
“And not one kiss? I have not had one,” said Tito, in his gentle reproachful tone, which gave him an air of dependence very charming in a creature with those rare gifts that seem to excuse presumption.
The sweet pink blush spread itself with the quickness of light over Romola’s face and neck as she bent towards him. It seemed impossible that their kisses could ever become common things.
“Let us walk once round the loggia,” said Romola, “before we go down.”
“There is something grim and grave to me always about Florence,” said Tito, as they paused in the front of the house, where they could see over the opposite roofs to the other side of the river, “and even in its merriment there is something shrill and hard—biting rather than gay. I wish we lived in Southern Italy, where thought is broken, not by weariness, but by delicious languors such as never seem to come over the ‘ingenia acerrima Florentina.’ I should like to see you under that southern sun, lying among the flowers, subdued into mere enjoyment, while I bent over you and touched the lute and sang to you some little unconscious strain that seemed all one with the light and the warmth. You have never known that happiness of the nymphs, my Romola.”
“No; but I have dreamed of it often since you came. I am very thirsty for a deep draught of joy—for a life all bright like you. But we will not think of it now, Tito; it seems to me as if there would always be pale sad faces among the flowers, and eyes that look in vain. Let us go.”
XVIII
The Portrait
When Tito left the Via de’ Bardi that day in exultant satisfaction at finding himself thoroughly free from the threatened peril, his thoughts, no longer claimed by the immediate presence of Romola and her father, recurred to those futile hours of dread in which he was conscious of having not only felt but acted as he would not have done if he had had a truer foresight. He would not have parted with his ring; for Romola, and others to whom it was a familiar object, would be a little struck with the apparent sordidness of parting with a gem he had professedly cherished, unless he feigned as a reason the desire to make some special gift with the purchase-money; and Tito had at that moment a nauseating weariness of simulation. He was well out of the possible consequences that might have fallen on him from that initial deception, and
