ONE GOLDEN HOUR
“To-day--to-day!” Teresa’s heart said. “To-day he will come!”
Just a month ago she had left Casa Guiccioli forever; now she sat in
the fountained garden of the Gamba villa, a few miles from Ravenna,
rose-pale, cypress-slender, her wanness accentuated by the black
gown she wore--the habit of mourning. The sentence of exile against
Count Gamba had never been carried out; a greater than Austria had
intervened. Since that morning when a servant had found him unconscious
among the cold retorts of his laboratory, clasping the decree that had
broken his heart, he had revived, but only to fail again. The end had
come soon. A week ago Teresa had followed him to the narrow home over
which no earthly power claimed jurisdiction.
As she sat, drenched with the attar of the September afternoon, in her
lap the “Romeo and Juliet” which Gordon had given her on their last
meeting, gladness crept goldenly through her grief. The book had lain
on the arbor bench during the night, and this morning she had found
a letter written on its blank title-page. For the hundredth time she
perused it now:
“I have found this book in your garden and re-read it in the
moonlight. You were absent, or I could not have done so. Others
would understand these words if I wrote them in Italian, but you
will interpret them in English. You will recognize, too, the
handwriting of one who loves you and will divine that over any book
of yours he can think only of that fact. In that word, beautiful in
all languages, but most so in yours--_amor mio_--is comprised my
existence here and hereafter. My destiny has rested with you, and you
are a woman, nineteen years of age, and but two out of a convent.
Fate has separated us, but to weigh this is now too late. I love you
and cannot cease to love you. Will you think of me if the Alps and
the ocean divide us? Ah,--but they never can unless you wish it!”
This letter had been wrung from him by the thought of idle loss and
loneliness in which he could not comfort her; beneath its few words
lay the strain and longing of the old struggle. He had told himself at
first that her separation could make no difference with his going. But
now she was alone, bereft, saddened. If he went, could she love him any
the less? So he had wrestled as Jacob wrestled with the angel.
As Teresa read, a moving shadow fell on the page. She looked up to see
him coming between the clipped yew hedges. In another moment he had
caught her hands in his.
“How you have suffered!” he said, his gaze searching her face, to which
a glad flush had leaped.
She framed his head in her arms, just touching his strong brown curling
hair with its slender threads of gray. “I knew you cared. I knew you
had been near me often. I found the flowers--and this note.”
“I have been here in the garden every night. I was here that one night,
too--when you were first alone.”
Tears gathered in her eyes.
“It was the decree of exile that killed him,” she said slowly. “He
loved Italy and hoped for what can never be. They say the uprising
in the north has failed and all its chiefs are betrayed. That is the
bitterness of it: it was for nothing after all that he died! Italy will
not be free. You believe it cannot, I know.”
“Sometime,” he answered gently. “But not soon. Italy’s peasants are not
fighting men like the Greeks; they lack the inspiration of history. But
no man champions a great cause in vain. And now,” he asked, changing
the subject, “what shall you do?”
“I have sent the news to my brother Pietro. Cavadja has lost his
principality and Prince Mavrocordato is in flight from Wallachia.
Pietro is with him. My letters must find and bring him soon. Till then
I have Elise--she was my nurse. I shall be glad when Pietro comes. How
long it is since I have seen him! He would not know me now. He has only
my convent miniature to remind him!”
Gordon’s thought fled back to a day when he had swum for the brother’s
life and found that pictured ivory. Fate had played an intricate game.
He would more than once have told her of that incident but for another
hounding memory--the recollection of the mad fit of rage in which he
had ground the miniature under his heel. He could not tell her that!
“I know why you have stayed on at the casa,” she said; “that it is for
my sake, to spare me idle tongues. Yet I have been so afraid for you.
You would never go armed!”
“I am in small danger,” he smiled. “Fletcher, and Tita whom you left me
for body-guard, watch zealously. One or the other is always under foot.
One would think I were Ali Pasha himself.”
He spoke half-humorously, trying to coax the smile back to her lips.
