CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT.
COUNTER-CHECK.
It was late in the afternoon when Tito returned home. Romola, seatedopposite the cabinet in her narrow room, copying documents, was about todesist from her work because the light was getting dim, when her husbandentered. He had come straight to this room to seek her, with athoroughly defined intention, and there was something new to Romola inhis manner and expression as he looked at her silently on entering, and,without taking off his cap and mantle, leaned one elbow on the cabinet,and stood directly in front of her.
Romola, fully assured during the day of the Frate's safety, was feelingthe reaction of some penitence for the access of distrust andindignation which had impelled her to address her husband publicly on amatter that she knew he wished to be private. She told herself that shehad probably been wrong. The scheming duplicity which she had heardeven her godfather allude to as inseparable from party tactics might besufficient to account for the connection with Spini, without thesupposition that Tito had ever meant to further the plot. She wanted toatone for her impetuosity by confessing that she had been too hasty, andfor some hours her mind had been dwelling on the possibility that thisconfession of hers might lead to other frank words breaking the twoyears' silence of their hearts. The silence had been so complete, thatTito was ignorant of her having fled from him and come back again; theyhad never approached an avowal of that past which, both in its younglove and in the shock that shattered the love, lay locked away from themlike a banquet-room where death had once broken the feast.
She looked up at him with that submission in her glance which belongedto her state of self-reproof; but the subtle change in his face andmanner arrested her speech. For a few moments they remained silent,looking at each other.
Tito himself felt that a crisis was come in his married life. Thehusband's determination to mastery, which lay deep below all blandnessand beseechingness, had risen permanently to the surface now, and seemedto alter his face, as a face is altered by a hidden muscular tensionwith which a man is secretly throttling or stamping out the life fromsomething feeble, yet dangerous.
"Romola," he began, in the cool liquid tone that made her shiver, "it istime that we should understand each other." He paused.
"That is what I most desire, Tito," she said, faintly. Her sweet paleface; with all its anger gone and nothing but the timidity of self-doubtin it, seemed to give a marked predominance to her husband's darkstrength.
"You took a step this morning," Tito went on, "which you must nowyourself perceive to have been useless--which exposed you to remark andmay involve me in serious practical difficulties."
"I acknowledge that I was too hasty; I am sorry for any injustice I mayhave done you." Romola spoke these words in a fuller and firmer tone;Tito, she hoped, would look less hard when she had expressed her regret,and then she could say other things.
"I wish you once for all to understand," he said, without any change ofvoice, "that such collisions are incompatible with our position ashusband and wife. I wish you to reflect on the mode in which you wereled to that step, that the process may not he repeated."
"That depends chiefly on you, Tito," said Romola, taking fire slightly.It was not at all what she had thought of saying, but we see a verylittle way before us in mutual speech.
"You would say, I suppose," answered Tito, "that nothing is to occur infuture which can excite your unreasonable suspicions. You were frankenough to say last night that you have no belief in me. I am notsurprised at any exaggerated conclusion you may draw from slightpremises, but I wish to point out to you what is likely to be the fruitof your making such exaggerated conclusions a ground for interfering inaffairs of which you are ignorant. Your attention is thoroughly awaketo what I am saying?"
He paused for a reply.
"Yes," said Romola, flushing in irrepressible resentment at this coldtone of superiority.
"Well, then, it may possibly not be very long before some other chancewords or incidents set your imagination at work devising crimes for me,and you may perhaps rush to the Palazzo Vecchio to alarm the Signoriaand set the city in an uproar. Shall I tell you what may be the result?Not simply the disgrace of your husband, to which you look forward withso much courage, but the arrest and ruin of many among the chief men inFlorence, including Messer Bernardo del Nero."
Tito had meditated a decisive move, and he had made it. The flush diedout of Romola's face, and her very lips were pale--an unusual effectwith her, for she was little subject to fear. Tito perceived hissuccess.
"You would perhaps flatter yourself," he went on, "that you wereperforming a heroic deed of deliverance; you might as well try to turnlocks with fine words as apply such notions to the politics of Florence.The question now is, not whether you can have any belief in me, butwhether, now you have been warned, you will dare to rush, like a blindman with a torch in his hand, amongst intricate affairs of which youknow nothing."
Romola felt as if her mind were held in a vice by Tito's: thepossibilities he had indicated were rising before her with terribleclearness.
"I am too rash," she said. "I will try not to be rash."
"Remember," said Tito, with unsparing insistance, "that your act ofdistrust towards me this morning might, for aught you knew, have hadmore fatal effects than that sacrifice of your husband which you havelearned to contemplate without flinching."
"Tito, it is not so," Romola burst forth in a pleading tone, rising andgoing nearer to him, with a desperate resolution to speak out. "It isfalse that I would willingly sacrifice you. It has been the greatesteffort of my life to cling to you. I went away in my anger two yearsago, and I came back again because I was more bound to you than toanything else on earth. But it is useless. You shut me out from yourmind. You affect to think of me as a being too unreasonable to share inthe 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 facetowards him with dilated eyes, and laid her hand upon his arm. ButRomola's touch and glance no longer stirred any fibre of tenderness inher husband. The good-humoured, tolerant Tito, incapable of hatred,incapable almost of impatience, disposed always to be gentle towards therest of the world, felt himself becoming strangely hard towards thiswife whose presence had once been the strongest influence he had known.With all his softness of disposition, he had a masculine effectivenessof intellect and purpose which, like sharpness of edge, is itself anenergy, working its way without any strong momentum. Romola had anenergy of her own which thwarted his, and no man, who is notexceptionally feeble, will endure being thwarted by his wife. Marriagemust be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.
