THE PASSING OF JANE CLERMONT
The storm-clouds were gone. An Italian spring was painting the hills
with April artistry. Myrtle hedges had waked to childish green, lusty
creepers swung callow tendrils, meadows were afire with the delicate,
trembling anemone, and the rustling olive copses were a silver
firmament of leaves. The immemorial pine woods that stretched about
Ravenna, with the groves and rivers which Boccaccio’s pen had made
forever haunted, were bathed in sun and noisy with winged creatures.
Under the boughs of the balsamic forest, through the afternoon, from
the convent of Bagnacavallo into Ravenna, a wagonette had been driven.
It had carried a woman, young, dark-haired and of Spanish type--she who
once had ruled the greenroom of Drury Lane. Time had made slight change
in Jane Clermont’s piquant beauty. A little deeper of tone and fuller
of lip she was, perhaps a little colder of look; but her black eyes
snapped and sparkled with all their old daring.
The convent road met the highway on the skirt of the town. At the
juncture sat a prosperous osteria half surrounded by trellised arbors,
blowsy with yellow snap-dragons and gilly-flowers, and bustling all day
long with the transient travel of tourists, to whom Ravenna with its
massive clusters of wide-eaved houses and dun-colored churches, its few
streets of leisurely business, its foliaged squares and its colonnaded
opera-house, were of less interest than the tomb of Dante. The inn
held a commanding position. The post-road that passed its door curved
southward toward Pisa; northward, it stretched to Venice. From both
directions through Ravenna, lumbered diligence and chaise.
At the osteria the wagonette halted, made a detour and was finally
drawn up in the shadow of the arbors where it was unobserved from the
inn and yet had a screened view of both roads. For hours the vehicle
sat there while the driver dozed, the occupant nesting her chin in her
gloved hand and from time to time restlessly shifting her position.
Her patience was at last rewarded. Two men on horseback had paused at
the cross-road. One was Shelley, astride the lank beast that had borne
him from Pisa to Venice. The other was George Gordon.
“So he _did_ come!” she muttered, peering through the screen of silver
twigs. “I thought he would. I wonder what he will say when he finds I
have changed my mind and settled Allegra’s affairs another way.”
She watched the pair as they parted. The dropping sun danced in
tiny flashes from the brass buttons on Shelley’s blue coat. “Poor
philosopher!” she soliloquized with pitying tolerance. “You are going
back to your humdrum Pisa, your books and your Mary. The world attracts
you no more now with your money than it did when we found you in the
debtors’ prison. Well, every one to his taste! I wonder why you always
troubled yourself about George Gordon.”
Her eyes narrowed as they lingered on the other figure, turning alone
into the forest road from which her wagonette had come.
“I would like to see your lordship’s face when you get there!” she
said half-aloud. “My authority is the convent’s now. You may take your
daughter--_if you can_!”
Not till both riders were out of sight did the wagonette draw into the
highway.
Jane Clermont rode on, humming an air, looking curiously at the various
vehicles that passed her on the smooth, well-travelled road, thinking
with triumph of the man she had seen riding to Bagnacavallo. She had
guessed the object of Shelley’s trip to Venice, but the knowledge had
not at first stirred her natural and self-absorbed indifference. It
was a malicious afterthought, a gratuitous spice of venom springing
more from an instinctive maleficence than from any deeper umbrage, that
had inspired that parting visit to the convent. The impulse that had
led her to assure herself of Gordon’s fruitless journey was distinctly
feline.
A mile from the town her reflections were abruptly broken. She spoke to
the driver and he stopped.
A sweating horse was approaching. Its trappings were of an ostentatious
gaudiness. The face of the man it carried was swarthy and mustachioed
and his bearing had the effect of flamboyant and disordered braggadocio.
“Trevanion!” she exclaimed, with an accent of surprise. She had not
seen him for two years. As she watched, her face showed a certain
amusement.
He would possibly have passed her by, for his gaze was set straight
ahead, but when he came opposite, she leaned from the carriage and
spoke his name.
