CHAPTER XXVIITHE EVIL EYE
Tears, too, had rushed to Teresa’s eyes, with a sweet, glad sense of something not akin to grief. Her hand on the couch in the semi-darkness touched another and she drew it away, trembling.
Suddenly a wail came from thecalle, a hurried step crossed the shop floor, and the slattern mother burst into the room. Close behind followed Tita, who, seeing his mistress, blocked the inner door with his huge frame against the curious, with whom the place now overflowed.
The weeping woman had thrown herself beside the couch where the child lay, his eyes closed again. All at once she saw the man who stood above her, and to Teresa’s astonishment sprang up and spat out coarse imprecations.
“The evil eye!” she screamed. “Take theIngleseaway and fetch some holy water! He has the evil eye!”
Teresa saw the spasm of pain that crossed the colorless face. “No, no!” she cried.
“What did I say!” sneered the carpenter.
Tita’s great hand took him by the throat. “Silence,devout jellyfish!” he said, “or I crack your skull. Didn’t you hear the signorina?”
“The evil eye!” wailed the woman, flinging back inky hair from her brows. “He looked at the heart-of-my-life or he would not have fallen!”
“For shame!” protested Teresa indignantly. “He who carried him in his own arms! Ah, do not listen!” She turned to Gordon appealingly. “She is mad to say such things! Let us go,” she added hastily, as murmurs swelled from the shop. “We can do no more!”
“Go, son of the Black One!” screamed the woman. “Go before my child dies!”
Gordon had distinguished in the girl’s voice a note of pity and of fear for his safety, and a flash of smile softened the bitterness of his lips.
“You are right, Signorina,” he answered, and preceded her. The people parted as they passed, some peering maliciously, some shamefaced. Tita, bringing up the rear, glared about him, his fist clenched like a hammer. He knew well enough who the stranger was, but his signorina walked with him and that was sufficient. Tita knew what was expected of him.
It was growing dusky as they emerged. The group before the shop had run to watch the great surgeon alighting at the water-stairs. The dozen steps that brought them to the open piazzetta they walked in silence.
There Teresa paused, wishing to say she knew not what, burning with sympathy, yet timid with confusion. The street seemed to wear an unwonted, un-everyday luster, yet she knew that around the corner lay little Pasquale woefully hurt, in full view Tita was unlashingthe gondola, and across the piazzetta she could see the entrance of thecaffèwhere her father was sipping his cognac. A fear lest the latter should appear and find her absent from the gondola mixed with the wave of feeling with which she held out her hand to the man beside her.
“Poor little fig-merchant!” she said—the scene with the mother was too painfully recent to touch upon at once. “He watched for my gondola every day. I hope he is not badly hurt. What do you think, Signore?”
“No bones were broken,” he rejoined. “But as to internal injury, I could not tell. I shall hope doubly for him,” he added, “since you love him.”
Her eyes sought the ground, suddenly shy. “I have loved him from the first. You know, he cannot play like other children. He is lame; I think that is why I love him.”
Gordon’s lips compressed, his cheeks flushed with an odd sensitiveness that had long been calloused. But he saw instantly that the remark had been innocent of allusion. A weird forgotten memory shot jaggedly through his brain. Years ago—how many years ago!—he had overheard a girl’s voice repeat a mocking antithesis: “Do you think I could ever care for that lame boy?” This girl facing him had the same fair hair and blue eyes of that boyish love of his. The resemblance caught him. Was it this that had haunted him in the miniature? Was this subconscious influence what had inspired at La Mira his aching desire that she should not think worse of him than might be?
Her voice recalled him. She had not understood that veiled look, but it brought to her life what had beennearest to her thought—the resentment and regret that the virago’s shrilling voice had roused.
“What must you think of our Venice, Signore!” she said. “But they knew no better—those poor people. They cannot tell evil from good.”
“It is no matter, Signorina,” Gordon answered. “Do not give it a thought. It was not unnatural, perhaps.”
“Not unnatural!” she echoed. “Natural to think you evil? Ah, Signore—when your every touch was kindness! Could she not see in your face?”
She paused abruptly, coloring under his gaze.
The words and the flush had cut him like a knife. The lines of ravage he had challenged in the mirror her innocence had misread. In the olive wood she had seen only wretchedness, here only mercy.