He did not tell her with what danger and annoyances his days had been
filled: that police spies, in whose assiduity he recognized the work
of her husband and Trevanion, shadowed his footsteps; that to excite
attempts at his assassination the belief had even been disseminated
that he was in league with the Austrians. Nor did he tell her that
this very morning Fletcher had found posted in the open market-place
a proclamation too evidently inspired by secret service agents,
denouncing him as an enemy to the morals, the literature and the
politics of Italy. He had long ago cautioned Tita against carrying her
news of these things.
As they strolled among the dahlias, straight and tall as the oleanders
in the river beds of Greece, she told him of her father’s last hours,
and her life in the villa, brightened only by Tita’s daily visits from
the casa.
“What have you been writing?” she questioned. “Has it been ‘Don Juan?’”
He shook his head. The hope she had expressed--that he would some day
finish it more worthily--had clung to him like ivy. With an instinct
having its root deeper than his innate hatred of hypocrisy, he had
forwarded the earlier cantos whose burning she had prevented to John
Murray in London for publication. This instinct was not kin to the
bravado with which he had sent “Cain” from Venice; it was a crude but
growing prescience that he must one day stand before the world by all
he had written and that the destruction even of its darker pages would
mutilate his life’s volume. But he had not yet continued the poem.
Thinking of this he sighed before he asked her:
“Have you read all the books I sent?”
“Many of them. But I liked this”--she touched the “Romeo and
Juliet”--“most of all.”
“It is scarce a tale for sad hours,” he said, laying his hand over hers
on the slim leather.
Her fingers crept into his, as she went on earnestly: “The stone you
brought from Verona makes it seem so true! Do you suppose it really
happened so? What do you think was the potion the monk gave her?”
“A drachm of mandragora, perhaps. That is said to produce the
cataleptic trance. I wish Juliet’s monk mixed his drafts in Ravenna
now,” he added with a touch of bitterness; “I shall often long for such
a nepenthe before the next moon, Teresa.”
He felt her fingers quiver. The thought of the coming long month shook
her heart. “You will go from Ravenna before that,” she whispered,
“shall you not?”
“From the casa, perhaps. Not from near you. The day you left Casa
Guiccioli I had made up my mind to leave Italy. But now--now--the only
thing I see certainly is that I cannot go yet. Not till the skies are
brighter for you.”
“Can they ever be brighter--if you go?”
“You must not tempt me beyond my strength,” he answered, a dumb pain
on his lips. “Ah, forgive me! I did not mean--”
“Tempt you! Have I done that?”
“It is my own heart tempts me--not you! It is _that_ I cannot trust!”
“_I_ can trust it,” she said under her breath. Her eyes were luminous
and tender. “It is all I have to trust now.”
His strength was melting. He would have taken her into his arms, but
the neigh of his tethered horse and a familiar answering whinny came
across the yews.
“It is Fletcher,” he said in surprise. He crossed the garden to meet
him.
“What is it, Fletcher?” he demanded. “Why have you left the rooms?”
“My lord!” stammered the valet, “did you not send for me?”
“No.”
Fletcher looked crestfallen.
“Who gave you such a message?”
“Count Guiccioli’s secretary, your lordship.”
A disquieting apprehension touched Gordon’s mind. Why had Paolo sent
the servant on this sleeveless errand--unless he were wished out of
the way? He remembered a packet which Count Gamba, weeks before, had
entrusted to him for safe-keeping. At the time Gordon had suspected its
contents had to do with the _Carbonari’s_ plans. This packet was in his
apartments. Found, might it inculpate the dead man’s friends in that
lost cause?
He rejoined Teresa with a hasty excuse for his return to the casa.
“You will come back?” She questioned with sudden vague foreboding.
“Yes, before sunset.”
“Promise me--promise me!”
For one reassuring moment he put his arm about her, aching to fold
her from all the world. The past for them both was a grim mirage, the
future a blind dilemma--nay, there was no future save as it gloomed, a
pregnant shadow of this present so wrought of doubt and joy.