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For a while after their marriage she was ideally happy; she was not even separated from her father, for Tito came to live with them, and was to Bardo, in his scholastic labours, all that he had wished his own son to be. Then came the first cloud.
While they came out, a strange dreary chant, as of a Miserere, met their ears, and they saw that at the extreme end of the piazza there seemed to be a stream of people impelled by something approaching from the Borgo de' Greci. "It is one of their masqued processions, I suppose," said Tito, who was now alone with Romola, while Bernardo took charge of Bardo.
"Ah, then, they are fine intagli," said Bardo. "Five hundred ducats! Ah, more than a man's ransom!" Tito gave a slight, almost imperceptible start, and opened his long dark eyes with questioning surprise at Bardo's blind face, as if his words a mere phrase of common parlance, at a time when men were often being ransomed from slavery or imprisonment had had some special meaning for him.
But in the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause." "Laughter, indeed!" burst forth Monna Brigida again, the moment, Bardo paused.
"Silenzio!" said Bardo, in a loud agitated voice, while Romola half started from her chair, clasped her hands, and looked round at Tito, as if now she might appeal to him. Monna Brigida gave a little scream, and bit her lip. "Donna!" said Bardo, again, "hear once more my will. Bring no reports about that name to this house; and thou, Romola, I forbid thee to ask. My son is dead."
When he saw those slender trunks, that fantastic vegetation shooting up in the white, hot air, when he felt the blinding dust crunching under the wheels like snow, de Géry, his eyes partly closed, half-dreaming in that leaden noonday heat, fancied that he was making once more the tiresome journey from Tunis to the Bardo, which he had made so often in a strange medley of Levantine chariots, brilliant liveries, meahris with long neck and hanging lip, gayly-caparisoned mules, young asses, Arabs in rags, half-naked negroes, great functionaries in full dress, with their escorts of honor.
"No, my Romola, we will work no more to-night. Tito, come and sit by me here." Tito moved from the reading-desk, and seated himself on the other side of Bardo, close to his left elbow. "Come nearer to me, figliuola mia," said Bardo again, after a moment's pause.
The Nabob received that motley crew at his table through kindness of heart, generosity, weakness, and entire lack of dignity, combined with absolute ignorance, and partly as a result of the same exile's melancholy, the same need of expansion that led him to receive, in his magnificent palace on the Bardo in Tunis, everybody who landed from France, from the petty tradesman and exporter of small wares, to the famous pianist on a tour and the consul-general.
And if you are less at ease in it, I will aid you yes, I will spend on you that long-accumulated study which was to have been thrown into the channel of another work a work in which I myself was to have had a helpmate." Bardo paused a moment, and then added "But who knows whether that work may not be executed yet?
He felt that a new crisis had come, but he was not, for all that, too evidently agitated to pay his visit to Bardo, and apologise for his previous non-appearance. Tito's talent for concealment was being fast developed into something less neutral.
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