TERESA MEETS A STRANGER
Through the twittering dawn, with its multitudinous damp scents, its
stubble-fields of maize glimpsed through the stripped ilex trees, whose
twigs scrawled black hieroglyphics on the hueless sky, Gordon strode
sharply, heedless of direction.
The convulsion of rage with which he had destroyed the miniature had
finished the work the latter’s advent had begun. The nerve, stirring
from its opiate sleep to a consciousness of dull pain, had jarred
itself to agony. His mind was awake, but the wind had swept saltly
through the coverts of his passion, and their denizens crouched
shivering.
The sight of a dove-tinted villa guarded by cypress spears--a gray
gathering of cupolas--told him he had walked about two miles. This was
La Mira, one of the estates of the Contessa Albrizzi, a great name in
Venice. He turned aside into the deserted olive grove above the river.
A slim walk meandered here, thick with dead leaves, with a cleared
slope stretching down to where the deep-dyed Brenta twisted like a
drenched ribbon on its way to the salt marshes. Fronting this breach,
Gordon came abruptly upon a wooden shrine, with a weather-fretted
prayer bench.
He stopped, regarding it half-absently, his surcharged thought
rearranging disused images out of some dusty speculative storehouse. A
more magnificent shrine rose on every campo of Venice. They stood for
a priestly hierarchy, an elaborate clericalism--the mullioned worship
that to his life seemed only the variform expression of the futile
earth-want, the satiric hallucination of finite and mortal brain that
grasped at immortality and the infinite. This, set in the isolation
of the place, seemed a symbol of more primitive faith and prayer, of
religion rough-hewn, shorn of its formal accessories.
He went a step nearer, seeing a small book lying beside the prayer
bench. He picked it up. It was a reprint in English of his own
“Prisoner of Chillon,” from a local press in Padua.
A sense of incongruity smote him. It was the poem he had composed in
Geneva. He readily surmised that it was through Shelley the verses had
reached his publisher in England, to meet his eye a year afterward, in
a foreign dress, in an Italian forest.
He turned the pages curiously, conning the scarce remembered stanzas.
Could he himself have created them? The instant wonder passed, blotted
out by lines he saw penned in Italian on the fly-leaf--lines that
he read with a tightening at his heart and an electric-like rush of
strange sensations such as he had never felt. For what was written
there, in the delicate tracery of a feminine hand, and in phrases
simple and pure as only the secret heart of a girl could have framed
them, was a prayer:
“_Oh, my God! Graciously hear me. I take encouragement from the
assurance of Thy word to pray to Thee in behalf of the author of
this book which has so pleased me. Thou desirest not the death of a
sinner--save, therefore, him whom Venice calls ‘the wicked milord.’
Thou who by sin art offended and by penance satisfied, give to him
the desire to return to the good and to glorify the talents Thou hast
so richly bestowed upon him. And grant that the punishment his evil
behavior has already brought him be more than sufficient to cover his
guilt from Thine eyes._
“_Oh blessed Virgin, Queen of the most holy Rosary! Intercede and
obtain for me of thy Son our Lord this grace! Amen._”
A step fell behind him. He turned half-dazed, his mind full of
conflict. A girl stood near him, delicate and alert and wand-like as
a golden willow, her curling amber hair loosely caught, her sea-blue
eyes wide and a little startled. She wore a Venetian hood, out of whose
green sheath her face looked, like lilies under leaves.
Gordon’s mind came back to the present of time and space across an
illimitable distance.
He stared, half believing himself in some automatic hallucination.
There had been no time to speculate upon what manner of hand had
written those words, what manner of woman’s soul had so weirdly touched
his own out of the void. Knowledge came staggeringly. Hers was the face
of the miniature that his heel had crushed to powder.
He noted that her eyes had fallen to the book in his hand, as
mechanically he asked, in Italian:
“This book is yours, Signorina?”
“Yes.” There was a faint flush of color in her cheek, for she saw the
volume was open at the written page.
Gordon was looking at her palely, seeing her face set in a silver
oval. Eyes, hair and lips; there in lifeless pigments, here in flesh
and blood! The same yet more, for here were unnunned youth, slumbrous,
glorious womanhood unawaked, stirring rosily in every vein, giving
a passionate human tint to the spiritual impression. And underneath
all, the same unsullied something he had raged at that black night,
even while her prayer for him lay here dumb at the feet of Our Lady of
Sorrows!
His voice sounded unreal to his own ears as he spoke, his mind feeling
its way through tumbled predispositions to an unfamiliar goal. “If
apology be owed,” he said, “for reading what was intended for purer
eyes than this world’s, I most humbly offer it, Signorina! I did so
quite inadvertently.”
He held out the book as he spoke, and her fingers closed over it,
the gesture betraying confusion. Who was this stranger, with face of
such wan luster and gray-blue eyes so sadly brilliant? Some sense in
her discerned a deeper, unguessed suffering that made her heart throb
painfully.
“If there be an ear which is open to human appeal,” he added gently,
“that prayer was registered, I know!”
He spoke calmly enough, but a hundred thoughts were ricochetting
through his mind. Pulpits had fulminated against him, priest and laic
had thundered him down, but when--in London, in Geneva, in Venice--had
a single disinterested voice been lifted in a prayer for him before?
And this girl had never seen him.
“If there be!” Her thought stirred protestingly. “Ah, Signore, surely
there is Some one who hears! How could one live and pray otherwise?”
