CHAPTER XLVIIITHE ALL OF LOVE
Spring, the flush wooer, was come again. The prints of gentian showed where his blue-sandalled feet had trod, and the wild plum and cherry blooms announced the earth his bride. In the tranquil streets of Pisa, where the chains of red-liveried convicts toiled not, young grass sprouted. Beneath a sky serenely, beautifully blue, the yellow Arno bore its lazy sails under still bridges and between bright houses, green-shuttered against the sun. Round about lay new corn-fields busy with scarlet-bodiced peasants, forests and hills sagy-green with olive, and further off the clear Carrara peaks and the solemn hoary Apennines. At night a breeze fragrant as wood-smoke, cooling the myrtle hedges flecked with the first pale-green meteors of the fireflies.
The few English residents had long grown used to the singular figure of Shelley, beardless and hatless, habited like a boy in stinted jacket and trousers—that mild philosopher at war with the theories of society; a fresherdivertissementhad stirred them when the old Lanfranchi Palace, built by Michael Angelo, on the Lung’ Arno, was thrown open in the autumn for a new occupant—aman whose striking face and halting step made him marked. The news flew among the gossips in a day.
George Gordon was not alone, it was whispered over indignant tea-cups; with him was a Ravennese contessa who had eloped by his aid out of Romagna. Report averred that he had duelled with her husband, and after spiriting her beyond the frontier, had returned to Ravenna to shoot down a military commandant who had attempted to interfere. Luckily for him, the story ran, the official had recovered, and the police, relieved to be quit of him, had allowed the execrated peer to depart unmolested with his chattels. For a time the Lanfranchi neighborhood was avoided, but at length, curiosity overcame rigid decorum; femininity forgot its prudence and watched with open eagerness.
Its reward, however, was meager. Except for Shelley and his young wife, Gordon chose seclusion even from the Italian circles, where title was an open sesame and uninsular laxity not unforgiven. This fact became unmistakable when a billet from no less a personage than the grand duchess, a princess of the House of Saxony, brought from the Lanfranchi Palace a clear declination. The gossips held up their hands and subsided.
For the primal object of this curiosity the winter, with its thaws and siroccos, had passed swiftly. In the present, so full of sweet surprise and unfolding, even Teresa’s long anxiety because of her brother’s non-appearance and the boding with which Gordon watched for a sign from Trevanion, or from Count Guiccioli—who he knew would read rightly the enigma of her reputed death and after disappearance—had softened finally to an undisturbed content.
The full measure of love was theirs. The outer world, with its myriad intonations, had dulled away, and Pisa and the old Lanfranchi pile constituted an inner roseate haven belonging wholly and only to themselves. A cloistered city, its old grandeur departed and seemingly but half inhabited; the river drifting by, the house of the Shelleys on the opposite bank; boats and horses; a garden sweet with orange-trees and gushes of violets along shady walks; a few servants marshalled by Fletcher and Tita; a study and books—and Teresa. It was the home Gordon had dreamed of when his arms were around her at the villa chapel, but more satisfying, more complete.
Sometimes, in this Elysian life of theirs, as he felt her head against his knee while he read her new verses of his,—for now he knew oftener the old melodic pen-mood that at Venice had seemed vanished forever and that had first returned in the hour he had etched those lines on the fungus,—he was conscious of a sudden tightening of the heart. Could it last? The poison of his fame had gone deep. He lived at peace only by sufferance of military authority, now busy avenging its late alarm by the black-sentence and proscription. At any moment it might recommence in Tuscany the persecution with which the police of Romagna had visited him: the yelping terriers of the Continental press, a upas-growth ofprocés-verbal, recrimination, hateful surveillance.
Entering his restful study one day from a gallop with Shelley, Gordon wondered whether this retreat, too—whether each retreat he might find—would in the end be denied him and he condemned, a modern son of Shem, to pitch his tent in the wilderness.
For himself it did not matter; but for her? She washappy now—only with him, even if beyond the pale. But could she always remain so? Drop by drop, as erosion wears the quartz, would not the trickling venom waste her soul? Were the specters of that further past when his life had run, like a burning train, through wanderings, adventure and passion—the ghosts of his own weaknesses and wilful tempers—not laid? Could they stalk into this halcyon present to pluck them asunder?
