In his earlier relations with Tessa, there is nothing more than seeking a present and passing amusement, and the desire to sun himself in her childish admiration and delight.  He is as far as possible from the intentional seducer and betrayer.  But his accidental encounters with her, cause him perplexity and annoyance; and at last it seems to him safer for his own position, especially in regard to Romola, that she should be secretly housed as she is, and taught to regard herself as his wife.  Soon there comes to be more of ease for him with the bond-submissive child-mistress, than in the presence of the high-souled, pure-hearted wife.  In the first and decisive encounter with Baldassarre, the words of repudiation which seal the whole after-character of his life, apparently escape from him unconsciously and by surprise.  But it is the traitor-heart that speaks them.  They could never even by surprise have escaped the lips, had not the baseness of their denial and desertion been already in the heart consummated.

We need not follow him through all his subsequent and deepening treasons.  They all, without exception, want every element that might make even treason impressive.  They want even such factitious elevation as their being prompted by hatred or revenge might lend;—­even such broader interest as their being done in the interest of a party, or for some wide end, could confer.  They have no fuller or deeper import than the present ease, present safety, present or future advantage, of that object which fills up his universe,—­Self.  He would rather not have betrayed the trust reposed in him by Romola’s father, if the end he thereby proposed to himself could have been attained otherwise than through such betrayal.  His plot with Dolfo Spini for placing the great Monk-prophet in the hands of his enemies, has no darker motive than the getting out of the way an indirect obstacle to his own advancement, and a man whose labours tend to make life harder and more serious for all who come under his influence.  Bernardo del Nero, with his stainless honour, has from the first taken up an attitude of tacit revulsion toward him; but there is no revenge prompting the part he plays towards the noble, true-hearted old man.  He would rather that he and his fellow-victims were saved, if his own safety and ultimate gain could be secured otherwise than through their betrayal and death.  There is no hardness or cruelty in him, save when its transient displays toward Romola are necessary for furthering some present end:  he never indulges in the luxury of unnecessary and unprofitable sins.  The sharp, steadfast, unwavering consistency of Tito is even more marked than that of Romola, for twice Romola falters, and turns to flee.  The supple, flexible Greek follows out the law he has laid down as the law of his life,—­worships the god he has set up as the god of his worship with an inexorable constancy that never for one chance moment falters.  That god is self; that law is, in one word, self-pleasing.  Long before the end comes, we feel that Tito Melema is a lost soul; that for him and in him there is no place for repentance; that to him we may without any uncharity apply the most fearful words human language has ever embodied;—­he has sinned the “sin which cannot be forgiven, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”