By the use of strong interest she had gained permission to visit him in the evening of this day, and remain with him until the result of the council should be determined. And now she was waiting with his confessor to follow the guard that would lead him to the Bargello. Her heart was bent on clinging to the presence of the childless old man to the last moment, as her father would have done; and she had overpowered all remonstrances. Giovan Battista Ridolfi, a disciple of Savonarola, who was going in bitterness to behold the death of his elder brother Niccolò, had promised that she should be guarded, and now stood by her side.
Tito, too, was in the palace; but Romola had not seen him. Since the evening of the seventeenth they had avoided each other, and Tito only knew by inference from the report of the Frate’s neutrality that her pleading had failed.
He was now surrounded with official and other personages, both Florentine and foreign, who had been awaiting the issue of the long-protracted council, maintaining, except when he was directly addressed, the subdued air and grave silence of a man whom actual events are placing in a painful state of strife between public and private feeling.
When an allusion was made to his wife in relation to those events, he implied that, owing to the violent excitement of her mind, the mere fact of his continuing to hold office under a government concerned in her godfather’s condemnation, roused in her a diseased hostility towards him; so that for her sake he felt it best not to approach her.
“Ah, the old Bardi blood!” said Cennini, with a shrug. “I shall not be surprised if this business shakes her loose from the Frate, as well as some others I could name.”
“It is excusable in a woman, who is doubtless beautiful, since she is the wife of Messer Tito,” said a young French envoy, smiling and bowing to