GORDON TELLS A STORY
Gordon threw the window wide. The sun had broken through the mist, the
lilies were awake in their beds, and the acacias were shaking the dew
from their solemn harmonies of green and olive. How sweet the laurel
smelled!
A long time he stood there. At length he turned into the room. He
collected his smaller belongings for Fletcher to pack, then drew out a
portmanteau. It was filled with books and loose manuscript, gathered by
the valet when he had removed from Venice.
As he re-read the pages, Gordon flushed with a sense of shame. Full of
beauty as they were, would Shelley have written them? Or would Teresa,
who treasured one book of his and had loved those simple lines etched
on the fungus, read these with like approval?
An aching dissatisfaction--a fiery recrudescent distaste seized him.
He rolled the leaves together and descended to the garden. At the base
of a stone sun-dial he set the roll funnel-shape and knelt to strike a
light.
He had not seen Teresa nor heard her approach till she caught his arm.
“What is it you burn?” she asked.
“The beginning of a poem I wrote a long time ago, named ‘Don Juan’.”
“May I read it first?”
He shook his head. “It is not worthy.”
She looked at him seriously, striving to translate his thought, and
with a sudden impulse, stooped and picked up the roll. “Do not destroy
it,” she said; “one day you will finish it--more worthily.”
He hesitated a moment, then thrust the manuscript into his pocket and
followed her to the bench where they had sat the night Tita had led him
to the columned gate, and how many gilded days since! With what words
should he tell her what he must say?
He saw that she held in her hand a small rough fragment of stone.
“What is that?” he questioned, trying to speak lightly. “A jewel?”
A change passed over her face and she raised the stone to her lips.
“Yes,” she answered; “do you not recognize it?”
As he looked at it curiously, she added: “It was in your pocket that
day on the convent hill. You never missed it, did you? The kriss”--she
shuddered as she spoke--“struck it. See--here is the mark. It saved
your life.”
Wondering, he took it from her hand. “Strange!” he said, as he handed
it back. “It is a piece of the tomb of Juliet which I got long ago in
Verona.”
“Juliet?” she repeated, and dropped the stone on the bench between
them, coloring. “Did you--care for her?”
The feminine touch in tone and gesture brought Gordon at one time a
smile and a pang. It had not occurred to him that Shakespeare could be
unknown to her. “All Englishmen love her,” he said gravely; “she was
one of the great lovers of the world. She died five hundred years ago.”
Her face was flushed more deeply now. “Will you tell me about her?”
Sitting there, the revelation of the early morning enfolding them, he
told her the undying story of those tragic loves and deaths that the
great Anglo-Saxon gave to all ages.
“There were two noble families in Verona,” he began, “who for
generations had been at enmity--the Capulets and the Montagues. Juliet
was the daughter of Lord Capulet. She was so beautiful her fame went
throughout the country. Romeo, scion of the house of Montague, heard of
her beauty, and to see it, went masked to a fête given by her father.
Among the Veronese ladies, he saw one who shone amid the splendor like
a jewel in an Ethiop’s ear. They danced together, and he kissed her
hand. Not till they parted did either know the other was an enemy.
That night, Romeo, unable to stay from the house where he had left his
heart, scaled the wall of its garden and they plighted troth upon her
balcony. Next day they were secretly married by a monk whom Romeo had
prevailed upon.
“There had been one, however, who, beneath his mask, recognized the
uninvited guest--a nephew of Lord Capulet himself. He kept silence
then, but the day of the marriage he met Romeo, forced a quarrel, and
was killed by him. For this, Romeo was sentenced to banishment. That
night he gained Juliet’s chamber from the garden. Only these few hours
were theirs; at dawn he fled to Mantua, till the monk could make public
their marriage.
“Lord Capulet meanwhile had selected another for Juliet’s husband and
bade her prepare for the nuptials. She dared not tell the truth, and
in her extremity appealed to the monk. He counselled her to consent to
her father’s plans, and on the night before the marriage to drink the
contents of a phial he gave her. The potion, he told her, would cause
a death-like trance, in which apparently lifeless state she should be
laid in the family vault. Thither he would bring Romeo in the night and
she should awaken in his arms.”
Teresa’s eyes had grown brighter. The lovers’ meeting among the
maskers, the garden trothing and the constrained marriage seemed
somehow to fit her own case. She leaned forward as he paused. “And she
took the potion?”
“Yes. Love and despair gave her courage. It happened partly as the
monk had said. But unluckily the news that Juliet was dead travelled
to Mantua faster than his letters. Romeo heard, and heart-broken, came
to Verona at midnight, broke open her tomb and swallowed poison by her
side. A few moments later she awoke, saw the cup in his hand, and,
guessing how it had befallen, unsheathed the dagger he wore and died
also by her own hand. So the monk found them, and over their bodies the
lords of Capulet and Montague healed the feud of their houses.”
The bruised petals of a rose Teresa had plucked fluttered down. “How
she loved him!” she said softly.
He remembered that among the volumes in the portmanteau he had opened
had been the “Romeo and Juliet,” which he had put into his pocket the
night he left England. “I have the book,” he said rising; “I will give
it to you.”
He went back under the flowering trees to fetch it. “This one hour,”
his heart was repeating; “this last hour! Then I will tell her.”
He was gone but a few moments. When he came down the stair she was in
the hall. He paused, for a man who had just dismounted at the casa
entrance stood before her. Gordon saw Teresa sink to her knees, saw the
other make the sign above her head as he handed her a letter, saw him
mount and ride away; saw her read and crush it to her breast. What did
it mean? The man had worn the uniform of a nuncio of the papal see. Had
the Contessa Albrizzi succeeded?
Teresa turned from the entrance and saw him.
“Here is the book,” he said.
She took it blankly. Suddenly she thrust the letter into his hands.
“Read it,” she whispered.
It was the pope’s decree. Teresa was free, if not from the priestly
bond, at least so far as actions went. Free to leave Casa Guiccioli and
to live under her father’s roof--free as the law of Church and land
could make her. But that was not all. The decree had its conditions,
and one of these contained his own name. She was to see him only once
each month, between noon and sunset.
Such was Count Guiccioli’s sop from Rome.
As Gordon read, he felt a dull anger at the assumption that had coupled
his name with hers in that document. Yet underneath he was conscious of
a painful relief; fate had partially solved the problem for them. He
raised his eyes as a sob came from Teresa’s lips.
She had not thought of possible conditions. A month--how swiftly the
last had flown!--seemed suddenly an infinity. She had longed for that
message, prayed for it; now she hated it.
Another figure entered at that instant from the street. It was Tita,
just from her father’s villa. Count Gamba had been less well of late,
and now the messenger’s face held an anxiety that struck through her
own grief.
The news was soon told. Her father had had a syncope at daybreak and
the doctor was then with him.
Tita did not tell her the whole: she did not learn till she reached
the villa that Count Gamba, suspected of fomenting the revolution, had
received notice from the government to quit Romagna within ten days.