evil beings. It seemed unlikely that good beings would be angry and punish her, as it was the nature of Nofri and the devil to do. And now that Monna Lisa had spoken freely about Lillo's legs, and Romola had laughed, Tessa was more at her ease. "Ninna's in the cradle," she said. pretty too." blue eyes," said Romola. "You must take her up, and I will sit down in this chair-may I ? -and nurse Lillo. Come, Lillo!" She sat down in Tito's chair, and put out her arms toward the lad, whose eyes had followed her. He hesitated, and, pointing his "She's small finger at her with a half-puzzled, halfangry feeling, said, "That's Babbo's chair," not seeing his way out of the difficulty if Babbo came and found Romola in his place. Romola went to look at the sleeping Ninna, and Monna Lisa, one of the exceptionally meek deaf, who never expect to be spoken to, returned to her salad. "But Babbo is not here, and I shall go soon. Come, let me nurse you as he does," said Ro"Ah! she is waking: she has opened her mola, wondering to herself for the first time TESSA AT HOME. what sort of Babbo he was whose wife was dressed in contadina fashion, but had a certain daintiness about her person that indicated idleness and plenty. Lillo consented to be lifted up, and, finding the lap exceedingly comfortable, began to explore her dress and hands, to see if there were any ornaments besides her rosary. Tessa, who had hitherto been occupied in coaxing Ninna out of her waking peevishness, now sat down in her low chair, near Romola's knee, arranging Ninna's tiny person to advantage, jealous that the strange lady too seemed to notice the boy most, as Naldo did. "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-penciled 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 every thing. 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 toward Romola, away from Nimma's snatching hand. "It is a fresh one. I cut it lately. See how bright it is!" she said, laying it against the white back-ground 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 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 toward 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 busband goes to when he leaves you?" 66 "No," said Tessa, putting back her treasures out of the children's way. "But I know Messer Saint Michael 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 high-born woman to have been brought to! But it seemed to Romola as if that were the only issue that would make duty any thing 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?" Much-much longer. "Ah yes! he was. 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 wo years. In which church were you married?" said Romola, too entirely absorbed by one thought to put any question that was less direct. Perhaps before the next morning she might go to her godfather and say that she was not Tito Melema's lawful wife-that the vows which had bound her to strive after an impossible union had been made void beforehand. to be solved by external law. She had relaxed her hold of Lillo, and was leaning her cheek against her hand, seeing nothing of the scene around her. Lillo was quick in perceiving a change that was not agreeable to him; he had not yet made any return to her caresses, but he objected to their withdrawal, and putting up both his brown arms to pull her head toward him, he said, "Play with me again!" Romola, roused from her self-absorption, clasped the lad anew, and looked from him to Tessa, who had now paused from her shower of kisses, and seemed to have returned to the more placid delight of contemplating the heav Tessa gave a slight start at Romola's new tone of inquiry, and looked up at her with a hesitating expression. Hitherto she had prattled on without consciousness that she was making revelations, any more than when she said old things over and over again to Monna Lisa.enly lady's face. That face was undergoing a “Naldo said I was never to tell about that," she said, doubtfully. "Do you think he would not be angry if I told you?" "It is right that you should tell me. Tell me every thing," said Romola, looking at her with mild authority. If the impression from Naldo's command had been much more recent than it was, the constraining effect of Romola's mysterious authority would have overcome it. But the sense that she was telling what she had never told before made her begin with a lowered voice. subtle change, like the gradual oncoming of a warmer, softer light. Presently Romola took her scissors from her scarsella, and cut off one of her long wavy locks, while the three pair of wide eyes followed her movements with kittenlike observation. "I must go away from you now," she said, "but I will leave this lock of hair that it may remind you of me, because if you are ever in trouble you can think that perhaps God will send me to take care of you again. I can not tell you where to find me, but if I ever know that "It was not in a church-it was at the Na-you want me I will come to you. Addio!" tività, when there was the fair, and all the people went overnight to see the Madonna in the Nunziata, and my mother was ill and couldn't go, and I took the bunch of cocoons for her; and then he came to me in the church, and I heard him say, 'Tessa!' I knew him because he had taken care of me at the San Giovanni, and then we went into the Piazza where the fair was, and I had some berlingozzi, for I was hungry, and he was very good to me; and at the end of the Piazza there was a holy father and an altar like what they have at the processions outside the churches. So he married us, and then Naldo took me back into the church and left me; and I went home, and my mother died, and Nofri began to beat me more, and Naldo never came back. And I used to cry, and once at the Carnival I saw him and followed him, and he was angry, and said he would come some time, I must wait. So I went and waited; but oh! it was a long while before he came; but he would have come if he could, for he was good; and then he took me away, because I cried and said I could not bear to stay with Nofri. And oh! I was so glad, and since then I have been always happy, for I don't mind about the goats and