CHAPTER XXXIXBARRIERS BURNED AWAY
Teresa came to her feet with a cry. Her mingled emotions were yet so recent that she had had no time to recover poise. Gordon’s face was as strangely moved. Surprise edged it, but overlapping this was a something lambent, desirous, summoned by sight of her tears.
In the first swift glimpse, through the fern fronds, of that agitated form bent above the fungus, he had noted the tokens of returning strength—and knew her present grief was from some cause nearer than the casa in Ravenna. These were not tears of mere womanly sensibility, called forth by the lines written there, for a shadow of pain was still lurking in her eyes. Was it grief for him? He tossed aside gloves and riding-crop and drew her to a seat on the warm pine-needles before he spoke:
“I did not imagine your eyes would ever see that!”
She wiped away the telltale drops hastily, feeling a guilty relief to think he had misread them.
“This is an old haunt of mine,” she said. “I loved it when I was a girl—only a year ago, how long it seems!—in the convent there!”
He started. The fact explained her presence to-day. She had known those walls that hid Allegra! It seemedto bring them immeasurably nearer. If he could only tell her! Reckless, uncaring as she knew a part of his past had been, could he bear to show her this concrete evidence of its dishonor?
Looking up at the pallid comeliness under its slightly graying hair, Teresa was feeling a swift, clairvoyant sense of the struggle that had kept him from her, without understanding all its significance.
“I am glad I came in time,” she continued. “A few days and the words will show no longer. I shall not need them then,” she went on, her face tinted. “I shall know them by heart. As soon as I read the first lines, I knew they were yours—that you had been here.”
“I am stopping at Bologna,” he told her.
“Ah,Madonna!” she said under her breath. “And you have been so near Ravenna!”
“Better it were a hundred leagues!” he exclaimed. “And yet—distant or near, it is the same. I think of you, Teresa! That is my punishment. Every day, as I have ridden through the pines, every hour as I have sat on this hill—and that has been often—I have thought of you!”
“I knew that”—she was gazing past him to the river and the far dusky amethyst of the hills—“when I read what is on the fungus.”
Thereafter neither spoke for a moment. A noisy cicala droned from a near chestnut bough, and from somewhere down the slope came the brooding coo of a wood-dove. At length he said:
“There were tears on your cheek when I first saw you. They were not for the verses, I know.”
She shook her head slowly. “It was something”—shecould not tell him all the truth—“something I saw in that.” She pointed to the German magazine.
He reached and retrieved it, but she put her hand on his restrainingly.
“Is it about me?”
“Yes,” she admitted; “but—”
“May I not see it?”
“Nothing in it really matters,” she entreated. “It could never make any difference to me—now! Not even if it were true. Your past is as if it belonged to some other person I never saw and never can know. You believe that? Tell me you do!”
“I do,” he responded; “I do!”
“Then do not read it.”
“But suppose it is false. Either way, I would tell you the truth.”
“That is just it.” Her fingers clasped his on the cover. “I know you would. But I do not believe what it says! I cannot! You can never have done such things! Ah, is it not enough that I have that trust?—even,” she ended hurriedly, “though it would make no difference?”
His pulses were beating painfully. He drew her fingers gently from their hold and opened the magazine to a page turned down lengthwise. It was a critique of his drama of “Cain”—sole fruit of that last year in Venice—which he had himself called “a drama of madness” and in sheer mocking bravado had posted to John Murray, his publisher. He saw at a glance that the article was signed with the name of Germany’s greatest mind, the famous Goethe.
She was trembling. “Remember,” she said earnestly;“I have not asked you! I should never have asked you!”
Gordon translated the cramped text with a strange lurid feeling, like coming in touch with an ancient past:
“The character of the author’s life permits with difficulty a just appreciation of his genius. Scarcely any one compassionates the suffering which cries out laboriously in his poems, since it arises from the phantoms of his own evil acts which trouble him. When a gold and impetuous youth, he stole the affections of a Florentine lady of quality. Her husband discovered the affair and slew his wife. But the murderer on the next night was found stabbed to death on the street, nor was there any one save the lover on whom it seemed suspicion could attach. The poet removed from Florence, but these unhappy spirits have haunted his whole life since.”
