THE HEART OF A WOMAN
From the coming of Gordon on that unforgettable night to the garden,
Teresa’s pulse began to beat more tumultuously. To offset the
humiliation of her daily life indoors and the tireless surveillance
in the person of Paolo of well-nigh her every excursion, she had the
buoyant memory of that hour and the promise of her appeal to the
Church’s favor. The three essentials of woman’s existence--love, hope
and purpose--were now hers in spite of all.
More than one new problem perturbed her. There was the swarthy visitor
coming and going mysteriously, closeted with her husband weekly. His
strange entrance into the casa that day of all days--the stranger ruse
that had been practised through him upon her--seemed to connect him
in some occult, uncanny way with the man of whom, every hour of day
and night, she mused and dreamed. Thinking of this, and weighing her
husband’s hatred, at first she hoped Gordon would not return to Ravenna.
There had befallen another matter, too, which seemed to have absorbed
much of the old count’s attention, and which, to her relief, took him
from the city for days at a time.
Teresa knew what this matter was. In every visit to her father he had
talked of it triumphantly--the rising of the Italian peoples and the
breaking of the galling yoke of Austria. During this spring strange
rumors had prevailed. Twice, morning had found placards posted on
the city walls: “Up with the Republic!” and “Down with the Pope!”
The foreign police were busy; houses were searched and more than one
Ravennese was seized under suspicion of membership in the _Carbonari_,
whose mystic free-masonry hid the secrets of enrolling bands and stores
of powder. Knowledge of the sycophant part her husband was currently
suspected of playing came to Teresa bit by bit, in sidelong looks, as
her carriage rolled through the town, and more definitely from Tita.
The Austrian wind blew strongest and Count Guiccioli trimmed his sails
accordingly.
But replete with its one image, Teresa’s heart left small space to
these things. Gordon’s face flushed her whole horizon. And as the empty
weeks linked on, she began, in spite of her fears, to long passionately
to see him again. That her letter had reached its destination she knew,
for the Contessa Albrizzi paused an hour for a visit of state at the
casa--on her way to Rome. But no word came from its bearer, and each
day Tita returned from the osteria messageless.
She could not guess the struggle that had torn Gordon--the struggle
between reasoning conscience and unreasoning desire--or how fiercely,
the letter once delivered by Fletcher, he had fought down the longing
to return to Ravenna, which held his child, and _her_. He had been
able to aid her once, prompted Desire; she might need him again. If he
stayed away in her trouble, what would she deem him? Suppose by chance
she should hear of the orgy he had witnessed at the osteria? This
reflection maddened him. “Yet,” Reason answered, “not to see her is the
only safety. She is unhappy now; but can I--because life is ended for
me--to bring her present comfort, run the risk of embittering her life
further?” So he had argued.
There came a week for Teresa when Paolo was summoned to Faenza, whither
her husband had gone two days before. The espionage of the casa
relaxed, and on her birthday, with Tita on the box, she drove alone
through the afternoon forest to the Bagnacavallo convent with a gift
for the Mother Superior, the only mother her childhood had known.
When she issued from the gate again she carried her birthday gift, a
Bible, and a German magazine given her by the nun who had taught her
that tongue. In her heart she bore a far heavier burden, for in that
hour she had held a child in her arms and listened to a story that had
sunk into her soul. Her face was deathly white and her limbs dragged.
Calling to Tita to wait, she left the road and climbed a path that
zigzagged up a wooded knoll overlooking the narcissus-scented valley
and the hurrying river that flowed past the convent walls. The briers
tore her hands, but she paid no heed, climbing breathlessly.
The sparser crown of the hillock was canopied by shaggy vine-festoons
and dappled by the shadow-play of firs, whose aged roots were covered
with scalloped fungus growths. As a child this had been her favorite
spot. With one of these giant tree-fungi for a seat she had loved to
day-dream, gazing down across the convent inclosure and the stream
that flowed silverly on, past Ravenna, to the sea. She stood a moment
knee-deep in the bracken, her form tense with suffering, then dropped
the books on the ground and throwing herself down, burst into tears.
She wept long and passionately, in utter desolation.
