BARRIERS BURNED AWAY
Teresa came to her feet with a cry. Her mingled emotions were yet so
recent that she had had no time to recover poise. Gordon’s face was
as strangely moved. Surprise edged it, but overlapping this was a
something lambent, desirous, summoned by sight of her tears.
In the first swift glimpse, through the fern fronds, of that agitated
form bent above the fungus, he had noted the tokens of returning
strength--and knew her present grief was from some cause nearer than
the casa in Ravenna. These were not tears of mere womanly sensibility,
called forth by the lines written there, for a shadow of pain was still
lurking in her eyes. Was it grief for him? He tossed aside gloves and
riding-crop and drew her to a seat on the warm pine-needles before he
spoke:
“I did not imagine your eyes would ever see that!”
She wiped away the telltale drops hastily, feeling a guilty relief to
think he had misread them.
“This is an old haunt of mine,” she said. “I loved it when I was a
girl--only a year ago, how long it seems!--in the convent there!”
He started. The fact explained her presence to-day. She had known those
walls that hid Allegra! It seemed to bring them immeasurably nearer.
If he could only tell her! Reckless, uncaring as she knew a part of his
past had been, could he bear to show her this concrete evidence of its
dishonor?
Looking up at the pallid comeliness under its slightly graying hair,
Teresa was feeling a swift, clairvoyant sense of the struggle that had
kept him from her, without understanding all its significance.
“I am glad I came in time,” she continued. “A few days and the words
will show no longer. I shall not need them then,” she went on, her face
tinted. “I shall know them by heart. As soon as I read the first lines,
I knew they were yours--that you had been here.”
“I am stopping at Bologna,” he told her.
“Ah, _Madonna_!” she said under her breath. “And you have been so near
Ravenna!”
“Better it were a hundred leagues!” he exclaimed. “And yet--distant or
near, it is the same. I think of you, Teresa! That is my punishment.
Every day, as I have ridden through the pines, every hour as I have sat
on this hill--and that has been often--I have thought of you!”
“I knew that”--she was gazing past him to the river and the far dusky
amethyst of the hills--“when I read what is on the fungus.”
Thereafter neither spoke for a moment. A noisy cicala droned from
a near chestnut bough, and from somewhere down the slope came the
brooding coo of a wood-dove. At length he said:
“There were tears on your cheek when I first saw you. They were not for
the verses, I know.”
She shook her head slowly. “It was something”--she could not tell him
all the truth--“something I saw in that.” She pointed to the German
magazine.
He reached and retrieved it, but she put her hand on his restrainingly.
“Is it about me?”
“Yes,” she admitted; “but--”
“May I not see it?”
“Nothing in it really matters,” she entreated. “It could never make any
difference to me--now! Not even if it were true. Your past is as if
it belonged to some other person I never saw and never can know. You
believe that? Tell me you do!”
“I do,” he responded; “I do!”
“Then do not read it.”
“But suppose it is false. Either way, I would tell you the truth.”
“That is just it.” Her fingers clasped his on the cover. “I know you
would. But I do not believe what it says! I cannot! You can never have
done such things! Ah, is it not enough that I have that trust?--even,”
she ended hurriedly, “though it would make no difference?”
His pulses were beating painfully. He drew her fingers gently from
their hold and opened the magazine to a page turned down lengthwise. It
was a critique of his drama of “Cain”--sole fruit of that last year in
Venice--which he had himself called “a drama of madness” and in sheer
mocking bravado had posted to John Murray, his publisher. He saw at a
glance that the article was signed with the name of Germany’s greatest
mind, the famous Goethe.
She was trembling. “Remember,” she said earnestly; “I have not asked
you! I should never have asked you!”
Gordon translated the cramped text with a strange lurid feeling, like
coming in touch with an ancient past:
“The character of the author’s life permits with difficulty a just
appreciation of his genius. Scarcely any one compassionates the
suffering which cries out laboriously in his poems, since it arises
from the phantoms of his own evil acts which trouble him. When a gold
and impetuous youth, he stole the affections of a Florentine lady of
quality. Her husband discovered the affair and slew his wife. But the
murderer on the next night was found stabbed to death on the street,
nor was there any one save the lover on whom it seemed suspicion
could attach. The poet removed from Florence, but these unhappy
spirits have haunted his whole life since.”