The ghosts ofhis own weaknesses! Clarity of vision had come to Gordon in these months. He had grown to see his old acts, not gaunt and perverse, projections of insistent caprice, but luminous with new self-solution. He had learned himself: what he had never known, either in his London life of success and failure, or in its ignoble Venetian aftermath.
Looking out toward the purpling Apennines, where the sun sank to his crimson covert, he felt a mute aching wish: an intense desire that the world—not his contemporaries, but a later generation—should be able to look beneath the specious shadow of opprobrium that covered him and see the truth.
It could do this only through himself; through pages he should write. The journals he had kept in London, when he had lived centered in a tremulous web of sensitiveness and wayward idiosyncrasy, had recorded his many-sided, prismatic personality only in fragments, torn, jagged morsels of his brain. In these memoirs he should strive to paint justly the old situations for which he had been judged. And these pages would persist, a cloud of witnesses, when he was beyond earthly summons and verdict.
When Teresa entered the room in a mist-white gown, his face was bent close to the paper, the candles yet unlighted. Coming close to him, she seated herself at his feet. He bent and kissed her in silence; the trooping visions the writing had recalled made his kiss lingeringly tender.
She pointed out of the window, through the million-tinted twilight.
“Do you remember, dear,” she asked, her voice thrilling him strangely, “when we rode to those mountains, you and I, from Ravenna?”
“Yes,” he replied, smiling.
She had turned toward him, kneeling, her hands caressing his clustering brown-gray curls.
“You have never regretted that ride?”
“Regretted it? Ah, Teresa!”
Her face was looking up into his, a wistful questioning in it—almost like pain, he thought wonderingly.
“You know all you said that night,” she went on hurriedly; “what I was to you? Is it as true now?”
“It is more true,” he answered. “All I have dreamed, all I have written here in Pisa—and some of it will live, Teresa—has had its source in you. All that I shall ever write will spring from your love! That began to be true the day you first kissed me.”
“That was when you found me on the convent hill, when we read from the Bible—the day I first knew of Allegra.”
His face was averted, but she could see his shoulders lift and fall in a deep silent suspiration.
“Your forgiveness then was divine!” he said. Notsuch had been the forgiveness of the world! He clasped her in his arms. “You are all things to me!”
“Oh,” she cried with a broken breath, “can I beallto you?”
“Wife and home and happiness—all!”
“—And child?” She was sobbing now.
He started, feeling her arms straining him, seeing her blinded with tears. There suddenly seemed a woeful significance in what she had said—in her question. He felt the surging of some unexpected wave of dread which broke over his heart and washed it up in his throat.
“Dearest! Two days ago I heard there was fever in the Bagnacavallo valley. I sent a courier at once. He has just returned. Gordon—how can I tell you?”
For an instant she was frightened at his stony stillness. In the dusk a mortal grayness spread itself over his features. He pushed back his chair as if to rise, but could not for her arms. It was not Allegra’s illness—it was more, it was the worst! His arms dropped to his sides. A shudder ran through him.
“I understand,” he said at length. “I understand. Say no more.”
In the words was not now the arrogant and passionate hostility of the old George Gordon. There was the deadly quietness of grief, but also something more. In that moment of numbing intelligence it was borne in upon him with searing force, that death, perhaps, had acted not unkindly, that it had chosen well. What perils might that young life have held, springing from those lawless elements compounded in her nature: recklessness, audacity, the roving berserker foot, contempt forthe world’s opinion, demoniac passions of hatred and reprisal? The subtle, unerring divination of death had taken her in youthfulness, a heavened soul, from the precincts of that past of his to which nothing pure should have a mortal claim.
So he thought, as feeling Teresa’s arms about him, his lips repeated more slowly and with a touch of painful resignation—the first he had felt in all his life:
“I understand!”
That was all. He was looking out across the mistily-moving Arno, silent, his hand on her bowed head. She lifted it after a time, feeling the silence acutely. Her eyes, swimming with changeless love and pitying tenderness, called his own.
At the wordless appeal, a swift rush of unshed tears burned his eyelids. “Death has done his work,” he said in a low voice. “Time, perhaps, may do his. Let us mention her no more.”
Just then both heard a noise on the stairway—the choked voice of Fletcher and a vengeful oath.
Teresa sprang to her feet with a sharp exclamation.
Gordon rose and threw open the door.