IN THE CASA GARDEN
The close was still--only the flutter of moths and the plash of
a fountain tinkling wetly. Here and there in the deeper shade of
cloistral walks, the moonlight, falling through patches of young
leaves, flecked bloodless bacchantes and bronze Tritons nestling palely
in shrub tangles of mimosa. This was all Gordon distinguished at first
as he moved, his hands before him, his feet feeling their way on the
cool sward.
Suddenly a low breath seemed to pierce the stillness. A sense of
nearness rushed upon him. His arm, outstretched, touched something
yielding.
“Teresa!” he cried, and his hands found hers and drew her close to him.
In that first moment of silence he was keenly conscious of her breath
against his cheek, hurried and warm.
“I know--I know,” he said in a choked voice. “Tita told me all. I would
give my body inch by inch, my blood drop by drop to give back to your
life what I have taken from it!”
She shook her head. “You have taken nothing from it. Before that night
on the square it held nothing--I have learned that since.”
She was feeling a sense of exaltation. Since the day at San Lazzarro
she had never expected to see him again. To her he had been a glorious
spirit, struggling for lost foothold on the causeways of redemption.
In her mental picture he had stood always as she had seen him on the
monastery path, pale, clad in a monk’s coarse robe, the vesture of
earthly penance. This picture had blotted out his past, whatever it
had been, whatever of rumor was true or false, whatever she may for a
time have believed. Every word he had spoken remained a living iterate
memory. And the thought that her hand had drawn him to his better self
had filled her with a painful ecstasy.
“Teresa,” he said unsteadily, “I long ago forfeited every right to hope
and happiness. And if this were not true, by a tie that holds me, and
by a bond you believe in, I have still no right to stand here now. But
fate drew me here to-day--as it drew me to you that morning at La Mira.
It is stronger than I--stronger than us both. Yet I have brought you
nothing but misery!”
“You have brought me much more than that,” she interrupted. “I knew
nothing of life when I met you. I have learned it now as you must have
known it to write as you have. I know that it is vaster than I ever
dreamed--more sorrowful, but sweeter, too.”
A stone bench showed near, wound with moonbeams, and she sat down,
making room beside her. In the white light she seemed unreal--a fantasy
in wild-rose brocade. A chain of dull gold girdled her russet hair,
dropping a single emerald to quiver and sparkle on her forehead. Her
face was pale, but with a shadowy something born of those weeks.
What he saw there was awakened self-reliance and mettle, the birthright
of clean inheritance. The wedding gondola that had borne a girl to
San Lazzarro had carried back a woman, rebellious, agonized, flushed
to every nerve. She had opposed a woman’s pride to the hatred that
otherwise would have made the ensuing time a slow unrolling nightmare;
had taken her place passively as mistress of the gloomy casa with its
atmosphere of cold grandeur and miserliness, thankful that its host
was niggardly of entertainment, enduring as best she might the petty
persecution with which the old count surrounded her. His anger, soured
by the acid sponge of jealousy, had fed itself daily with this baiting.
He believed she had come smirched from the very altar to his name and
place. Yet he had no proof, and to make the scandal public--to put
her away--would have seared his pride, laid him open to the wrath of
her kin, brought her brother back to Italy to avenge the slight upon
their house, and most of all to be dreaded, would have necessitated
the repayment of her dowry. A slow and secret satisfaction was all
he had, and under it her spirit had galled and chafed him. In this
strait she had had no confidant, for her father, aging rapidly and
failing, she would not sadden, and whenever he drove to Casa Guiccioli
from his villa, some miles from the town,--sole relic of his wasted
properties,--had striven to conceal all evidence of unhappiness. Even
when she had determined on a momentous step--a secret appeal to the
papal court for such a measure of freedom as was possible--she had
determined not to tell him yet. Grief and repression had called to
the surface the latent capabilities which in the girl had been but
promises, and these spoke now to Gordon in a beauty strong, eager
and far-divining.
[Illustration: COUNTESS TERESA.]
“What I have known of life is not its sweets,” he answered in
bitterness. “I have gathered its poison-flowers, and their perfume
clings to the life I live now.”
“But it _will_ not be so,” she said earnestly. “I believe more than
you told me at La Mira--when you said it had been one of your faults
that you had never justified yourself. You were never all they said.
Something tells me that. If you did evil, it was not because you chose
it or took pleasure in it. For a while I doubted everything, but that
day at San Lazzarro, when I saw you--the moment you spoke--it came back
to me. No matter what I might think or hear again, in my heart I should
always believe that now!”
