Romola

by George Eliot

Tessa looked meditative, and began to count on her fingers, and Romola watched the fingers as if they would tell the secret of her destiny.

“The chestnuts were ripe when we were married,” said Tessa, marking off her thumb and fingers again as she spoke; “and then again they were ripe at Peretola before he came back, and then again, after that, on the hill. And soon the soldiers came, and we heard the trumpets, and then Naldo had the coat.”

“You had been married more than two years. In which church were you married?” said Romola, too entirely absorbed by one thought to put any question that was less direct. Perhaps before the next morning she might go to her godfather and say that she was not Tito Melema’s lawful wife—that the vows which had bound her to strive after an impossible union had been made void beforehand.

Tessa gave a slight start at Romola’s new tone of inquiry, and looked up at her with a hesitating expression. Hitherto she had prattled on without consciousness that she was making revelations, any more than when she said old things over and over again to Monna Lisa.

“Naldo said I was never to tell about that,” she said, doubtfully. “Do you think he would not be angry if I told you?”

“It is right that you should tell me. Tell me everything,” said Romola, looking at her with mild authority.

If the impression from Naldo’s command had been much more recent than it was, the constraining effect of Romola’s mysterious authority would have overcome it. But the sense that she was telling what she had never told before made her begin with a lowered voice.

“It was not in a church—it was at the Nativita, when there was a fair, and all the people went overnight to see the Madonna in the Nunziata, and my mother was ill and couldn’t go, and I took the bunch of cocoons for her; and then he came to me in the church and I heard him say, ‘Tessa!’ I knew him because he had taken care of me at the San Giovanni, and then we went into the piazza where the fair was, and I had some berlingozzi, for I was hungry and he was very good to me; and at the end of the piazza there was a holy father, and an altar like what they have at the processions outside the churches. So he married us, and then Naldo took me back into the church and left me; and I went home, and my mother died, and Nofri began to beat me more, and Naldo never came back. And I used to cry, and once at the Carnival I saw him and followed him, and he was angry, and said he would come some time, I must wait. So I went and waited; but, oh! it was a long while before he came; but he would have come if he could, for he was good; and then he took me away, because I cried and said I could not bear to stay with Nofri. And, oh! I was so glad, and since then I have been always happy, for I don’t mind about the goats and mules, because I have Lillo and Ninna now; and Naldo is never angry, only I think he doesn’t love Ninna so well as Lillo, and she is pretty.”

Quite forgetting that she had thought her speech rather momentous at the beginning, Tessa fell to devouring Ninna with kisses, while Romola sat in silence with absent eyes. It was inevitable that in this moment she should think of the three beings before her chiefly in their relation to her own lot, and she was feeling the chill of disappointment that her difficulties were not to be solved by external law. She had relaxed her hold of Lillo, and was leaning her cheek against her hand, seeing nothing of the scene around her. Lillo was quick in perceiving a change that was not agreeable to him; he had not yet made any return to her caresses, but he objected to their withdrawal, and putting up both his brown arms to pull her head towards him, he said, “Play with me again!”

Romola, roused from her self-absorption, clasped the lad anew, and looked from him to Tessa, who had now paused from her shower of kisses, and seemed to have returned to the more placid delight of contemplating the heavenly lady’s face. That face was undergoing a subtle change, like the gradual oncoming of a warmer, softer light. Presently Romola took her scissors from her scarsella, and cut off one of her long wavy locks, while the three pair of wide eyes followed her movements with kitten-like observation.