Romola

by George Eliot

  CHAPTER FIFTY SEVEN.

  WHY TITO WAS SAFE.

  Tito had good reasons for saying that he was safe. In the last threemonths, during which he had foreseen the discovery of the Mediceanconspirators as a probable event, he had had plenty of time to providehimself with resources. He had been strengthening his influence at Romeand at Milan, by being the medium of secret information and indirectmeasures against the Frate and the popular party; he had cultivated moreassiduously than ever the regard of this party, by showing subtleevidence that his political convictions were entirely on their side; andall the while, instead of withdrawing his agency from the Mediceans, hehad sought to be more actively employed and exclusively trusted by them.It was easy to him to keep up this triple game. The principle ofduplicity admitted by the Mediceans on their own behalf deprived them ofany standard by which they could measure the trustworthiness of acolleague who had not, like themselves, hereditary interests, alliances,and prejudices, which were intensely Medicean. In their minds, todeceive the opposite party was fair stratagem; to deceive their ownparty was a baseness to which they felt no temptation; and, in usingTito's facile ability, they were not keenly awake to the fact that theabsence of traditional attachments which made him a convenient agent wasalso the absence of what among themselves was the chief guarantee ofmutual honour. Again, the Roman and Milanese friends of thearistocratic party, or Arrabbiati, who were the bitterest enemies ofSavonarola, carried on a system of underhand correspondence andespionage, in which the deepest hypocrisy was the best service, anddemanded the heaviest pay; so that to suspect an agent because he playeda part strongly would have been an absurd want of logic. On the otherhand, the Piagnoni of the popular party, who had the directness thatbelongs to energetic conviction, were the more inclined to credit Titowith sincerity in his political adhesion to them, because he affected noreligious sympathies.

  By virtue of these conditions, the last three months had been a time offlattering success to Tito. The result he most cared for was thesecuring of a future position for himself at Rome or at Milan; for hehad a growing determination, when the favourable moment should come, toquit Florence for one of those great capitals where life was easier, andthe rewards of talent and learning were more splendid. At present, thescale dipped in favour of Milan; and if within the year he could rendercertain services to Duke Ludovico Sforza, he had the prospect of a placeat the Milanese court which outweighed the advantages of Rome.

  The revelation of the Medicean conspiracy, then, had been a subject offorethought to Tito; but he had not been able to foresee the mode inwhich it would be brought about. The arrest of Lamberto dell' Antellawith a tell-tale letter on his person, and a bitter rancour against theMedici in his heart, was an incalculable event. It was not possible, inspite of the careful pretexts with which his agency had been guarded,that Tito should escape implication: he had never expected this in caseof any wide discovery concerning the Medicean plots. But his quick mindhad soon traced out the course that would secure his own safety with thefewest unpleasant concomitants. It is agreeable to keep a whole skin;but the skin still remains an organ sensitive to the atmosphere.

  His reckoning had not deceived him. That night, before he returnedhome, he had secured the three results for which he most cared: he wasto be freed from all proceedings against him on account of complicitywith the Mediceans; he was to retain his secretaryship for another year,unless he previously resigned it; and, lastly, the price by which he hadobtained these guarantees was to be kept as a State secret. The pricewould have been thought heavy by most men; and Tito himself would rathernot have paid it.

  He had applied himself first to win the mind of Francesco Valori, whowas not only one of the Ten under whom he immediately held hissecretaryship, but one of the special council appointed to investigatethe evidence of the plot. Francesco Valori, as we have seen, was thehead of the Piagnoni, a man with certain fine qualities that were notincompatible with violent partisanship, with an arrogant temper thatalienated his friends, nor with bitter personal animosities--one of thebitterest being directed against Bernardo del Nero. To him, in a briefprivate interview, after obtaining a pledge of secrecy, Tito avowed hisown agency for the Mediceans--an agency induced by motives about whichhe was very frank, declaring at the same time that he had alwaysbelieved their efforts futile, and that he sincerely preferred themaintenance of the popular government; affected to confide to Valori, asa secret, his own personal dislike for Bernardo del Nero; and, afterthis preparation, came to the important statement that there was anotherMedicean plot, of which, if he obtained certain conditions from thegovernment, he could, by a journey to Siena and into Romagna, wherePiero de' Medici was again trying to gather forces, obtain documentaryevidence to lay before the council. To this end it was essential thathis character as a Medicean agent should be unshaken for all Mediceans,and hence the fact that he had been a source of information to theauthorities must be wrapped in profound secrecy. Still, some odour ofthe facts might escape in spite of precaution, and before Tito couldincur the unpleasant consequences of acting against his friends, he mustbe assured of immunity from any prosecution as a Medicean, and fromdeprivation of office for a year to come.

  These propositions did not sound in the ear of Francesco Valoriprecisely as they sound to us. Valori's mind was not intensely bent onthe estimation of Tito's conduct; and it _was_ intensely bent onprocuring an extreme sentence against the five prisoners. There weresure to be immense efforts to save them; and it was to be wished (onpublic grounds) that the evidence against them should be of thestrongest, so as to alarm all well-affected men at the dangers ofclemency. The character of legal proceedings at that time implied thatevidence was one of those desirable things which could only be come atby foul means. To catch a few people and torture them into confessingeverybody's guilt was one step towards justice; and it was not alwayseasy to see the next, unless a traitor turned up. Lamberto dell'Antella had been tortured in aid of his previous willingness to tellmore than he knew; nevertheless, additional and stronger facts weredesirable, especially against Bernardo del Nero, who, so far as appearedhitherto, had simply refrained from betraying the late plot after havingtried in vain to discourage it; for the welfare of Florence demandedthat the guilt of Bernardo del Nero should be put in the strongestlight. So Francesco Valori zealously believed; and perhaps he was nothimself aware that the strength of his zeal was determined by hishatred. He decided that Tito's proposition ought to be accepted, laidit before his colleagues without disclosing Tito's name, and won themover to his opinion. Late in the day, Tito was admitted to an audienceof the Special Council, and produced a deep sensation among them byrevealing another plot for insuring the mastery of Florence to Piero de'Medici, which was to have been carried into execution in the middle ofthis very month of August. Documentary evidence on this subject woulddo more than anything else to make the right course clear. He receiveda commission to start for Siena by break of day; and, besides this, hecarried away with him from the council-chamber a written guarantee ofhis immunity and of his retention of office.

