my daughter. Your old servant will return to you with the mules; my companion is gone to fetch him; and you will go back to Florence.”
She started up with anger in her eyes, and faced the speaker. It was Fra Girolamo: she knew that well enough before.
She was nearly as tall as he was, and their faces were almost on a level.
She had started up with defiant words ready to burst from her lips, but they fell back again without utterance. She had met Fra Girolamo’s calm glance, and the impression from it was so new to her, that her anger sank ashamed as something irrelevant.
There was nothing transcendent in Savonarola’s face. It was not beautiful. It was strong-featured, and owed all its refinement to habits of mind and rigid discipline of the body.
The source of the impression his glance produced on Romola was the sense it conveyed to her of interest in her and care for her apart from any personal feeling. It was the first time she had encountered a gaze in which simple human fellowship expressed itself as a strongly-felt bond.
Such a glance is half the vocation of the priest or spiritual guide of men, and Romola felt it impossible again to question his authority to speak to her.
She stood silent, looking at him. And he spoke again.
“You assert your freedom proudly, my daughter. But who is so base as the debtor that thinks himself free?”
There was a sting in those words, and Romola’s countenance changed as if a subtle pale flash had gone over it.
“And you are flying from your debts: the debt of a Florentine woman; the debt of a wife.