THE COMPLICITY OF THE GODS
“Self-slain!” The words of the priest, as Gordon stood there, seemed
to reëcho about him with infinite variations of agony. He had ridden
vacant of purpose, destitute of plan--thrilling only to reach her.
Desperate, lawless thoughts had rung through his mind as he galloped.
Entering the garden he had seen the carriages and heard the chaplain’s
cry at the same moment. Then, with the awful instantaneousness of an
electric bolt, the blow had fallen. It was the last finality--the
closure of the ultimate gateway of hope--the utter assurance of the
unescapable doom in which all ends save the worm that dies not and the
fire that is not quenched.
He drew closer to the altar, his step dragging as he walked--his
infirmity grown all at once painfully apparent--and gazed at the mute
face on the cushions. The priest and his escort were forgotten. He knew
nothing save that dreadful assertion that had sent the nuns hastily
from the door, telling their beads, and had forbidden even the servant
to enter.
Self-slain? No, but slain by George Gordon--the accursed bearer of
all _maranatha_, damned to the last jot and tittle. He had done her
to death as surely as if his own hand had held the phial lying there
to her lips. It was because he had stayed in Ravenna that she lay
here dead before the crucifix--the symbol that she had sought at San
Lazzarro, that Padre Somalian had prayed to!
Staring across hueless wastes of mental torture to a blank horizon,
something the friar had said came to him: “Every man beam a cross of
despair to his Calvary.” What a vacuous futility! Infinity, systems,
worlds, man, brain. Was this the best the æon-long evolution could
offer? This bloodless image nailed upon a tree? What had it availed
_her_?
He suddenly fell on his knees beside her. Dead? Teresa dead? Why, a few
months before, at the monastery, he had regarded death for himself with
calmness, almost with satisfaction. But not for her--never for her. Was
_she_ dead, and he to live on--never to see her, to hear her speak, not
even to know that she was somewhere in the world?
He saw for the first time the little book lying open on her breast in
the candle-light. He took it mechanically and turned its leaves. As
mechanically his eye read, not sensible of what it translated, but as
surcharged agony unconsciously seeks relief in the doing of simple,
habitual things:
“When presently through all thy veins shall run
A cold and drowsy humor; for no pulse
Shall keep his native progress, but surcease:
No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou livest;
The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade
To paly ashes; thy eyes’ windows fall,
Like death, when he shuts up the day of life!
And in this borrowed likeness of shrunk death
Thou shalt continue two and forty hours,
And then awake as from a pleasant sleep.”
The last words of the monk Gordon repeated aloud: “And then awake as
from a pleasant sleep.”
A sudden tingling sensation leaped through every nerve. He snatched at
the phial and bent to its label--“Mandragora.”
With an inarticulate cry he sprang up, leaped to the nearest window and
smashed it frantically with his fist. The splintering glass cut his
hand, but he did not feel it. He caught a fragment as it fell, and in a
second was holding it close over Teresa’s parted lips.
He waited a time that seemed a dragging eternity, then lifted it to the
candle-light and looked with fearful earnestness. The faintest tarnish,
light as gossamer film, clouded it.
The crystal clashed upon the floor. He seized and emptied one of the
rose bowls and rushed out through the darkening flower-paths to the
fountain in the garden. Goldfish flirted and glistened in panic as he
filled the bowl with the icy water. He hurried back, dipped Teresa’s
stirless hands into its coldness and dashed it over her face, drenching
her white neck and the dull gold hair meshed on the velvet.
Three separate times he did this. Then, breathless, he seized her arms
and began to move them as one resuscitates a half-drowned person,
trying to rouse the lungs to action to throw off the lethal torpor of
the belladonna-like opiate.
He worked for many minutes, the moisture running from his forehead, his
breath coming in gasps. Laboring, he thought of the dire risk she had
run, trusting all to his promise to return and to his divination. He
remembered he had said a drachm. To make assurance doubly sure, might
she have taken more?
He kept watching her features--the rigor seemed to be loosening, the
marble rigidity softening its outlines. But heart and pulse were still.
In despair he laid his warm lips close upon her cold ones and filled
her lungs with a great expiration, again and again.
He lifted himself, trembling now with hope. The lungs, responding to
that forced effort, had begun to renew their function. Her bosom rose
and fell--slowly, but still it was life. He dried her face and chafed
her hands between his own. She commenced to breathe more naturally and
rhythmically; at length she sighed and stirred on the cushions.
A rush of tears blinded Gordon’s eyes--the first he had shed since the
night in London when he had bent above the little empty snow-silent bed
that had held Ada. He dashed them away, seeing that Teresa’s eyes were
open.
Her hand, wavering, touched his wet cheek.
“My love!” he said. “My love!”
The first fact that came to her out of the void was that of his tears.
A troubled look crossed her brow.
“All is well. Do you remember?”