“The character of the author’s life permits with difficulty a just appreciation of his genius. Scarcely any one compassionates the suffering which cries out laboriously in his poems, since it arises from the phantoms of his own evil acts which trouble him. When a gold and impetuous youth, he stole the affections of a Florentine lady of quality. Her husband discovered the affair and slew his wife. But the murderer on the next night was found stabbed to death on the street, nor was there any one save the lover on whom it seemed suspicion could attach. The poet removed from Florence, but these unhappy spirits have haunted his whole life since.”
He raised his eyes from the page. Her face was turned away, her hand pulling up the grass-spears in a pathetic apprehension.
“Teresa,” he said in a smothered voice; “it is not true. I have never been in Florence.”
“I knew—I knew!” she cried, and all her soul looked into his. She had not really credited. But the tangible allegation, coming at the moment when her heart was wrenched with that convent discovery and warped from its orbit of instinct, had dismayed and disconcerted her. The balm she had longed for was not proof, it was only reassurance.
He closed the magazine. The feeling that had choked his utterance was swelling in his throat. For the rest of the world he cared little, but for her!
She leaned toward him, her eyes shining. “I know how you have suffered! You have not deserved it. Ihave learned so much, since I saw you last, of your life in England!”
His tone shook. “Have you learned all? That my wife left me in the night and robbed me of my child? That society shut its doors upon me? That I was driven from London like a wild beast—a scapegoat at which any man might cast a stone?”
“Yes,” she breathed, “all that, and more! I have not understood it quite, for our Italy is so different. But you have helped me understand it now! It was like this.”
She picked up the Bible from where it had fallen and turned the pages quickly. “Listen,” she said, and began to read:
“And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats.... But the goat on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.“And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness.“And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.”
“And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats.... But the goat on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.
“And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness.
“And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.”
He had risen and now stood movelessly before her.
She looked up as she finished. “So it was with you.”
“Yes,” he said in a low voice. “And so I have lived ever since, a murderless Cain with a mark on my brow! So shall I live and die, hated and avoided by all men!”
“No!” she contradicted, coming to him. “That will not be! I see further and clearer than that! It is not for such an end that you have lived and written and suffered! But for something nobler, which the world that hates you now will honor! I see it! I know it!”
“Stop!” he exclaimed, “I cannot bear it. I am not a murderer, Teresa, but all of the past you forgive with such divine compassion, you do not know. There is a silence yet to break which I have kept, a chapter unlovely to look upon that you have not seen.”
“I ask nothing!” she interrupted.
“I must,” he went on with dry lips. “You shall see it all, to the dregs. In that convent, Teresa,—”
She put a hand over his lips. “You need not. For—I already know.”
He looked in dazed wonder. “You know? And—you do not condemn?”
“That other woman—do you love her?”
“No, Teresa. I have not seen her for two years.”
“Did she ever love you?”
“Never in her life,” he answered, his face again averted.
Her own was glowing with a strange light. “Look at me,” she said softly.
He turned to her, his eyes—golden-gray like seaweed glimpsed through deep water—cored with a hungry, hopeless fire which seemed to transform her whole frame to thirsty tinder.
FEELING HER FORM SWAY TOWARD HIM WITH FIERCE TUMULTUOUS GLADNESS... FEELING HER FORM SWAY TOWARD HIM WITH FIERCE TUMULTUOUS GLADNESS.p.289.
... FEELING HER FORM SWAY TOWARD HIM WITH FIERCE TUMULTUOUS GLADNESS.p.289.
... FEELING HER FORM SWAY TOWARD HIM WITH FIERCE TUMULTUOUS GLADNESS.p.289.
“Ah,” she whispered, “do you think it could matter, then?”
An overmastering emotion, blent of bitterness and longing, surged through him, beating down constraint, blotting out all else, all that thrilled him finding its way into broken speech. In that moment he forgot himself and the past, forgot the present and what the convent held—forgot what bound them both—forgot grief and danger. London and Venice, Annabel, the master of Casa Guiccioli drew far off. There was nothing but this fragrant, Italian forest, this whispering glade above the blue rushing of the arrowy river, this sun-drenched afternoon—and Teresa there beside him. With an impulse wholly irresistible he caught her to him, feeling her form sway toward him with fierce tumultuous gladness.
“Amor mio!” she breathed, and their lips clung into a kiss.
As she strained back in his embrace, letting the tide of love ripple over her, looking up into his face in desperate joy, something swift and flashing like a silver swallow darted through the air.
It sung between them—a Malay kriss—and struck Gordon above the heart.