CHAPTER XXXVIN THE CASA GARDEN
The close was still—only the flutter of moths and the plash of a fountain tinkling wetly. Here and there in the deeper shade of cloistral walks, the moonlight, falling through patches of young leaves, flecked bloodless bacchantes and bronze Tritons nestling palely in shrub tangles of mimosa. This was all Gordon distinguished at first as he moved, his hands before him, his feet feeling their way on the cool sward.
Suddenly a low breath seemed to pierce the stillness. A sense of nearness rushed upon him. His arm, outstretched, touched something yielding.
“Teresa!” he cried, and his hands found hers and drew her close to him. In that first moment of silence he was keenly conscious of her breath against his cheek, hurried and warm.
“I know—I know,” he said in a choked voice. “Tita told me all. I would give my body inch by inch, my blood drop by drop to give back to your life what I have taken from it!”
She shook her head. “You have taken nothing from it. Before that night on the square it held nothing—I have learned that since.”
She was feeling a sense of exaltation. Since the dayat San Lazzarro she had never expected to see him again. To her he had been a glorious spirit, struggling for lost foothold on the causeways of redemption. In her mental picture he had stood always as she had seen him on the monastery path, pale, clad in a monk’s coarse robe, the vesture of earthly penance. This picture had blotted out his past, whatever it had been, whatever of rumor was true or false, whatever she may for a time have believed. Every word he had spoken remained a living iterate memory. And the thought that her hand had drawn him to his better self had filled her with a painful ecstasy.
“Teresa,” he said unsteadily, “I long ago forfeited every right to hope and happiness. And if this were not true, by a tie that holds me, and by a bond you believe in, I have still no right to stand here now. But fate drew me here to-day—as it drew me to you that morning at La Mira. It is stronger than I—stronger than us both. Yet I have brought you nothing but misery!”
“You have brought me much more than that,” she interrupted. “I knew nothing of life when I met you. I have learned it now as you must have known it to write as you have. I know that it is vaster than I ever dreamed—more sorrowful, but sweeter, too.”
A stone bench showed near, wound with moonbeams, and she sat down, making room beside her. In the white light she seemed unreal—a fantasy in wild-rose brocade. A chain of dull gold girdled her russet hair, dropping a single emerald to quiver and sparkle on her forehead. Her face was pale, but with a shadowy something born of those weeks.
What he saw there was awakened self-reliance and mettle, the birthright of clean inheritance. The wedding gondola that had borne a girl to San Lazzarro had carried back a woman, rebellious, agonized, flushed to every nerve. She had opposed a woman’s pride to the hatred that otherwise would have made the ensuing time a slow unrolling nightmare; had taken her place passively as mistress of the gloomy casa with its atmosphere of cold grandeur and miserliness, thankful that its host was niggardly of entertainment, enduring as best she might the petty persecution with which the old count surrounded her. His anger, soured by the acid sponge of jealousy, had fed itself daily with this baiting. He believed she had come smirched from the very altar to his name and place. Yet he had no proof, and to make the scandal public—to put her away—would have seared his pride, laid him open to the wrath of her kin, brought her brother back to Italy to avenge the slight upon their house, and most of all to be dreaded, would have necessitated the repayment of her dowry. A slow and secret satisfaction was all he had, and under it her spirit had galled and chafed him. In this strait she had had no confidant, for her father, aging rapidly and failing, she would not sadden, and whenever he drove to Casa Guiccioli from his villa, some miles from the town,—sole relic of his wasted properties,—had striven to conceal all evidence of unhappiness. Even when she had determined on a momentous step—a secret appeal to the papal court for such a measure of freedom as was possible—she had determined not to tell him yet. Grief and repression had called to the surface the latent capabilities which in the girl had been but promises, and thesespoke now to Gordon in a beauty strong, eager and far-divining.
COUNTESS TERESACOUNTESS TERESA.
COUNTESS TERESA.
COUNTESS TERESA.
“What I have known of life is not its sweets,” he answered in bitterness. “I have gathered its poison-flowers, and their perfume clings to the life I live now.”
“But itwillnot be so,” she said earnestly. “I believe more than you told me at La Mira—when you said it had been one of your faults that you had never justified yourself. You were never all they said. Something tells me that. If you did evil, it was not because you chose it or took pleasure in it. For a while I doubted everything, but that day at San Lazzarro, when I saw you—the moment you spoke—it came back to me. No matter what I might think or hear again, in my heart I should always believe that now!”
