“It is a beautiful curl,” she said, resisting the impulse to withdraw her hand. “Lillo’s curls will be like it, perhaps, for his cheek, too, is dark. And you never know where your husband goes to when he leaves you?”
“No,” said Tessa, putting back her treasures out of the children’s way. “But I know Messer San Michele takes care of him, for he gave him a beautiful coat, all made of little chains; and if he puts that on, nobody can kill him. And perhaps, if—”
Tessa hesitated a little, under a recurrence of that original dreamy wonder about Romola which had been expelled by chatting contact—“if you were a saint, you would take care of him, too, because you have taken care of me and Lillo.”
An agitated flush came over Romola’s face in the first moment of certainty, but she had bent her cheek against Lillo’s head.
The feeling that leaped out in that flush was something like exultation at the thought that the wife’s burden might be about to slip from her overladen shoulders; that this little ignorant creature might prove to be Tito’s lawful wife. A strange exultation for a proud and highborn woman to have been brought to!
But it seemed to Romola as if that were the only issue that would make duty anything else for her than an insoluble problem. Yet she was not deaf to Tessa’s last appealing words; she raised her head, and said, in her clearest tones—
“I will always take care of you if I see you need me.
But that beautiful coat? your husband did not wear it when you were first married? Perhaps he used not to be so long away from you then?”
“Ah, yes! he was. Much—much longer. So long, I thought he would never come back. I used to cry. Oh me! I was beaten then; a long, long while ago at Peretola, where we had the goats and mules.”