Her eyes, roaming at first bewildered, saw the dark chapel, the
flaring, garish candles, caught the expression of his face, still
drawn and haggard, and white with strain. All came back upon her in a
surge. She half raised herself, his arm supporting her. They two there
alone--the priest gone--the dusk fallen to night. She had succeeded!
Gordon had come--his arms held her!
In the joyful revulsion, she turned her face to him and threw her arms
about his neck, feeling herself caught up in his embrace, every fiber
shuddering with the terror passed, weeping with weak delight, clinging
to him as to her only refuge, still dizzy and faint, but with safe
assurance and peace.
Looking down at her where she rested, her face buried on his breast,
her whole form shaken with feeling, murmuring broken words, slowly
calling back her strength, Gordon felt doubt and indecision drop from
his mind. The convent was not for her--not by all she had suffered that
day! Only one thing else remained: to take her away forever, beyond the
papal frontier--with _him_! Fate and the world had given her to him now
by the resistless logic of circumstance.
He reckoned swiftly:
The news by this time had reached the casa in Ravenna. Another
half-hour at most and choice would be taken from their hands. They must
lose no time. Yet whither? Where could he go, that hatred would not
pursue? To what Ultima Thule could he fly, that the poison barb would
not follow to wound her happiness? Where to live? Never in England!
In the East,--in Greece, perhaps, the land of his youthful dreams? It
was a barbarian _pashawlik_, under the foot of Ottoman greed; neither
a fit nor secure habitation. In Italy, where her soul must always be?
Tuscany--Pisa, where Shelley lived--was not far distant. They might
reach its borders in safety. There they would be beyond the rule of
Romagna, out of the states of the Church.
“Dearest,” asked Gordon, “are you strong enough to ride?”
She stirred instantly in his arms and stood up, though unsteadily.
“Yes, yes, some one will come. We must go quickly.”
“I will saddle and fetch a horse for you to the chapel door.”
She was feeling the sharp edge of fear again. “I shall be quite strong
presently,” she assured him. “Let us wait no longer.”
He went noiselessly to the stables. He had dreaded meeting some one,
but old Elise, beside herself with grief, had run to watch for those
who should come from Ravenna, and the rest of the servants, dazed by
the calamity, were huddled in the kitchen. Leading the horse, Gordon
returned speedily.
He put his arms about Teresa in the chapel doorway for an instant
and held her close. He was feeling a call he had never felt before,
the call that nature and civilization have planted in man deep as
the desire for offspring, the song of the silver-singing goddess,
whose marble image, on the night he had made that fatal trothing
with Annabel, had been blackened by his thrown ink-well--Vesta, the
personification of the hearthstone, of home.
Teresa suddenly meant that to him. Home! Not such a one as he had
known at Newstead Abbey, with Hobhouse and Sheridan and Moore. Not
a gray moated pile wound with the tragic fates of his own blood--a
house of mirth, but not of happiness! Not like the one in Piccadilly
Terrace, where he had lived with Annabel that one year of fever and
heart-sickness and fading ideals! No, but a home that should be no part
of his past; a nook enisled, where spying eyes might not enter, where
he should redeem those barren pledges he had once made to life, in the
coin of real love.
“Teresa,” he said, “from the journey we begin this hour there can be no
return. It is out of the world you have lived in and known! If there
were any other way for you--save that one--”
“My life!” she whispered.
The soft-voiced passion of her tenderness thrilled him. “You go to
exile,” he went on, “to an alien place--”
“There is no exile, except from you, nor alien place where you are! The
world that disowns you may cast me out--ah, I shall be glad!”
He laughed a low laugh of utter content. Lightly as if she had been a
child, he lifted her into the saddle. Supporting her at first, he led
the horse over the turf and into the driveway where his own waited.
Then mounting, his hand holding her bridle, they rode into the velvety
dark.
Old Elise, tearfully watching the Ravenna Road, heard horses coming
from the villa grounds. From the selvedge of the hedge, she saw the
faces of Teresa and Gordon, pallid in the starlight.
The old woman’s breath failed her. All the servants’ tales of
the Englishman, whom she had seen at the casa, recurred to her
superstitious imagination. He was a fiend, carrying off the dead body
of her mistress!
She crouched against the ground, palsied with fright, till the muffled
hoof-beats died away. Then she rose and ran, stumbling with fear, to
the house.
As Gordon and Teresa rode through the azure gloom of the Italian night,
a girlish moon was tilting over the distant purple of the mountains,
beyond whose many-folded fastnesses lay Tuscany and Pisa. Her weakness
had passed and she kept her saddle more certainly. The darkness was
friendly; before the sun rose they would be beyond pursuit.
As the villa slipped behind them and the odorous forest shut them
round, Gordon rode closer and clasped her in his arms with a rush of
joy, straining her tight to him, feeling the fervid beating of her
heart, his own exulting with the fierce, primordial flame of possession.
“Mine!” he cried. “My very own at last--now and always.”