CHAPTER XLIASHES 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. Atsuch 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 thecorsoin the great coach and six, and later appearing at theconversazioniof 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 likefalling 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 suprememoment: 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 ithisfault? Hadhecreated these conditions that separated them? What did either he or she owe this old man who hatedher 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.