Valori, for among the apparent
contradictions that belonged to this event, not the least striking was
the alleged alarm on the one hand at the popular rage against the
conspirators, and the alleged alarm on the other lest there should be an
attempt to rescue them in the midst of a hostile crowd. When they had
arrived within the court of the Bargello, Romola was allowed to approach
Bernardo with his confessor for a moment of farewell. Many eyes were
bent on them even in that struggle of an agitated throng, as the aged
man, forgetting that his hands were bound with irons, lifted them
towards the golden head that was bent towards him, and then, checking
that movement, leaned to kiss her. She seized the fettered hands that
were hung down again, and kissed them as if they had been sacred things.

"My poor Romola," said Bernardo, in a low voice, "I have only to die,
but thou hast to live--and I shall not be there to help thee."

"Yes," said Romola, hurriedly, "you _will_ help me--always--because I
shall remember you."

She was taken away and conducted up the flight of steps that led to the
loggia surrounding the grand old court. She took her place there,
determined to look till the moment when her godfather laid his head on
the block. Now while the prisoners were allowed a brief interval with
their confessor, the spectators were pressing into court until the crowd
became dense around the black scaffold, and the torches fixed in iron
rings against the pillars threw a varying startling light at one moment
on passionless stone carvings, at another on some pale face agitated
with suppressed rage or suppressed grief--the face of one among the many
near relatives of the condemned, who were presently to receive their
dead and carry them home.

Romola's face looked like a marble image against the dark arch as she
stood watching for the moment when her godfather would appear at the
foot of the scaffold. He was to suffer first, and Battista Ridolfi, who
was by her side, had promised to take her away through a door behind
them when she would have seen the last look of the man who alone in all
the world had shared her pitying love for her father. And still, in the
background of her thought, there was the possibility striving to be a
hope, that some rescue might yet come, something that would keep that
scaffold unstained by blood.

For a long while there was constant movement, lights flickering, heads
swaying to and fro, confu