ering feelings against further submission, and if her godfather lived
she would win him to share her belief without much trouble. Romola
seemed more than ever an unmanageable fact in his destiny. But if
Bernardo del Nero were dead, the difficulties that would beset her in
placing herself in opposition to her husband would probably be
insurmountable to her shrinking pride. Therefore Tito had felt easier
when he knew that the Eight had gone to the Bargello to order the
instant erection of the scaffold. Four other men--his intimates and
confederates--were to die, besides Bernardo del Nero. But a man's own
safety is a god that sometimes makes very grim demands. Tito felt them
to be grim: even in the pursuit of what was agreeable, this paradoxical
life forced upon him the desire for what was disagreeable. But he had
had other experience of this sort, and as he heard through the open
doorway the shuffle of many feet and the clanking of metal on the
stairs, he was able to answer the questions of the young French envoy
without showing signs of any other feeling than that of sad resignation
to State necessities.

Those sounds fell on Romola as if her power of hearing had been exalted
along with every other sensibility of her nature. She needed no arm to
support her; she shed no tears. She felt that intensity of life which
seems to transcend both grief and joy--in which the mind seems to itself
akin to elder forces that wrought out existence before the birth of
pleasure and pain. Since her godfather's fate had been decided, the
previous struggle of feeling in her had given way to an identification
of herself with him in these supreme moments: she was inwardly asserting
for him that, if he suffered the punishment of treason, he did not
deserve the name of traitor; he was the victim to a collision between
two kinds of faithfulness. It was not given him to die for the noblest
cause, and yet he died because of his nobleness. He might have been a
meaner man and found it easier not to incur this guilt. Romola was
feeling the full force of that sympathy with the individual lot that is
continually opposing itself to the formulae by which actions and parties
are judged. She was treading the way with her second father to the
scaffold, and nerving herself to defy ignominy by the consciousness that
it was not deserved.

The way was fenced in by three hundred armed men, who had been placed as
a guard by the orders of Francesco