ASHES OF DENIAL
Days went by. Summer was merging into full-bosomed autumn of turquoise
heavens, more luscious foliage and ripening olives.
Gordon’s wound had proven deep, but luckily not too serious, thanks to
a rough fragment of stone in his pocket, which the surgeon declared
had turned the heavy blade, and which Teresa had covered with secret
kisses and put carefully away. But to his weakness from loss of blood,
a tertian ague had added its high temperature, and strength had been
long in returning.
He had hours of delirium when Teresa and Fletcher--whom Tita had
brought from Bologna with Gordon’s belongings--alternately sat by his
bedside. Sometimes, then, he dictated strange yet musical stanzas which
she was able to set down. It was a subconscious bubbling up from the
silt-choked well of melody within him: a clouded rivulet, finding an
unused way along turgid channels of fever.
More often Gordon seemed to be living again in his old life--with
Hobhouse in the Greece that he had loved--in London at White’s club
with Beau Brummell, or with Sheridan or Tom Moore at the Cocoa-Tree.
At such times Teresa seemed to comprehend all his strivings and
agonies, and wept tears of pity and yearning.
Often, too, he muttered of Annabel and Ada, and then the fierce
jealousy that had once before come to her assailed her anew. It was
not a jealousy now, however, of any one person; it was a stifling,
passionate resentment of that past of his into which she could not
enter, lying instinct and alive in some locked chamber of his brain to
defy and outwit her.
Early in his betterment a subtle inducement not to hasten the going
he knew was inevitable ambushed Gordon. He found folded in his
writing tablet a six months’ lease of the apartments he occupied. The
signature was his own, added, he readily guessed, during his fever. The
stupendous rental with which the old count had comforted his covetous
soul was a whet to the temptation. The thought to which he yielded,
however, was the reflection that to depart without showing himself
to Ravenna--whose untravelled gossips had made of his illness at the
casa a topic of interest--would neither conceal the real situation
nor make easier Teresa’s position. He prolonged his stay, therefore,
riding with her at the hour of the _corso_ in the great coach and six,
and later appearing at the _conversazioni_ of the vice-legate’s and
at the provincial opera, to hear the “Barber of Seville” or Alfieri’s
“Filippo.”
One day a child in Teresa’s care rode from the convent of Bagnacavallo
to a father whom she had never seen, and thereafter Gordon saw with
less kaleidoscopic clearness the walls of the fool’s paradise fate was
rearing, brick by brick.
So the long weeks of convalescence dropped by like falling leaves. In
spite of the constrained oath he had heard on a certain night in his
chamber, Gordon more than once wondered grimly what hour a stiletto
might end it all. That Teresa guarded well, he realized once with a
sudden thrill, when he opened the door of his bedroom in the night to
find Tita’s great form stretched asleep across the threshold.
The master of the casa, meanwhile, was seldom to be seen. When he
encountered Gordon, it was with snarling, satiric courtesy--a bitter,
armed armistice. Teresa did not doubt he had been more than once
to Rome, but what effect his visit might have on her petition she
could not guess. The Contessa Albrizzi was powerful, but he was an
influential factor also. If her plea were granted, well and good. If
not, at least she was happy now. And because she was happy now, she
thrust away, with a woman’s fatuousness, the thought that there must
come a time when Gordon would go.
Trevanion Gordon met but once, and then with Paolo at the casa
entrance. A single steady look had hung between them. The other’s eyes
shifted and he passed in. Teresa was with Gordon at the moment and her
hand had trembled on his arm. She said nothing, but that night he came
upon Tita in his bedroom, oiling his pocket-pistols--which he did not
wear.
What he had said once as he fought down the passion of murder in his
soul recurred to him as he laid them away: “What comes to me thus,
I myself have beckoned. The Great Mechanism shall have its way.” If
Trevanion then had seemed the Nemesis of his past, he seemed doubly
so now. The vengeance had fallen just when the cup of joy was at his
lips--in that one supreme moment: fate’s red reminder that the moment
was not his, but filched from his own resolve and from Teresa’s peace.
But though he struck not openly, Gordon was soon to discover that
Trevanion’s hand was unwearied; Shelley came to him from Pisa, bringing
report of fresh fictions afloat in the London press: his pasha-like
residence on the island of Mitylene, and his romantic voyages to Sicily
and Ithaca. These Gordon heard with a new sting, named as his companion
the Contessa Guiccioli, who, it was stated in detail, had been sold to
him by her husband.
Not that Gordon cared, for himself. Save as they might have power
to hurt her, that kiss on the convent hill, when it sweetened the
bitterness that had fallen in that hour, had burned away the barb from
all such canards. All that signified was Teresa--from whom he must soon
part.
Parting: that was the sting! Coiled in it was a realization that in
every conscious moment since that stabbing thrust in the forest had
been rankling with growing pain. It was, that his own weakness had made
withdrawal from her life an infinitely crueler thing, had made his
elimination at one time less possible and more necessitous. That kiss
had changed the universe for them both. For either of them, bound or
free, nothing could ever be the same again!
Sleepless and battling, the night after Shelley’s visit, Gordon asked
himself fiercely why, after all, life might not go on for them still
the same. Was it _his_ fault? Had _he_ created these conditions that
separated them? What did either he or she owe this old man who hated
her and had tried to take his life? Hereafter, would not her existence
alone with him in the casa be a more intolerable thing than ever?
He, Gordon, could rob him of nothing he now possessed or had ever
possessed. Besides, in time--who could tell how soon?--changes must
inevitably occur. In the natural course, her husband would die. Then
Teresa would, in truth, be free.
He paused in his interminable pace and groaned aloud. What then? For
himself there could be no retracing of steps. Whatever the issues to
him and to her, he could not go back to England, invoke the law and
free himself. When he had quitted London, life--the life of wife and
home--had seemed ended. He had thought only of Ada, his child, when he
had signed that paper which put it forever out of his power alone to
break the tie which bound him to Annabel. Between him and Teresa reared
the law, a cold brazen wall between two hearts of fire. “I cannot!” he
said. “The old tie holds. It is too late! Because one woman’s pitiless
pureness has ruined me, shall I ruin another woman’s pitying purity?”
So while the dark wore away to dawn, his thought began and ended with
the same desolate cry.
As the first light came through the windows, he blew out the candles.
He must go--though it shut him again from sight of Allegra--though it
meant forever.