mules, because I have Lillo and Ninna now; and Naldo is never angry, only I think he doesn't love Ninna so well as Lillo, and she is pretty." She had set down Lillo hurriedly, and held out her hand to Tessa, who kissed it with a mixture of awe and sorrow at this parting. Romola's mind was oppressed with thoughts; she needed to be alone as soon as possible, but with her habitual care for the least fortunate, she turned aside to put her hand in a friendly way on Monna Lisa's shoulder and make her a farewell sign. Before the old woman had finished her deep reverence Romola had disappeared. Monna Lisa and Tessa moved toward each other by simultaneous impulses, while the two children stood clinging to their mother's skirts as if they, too, felt the atmosphere of awe. "Do you think she was a saint?" said Tessa, in Lisa's ear, showing her the lock. Lisa rejected that notion very decidedly by a backward movement of her fingers, and then stroking the rippled gold, said, "She's a great and noble lady. I saw such in my youth.' Romola went home and sat alone through the sultry hours of that day with the heavy certainty that her lot was unchanged. She was thrown back again on the conflict between the demands of an outward law which she recognized as a widely ramifying obligation and the demands of inner moral facts which were becoming more and more peremptory. She had drunk in deeply the spirit of that teaching by which Quite forgetting that she had thought her Savonarola had urged her to return to her place. speech rather momentous at the beginning, Tessa She felt that the sanctity attached to all close fell to devouring Ninna with kisses, while Romo- relations, and, therefore, pre-eminently to the la sat in silence with absent eyes. It was inev- closest, was but the expression in outward law itable that in this moment she should think of of that result toward which all human goodness the three beings before her chiefly in their rela- and nobleness must spontaneously tend; that tion to her own lot, and she was feeling the chill the light abandonment of ties, whether inheritof disappointment that her difficulties were noted or voluntary, because they had ceased to be pleasant, was the uprooting of social and personal virtue. What else had Tito's crime toward Baldassarre been but that abandonment working itself out to the most hideous extreme of falsity and ingratitude? and wondering anxiety; but finding that she asked him no question, he slowly turned away. Why should she ask questions? Perhaps Maso only knew or guessed something of what she knew already. It was late before Tito came. Romola had been pacing up and down the long room which had once been the library, with the windows open and a loose white linen robe on instead of her usual black garment. She was glad of that change after the long hours of heat and motionless meditation; but the coolness and exercise went with the lamp in her hand to open the door for Tito he might well have been startled by the vividness of her eyes and the expression of painful resolution which was in contrast with her usual self-restrained quiescence before him. But it seemed that this excitement was just what he expected. And the inspiring consciousness breathed into her by Savonarola's influence that her lot was vitally united with the general lot had exalted even the minor details of obligation into religion. She was marching with a great army; she was feeling the stress of a common life. If victims were needed, and it was uncertain on whom the lot might fall, she would stand ready to an-made her more intensely wakeful, and as she swer to her name. She had stood long; she had striven hard to fulfill the bond; but she had seen all the conditions which made the fulfillment possible gradually forsaking her. The one effect of her marriage-tie seemed to be the stifling predominance over her of a nature that she despised. All her efforts at union had only made its impossibility more palpable, and the relation had become for her simply a degrading servitude. The law was sacred. Yes, but rebellion might be sacred too. It flashed upon her mind that the problem before her was essentially the same as that which had lain before Savonarola -the problem where the sacredness of obedience ended and where the sacredness of rebellion began. To her, as to him, there had come one of those moments in life when the soul must dare to act on its own warrant, not only without external law to appeal to, but in the face of a law which is not unarmed with Divine light-ing, until he added, "The accused have too nings-lightnings that may yet fall if the warrant has been false. "Ah! it is you, Romola. Maso is gone to bed," he said, in a grave, quiet tone, interposing to close the door for her. Then, turning round, he said, looking at her more fully than he was wont, "You have heard it all, I see.' Romola quivered. He, then, was inclined to take the initiative. He had been to Tessa. She led the way through the nearest door, set down her lamp, and turned toward him again. "You must not think despairingly of the consequences," said Tito, in a tone of soothing encouragement, at which Romola stood wonder many family ties with all parties not to escape; and Messer Bernardo del Nero has other things in his favor besides his age." Romola started, and gave a cry as if she had been suddenly stricken by a sharp weapon. "What! you did not know it?" said Tito, putting his hand under her arm that he might lead her to a seat; but she seemed to be unaware of his touch. "Tell me," she said, hastily, "tell me what it is. Before the sun had gone down she had adopted 'a resolve. She would ask no counsel of her godfather or of Savonarola until she had made one determined effort to speak freely with Tito and obtain his consent that she should live apart from him. She desired not to leave him clandestinely again, or to forsake Florence. She would tell him that, if he ever felt a real need of her, she would come back to him. Was not that the utmost faithfulness to her bond that "A man, whose name you may forget-Lamcould be required of her? A shuddering anti- berto dell' Antella-who was banished, has been cipation came