His horse halted instantly; a hot red leaped into his oriental cheeks,
a look fierce and painful into his eyes. He sat still, looking at her
without a word.
“I thought you were in England,” he said at length.
“So I was till last fall. Since, I’ve been at Pisa with the Shelleys.
But I find the continent precious dull. I see you haven’t been caught
yet for deserting from the navy. Is that why you don’t stay in London?
Tell me,” she asked suddenly; “where is George Gordon now?”
“In Venice.”
“Really!” Her voice had a kind of measured mockery that did not cloak
its satire. “And yet I hear of his doings in many other places--Lucca,
Bologna, all the post-towns. From the descriptions, I judge he has
changed, not only in looks but in habits.”
He winced and made no reply.
“Pshaw!” she said, scorn suddenly showing. “Don’t you think I
guessed? Gulling a few travellers in the post-houses with a brawling
impersonation! Suppose a million should think George Gordon the
tasteless roustabout ruffian you make him out? What do you gain? One of
these days, some tourist friend of his--Mr. Hobhouse, for instance; he
used to be a great traveller--will put a sharp end to your play.”
“I’ll risk that!” he threw her. “And I’d risk more!”
“How you hate him!”
He laughed--a hard, dare-devil sound. “Haven’t I cause enough?”
“Not so far as I know. But I wish you luck, if the game pleases you.
It’s nothing to me.”
“It was something to you, once,” he said, “wasn’t it?”
She smiled amusedly. “How tragic you always were! He was never more to
me than that”--she snapped her fingers. “Constancy is too heavy a rôle.
I always preferred lighter parts. I am going to play in America. Why
don’t you turn stroller and act to some purpose? Why not try New York?”
While she spoke her tone had changed. It had become softer, more
musical. Her lashes drooped with well-gauged coquetry.
“Look,” she said, in a lower key; “am I as handsome as I used to be at
Drury Lane--when you said you’d like to see the world with me?”
A smoldering fire kindled in his eyes as he gazed at her. He half
leaned from the saddle--half put out his hand.
But at his movement she dropped the mask. She laughed in open scorn. “A
fig for your hate!” she exclaimed contemptuously. “I have no liking for
George Gordon, but he was never a sneak at any rate!”
The man to whom she spoke struck savage spurs to his horse. As he
wheeled, she swept him a curtsy from the carriage seat. “Joy to your
task!” she cried, and drove on with her lips curled.
“He doesn’t know Gordon is near Ravenna,” she thought presently. “If he
gives one of his free entertainments at the inn to-night, there may be
an interesting meeting. What a pity I shall miss it!” and she laughed.
A little further on, the carriage turned to the westward toward the
Swiss frontier.
As Trevanion reined the animal he bestrode to its haunches at the porch
of the osteria, where Jane Clermont’s wagonette had waited, he looked
back along the road with a muttered curse. Then he kicked a sleeping
hound from the step and went in with an assumed limp and a swagger.
* * * * *
Two hours later, when the early dusk had fallen, and the ghostly disk
that had hung all day in the sky was yellowing above the olive-trees,
George Gordon flung his bridle wearily to a groom at the inn. His face
was set and thwarted. He had been to the convent, to find that a wall
had suddenly reared between him and the possession of his child. To
surmount this would mean publicity, an appeal to British authority, red
tape, a million Italian delays,--perhaps failure then.
As he stood, listening to the stir of the inn he was about to enter, a
low voice suddenly spoke from the shadow of a hedge: “Excellence!”
Turning he recognized the huge frame of the gondolier who had borne
Teresa from the Piazza San Marco on the night she had come to warn him.
His heart leaped into his throat. Had the man followed him from Venice?
Did he bring a message from her?
“Excellence! I heard in the town that you were at the inn. I would like
speech with you, but I must not be seen. Will you follow me?”
Even in his surprise, Gordon felt an instant’s wonder. He himself had
not yet entered the osteria. How had the other heard of his presence?
The wonder, however, was lost in the thought of Teresa.
He turned from the inn and followed the figure silently through the
falling shadows.