He put out his hand, a gesture of hopelessness and protest. His mind was crying out against the twin implacables, Time and Space. If man could but push back the Now to Then, enweave the There and Here! If in such a re-formed universe, He and She might this hour be standing—no irrevocable past, only the new Now! What might not life yield up for him, of its burgeoning, not of its corruption, its hope, not of its despair!
“That day!” he repeated. “I saw you in the gondola. I would have spared you that meeting.”
“Yet that was what told me. If I had not seen you there—” She paused.
The chains of his repression clung about him like the load of broken wings. The knowledge that had come as he walked the floor of his monastery room with the burn of a blow on his forehead, had spelled abnegation.She must never know the secret he carried—must in time forget her own. Once out, he could never shackle it again. He completed her sentence:
“You would have forgotten the sooner.”
“I should never have forgotten,” she said softly.
He was silent. He dared not look at her face, but he saw her hands, outstretched, clasping her knee.
Presently—he could not guess the dear longing for denial that made her tone shake now!—she said:
“Tita told me that—when you came to Ravenna—you had not known—”
He rose to his feet, feeling the chains weakening, the barriers of all that had lain unspoken, yet not unfelt, burning away.
“It was true,” he answered, confronting her. “I did not know it. But if Ihadknown all I know to-night, I would have crossed seas and mountains to come to you! Now that I have seen you—what can I do? Teresa! Teresa!”
The exclamation held trenchant pain—something else, too, that for the life of him he could not repress. It pierced her with a darting rapture.
Since that hour at the monastery, with its pang and its reassurance, as she felt budding those new, mysterious flowers of faith and heart experience, she had felt a deeper unguessed want. Over and over she had repeated to herself the last words he had said before that painful interruption: “Because it was a prayer ofyoursforme.” Her soul had been full of a vague, unphrased yearning for all the meanings that might lie unexpressed in the coupling of those two words. So now,as she heard him speak her name in that shaken accent, her heart thrilled.
“Ah,” she breathed, “then you care—so much?”
His fingers clenched. He was torn with two emotions: self-abasement, and a hungry desire, lashed by propinquity, to take her in his arms, to defy vow and present, be the consequence what it might. There came upon him again the feeling that had gripped him when she stood with him among the circling maskers, violet-eyed, lilac-veined, bright with new impulses, passionate and lovely. He leaned toward her. If she but knew how he cared!
A sound startled them both. Her hand grasped his with apprehensive fingers as she listened. “Look! There beyond the hedge. A shadow moved.”
He looked. Only an acacia stirred in the light air.
“It is nothing,” he reassured her. “Tita is at the gate.”
“Oh,” she said fearfully, “I should not have said come. There is risk for you here.”
“What would I not have risked?”
“Listen!”
Another sound came to both now, the pounding of horses’ hoofs, borne over the roof from the street—the rumble of heavy coach wheels. It ceased all at once, and lights sprang into windows across the shrubbery.
She came to her feet as Tita hurried toward them. “It is the signore,” warned the gondolier.
“Dio mio!” she whispered. “Go—go quickly!”
He caught her hands. “If only I could help you, serve you!”
“You can,” she said hurriedly. “I have a letter onwhich much depends—for the Contessa Albrizzi at Venice. I cannot trust a messenger.”
“It shall start to-night.”
“It is in my room. I will send it after you by Tita. Ah—hasten!”
He bent and touched his lips to a curl that had blown like litten gold against her shoulder. Her eyes met his an instant in fluttering, happy confusion. Then, as he followed Tita quickly to the gate, she turned and ran toward the house.
She had not seen a man, crouched in the shadow of a hedge, who had hurried within doors to greet the master of the casa so unexpectedly returned. She did not see the rage that colored her husband’s shrunken cheeks in his chamber as Paolo, his Corsican secretary, imparted to him two pieces of information: the presence of the stranger in the garden and the arrival that afternoon at the osteria of him Venice called “the wicked milord.”
The old count pondered, with shaking fingers. He hated the Englishman of Venice; hated him for robbing him of the youth and beauty he had gloated over, for the arrow to his pride—with a hatred that had settled deeper each day, fanatical and demented. The story of the garden trespasser inspired now an unholy craving for reprisal, unformed and but half conceived. He summoned his secretary.
In a few moments more—a half-hour after Teresa’s letter had started on its way to the inn—his coach, with its six white horses, bearing Paolo, and followed by four of the casa servants afoot, was being driven thither by a roundabout course.