He put out his hand, a gesture of hopelessness and protest. His mind
was crying out against the twin implacables, Time and Space. If man
could but push back the Now to Then, enweave the There and Here! If in
such a re-formed universe, He and She might this hour be standing--no
irrevocable past, only the new Now! What might not life yield up for
him, of its burgeoning, not of its corruption, its hope, not of its
despair!
“That day!” he repeated. “I saw you in the gondola. I would have spared
you that meeting.”
“Yet that was what told me. If I had not seen you there--” She paused.
The chains of his repression clung about him like the load of broken
wings. The knowledge that had come as he walked the floor of his
monastery room with the burn of a blow on his forehead, had spelled
abnegation. She must never know the secret he carried--must in time
forget her own. Once out, he could never shackle it again. He completed
her sentence:
“You would have forgotten the sooner.”
“I should never have forgotten,” she said softly.
He was silent. He dared not look at her face, but he saw her hands,
outstretched, clasping her knee.
Presently--he could not guess the dear longing for denial that made her
tone shake now!--she said:
“Tita told me that--when you came to Ravenna--you had not known--”
He rose to his feet, feeling the chains weakening, the barriers of all
that had lain unspoken, yet not unfelt, burning away.
“It was true,” he answered, confronting her. “I did not know it. But
if I _had_ known all I know to-night, I would have crossed seas and
mountains to come to you! Now that I have seen you--what can I do?
Teresa! Teresa!”
The exclamation held trenchant pain--something else, too, that for the
life of him he could not repress. It pierced her with a darting rapture.
Since that hour at the monastery, with its pang and its reassurance,
as she felt budding those new, mysterious flowers of faith and heart
experience, she had felt a deeper unguessed want. Over and over she
had repeated to herself the last words he had said before that painful
interruption: “Because it was a prayer of _yours_ for _me_.” Her soul
had been full of a vague, unphrased yearning for all the meanings that
might lie unexpressed in the coupling of those two words. So now, as
she heard him speak her name in that shaken accent, her heart thrilled.
“Ah,” she breathed, “then you care--so much?”
His fingers clenched. He was torn with two emotions: self-abasement,
and a hungry desire, lashed by propinquity, to take her in his arms,
to defy vow and present, be the consequence what it might. There came
upon him again the feeling that had gripped him when she stood with him
among the circling maskers, violet-eyed, lilac-veined, bright with new
impulses, passionate and lovely. He leaned toward her. If she but knew
how he cared!
A sound startled them both. Her hand grasped his with apprehensive
fingers as she listened. “Look! There beyond the hedge. A shadow moved.”
He looked. Only an acacia stirred in the light air.
“It is nothing,” he reassured her. “Tita is at the gate.”
“Oh,” she said fearfully, “I should not have said come. There is risk
for you here.”
“What would I not have risked?”
“Listen!”
Another sound came to both now, the pounding of horses’ hoofs, borne
over the roof from the street--the rumble of heavy coach wheels. It
ceased all at once, and lights sprang into windows across the shrubbery.
She came to her feet as Tita hurried toward them. “It is the signore,”
warned the gondolier.
“_Dio mio!_” she whispered. “Go--go quickly!”
He caught her hands. “If only I could help you, serve you!”
“You can,” she said hurriedly. “I have a letter on which much
depends--for the Contessa Albrizzi at Venice. I cannot trust a
messenger.”
“It shall start to-night.”
“It is in my room. I will send it after you by Tita. Ah--hasten!”
He bent and touched his lips to a curl that had blown like litten gold
against her shoulder. Her eyes met his an instant in fluttering, happy
confusion. Then, as he followed Tita quickly to the gate, she turned
and ran toward the house.
She had not seen a man, crouched in the shadow of a hedge, who had
hurried within doors to greet the master of the casa so unexpectedly
returned. She did not see the rage that colored her husband’s shrunken
cheeks in his chamber as Paolo, his Corsican secretary, imparted to him
two pieces of information: the presence of the stranger in the garden
and the arrival that afternoon at the osteria of him Venice called “the
wicked milord.”
The old count pondered, with shaking fingers. He hated the Englishman
of Venice; hated him for robbing him of the youth and beauty he had
gloated over, for the arrow to his pride--with a hatred that had
settled deeper each day, fanatical and demented. The story of the
garden trespasser inspired now an unholy craving for reprisal, unformed
and but half conceived. He summoned his secretary.
In a few moments more--a half-hour after Teresa’s letter had started
on its way to the inn--his coach, with its six white horses, bearing
Paolo, and followed by four of the casa servants afoot, was being
driven thither by a roundabout course.