He raised his eyes from the page. Her face was turned away, her hand
pulling up the grass-spears in a pathetic apprehension.
“Teresa,” he said in a smothered voice; “it is not true. I have never
been in Florence.”
“I knew--I knew!” she cried, and all her soul looked into his. She had
not really credited. But the tangible allegation, coming at the moment
when her heart was wrenched with that convent discovery and warped from
its orbit of instinct, had dismayed and disconcerted her. The balm she
had longed for was not proof, it was only reassurance.
He closed the magazine. The feeling that had choked his utterance was
swelling in his throat. For the rest of the world he cared little, but
for her!
She leaned toward him, her eyes shining. “I know how you have suffered!
You have not deserved it. I have learned so much, since I saw you
last, of your life in England!”
His tone shook. “Have you learned all? That my wife left me in the
night and robbed me of my child? That society shut its doors upon me?
That I was driven from London like a wild beast--a scapegoat at which
any man might cast a stone?”
“Yes,” she breathed, “all that, and more! I have not understood it
quite, for our Italy is so different. But you have helped me understand
it now! It was like this.”
She picked up the Bible from where it had fallen and turned the pages
quickly. “Listen,” she said, and began to read:
“_And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats.... But the goat on
which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive
before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for
a scapegoat into the wilderness._
“_And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat,
and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel and
all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the
head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man
into the wilderness._
“_And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land
not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness._”
He had risen and now stood movelessly before her.
She looked up as she finished. “So it was with you.”
“Yes,” he said in a low voice. “And so I have lived ever since, a
murderless Cain with a mark on my brow! So shall I live and die, hated
and avoided by all men!”
“No!” she contradicted, coming to him. “That will not be! I see further
and clearer than that! It is not for such an end that you have lived
and written and suffered! But for something nobler, which the world
that hates you now will honor! I see it! I know it!”
“Stop!” he exclaimed, “I cannot bear it. I am not a murderer, Teresa,
but all of the past you forgive with such divine compassion, you do
not know. There is a silence yet to break which I have kept, a chapter
unlovely to look upon that you have not seen.”
“I ask nothing!” she interrupted.
“I must,” he went on with dry lips. “You shall see it all, to the
dregs. In that convent, Teresa,--”
She put a hand over his lips. “You need not. For--I already know.”
He looked in dazed wonder. “You know? And--you do not condemn?”
“That other woman--do you love her?”
“No, Teresa. I have not seen her for two years.”
“Did she ever love you?”
“Never in her life,” he answered, his face again averted.
Her own was glowing with a strange light. “Look at me,” she said softly.
He turned to her, his eyes--golden-gray like seaweed glimpsed through
deep water--cored with a hungry, hopeless fire which seemed to
transform her whole frame to thirsty tinder.
[Illustration: ... FEELING HER FORM SWAY TOWARD HIM WITH FIERCE
TUMULTUOUS GLADNESS. _p. 289._]
“Ah,” she whispered, “do you think it could matter, then?”
An overmastering emotion, blent of bitterness and longing, surged
through him, beating down constraint, blotting out all else, all that
thrilled him finding its way into broken speech. In that moment he
forgot himself and the past, forgot the present and what the convent
held--forgot what bound them both--forgot grief and danger. London and
Venice, Annabel, the master of Casa Guiccioli drew far off. There was
nothing but this fragrant, Italian forest, this whispering glade above
the blue rushing of the arrowy river, this sun-drenched afternoon--and
Teresa there beside him. With an impulse wholly irresistible he caught
her to him, feeling her form sway toward him with fierce tumultuous
gladness.
“_Amor mio!_” she breathed, and their lips clung into a kiss.
As she strained back in his embrace, letting the tide of love ripple
over her, looking up into his face in desperate joy, something swift
and flashing like a silver swallow darted through the air.
It sung between them--a Malay kriss--and struck Gordon above the heart.