“Ha! my children!” he said, instantly, stretching out his hands in a benedictory attitude, “you are come to be married. I commend your penitence—the blessing of Holy Church can never come too late.”
But whilst he was speaking, he had taken in the whole meaning of Tessa’s attitude and expression, and he discerned an opportunity for a new kind of joke which required him to be cautious and solemn.
“Should you like to be married to me, Tessa?” said Tito, softly, half enjoying the comedy, as he saw the pretty childish seriousness on her face, half prompted by hazy previsions which belonged to the intoxication of despair.
He felt her vibrating before she looked up at him and said, timidly, “Will you let me?”
He answered only by a smile, and by leading her forward in front of the cerretano, who, seeing an excellent jest in Tessa’s evident delusion, assumed a surpassing sacerdotal solemnity, and went through the mimic ceremony with a liberal expenditure of lingua furbesca or thieves’ Latin. But some symptoms of a new movement in the crowd urged him to bring it to a speedy conclusion and dismiss them with hands outstretched in a benedictory attitude over their kneeling figures. Tito, disposed always to cultivate goodwill, though it might be the least select, put a piece of four grossi into his hand as he moved away, and was thanked by a look which, the conjuror felt sure, conveyed a perfect understanding of the whole affair.
But Tito himself was very far from that understanding, and did not, in fact, know whether, the next moment, he should tell Tessa of the joke and laugh at her for a little goose, or whether he should let her delusion last, and see what would come of it—see what she would say and do next.
“Then you will not go away from me again,” said Tessa, after they had walked a few steps, “and you will take me to where you live.” She spoke meditatively, and not in a questioning tone. But presently she added, “I must go back once to the Madre though, to tell her I brought the cocoons, and that I am married, and shall not go back again.”
Tito felt the necessity of speaking now; and in the rapid thought prompted by that necessity, he saw that by undeceiving Tessa he should be robbing himself of some at least of that pretty trustfulness which might, by-and-by, be his only haven from contempt. It would spoil Tessa to make her the least particle wiser or more suspicious.
“Yes, my little Tessa,” he said, caressingly, “you must go back to the Madre; but you must not tell her you are married—you must keep that a secret from everybody; else some very great harm would happen to me, and you would never see me again.”
She looked up at him with fear in her face.