Bardo paused a few moments, but his silence was evidently charged with some idea that he was hesitating to express, for he once leaned forward a little as if he were going to speak, then turned his head aside towards Romola and sank backward again. At last, as if he had made up his mind, he said in a tone which might have become a prince giving the courteous signal of dismissal—
“I am somewhat fatigued this morning, and shall prefer seeing you again to-morrow, when I shall be able to give you the secretary’s answer, authorising you to present yourself to him at some given time. But before you go,”—here the old man, in spite of himself, fell into a more faltering tone—“you will perhaps permit me to touch your hand? It is long since I touched the hand of a young man.”
Bardo had stretched out his aged white hand, and Tito immediately placed his dark but delicate and supple fingers within it. Bardo’s cramped fingers closed over them, and he held them for a few minutes in silence. Then he said—
“Romola, has this young man the same complexion as thy brother—fair and pale?”
“No, father,” Romola answered, with determined composure, though her heart began to beat violently with mingled emotions. “The hair of Messere is dark—his complexion is dark.” Inwardly she said, “Will he mind it? will it be disagreeable? No, he looks so gentle and good-natured.” Then aloud again—
“Would Messere permit my father to touch his hair and face?”
Her eyes inevitably made a timid entreating appeal while she asked this, and Tito’s met them with soft brightness as he said, “Assuredly,” and, leaning forward, raised Bardo’s hand to his curls, with a readiness of assent, which was the greater relief to her, because it was unaccompanied by any sign of embarrassment.
Bardo passed his hand again and again over the long curls and grasped them a little, as if their spiral resistance made his inward vision clearer; then he passed his hand over the brow and cheek, tracing the profile with the edge of his palm and fourth finger, and letting the breadth of his hand repose on the rich oval of the cheek.
“Ah,” he said, as his hand glided from the face and rested on the young man’s shoulder. “He must be very unlike thy brother, Romola: and it is the better. You see no visions, I trust, my young friend?”
At this moment the door opened, and there entered, unannounced, a tall elderly man in a handsome black silk lucco, who, unwinding his becchetto from his neck and taking off his cap, disclosed a head as white as Bardo’s. He cast a keen glance of surprise at the group before him—the young stranger leaning in that filial attitude, while Bardo’s hand rested on his shoulder, and Romola sitting near with eyes dilated by anxiety and agitation. 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.”
“It is thou, Bernardo,” said Bardo. “Thou art come at a fortunate moment. This, young man,” he continued, while Tito rose and bowed, “is one of the chief citizens of Florence, Messer Bernardo del Nero, my oldest, I had almost said my only friend—whose good opinion, if you can win it, may carry you far. He is but three-and-twenty, Bernardo, yet he can doubtless tell thee much which thou wilt care to hear; for though a scholar, he has already travelled far, and looked on other things besides the manuscripts for which thou hast too light an esteem.”
“Ah, a Greek, as I augur,” said Bernardo, returning Tito’s reverence but slightly, and surveying him with that sort of glance which seems almost to cut like fine steel. “Newly arrived in Florence, it appears. The name of Messere—or part of it, for it is doubtless a long one?”
“On the contrary,” said Tito, with perfect good-humour, “it is most modestly free from polysyllabic pomp. My name is Tito Melema.”
“Truly?” said Bernardo, rather scornfully, as he took a seat; “I had expected it to be at least as long as the names of a city, a river, a province, and an empire all put together. We Florentines mostly use names as we do prawns, and strip them of all flourishes before we trust them to our throats.”
“Well, Bardo,” he continued, as if the stranger were not worth further notice, and changing his tone of sarcastic suspicion for one of sadness, “we have buried him.”
“Ah!” replied Bardo, with corresponding sadness, “and a new epoch has come for Florence—a dark one, I fear. Lorenzo has left behind him an inheritance that is but like the alchemist’s laboratory when the wisdom of the alchemist is gone.”
“Not altogether so,” said Bernardo. “Piero de’ Medici has abundant intelligence; his faults are only the faults of hot blood. I love the lad—lad he will always be to me, as I have always been ‘little father’ to him.”
“Yet all who want a new order of things are likely to conceive new hopes,” said Bardo. “We shall have the old strife of parties, I fear.”
“If we could have a new order of things that was something else than knocking down one coat of arms to put up another,” said Bernardo, “I should be ready to say, ‘I belong to no party: I am a Florentine.’ But as long as parties are in question, I am a Medicean, and will be a Medicean till I die. I am of the same mind as Farinata degli Uberti: if any man asks me what is meant by siding with a party, I say, as he did, ‘To wish ill or well, for the sake of past wrongs or kindnesses.’”
During this short dialogue, Tito had been standing, and now took his leave.
“But come again at the same hour to-morrow,” said Bardo, graciously, before Tito left the room, “that I may give you Bartolommeo’s answer.”
“From what quarter of the sky has this pretty Greek youngster alighted so close to thy chair, Bardo?” said Bernardo del Nero, as the door closed. He spoke with dry emphasis, evidently intended to convey something more to Bardo than was implied by the mere words.
“He is a scholar who has been shipwrecked and has saved a few gems, for which he wants to find a purchaser. I am going to send him to Bartolommeo Scala, for thou knowest it were more prudent in me to abstain from further purchases.”
Bernardo shrugged his shoulders and said, “Romola, wilt thou see if my servant is without? I ordered him to wait for me here.” Then, when Romola was at a sufficient distance, he leaned forward and said to Bardo in a low, emphatic tone—
“Remember, Bardo, thou hast a rare gem of thy own; take care no one gets it who is not likely to pay a worthy price. That pretty Greek has a lithe sleekness about him, that seems marvellously fitted for slipping easily into any nest he fixes his mind on.”
Bardo was startled: the association of Tito with the image of his lost son had excluded instead of suggesting the thought of Romola. But almost immediately there seemed to be a reaction which made him grasp the warning as if it had been a hope.
“But why not, Bernardo? If the young man approved himself worthy—he is a scholar—and—and there would be no difficulty about the dowry, which always makes thee gloomy.”
Chapter Seven.
A Learned Squabble
Bartolommeo Scala, secretary of the Florentine Republic, on whom Tito Melema had been thus led to anchor his hopes, lived in a handsome palace close to the Porta Pinti, now known as the Casa Gherardesca. His arms—an azure ladder transverse on a golden field, with the motto Gradatim placed over the entrance—told all comers that the miller’s son held his ascent to honours by his own efforts a fact to be proclaimed without wincing. The secretary was a vain and pompous man, but he was also an honest one: