The morning warmth was already beginning to be rather oppressive to Romola, when, after a walk along by the walls on her way from San Marco, she turned towards the intersecting streets again at the gate of Santa Croce.
The Borgo La Croce was so still, that she listened to her own footsteps on the pavement in the sunny silence, until, on approaching a bend in the street, she saw, a few yards before her, a little child not more than three years old, with no other clothing than his white shirt, pause from a waddling run and look around him. In the first moment of coming nearer she could only see his back — a boy’s back, square and sturdy, with a cloud of reddish-brown curls above it; but in the next he turned towards her, and she could see his dark eyes wide with tears, and his lower lip pushed up and trembling, while his fat brown fists dutched his shirt helplessly. The glimpse of a tall black figure sending a shadow over him brought his bewildered fear to a climax, and a loud crying sob sent the big tears rolling.
Romola, with the ready maternal instinct which was one hidden source of her passionate tenderness, instantly uncovered her head, and, stooping down on the pavement, put her arms round him, and her cheeks against his, while she spoke to him in caressing tones. At first his sobs were only the louder, but he made no effort to get away, and presently the outburst ceased with that strange abruptness which belongs to childish joys and griefs: his face lost its distortion, and was fixed in an open-mouthed gaze at Romola.
‘You have lost yourself, little one,’ she said, kissing him. ‘Never mind I we will find the house again. Perhaps mamma will meet us.’
She divined that he had made his escape at a moment when the mother’s eyes were turned away from him, and thought it likely that he would soon be followed.
‘Oh, what a heavy, heavy boy!’ she said, trying to lift him. ‘I cannot carry you. Come, then, you must toddle back by my side.’
The parted lips remained motionless in awed silence, and one brown fist still clutched the shirt with as much tenacity as ever; but the other yielded itself quite willingly to the wonderful white hand, strong but soft.
‘You have a mamma?’ said Romola, as they set out, looking down at the boy with a certain yearning. But he was mute. A girl under those circumstances might perhaps have chirped abundantly; not so this square-shouldered little man with the big cloud of curls.
He was awake to the first sign of his whereabout, however. At the turning by the front of San Ambrogio he dragged Romola towards it, looking up at her.
‘Ah, that is the way home, is it?’ she said, smiling at him. He only thrust his head forward and pulled, as an admonition that they should go faster.
There was still another turning that he had a decided opinion about, and then Romola found herself in a short street leading to open garden ground. It was in front of a house at the end of this street that the little fellow paused, pulling her towards some stone stairs. He had evidently no wish for her to loose his hand, and she would not have been willing to leave him without being sure that she was delivering him to his friends. They mounted the stairs, seeing but dimly in that sudden withdrawal from the sunlight, till, at the final landing-place, an extra stream of light came from an open doorway. Passing through a small lobby, they came to another open door, and there Romola paused. Her approach had not been heard.
On a low chair at the farther end of the room, opposite the light, sat Tessa, with one hand on the edge of the cradle, and her head hanging a little on one side, fast asleep. Near one of the windows, with her back turned towards the door, sat Monna Lisa at her work of preparing salad, in deaf unconsciousness. There was only an instant for Romola’s eyes to take in that still scene; for Lillo snatched his hand away from her and ran up to his mother’s side, not making any direct effort to wake her, but only leaning his head back against her arm, and surveying Romola seriously from that distance.
As Lillo pushed against her, Tessa opened her eyes, and looked up in bewilderment; but her glance had no sooner rested on the figure at the opposite doorway than she started up, blushed deep]y, and began to tremble a little, neither speaking nor moving forward.
‘Ah I we have seen each other before,’ said Romola, smiling, and coming forward. ‘I am glad it was your little boy. He was crying in the street; I suppose he had run away. So we walked together a little way, and then he knew where he was, and brought me here. But you had not missed him? That is well, else you would have been frightened.’
The shock of finding that Lillo had run away overcame every other feeling in Tessa for the moment. Her colour went again, and, seizing Lillo’s arm, she ran with him to Monna Lisa, saying, with a half sob, loud in the old woman’s ear —
‘Oh, Lisa, you are wicked! Why will you stand with your back to the door? Lillo ran away ever so far into the street.’
‘Holy Mother!’ said Monna Lisa, in her meek, thick tone, letting the spoon fall from her hands. ‘Where were you, then? I thought you were there, and had your eye on hum.’
‘But you know I go to sleep when I am rocking,’ said Tessa, in pettish remonstrance.
‘Well, well, we must keep the outer door shut, or else tie him up,’ said Monna Lisa, ‘for he’ll be as cunning as Satan before long, and that’s the holy truth. But how came he back, then?’
This question recalled Tessa to the consciousness of Romola’s presence. Without answering, she turned towards her, blushing and timid again, and Monna Lisa’s eyes followed her movement. The old woman made a low reverence, and said —
‘Doubtless the most noble lady brought him back.’ Then, advancing a little nearer to Romola, she added, ‘It’s my shame for him to have been found with only his shirt on; but he kicked, and wouldn’t have his other clothes on this morning, and the mother, poor thing, will never hear of his being beaten. But what’s an old woman to do without a stick when the lad’s legs get so strong? Let your nobleness look at his legs.’
Lillo, conscious that his legs were in question, pulled his shirt up a little higher, and looked down at their olive roundness with a dispassionate and curious air. Romola laughed, and stooped to give him a caressing shake and a kiss, and this action helped the reassurance that Tessa had already gathered from Monna Lisa’s address to Romola. For when Naldo had been told about the adventure at the Carnival, and Tessa had asked him who the heavenly lady that had come just when she was wanted, and had vanished so soon, was likely to be — whether she could be the Holy Madonna herself? — he had answered, ‘Not exactly, my Tessa; only one of the saints,’ and had not chosen to say more. So that in the dream-like combination of small experience which made up Tessa’s thought, Romola had remained confusedly associated with the pictures in the churches, and when she reappeared, the grateful remembrance of her protection was slightly tinctured with religious awe — not deeply, for Tessa’s dread was chiefly of ugly and 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. ‘She’s pretty too.’
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.
‘Ah! she is waking: she has opened her 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 towards the lad, whose eyes had followed her. He hesitated: and, pointing his small fingers at her with a half-puzzled, half-angry feeling, said, ‘That’s Babbo’s chair,’ not seeing his way out of the difficulty if Babbo came and found Romola in his place.
‘But Babbo is not here, and I shall go soon. Come, let me nurse you as he does,’ said Romola, wondering to herself for the first time 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 beside the 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-pencilled 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 everything. 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 towards Romola, away from Ninna’s snatching hand.
‘It is a fresh one. I cut it lately. See how bright it is!’ she said, laying it against the white background 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 I think 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 towards 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 husband goes to when he leaves you?’
‘No,’ said Tessa, putting back her treasures out of the children’s way. ‘But I know Messer San Michele 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 t............