A WOMAN OF FIRE AND DREAMS
From the moment those lips touched her hand in that meeting at the wood
shrine Teresa Gamba felt her life unfold to rose-veined visions.
Her unmothered childhood and the placid convent school years at
Bagnacavallo, near Ravenna, had known no mystery other than her
day-dreams had fashioned. She had dreamed much: of the time when she
should marry and redeem the fortunes of her house, which, despite
untainted blood and ancient provincial name, was impoverished; of the
freedom of Italy, the sole topic, aside from his endless chemical
experiments, of which her father, now growing feeble, never tired; of
her elder brother, away in Wallachia, secretary to the Greek Prince
Mavrocordato; of the few books she read, and the fewer people she
met. But these dreams had not possessed the charm of novelty. Even
when, at eighteen, through family friendship, she became a member of
the Albrizzi household and exchanged the dull convent walls for the
garlanded La Mira--even with those rare days when she saw the gay
splendor of Venice from a curtained gondola--even then her mental life
suffered small change.
The marriage arranged for her with Count Guiccioli, the oldest and
richest nobleman of Ravenna, a miser and twice a widower, had aroused
an interest in her mind scarce greater than had the tales of the
Englishman of the Palazzo Mocenigo. Such marriages were of common
occurrence in the life she knew: the “wicked milord” was a stranger
thing--one to speculate more endlessly upon.
It was Tita, the gigantic black-bearded gondolier and door-porter, a
servant in the Gamba family since she was born, whom she had brought
with her as her own attendant--one who worshiped her devoutly, and
in whose care her father entrusted her more confidently than to any
duenna--who had first pointed out to her the gloomy building which
shielded that mysterious occupant, and had piqued her interest
with weird tales: how in his loneliness for human kind the outcast
surrounded himself with tamed ravens and paroquets, and used for a wine
cup a human skull, that of a woman he had once loved. With her rapt
eyes on the palazzo front, Teresa had wondered and shuddered in never
ending surmise.
The little volume from the Paduan press had deepened her curiosity
and given it virgin fields in which to wander. The English books in
her father’s library were prose and for the most part concerned his
pet hobby, chemistry. This volume, given her on a saint’s day by the
Contessa Albrizzi, who took pride in her _protégée’s_ scholarship, was
her first glimpse of English poetry, and her pulses had leaped at the
new charm. Thereafter the personality of the contradictory being who
had written it had lived in her daily thought. She retained the faiths
of her childhood unshattered, and the prayer she had left at the shrine
of Our Lady of Sorrows sprang from an impulse as natural as it was
significant.
But that meeting in the wood had turned the course of her imaginings.
“A wanderer--like him”; the words had bridged the chasm between the
dreaming and the real. The secret thought given to the “wicked milord”
found itself absorbed by a nearer object. The palazzo on the Grand
Canal grew more remote, and the stranger she had seen stepped at a
single stride into a place her mind had already prepared.
The blush with which she had taken the book from Gordon’s hand was
one of mere self-consciousness; the vivid, burning color which
overspread her face as she ran back through the trees was something
very different. It was a part of her throbbing heart, of the tremulous
confusion that overran her whole body, called into life by the touch
of those palely carved lips upon her fingers. His colorless face--a
face with the outline of the Apollo Belvedere--the gray magnetic eyes,
the words he had said and their accent of sadness, all were full of
suggestive mystery. Why was he a wanderer--like that other? Not for a
kindred reason, surely! He could not be evil also! Rather it must have
been because of some loss, some hurt of love which time might remedy.
Her agile fancy constructed more than one hypothesis, spun more than
one romance, all of like ending. A new love would heal his heart.
Sometime he would look into a woman’s eyes--not as he had looked into
hers; some one would feel his lips--not as he had kissed her hand. She
in the meantime would be no longer a girl; she would be the Contessa
Guiccioli, with a palazzo of her own in Ravenna, and--a husband.
But, somehow, this reflection brought no satisfaction. The old count
she had seen more than once driving by in state when she played as a
child in the convent woods; and that he with his riches should desire
her, had given her father great pride, which was reflected in her. Her
suitor had brought his age and ailments to La Mira on the very day
she had met the stranger at the shrine--the day her heart had beat so
oddly--and with his arrival, her marriage had projected itself out of
the hazy future and become a dire thing of the present. She felt a
fresh distaste of his sharp yellow eyes, his cracked laugh. His eighty
wiry years seemed as many centuries. She became moody, put her father
off and took refuge in whims. The contessa advised the city, and the
week’s end saw the Albrizzi palazzo thrown open.
In Venice, Teresa’s spirits rose. She loved to watch the bright little
shops opening like morning-glories, the sky-faring pigeons a silver
quiver of wings; to lie in the gondola waiting while her father drank
his brandy at the piazzetta _caffè_; to buy figs from little lame
Pasquale, who watched for her at a shop-door in a narrow _calle_ near
at hand; to see the gaudy flotillas of the carnival, and the wedding
processions, fresh from the church, crossing the lagoon to leave
their gifts at the various island-convents; or, propelled by Tita’s
swinging oar, to glide slowly in the purpling sunset shadows, by the
Piazza San Marco, around red-towered San Giorgio, and so home again
on color-soaked canals in the gleaming ruby of the afterglow, through
a city bubbling with ivory domes and glistening like an opal’s heart
under its tiara of towers.