No emotion darted across his face as he heard Romola for the first timespeak of having gone away from him. His lips only looked a littleharder as he smiled slightly and said--
"My Romola, when certain conditions are ascertained, we must make up ourminds to them. No amount of wishing will fill the Arno, as your peoplesay, or turn a plum into an orange. I have not observed even thatprayers have much efficacy that way. You are so constituted as to havecertain strong impressions inaccessible to reason: I cannot share thoseimpressions, and you have withdrawn all trust from me in consequence.You have changed towards me; it has followed that I have changed towardsyou. It is useless to take any retrospect. We have simply to adaptourselves 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 muscleagainst some lifeless insurmountable resistance. "It was the sense ofdeception in you that changed me, and that has kept us apart. And it isnot true that I changed first. You changed towards me the night youfirst wore that chain-armour. You had some secret from me--it was aboutthat old man--and I saw him again yesterday. Tito," she went on, in atone of agonised entreaty, "if you would once tell me everything, let itbe what it may--I would not mind pain--that there might be no wallbetween 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 stoodperfectly still; but the flash seemed to have whitened him. He took nonotice of Romola's appeal, but after a moment's pause, said quietly--
"Your impetuosity about trifles, Romola, has a freezing influence thatwould cool the baths of Nero." At these cutting words, Romola shrankand drew herself up into her usual self-sustained attitude. Tito wenton. "If by `that old man' you mean the mad Jacopo di Nola who attemptedmy life and made a strange accusation against me, of which I told younothing because it would have alarmed you to no purpose, he, poorwretch, 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 isthe man whom I saw with the rope round his neck in the Duomo--the manwhose portrait Piero di Cosimo painted, grasping your arm as he saw himgrasp it the day the French entered, the day you first wore the armour."
"And where is he now, pray?" said Tito, still pale, but governinghimself.
"He was lying lifeless in the street from starvation," said Romola. "Irevived him with bread and wine. I brought him to our door, but herefused to come in. Then I gave him some money, and he went awaywithout 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 inGreece, and who has a rancorous hatred towards me because I got himdismissed for theft. Now you have the whole mystery, and the furthersatisfaction of knowing that I am again in danger of assassination. Thefact of my wearing the armour, about which you seem to have thought somuch, 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 invitehim into the house?"
Romola was mute. To speak was only like rushing with bare breastagainst 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 finalwords. And Romola stood upright looking at him as she might have lookedat some on-coming deadly force, to be met only by silent endurance.
"We need not refer to these matters again, Romola," he said, preciselyin the same tone as that in which he had spoken at first. "It is enoughif you will remember that the next time your generous ardour leads youto interfere in political affairs, you are likely, not to save any onefrom danger, but to be raising scaffolds and setting houses on fire.You are not yet a sufficiently ardent Piagnone to believe that MesserBernardo del Nero is the prince of darkness, and Messer Francesco Valorithe archangel Michael. I think I need demand no promise from you?"
"I have understood you too well, Tito."
"It is enough," he said, leaving the room.
Romola turned round with despair in her face and sank into her seat. "OGod, I have tried--I cannot help it. We shall always be divided."Those words passed silently through her mind. "Unless," she said aloud,as if some sudden vision had startled her into speech--"unless miseryshould come and join us!"
Tito, too, had a new thought in his mind after he had closed the doorbehind him. With the project of leaving Florence as soon as his lifethere had become a high enough stepping-stone to a life elsewhere,perhaps at Rome or Milan, there was now for the first, time associated adesire to be free from Romola, and to leave her behind him. She hadceased to belong to the desirable furniture of his life: there was nopossibility of an easy relation between them without genuineness on hispart. Genuineness implied confession of the past, and confessioninvolved a change of purpose. But Tito had as little bent that way as aleopard has to lap milk when its teeth are grown. From all relationsthat were not easy and agreeable, we know that Tito shrank: why shouldhe cling to them?
And Romola had made his relations difficult with others besides herself.He had had a troublesome interview with Dolfo Spini, who had come backin a rage after an ineffectual soaking with rain and long waiting inambush, and that scene between Romola and himself at Nello's door, oncereported in Spini's ear, might be a seed of something more unmanageablethan suspicion. But now, at least, he believed that he had masteredRomola by a terror which appealed to the strongest forces of her nature.He had alarmed her affection and her conscience by the shadowy image ofconsequences; he had arrested her intellect by hanging before it theidea of a hopeless complexity in affairs which defied any moraljudgment.
Yet Tito was not at ease. The world was not yet quite cushioned withvelvet, and, if it had been, he could not have abandoned himself to thatsoftness with thorough enjoyment; for before he went out again thisevening he put on his coat of chain-armour.