over her that he would clothe a seized within the territory: a letter has been refusal in a sneering suggestion that she should found on him of very dangerous import to the enter a convent as the only mode of quitting him chief Mediceans, and the scoundrel, who was that would not be scandalous. He knew well once a favorite hound of Piero de' Medici, is that her mind revolted from that means of es-ready now to swear what any one pleases against cape, not only because of her own repugnance him or his friends. Some have made their esto a narrow rule, but because all the cherished memories of her father forbade that she should adopt a mode of life which was associated with his deepest griefs and his bitterest dislike. cape, but five are now in prison." "My godfather?" said Romola, scarcely above a whisper, as Tito made a slight pause. "Yes; I grieve to say it. But along with him there are three, at least, whose names have a commanding interest even among the popular party-Niccolò Ridolfi, Lorenzo Tornabuoni, and Giannozzo Pucci." Tito had announced his intention of coming home this evening. She would wait for him, and say what she had to say at once, for it was difficult to get his ear during the day. If he had the slightest suspicion that personal words The tide of Romola's feelings had been yiowere coming, he slipped away with an appear-lently turned into a new channel. In the tuance of unpremeditated ease. When she sent for Maso to tell him that she would wait for his master, she observed that the old man looked at her and lingered with a mixture of hesitation mult of that moment there could be no check to the words which came as the impulsive utterance of her long-accumulating horror. When Tito had named the men of whom she felt certain he was the confederate, she said, with a recoiling | to the fact that the absence of traditional attachgesture and low-toned bitterness, "And you-you are safe?" "You are certainly an amiable wife, my Romola," said Tito, with the coldest irony. "Yes; I am safe." They turned away from each other in silence. TITO had good reasons for saying that he was safe. In the last three months, during which he had foreseen the discovery of the Medicean conspirators as a probable event, he had had plenty of time to provide himself with resources. He had been strengthening his influence at Rome and at Milan, by being the medium of secret information and indirect measures against the Frate and the popular party; he had cultivated more assiduously than ever the regard of this party by showing subtle evidence that his political convictions were entirely on their side, and all the while, instead of withdrawing his agency from the Mediceans, he had sought to be more actively employed and exclusively trusted by them. It was easy to him to keep up this triple game. The principle of duplicity admitted by the Mediceans on their own behalf deprived them of any standard by which they could measure the trust-worthiness of a colleague who had not, like themselves, hereditary interests, alliances, and prejudices, which were intensely Medicean. In their minds to deceive the opposite party was fair stratagem, to deceive their own party was a baseness to which they felt no temptation; and in using Tito's facile ability they were not keenly awake ments which made him a convenient agent was also the absence of what among themselves was the chief guarantee of mutual honor. Again, the Roman and Milanese friends of the aristocratic party, or Arrabbiati, who were the bitterest enemies of Savonarola, carried on a system of underhand correspondence and espionage, in which the deepest hypocrisy was the best service, and demanded the heaviest pay; so that to suspect an agent because he played a part strongly would have been an absurd want of logic. On the other hand, the Piagnoni of the popular party who had the directness that belongs to energetic conviction, were the more inclined to credit Tito with sincerity in his political adhesion to them, because he affected no religious sympathies. By virtue of these conditions the last three months had been a time of flattering success to Tito. The result he most cared for was the securing of a future position for himself at Rome or at Milan, for he had a growing determination, when the favorable moment should come, to quit Florence for one of those great capitals where life was easier, and the rewards of talent and learning were more splendid. At present, the scale dipped in favor of Milan; and if within the year he could render certain services to Duke Ludovico Sforza, he had the prospect of a place at the Milanese court, which outweighed the advantages of Rome. The revelation of the Medicean conspiracy, then, had been a subject of forethought to Tito; but he had not been able to foresee the mode in which it would be brought about. The arrest of Lamberto dell' Antella with a tell-tale letter on his person, and a bitter rancor against the Medici in his heart, was an incalculable event, It was not possible, in spite of the careful pretexts with which his agency had been guarded, that Tito should escape implication: he had never expected this in case of any wide discovery concerning the Medicean plots. But his quick mind had soon traced out the course that would secure his own safety with the fewest unpleasant concomitants. It is agreeable to keep a whole skin; but the skin still remains an organ sensitive to the atmosphere. His reckoning had not deceived him. That night before he returned home he had secured the three results for which he most cared: he was to be freed from all proceedings against him on account of complicity with the Mediceans; he was to retain his secretaryship for another year, unless he previously resigned it; and, lastly, the price by which he had obtained these guarantees was to be kept as a State secret. The price would have been thought heavy by most men; and Tito himself would rather not have paid it. He had applied himself first to win the mind of Francesco Valori, who was not only one of the Ten under whom he immediately held his secretaryship, but one of the special council appointed to investigate the evidence of the plot. |