“The face is a sorry index, sometimes, Signorina. In mine the world may not see what you see.”
He had schooled his tone to lightness, but her mood, still tense-drawn, felt its strain. She spoke impulsively, bravely, her heart beating hard.
“What I see there—it is pain, not evil, Signore; sorrow, but not all your own; loneliness and regret and feelings that people like those”—she threw out her hand in a passionate gesture toward the shop—“can never understand!”
“It is not only such as they!” he interposed. “The world, your world, would not understand, either. It is only here and there one finds one—like you, Signorina—with sympathy as pure as yours.”
Her face had turned the tint that autumn paints wild strawberry leaves, a rich translucent flush that deepened the light in her eyes. It was a lyric world to-day!Just then Tita’s voice spoke warningly from the water-side. She looked around, and through the gathering shadows, saw her father’s form standing in the door of thecaffèacross the piazzetta.
“Oh!” she said confusedly, and turning, hastily crossed the pavement to the gondola.
Tita’s oar swung vigorously on the return, for Count Gamba was in haste. He was voluble, but Teresa, as she looked out through the curtains, was inattentive.
Swiftly as they went, a gondola outstripped them on the canal. It held the low-browed carpenter whom Tita had throttled in the shop. In addition to a superstitious mind, the carpenter possessed a malicious tongue and loved a sensation. He knew that the father of little Pasquale was at work that day on the Giudecca. As the doctor had driven all save the mother from the shop, there was little profit to be got by remaining. He therefore hastened to bear the news to the quay where the stone masons labored overtime. He had drawn his own conclusions. The child was mortally hurt—dying, doubtless—and as he revolved in his mind the words with which he should make the announcement to the father, the wicked milord and his evil eye entered with all their dramatic values.
Teresa noted the speed of the gondola as it passed to tie to the rising wall, saw the gesticulations of the blue-clad workmen as the man it bore told his story. Even in the failing light she saw the gesture of grief and despair with which one, the center of all eyes, threw up his arms and sank down on to the stones, his head in his hands. As her father’s gondola swept by, thefigure sprang up suddenly and his brown hand flew to his belt.
“My Pasquale—dead!” he shouted; “I’ll kill theInglese!”
Teresa stifled a cry. Her father had seen and heard also, though he did not know the explanation. Nor could he have guessed what an icy fear had gripped the heart of the girl beside him.
“An ugly look!” he muttered, as the frantic form scrambled into the carpenter’s craft.
Teresa could not speak. Her horrified gaze was on the sinister face, the red cap like asans-culotte, the eye glancing under it tigerishly. Little Pasquale was dead then! The father blamed the Englishman. His look was one of murder! He would kill him—of whom she had thought and dreamed, the man in whose heart had been only tenderness! Kill him? A panging dread seized her. She felt as if she must cry out; and all the time Tita’s oar swept her on through the dusk, further away from him whom danger threatened—him whom, in some way, no matter how, she must warn!
A strange helplessness descended upon her. She did not even know his name, or his habitation. To her he was but one of the hundreds Tita had said were in Venice. That the gondolier himself could have enlightened her did not cross her mind. She felt the impossibility of appealing to her father—she had not even dared tell him she had left the gondola. What could she do? Trust to Tita to find him? Could he know every line of that face as did she? Even in the dark—in crowds—she told herself that she would know him, would somehow feel his presence. But how to do it?How to elude the surveillance at home? And if she could do so, where to look for him?
Her reverie was broken by the gondola’s bumping against the landing. Her father’s talk had been running on like a flowing spout.
“A palazzo in Ravenna finer than this,” he was saying, “and you the Contessa Guiccioli! Shall we not be proud—eh, my Teresa?”
She realized suddenly of what he had been babbling. As she disembarked at the water-stairs, she looked up at the balcony. There, beside the stately Contessa Albrizzi, an old man was leaning, hawk-eyed, white-haired and thin. He blew her a kiss from his sallow fingers.
Her nervous tension relaxed in a sudden quiver of aversion.
“No, no!” she said in a choked voice, with clenched fingers. “I will not marry till I choose! Why must every one be in such haste?”
And with these broken sentences, that left her father standing in blank astonishment, she hurried before him into the house.