She scarcely told the secret to her own heart--that it was one face
she looked to see, one mysterious stranger whose image haunted every
campo, every balcony and every bridge. She flushed whenever she thought
of that kiss on her fingers; in the daytime she felt it there like a
sentient thing; at night when she woke, her hand burned her cheek.
Who was he? Why had he asked her for the prayer? What had he done with
it? Was he still in Venice? Should she see him again? She wondered, as,
parting the gondola _tenda_, she watched her father cross the pave for
his cognac.
“Are there many English in Venice, Tita?”
The gondolier, lounging like a brilliant-hued lizard, shrugged his
shoulders. “_Bellissima_, there are hundreds in the season. They come
and go. They are all _lasagnoni_, these Englishmen!”
Teresa’s sigh checked itself. Tita suddenly turned his head. Across the
piazzetta a crowd was gathering. It centered before the shop at whose
front the five-year-old fig-seller was used to watch for her.
“He fell from the scaffolding!” said a voice.
“If it should be little Pasquale!” cried Teresa, and springing out, ran
quickly forward. Tita waited to secure the gondola before he followed
her.
A sad accident had happened. Before the _calle_ a platform had been
erected from which spectators might watch the flotillas of the
carnival. Little Pasquale’s delight was a tame sparrow, whose home was
a wicker cage, and climbing to sun his pet when he had been left to
tend the empty shop, the child had slipped and fallen to the pavement.
Teresa broke through the circle of bystanders and knelt by the tumbled
little body, looking at the tiny face now so waxen. The neighbors
thronged about, stupefied and hindering. A woman ran to fetch the
mother, gossiping with a neighbor. Another called loudly for a priest.
The girl, looking up, was bewildered by the tumult. “He must be got
in,” she murmured, half helplessly, for the people ringed them round.
A voice answered close beside her: “I will carry him, Signorina”--and a
form she knew bent beside her, and very gently lifted the small bundle
in his arms.
Teresa’s heart bounded. Through these days she had longed to hear that
voice again how vainly! Now, in this moment, she was brought suddenly
close to him. She ceased to hear the sounds about her--saw only him.
She sprang up and led the way through the press, down the close damp
_calle_ and to the shop where the child lived.
“Dog of the Virgin! He need touch no finger to child of mine!” swore a
carpenter from the adjoining campo.
“Nor mine!”
“Why didn’t you carry him in yourself, then?” growled Giuseppe, the
fruit-vender. “Standing there like a bronze pig! What have you against
the Englishman? Didn’t he buy your brother-in-law a new gondola when
the piling smashed it?”
“_Scellerato!_” sneered the carpenter. “Why is his face so white? Like
a potato sprout in a cellar! He is so evil he fears the sun!”
The fruit-vender turned away disdainfully. His foot kicked a shapeless
wicker object--it was little Pasquale’s cage smashed flat. The sparrow
inside was gasping. He picked up the cage and carried it to the shop.
In the inner, ill-lighted room, Gordon laid the child on a couch.
He had spoken no further word to Teresa. At the first sight of her,
kneeling in the street, he had started visibly as he had done in the
forest of La Mira when he recognized her face as that of the miniature.
Now he was feeling her presence beside him with a curious thrill not
unlike her own--a pleasure deeply mixed with pain that was almost a
physical pang.
Since that dawn walk above the plane-treed Brenta he had been treading
strange ways. In the hours that followed, remorse had been born in him.
And as the first indrawn breath racks the half-drowned body with agony
greater than that of the death it has already tasted, so the man had
suffered. During a fortnight, words written on a sheet of paper that
he carried in his pocket had rung through his brain. Day after day,
as he sat in his gloomy palazzo, he had heard them; night after night
they had floated with him as his gondola bore him through the waterways
ringing with the _estro_ of the carnival. To escape them he had fled
again and again to the black phial, but when he awoke the pain was
still with him, instinct and unrenounceable. It was more acute at this
moment than it had ever been.
Teresa scarcely noted the fruit-vender as he put the battered cage into
her hand just before its feathered occupant breathed its last. Her
look, fixed on Gordon, was still eloquent with the surprise. She saw
the same pale face, the same deep eyes, the same chiselled curve of
lips. His voice, too, as he despatched the kind-hearted Giuseppe for a
surgeon on the Riva, had the same cadence of sadness. She had noticed
that his step halted as he walked, as though from weakness. And surely
there was illness in his face, too! Had there been any tender hands
near him--as tender as those with which he now examined the unconscious
child?
As Gordon bent above him, little Pasquale opened his eyes. His gaze
fell first not on the man or on Teresa, but on the broken cage beside
him, where the bird lay still, one claw standing stiffly upright. He
tried to lift his head, and called the sparrow’s name.
There was no answering chirp. The claw was very still.
Then little Pasquale saw the faces about him and knew what had happened.
“He’s dead!” he shrilled, and burst into tears.