  Among the twenty Florentines who bent their grave eyes on Tito, as hestood gracefully before them, speaking of startling things with easyperiphrasis, and with that apparently unaffected admission of beingactuated by motives short of the highest, which is often the intensestaffectation, there were several whose minds were not too entirelypreoccupied to pass a new judgment on him in these new circumstances;they silently concluded that this ingenious and serviceable Greek was infuture rather to be used for public needs than for private intimacy.Unprincipled men were useful, enabling those who had more scruples tokeep their hands tolerably clean in a world where there was much dirtywork to be done. Indeed, it was not clear to respectable Florentinebrains, unless they held the Frate's extravagant belief in a possiblepurity and loftiness to be striven for on this earth, how life was to becarried on in any department without human instruments whom it would notbe unbecoming to kick or to spit upon i
n the act of handing them theirwages. Some of these very men who passed a tacit judgment on Tito wereshortly to be engaged in a memorable transaction that could by no meanshave been carried through without the use of an unscrupulousness asdecided as his; but, as their own bright poet Pulci had said for them,it is one thing to love the fruits of treachery, and another thing tolove traitors--

  "Il tradimento a molti piace assai, Ma il traditore a gnun non piacque mal."

  The same society has had a gibbet for the murderer and a gibbet for themartyr, an execrating hiss for a dastardly act, and as loud a hiss formany a word of generous truthfulness or just insight: a mixed conditionof things which is the sign, not of hopeless confusion, but ofstruggling order.

  For Tito himself, he was not unaware that he had sunk a little in theestimate, of the men who had accepted his services. He had that degreeof self-contemplation which necessarily accompanies the habit of actingon well-considered reasons, of whatever quality; and if he could havechosen, he would have declined to see himself disapproved by men of theworld. He had never meant to be disapproved; he had meant always toconduct himself so ably that if he acted in opposition to the standardof other men they should not be aware of it; and the barrier betweenhimself and Romola had been raised by the impossibility of suchconcealment with her. He shrank from condemnatory judgments as from aclimate to which he could not adapt himself But things were not soplastic in the hands of cleverness as could be wished, and events hadturned out inconveniently. He had really no rancour against MesserBernardo del Nero: he had a personal liking for Lorenzo Tornabuoni andGiannozzo Pucci. He had served them very ably, and in such a way thatif their party had been winners he would have merited high reward; butwas he to relinquish all the agreeable fruits of life because theirparty had failed? His proffer of a little additional proof against themwould probably have no influence on their fate; in fact, he feltconvinced they would escape any extreme consequences; but if he had notgiven it, his own fortunes, which made a promising fabric, would havebeen utterly ruined. And what motive could any man really have, excepthis own interest? Florentines whose passions were engaged in theirpetty and precarious political schemes might have no self-interestseparable from family pride and tenacity in old hatreds and attachments;a modern simpleton who swallowed whole one of the old systems ofphilosophy, and took the indigestion it occasioned for the signs of adivine afflux or the voice of an inward monitor, might see his interestin a form of self-conceit which he called self-rewarding virtue;fanatics who believed in the coming Scourge and Renovation might seetheir own interest in a future palm-branch and white robe: but no man ofclear intellect allowed his course to be determined by such puerileimpulses or questionable inward fumes. Did not Pontanus, poet andphilosopher of unrivalled Latinity, make the finest possible oration atNaples to welcome the French king, who had come to dethrone the learnedorator's royal friend and patron? and still Pontanus held up his headand prospered. Men did not really care about these things, except whentheir personal spleen was touched. It was weakness only that wasdespised; power of any sort carried its immunity; and no man, unless byvery rare good fortune, could mount high in the world without incurringa few unpleasant necessities which laid him open to enmity, and perhapsto a little hissing, when enmity wanted a pretext.

  It was a faint prognostic of that hissing, gathered by Tito from certainindications when he was before the council, which gave his presentconduct the character of an epoch to him, and made him dwell on it withargumentative vindication. It was not that he was taking a deeper stepin wrong-doing, for it was not possible that he should feel any tie tothe Mediceans to be stronger than the tie to his father; but his conductto his father had been hidden by successful lying: his present act didnot admit of total concealment--in its very nature it was a revelation.And Tito winced under his new liability to disesteem.

  Well! a little patience, and in another year, or perhaps in half a year,he might turn his back on these hard, eager Florentines, with theirfutile quarrels and sinking fortunes. His brilliant success at Florencehad had some ugly flaws in it: he had fallen in love with the wrongwoman, and Baldassarre had come back under incalculable circumstances.But as Tito galloped with a loose rein towards Siena, he saw a futurebefore him in which he would no longer be haunted by those mistakes. Hehad much money safe out of Florence already; he was in the freshripeness of eight-and-twenty; he was conscious of well-tried skill.Could he not strip himself of the past, as of rehearsal clothing, andthrow away the old bundle, to robe himself for the real scene?

  It did not enter into Tito's meditations on the future, that, on issuingfrom the council-chamber and descending the stairs, he had brushedagainst a man whose face he had not stayed to recognise in thelamplight. The man was Ser Ceccone--also willing to serve the State bygiving information against unsuccessful employers.