CHAPTER XXVTERESA MEETS A STRANGER
Through the twittering dawn, with its multitudinous damp scents, its stubble-fields of maize glimpsed through the stripped ilex trees, whose twigs scrawled black hieroglyphics on the hueless sky, Gordon strode sharply, heedless of direction.
The convulsion of rage with which he had destroyed the miniature had finished the work the latter’s advent had begun. The nerve, stirring from its opiate sleep to a consciousness of dull pain, had jarred itself to agony. His mind was awake, but the wind had swept saltly through the coverts of his passion, and their denizens crouched shivering.
The sight of a dove-tinted villa guarded by cypress spears—a gray gathering of cupolas—told him he had walked about two miles. This was La Mira, one of the estates of the Contessa Albrizzi, a great name in Venice. He turned aside into the deserted olive grove above the river. A slim walk meandered here, thick with dead leaves, with a cleared slope stretching down to where the deep-dyed Brenta twisted like a drenched ribbon on its way to the salt marshes. Fronting this breach, Gordon came abruptly upon a wooden shrine, with a weather-fretted prayer bench.
He stopped, regarding it half-absently, his surcharged thought rearranging disused images out of some dusty speculative storehouse. A more magnificent shrine rose on every campo of Venice. They stood for a priestly hierarchy, an elaborate clericalism—the mullioned worship that to his life seemed only the variform expression of the futile earth-want, the satiric hallucination of finite and mortal brain that grasped at immortality and the infinite. This, set in the isolation of the place, seemed a symbol of more primitive faith and prayer, of religion rough-hewn, shorn of its formal accessories.
He went a step nearer, seeing a small book lying beside the prayer bench. He picked it up. It was a reprint in English of his own “Prisoner of Chillon,” from a local press in Padua.
A sense of incongruity smote him. It was the poem he had composed in Geneva. He readily surmised that it was through Shelley the verses had reached his publisher in England, to meet his eye a year afterward, in a foreign dress, in an Italian forest.
He turned the pages curiously, conning the scarce remembered stanzas. Could he himself have created them? The instant wonder passed, blotted out by lines he saw penned in Italian on the fly-leaf—lines that he read with a tightening at his heart and an electric-like rush of strange sensations such as he had never felt. For what was written there, in the delicate tracery of a feminine hand, and in phrases simple and pure as only the secret heart of a girl could have framed them, was a prayer:
“Oh, my God! Graciously hear me. I take encouragement from the assurance of Thy word to pray to Thee in behalf of the author of this book which has so pleased me. Thou desirest not the death of a sinner—save, therefore, him whom Venice calls ‘the wicked milord.’ Thou who by sin art offended and by penance satisfied, give to him the desire to return to the good and to glorify the talents Thou hast so richly bestowed upon him. And grant that the punishment his evil behavior has already brought him be more than sufficient to cover his guilt from Thine eyes.“Oh blessed Virgin, Queen of the most holy Rosary! Intercede and obtain for me of thy Son our Lord this grace! Amen.”
“Oh, my God! Graciously hear me. I take encouragement from the assurance of Thy word to pray to Thee in behalf of the author of this book which has so pleased me. Thou desirest not the death of a sinner—save, therefore, him whom Venice calls ‘the wicked milord.’ Thou who by sin art offended and by penance satisfied, give to him the desire to return to the good and to glorify the talents Thou hast so richly bestowed upon him. And grant that the punishment his evil behavior has already brought him be more than sufficient to cover his guilt from Thine eyes.
“Oh blessed Virgin, Queen of the most holy Rosary! Intercede and obtain for me of thy Son our Lord this grace! Amen.”
A step fell behind him. He turned half-dazed, his mind full of conflict. A girl stood near him, delicate and alert and wand-like as a golden willow, her curling amber hair loosely caught, her sea-blue eyes wide and a little startled. She wore a Venetian hood, out of whose green sheath her face looked, like lilies under leaves.
Gordon’s mind came back to the present of time and space across an illimitable distance.
He stared, half believing himself in some automatic hallucination. There had been no time to speculate upon what manner of hand had written those words, what manner of woman’s soul had so weirdly touched his own out of the void. Knowledge came staggeringly. Hers was the face of the miniature that his heel had crushed to powder.
He noted that her eyes had fallen to the book in his hand, as mechanically he asked, in Italian:
“This book is yours, Signorina?”
“Yes.” There was a faint flush of color in her cheek, for she saw the volume was open at the written page.
Gordon was looking at her palely, seeing her face set in a silver oval. Eyes, hair and lips; there in lifeless pigments, here in flesh and blood! The same yet more, for here were unnunned youth, slumbrous, glorious womanhood unawaked, stirring rosily in every vein, giving a passionate human tint to the spiritual impression. And underneath all, the same unsullied something he had raged at that black night, even while her prayer for him lay here dumb at the feet of Our Lady of Sorrows!
His voice sounded unreal to his own ears as he spoke, his mind feeling its way through tumbled predispositions to an unfamiliar goal. “If apology be owed,” he said, “for reading what was intended for purer eyes than this world’s, I most humbly offer it, Signorina! I did so quite inadvertently.”
He held out the book as he spoke, and her fingers closed over it, the gesture betraying confusion. Who was this stranger, with face of such wan luster and gray-blue eyes so sadly brilliant? Some sense in her discerned a deeper, unguessed suffering that made her heart throb painfully.
“If there be an ear which is open to human appeal,” he added gently, “that prayer was registered, I know!”
He spoke calmly enough, but a hundred thoughts were ricochetting through his mind. Pulpits had fulminated against him, priest and laic had thundered him down, but when—in London, in Geneva, in Venice—had a single disinterested voice been lifted in a prayer for him before? And this girl had never seen him.
