Monna Brigida would have been compelled to pause, even if she had been in a less submissive mood. She put up one hand deprecatingly to arrest Romola’s remonstrance, and with the other reached out a grosso, worth many white quattrini, saying, in an entreating tone—
“Take it, good man, and begone.”
“You’re in the right, madonna,” said Bratti, taking the coin quickly, and thrusting the cross into her hand; “I’ll not offer you change, for I might as well rob you of a mass. What! we must all be scorched a little, but you’ll come off the easier; better fall from the window than the roof. A good Easter and a good year to you!”
“Well, Romola,” cried Monna Brigida, pathetically, as Bratti left them, “if I’m to be a Piagnone it’s no matter how I look!”
“Dear cousin,” said Romola, smiling at her affectionately, “you don’t know how much better you look than you ever did before. I see now how good-natured your face is, like yourself. That red and finery seemed to thrust themselves forward and hide expression. Ask our Piero or any other painter if he would not rather paint your portrait now than before. I think all lines of the human face have something either touching or grand, unless they seem to come from low passions. How fine old men are, like my godfather! Why should not old women look grand and simple?”
“Yes, when one gets to be sixty, my Romola,” said Brigida, relapsing a little; “but I’m only fifty-five, and Monna Berta, and everybody—but it’s no use: I will be good, like you. Your mother, if she’d been alive, would have been as old as I am; we were cousins together. One must either die or get old. But it doesn’t matter about being old, if one’s a Piagnone.”
CHAPTER LII.
A Prophetess.
The incidents of that Carnival day seemed to Romola to carry no other personal consequences to her than the new care of supporting poor cousin Brigida in her fluctuating resignation to age and grey hairs; but they introduced a Lenten time in which she was kept at a high pitch of mental excitement and active effort.
Bernardo del Nero had been elected Gonfaloniere. By great exertions the Medicean party had so far triumphed, and that triumph had deepened Romola’s presentiment of some secretly-prepared scheme likely to ripen either into success or betrayal during these two months of her godfather’s authority. Every morning the dim daybreak as it peered into her room seemed to be that haunting fear coming back to her. Every morning the fear went with her as she passed through the streets on her way to the early sermon in the Duomo: but there she gradually lost the sense of its chill presence, as men lose the dread of death in the clash of battle.