“Some little contadina who probably mistook me for an acquaintance, for she had honoured me with a greeting.”
“Or who wished to begin an acquaintance,” said Nello. “But you are bound for the Via de’ Bardi and the feast of the Muses: there is no counting on you for a frolic, else we might have gone in search of adventures together in the crowd, and had some pleasant fooling in honour of San Giovanni. But your high fortune has come on you too soon: I don’t mean the professor’s mantle—that is roomy enough to hide a few stolen chickens, but— Messer Endymion minded his manners after that singular good fortune of his; and what says our Luigi Pulci?
“‘Da quel giorno in qua ch’amor m’accese
Per lei son fatto e gentile e cortese.’”
“Nello, amico mio, thou hast an intolerable trick of making life stale by forestalling it with thy talk,” said Tito, shrugging his shoulders, with a look of patient resignation, which was his nearest approach to anger: “not to mention that such ill-founded babbling would be held a great offence by that same goddess whose humble worshipper you are always professing yourself.”
“I will be mute,” said Nello, laying his finger on his lips, with a responding shrug. “But it is only under our four eyes that I talk any folly about her.”
“Pardon! you were on the verge of it just now in the hearing of others. If you want to ruin me in the minds of Bardo and his daughter—”
“Enough, enough!” said Nello. “I am an absurd old barber. It all comes from that abstinence of mine, in not making bad verses in my youth: for want of letting my folly run out that way when I was eighteen, it runs out at my tongue’s end now I am at the unseemly age of fifty. But Nello has not got his head muffled for all that; he can see a buffalo in the snow. Addio, giovane mio.”
CHAPTER IX.
A Man’s Ransom.
Tito was soon down among the crowd, and, notwithstanding his indifferent reply to Nello’s question about his chance acquaintance, he was not without a passing wish, as he made his way round the piazza to the Corso degli Adimari, that he might encounter the pair of blue eyes which had looked up towards him from under the square bit of white linen drapery that formed the ordinary hood of the contadina at festa time. He was perfectly well aware that that face was Tessa’s; but he had not chosen to say so. What had Nello to do with the matter? Tito had an innate love of reticence—let us say a talent for it—which acted as other impulses do, without any conscious motive, and, like all people to whom concealment is easy, he would now and then conceal something which had as little the nature of a secret as the fact that he had seen a flight of crows.