“If there be!” Her thought stirred protestingly.“Ah, Signore, surely there is Some one who hears! How could one live and pray otherwise?”
How indeed? To such a one as she, to pray and to live were one and the same thing. Prayer to her was not a mental process—it was as instinctive and unconscious as breathing. For such as she, shrines like this were erected; not for him! So, across the riot in his breast, Gordon’s waked habit paused to smile—a satire-smile, at itself, at the new sweet flower that was lifting head there amidst desert ruins.
The girl caught the mixed feeling in his face. He was not Italian—his accent had told her that. He was an Englishman, too, perhaps. “Do you know him, Signore?”
His head turned quickly toward her. In truth, had he ever really known himself? “Yes,” he answered after a pause. “I know him, Signorina—far better than most of the world.”
She was gazing with varied feelings, her heart beating strangely, curiosity and wonder merging. In her few short weeks at La Mira, fresh from the convent, the Englishman of whom all Venice told tales had been but a dim and unsubstantial figure. She had thought of the grim Palazzo Mocenigo with a kind of awe, as a child regards a mysterious cavern bat-haunted and shunned. Into her poetic world of dreams had fallen the little book, and thereafter the shadowy figure that roamed nightly Venice had taken on the brilliant and piteous outline of a fallen angel. Here, wonderfully, was a man who knew him, whose speech could visualize the figure that had grown to possess such fascination. Questions were on her tongue, but she could not framethem. She hesitated, opening and closing the book in her hands.
“Is he all they say of him?”
“Who knows, Signorina?”
It was an involuntary exclamation that sounded like acquiescence. The girl’s face fell. In her thought, the man of her dreaming, lacking an open advocate, had gained the secret one of sympathy. Was it all true then? Her voice faltered a little.
“I have not believed, Signore, that with a heart all evil one could write—so!”
Into the raw blend of tangent emotions which were enwrapping Gordon, had entered, as she spoke, another well-defined. Never in his life, for his own sake, had he cared whether one or many believed truth or lie of him. But now there thrilled in him, new-born, a desire that this slight girl should not judge him as did the world. The feeling lent his words a curious energy:
“Many tales are told, Signorina, that are true—some that are false. If he were here—and I speak from certain knowledge of him—he would not wish me to extenuate; least of all to you who have written what is on that leaf. Perhaps that has been one of his faults, that he has never justified himself. By common report he has committed all crimes, Signorina. He has thought it useless to deny, since slander is not guilt, nor is denial innocence, and since neither good nor bad report could lighten or add to his wretchedness.”
The tint of her clear eyes deepened. “I knew he was wretched, Signore! It was for that reason I left the prayer here overnight before Our Lady of Sorrows—because I have heard he is an outcast from his own countryand his own people. And then, because of this.” She touched the volume. “Ah, I have read little of all he has written—this is the only poem—for I read his English tongue so poorly; but in this his heart speaks, Signore. It speaks of pain and suffering and bondage. It was not only the long-ago prisoner he sang of; it was himself! himself! I felt it—here, like a hurt.”
She had spoken rapidly, stumblingly, and ended with a hand pressed on her heart. Her own feeling, as she suddenly became aware of her vehemence, startled her, and she half turned away, her lips trembling.
A sentiment at variance with his whole character was fighting in Gordon. The Babel he had builded of curses was being smitten into confusion. Something granite-like, mural and sealed by time, was breaking and melting unaccountably away. His face was turned from hers—toward the slope below, where the river bubbled and sparkled. When he spoke it was in words choked and impeded:
“I think if he were here—this wicked milord—he would bless you for that, Signorina. He has suffered, no doubt. Perhaps if there had been more who felt what he wrote—as you have felt,—if there had been more to impute good of him rather than evil—I am quite sure if this could have been, Signorina, he would not now be in Venice the man for whom you have written that prayer. I know him well enough to say this. It is through his wretchedness that I have come to know him—because, like him, I am a wanderer.”
A softer light suffused her cheek. The words smote her strangely. His pain-engraved face brought a mist to her eyes. She was a child of the sun, with bloodleaping to quick response, and a heart a well of undiscovered impulses. The wicked milord’s form lost distinction and faded. Here was a being mysterious, wretched, too, and alone—not intangible as was he of the Palazzo Mocenigo, but beside her, speaking with a voice which thrilled every nerve of her sensitive nature. Unconsciously she drew closer to him.
At that moment a call came under the bare boughs: “Teresa! Teresa!”
She drew back. “It isla Contessa,” she said; “I must hasten,” and started quickly through the trees.
His voice overtook her. “Signorina!” The word vibrated. “Will you give me the prayer?” He had come toward her as she stopped. “There is a charm in such things, perhaps.”
The voice called again, and more impatiently: “Teresa!”
She opened the book and tore out the leaf with uncertain fingers. As he took it his hand met hers. He bent his head and touched it with his lips. She flushed deeply, then turned and ran through the naked trees toward the villa shielded in its cypress rows.
The girl ran breathlessly to the terrace, where a lady leaned from a window with a gently chiding tongue:
“Do they teach you to do wholly without sleep in convents?” she cried. “Do you not know your father and Count Guiccioli, your lord and master to be, are to arrive to-day from Ravenna? You will be wilted before the evening.”
The girl entered the house.
Under the olive wood a man, strangely moved, a rustling paper still in his hand, walked back with quickstrides to his gondola, striving to exorcise a chuckling fiend within him, who, with mocking and malignant emphasis, kept repeating:
“Oh blessed Virgin, Queen of the most holy Rosary! Intercede and obtain for me, of Thy Son our Lord, this grace!”