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Updated: June 6, 2025
But Romola's suspicion was not to be dissipated: her horror of his conduct towards Baldassarre projected itself over every conception of his acts; it was as if she had seen him committing a murder, and had had a diseased impression ever after that his hands were covered with fresh blood.
"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 Niccolo Ridolfi, Lorenzo Tornabuoni, and Giannozzo Pucci." The tide of Romola's feelings had been violently turned into a new channel.
He delighted in sitting there with the sense that Romola's attention was fixed on him, and that he could occasionally look at her. He was pleased that Bardo should take an interest in him; and he did not dwell with enough seriousness on the prospect of the work in which he was to be aided, to feel moved by it to anything else than that easy, good-humoured acquiescence which was natural to him.
The door opening on the wild garden was closed now, and the painter was at work. Not at Romola's picture, however. That was standing on the floor, propped against the wall, and Piero stooped to lift it, that he might carry it into the proper light. But in lifting away this picture, he had disclosed another the oil-sketch of Tito, to which he had made an important addition within the last few days.
Romola's ardour on the side of the Frate was doubly strengthened by the gleeful triumph she saw in hard and coarse faces, and by the fear-stricken confusion in the faces and speech of many among his strongly-attached friends.
Yet Romola's life seemed an image of that loving, pitying devotedness, that patient endurance of irksome tasks, from which he had shrunk and excused himself.
As the soft warmth penetrated Romola's young limbs, as her eyes rested on this sequestered luxuriance, it seemed that the agitating past had glided away like that dark scene in the Bargello, and that the afternoon dreams of her girlhood had really come back to her.
But there was an instantaneous change: Bardo let fall his hand, Tito raised himself from his stooping posture, and Romola rose to meet the visitor with an alacrity which implied all the greater intimacy, because it was unaccompanied by any smile. "Well, god-daughter," said the stately man, as he touched Romola's shoulder; "Maso said you had a visitor, but I came in nevertheless."
The fierceness had flamed up again. He spoke with his former intensity, and again he grasped Romola's arm. "But you will help me? He has been false to you too. He has another wife, and she has children. He makes her believe he is her husband, and she is a foolish, helpless thing. I will show you where she lives." The first shock that passed through Romola was visibly one of anger.
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.
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