How indeed? To such a one as she, to pray and to live were one and
the same thing. Prayer to her was not a mental process--it was as
instinctive and unconscious as breathing. For such as she, shrines like
this were erected; not for him! So, across the riot in his breast,
Gordon’s waked habit paused to smile--a satire-smile, at itself, at the
new sweet flower that was lifting head there amidst desert ruins.
The girl caught the mixed feeling in his face. He was not Italian--his
accent had told her that. He was an Englishman, too, perhaps. “Do you
know him, Signore?”
His head turned quickly toward her. In truth, had he ever really known
himself? “Yes,” he answered after a pause. “I know him, Signorina--far
better than most of the world.”
She was gazing with varied feelings, her heart beating strangely,
curiosity and wonder merging. In her few short weeks at La Mira, fresh
from the convent, the Englishman of whom all Venice told tales had
been but a dim and unsubstantial figure. She had thought of the grim
Palazzo Mocenigo with a kind of awe, as a child regards a mysterious
cavern bat-haunted and shunned. Into her poetic world of dreams had
fallen the little book, and thereafter the shadowy figure that roamed
nightly Venice had taken on the brilliant and piteous outline of a
fallen angel. Here, wonderfully, was a man who knew him, whose speech
could visualize the figure that had grown to possess such fascination.
Questions were on her tongue, but she could not frame them. She
hesitated, opening and closing the book in her hands.
“Is he all they say of him?”
“Who knows, Signorina?”
It was an involuntary exclamation that sounded like acquiescence. The
girl’s face fell. In her thought, the man of her dreaming, lacking an
open advocate, had gained the secret one of sympathy. Was it all true
then? Her voice faltered a little.
“I have not believed, Signore, that with a heart all evil one could
write--so!”
Into the raw blend of tangent emotions which were enwrapping Gordon,
had entered, as she spoke, another well-defined. Never in his life, for
his own sake, had he cared whether one or many believed truth or lie of
him. But now there thrilled in him, new-born, a desire that this slight
girl should not judge him as did the world. The feeling lent his words
a curious energy:
“Many tales are told, Signorina, that are true--some that are false.
If he were here--and I speak from certain knowledge of him--he would
not wish me to extenuate; least of all to you who have written what
is on that leaf. Perhaps that has been one of his faults, that he has
never justified himself. By common report he has committed all crimes,
Signorina. He has thought it useless to deny, since slander is not
guilt, nor is denial innocence, and since neither good nor bad report
could lighten or add to his wretchedness.”
The tint of her clear eyes deepened. “I knew he was wretched, Signore!
It was for that reason I left the prayer here overnight before Our
Lady of Sorrows--because I have heard he is an outcast from his own
country and his own people. And then, because of this.” She touched
the volume. “Ah, I have read little of all he has written--this is the
only poem--for I read his English tongue so poorly; but in this his
heart speaks, Signore. It speaks of pain and suffering and bondage. It
was not only the long-ago prisoner he sang of; it was himself! himself!
I felt it--here, like a hurt.”
She had spoken rapidly, stumblingly, and ended with a hand pressed
on her heart. Her own feeling, as she suddenly became aware of her
vehemence, startled her, and she half turned away, her lips trembling.
A sentiment at variance with his whole character was fighting in
Gordon. The Babel he had builded of curses was being smitten into
confusion. Something granite-like, mural and sealed by time, was
breaking and melting unaccountably away. His face was turned from
hers--toward the slope below, where the river bubbled and sparkled.
When he spoke it was in words choked and impeded:
“I think if he were here--this wicked milord--he would bless you for
that, Signorina. He has suffered, no doubt. Perhaps if there had been
more who felt what he wrote--as you have felt,--if there had been more
to impute good of him rather than evil--I am quite sure if this could
have been, Signorina, he would not now be in Venice the man for whom
you have written that prayer. I know him well enough to say this. It is
through his wretchedness that I have come to know him--because, like
him, I am a wanderer.”
A softer light suffused her cheek. The words smote her strangely. His
pain-engraved face brought a mist to her eyes. She was a child of
the sun, with blood leaping to quick response, and a heart a well
of undiscovered impulses. The wicked milord’s form lost distinction
and faded. Here was a being mysterious, wretched, too, and alone--not
intangible as was he of the Palazzo Mocenigo, but beside her, speaking
with a voice which thrilled every nerve of her sensitive nature.
Unconsciously she drew closer to him.
At that moment a call came under the bare boughs: “Teresa! Teresa!”
She drew back. “It is _la Contessa_,” she said; “I must hasten,” and
started quickly through the trees.
His voice overtook her. “Signorina!” The word vibrated. “Will you give
me the prayer?” He had come toward her as she stopped. “There is a
charm in such things, perhaps.”
The voice called again, and more impatiently: “Teresa!”
She opened the book and tore out the leaf with uncertain fingers. As
he took it his hand met hers. He bent his head and touched it with his
lips. She flushed deeply, then turned and ran through the naked trees
toward the villa shielded in its cypress rows.
The girl ran breathlessly to the terrace, where a lady leaned from a
window with a gently chiding tongue:
“Do they teach you to do wholly without sleep in convents?” she cried.
“Do you not know your father and Count Guiccioli, your lord and master
to be, are to arrive to-day from Ravenna? You will be wilted before the
evening.”
The girl entered the house.
Under the olive wood a man, strangely moved, a rustling paper still in
his hand, walked back with quick strides to his gondola, striving to
exorcise a chuckling fiend within him, who, with mocking and malignant
emphasis, kept repeating:
“Oh blessed Virgin, Queen of the most holy Rosary! Intercede and obtain
for me, of Thy Son our Lord, this grace!”