Part 19 (1/2)
Romola told him all that had pa.s.sed, from her entrance into San Marco, hardly leaving out one of her brother's words, which had burnt themselves into her memory as they were spoken. But when she was at the end of the vision, she paused; the rest came too vividly before her to be uttered, and she sat looking at the distance, almost unconscious for the moment that t.i.to was near her. _His_ mind was at ease now; that vague vision had pa.s.sed over him like white mist, and left no mark. But he was silent, expecting her to speak again.
”I took it,” she went on, as if t.i.to had been reading her thoughts; ”I took the crucifix; it is down below in my bedroom.”
”And now, my Romola,” said t.i.to, entreatingly, ”you will banish these ghastly thoughts. The vision was an ordinary monkish vision, bred of fasting and fanatical ideas. It surely has no weight with you.”
”No, t.i.to; no. But poor. Dino, _he_ believed it was a divine message.
It is strange,” she went on meditatively, ”this life of men possessed with fervid beliefs that seem like madness to their fellow-beings. Dino was not a vulgar fanatic; and that Fra Girolamo--his very voice seems to have penetrated me with a sense that there is some truth in what moves them: some truth of which I know nothing.”
”It was only because your feelings were highly wrought, my Romola. Your brother's state of mind was no more than a form of that theosophy which has been the common disease of excitable dreamy minds in all ages; the same ideas that your father's old antagonist, Marsilio Ficino, pores over in the New Platonists; only your brother's pa.s.sionate nature drove him to act out what other men write and talk about. And for Fra Girolamo, he is simply a narrow-minded monk, with a gift of preaching and infusing terror into the mult.i.tude. Any words or any voice would have shaken you at that moment. When your mind has had a little repose, you will judge of such things as you have always done before.”
”Not about poor Dino,” said Romola. ”I was angry with him; my heart seemed to close against him while he was speaking; but since then I have thought less of what was in my own mind and more of what was in his.
Oh, t.i.to! it was very piteous to see his young life coming to an end in that way. That yearning look at the crucifix when he was gasping for breath--I can never forget it. Last night I looked at the crucifix a long while, and tried to see that it would help him, until at last it seemed to me by the lamplight as if the suffering face shed pity.”
”My Romola, promise me to resist such thoughts; they are fit for sickly nuns, not for my golden-tressed Aurora, who looks made to scatter all such twilight fantasies. Try not to think of them now; we shall not long be alone together.”
The last words were uttered in a tone of tender beseeching, and he turned her face towards him with a gentle touch of his right-hand.
Romola had had her eyes fixed absently on the arched opening, but she had not seen the distant hill; she had all the while been in the chapter house, looking at the pale images of sorrow and death.
t.i.to's touch and beseeching voice recalled her; and now in the warm sunlight she saw that rich dark beauty which seemed to gather round it all images of joy--purple vines festooned between the elms, the strong corn perfecting itself under the vibrating heat, bright winged creatures hurrying and resting among the flowers, round limbs beating the earth in gladness with cymbals held aloft, light melodies chanted to the thrilling rhythm of strings--all objects and all sounds that tell of Nature revelling in her force. Strange, bewildering transition from those pale images of sorrow and death to this bright youthfulness, as of a sun-G.o.d who knew nothing of night! What thought could reconcile that worn anguish in her brother's face--that straining after something invisible--with this satisfied strength and beauty, and make it intelligible that they belonged to the same world? Or was there never any reconciling of them, but only a blind wors.h.i.+p of clas.h.i.+ng deities, first in mad joy and then in wailing? Romola for the first time felt this questioning need like a sudden uneasy dizziness and want of something to grasp; it was an experience hardly longer than a sigh, for the eager theorising of ages is compressed, as in a seed, in the momentary want of a single mind. But there was no answer to meet the need, and it vanished before the returning rush of young sympathy with the glad loving beauty that beamed upon her in new radiance, like the dawn after we have looked away from it to the grey west.
”Your mind lingers apart from our love, my Romola,” t.i.to 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 t.i.to, 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, t.i.to, 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, t.i.to, and were so much to my father, and I began to believe that life could be happy for me too.”
”My G.o.ddess! is there any woman like you?” said t.i.to, 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, t.i.to, I will, I do mind. But I am sure my G.o.dfather 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 G.o.dfather. I know he is prejudiced and narrow, but yet he is very n.o.ble. 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 n.o.ble--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 t.i.to: 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, t.i.to: it always does.”
”And not one kiss? I have not had one,” said t.i.to, 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 t.i.to, 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.