She had listened to the Superior’s story with her face buried in the
child’s frock, now burning, now drenched with cold. The touch had given
her a wild delight and yet an agony unfathomable. As she lay and wept,
tenderness and torture still mingled inextricably in her emotions. She
knew now why Gordon had been in Ravenna that spring day. He had told
the truth; it had been with no thought of her.
A sudden memory of his words in the casa garden came with sickening
force: “By a tie that holds me, and by a bond you believe in, I have
no right to stand here now.” Was this the tie he had meant? Not the
unloving wife in England, but the mother of this child--a later, nearer
one? When he had come that once to her, was it at best out of pity? Did
he love this other woman? Was this why she herself had seen him no more?
Before the acute shaft of this pain the facts she had learned of his
life in London fell unheeded. They belonged to that far dim past
that he had forsaken and that had forsaken him! But the one fact she
knew now had to do with his present, here in Italy--the present that
held _her_! She was facing for the first time in her life the hydra,
elemental passion--jealousy. And in the grip of its merciless talons
everything of truth in her wavered.
For a moment she lost hold on her own heart, her instinct, her trust
in Gordon’s word, the faith that had returned to her at San Lazzarro.
What if all--all--what the whole world said, what this magazine told
of him--were true after all, and she, desolate and grieving, the only
one deceived? _What if it were!_ She drew the magazine close to her
tear-swollen eyes, only to thrust it from her desperately.
“No, no!” she said. “Not that! It is a lie! I will not believe it!”
In her anguish she sat up, flinging her hat aside, and leaned against
a tree. Her glance fell on the great saffron fungus that jutted, a
crumpled half-disk, above its roots. Into the brittle shiny surface
words had been etched with a sharp point--lines in English, almost
covering it. She began to read the unfamiliar tongue aloud, deciphering
the words slowly at first, then with more confidence:
“River, that rollest by the ancient walls.
Where dwells the lady of my love--when she
Walks by thy brink, and there perchance recalls
A faint and fleeting memory of me--”
A color tinged her paleness; she bent closer in a startled wonder.
“What if thy deep and ample stream should be
A mirror of my heart, where she may read
A thousand thoughts I now betray to thee,
Wild as thy wave, and headlong as thy speed!
What do I say--a mirror of my heart?
Are not thy waters sweeping, dark, and strong?
Such as my feelings were and are, thou art;
And such as thou art were my passions long.
And left long wrecks behind, and now again,
Borne in our old unchanged career, we move;
Thou tendest wildly onward to the main,
And I--to loving one I should not love!”
She drew herself half-upright with a sob. She was not mistaken! No
other could have written those lines, rhythmically sad and passionate,
touched with abnegation. He had been near her when she had not
guessed--had been here, in this very nook where she now sat! Recently,
too, for new growth had not blotted the characters. Her heart beat
poignantly:
“The wave that bears my tears returns no more:
Will she return, by whom that wave shall sweep?
Both tread thy banks, both wander on thy shore,
I near thy source, she by the dark blue deep.
She will look on thee,--I have look’d on thee.
Full of that thought: and from that moment, ne’er
Thy waters could I dream of, name or see,
Without the inseparable sigh for her!”
For whom had he longed when he wrote? For the woman whose child--_his_
child, denied him now!--was hidden in the convent below? No! The mist
of anguish melted. She felt her bitterness ebbing fast away.
What else mattered? Nothing! Not what this convent held! Not all
his past, though even the worst of all the tales she had ever heard
were true; though what the pamphlet at her feet alleged were true
a thousand times over--though it were the worst crime of all man
punished on earth! Nothing, nothing! At this moment she knew that, for
all the dreams of God bred in her, without him, prayers and faiths and
life itself went for naught as human hearts are made.
Clasping her hands she read to the end:
“Her bright eyes will be imaged in thy stream,--
Yes! they will meet the wave I gaze on now:
Mine cannot witness, even in a dream.
That happy wave repass me in its flow!
But that which keepeth us apart is not
Distance, nor depth of wave, nor space of earth.
But the distraction of a various lot,
As various as the climates of our birth.
My blood is all meridian; were it not,
I had not left my clime, nor should I be
In spite of tortures ne’er to be forgot,
A slave again of love,--at least of thee!”
Kneeling over the fungus, absorbed, she had not heard a quick step
behind her. She heard nothing in her abandon, till a voice--_his_
voice--spoke her name.