From the moment those lips touched her hand in that meeting at the wood shrine Teresa Gamba felt her life unfold to rose-veined visions.
Her unmothered childhood and the placid convent school years at Bagnacavallo, near Ravenna, had known no mystery other than her day-dreams had fashioned. She had dreamed much: of the time when she should marry and redeem the fortunes of her house, which, despite untainted blood and ancient provincial name, was impoverished; of the freedom of Italy, the sole topic, aside from his endless chemical experiments, of which her father, now growing feeble, never tired; of her elder brother, away in Wallachia, secretary to the Greek Prince Mavrocordato; of the few books she read, and the fewer people she met. But these dreams had not possessed the charm of novelty. Even when, at eighteen, through family friendship, she became a member of the Albrizzi household and exchanged the dull convent walls for the garlanded La Mira—even with those rare days when she saw the gay splendor of Venice from a curtained gondola—even then her mental life suffered small change.
[190]The marriage arranged for her with Count Guiccioli, the oldest and richest nobleman of Ravenna, a miser and twice a widower, had aroused an interest in her mind scarce greater than had the tales of the Englishman of the Palazzo Mocenigo. Such marriages were of common occurrence in the life she knew: the “wicked milord” was a stranger thing—one to speculate more endlessly upon.
It was Tita, the gigantic black-bearded gondolier and door-porter, a servant in the Gamba family since she was born, whom she had brought with her as her own attendant—one who worshiped her devoutly, and in whose care her father entrusted her more confidently than to any duenna—who had first pointed out to her the gloomy building which shielded that mysterious occupant, and had piqued her interest with weird tales: how in his loneliness for human kind the outcast surrounded himself with tamed ravens and paroquets, and used for a wine cup a human skull, that of a woman he had once loved. With her rapt eyes on the palazzo front, Teresa had wondered and shuddered in never ending surmise.
The little volume from the Paduan press had deepened her curiosity and given it virgin fields in which to wander. The English books in her father’s library were prose and for the most part concerned his pet hobby, chemistry. This volume, given her on a saint’s day by the Contessa Albrizzi, who took pride in her protégée’s scholarship, was her first glimpse of English poetry, and her pulses had leaped at the new charm. Thereafter the personality of the contradictory being who had written it had lived in her daily thought. She retained the[191] faiths of her childhood unshattered, and the prayer she had left at the shrine of Our Lady of Sorrows sprang from an impulse as natural as it was significant.
But that meeting in the wood had turned the course of her imaginings. “A wanderer—like him”; the words had bridged the chasm between the dreaming and the real. The secret thought given to the “wicked milord” found itself absorbed by a nearer object. The palazzo on the Grand Canal grew more remote, and the stranger she had seen stepped at a single stride into a place her mind had already prepared.
The blush with which she had taken the book from Gordon’s hand was one of mere self-consciousness; the vivid, burning color which overspread her face as she ran back through the trees was something very different. It was a part of her throbbing heart, of the tremulous confusion that overran her whole body, called into life by the touch of those palely carved lips upon her fingers. His colorless face—a face with the outline of the Apollo Belvedere—the gray magnetic eyes, the words he had said and their accent of sadness, all were full of suggestive mystery. Why was he a wanderer—like that other? Not for a kindred reason, surely! He could not be evil also! Rather it must have been because of some loss, some hurt of love which time might remedy.
Her agile fancy constructed more than one hypothesis, spun more than one romance, all of like ending. A new love would heal his heart. Sometime he would look into a woman’s eyes—not as he had looked into hers; some one would feel his lips—not as he had kissed her hand. She in the meantime would be no longer a[192] girl; she would be the Contessa Guiccioli, with a palazzo of her own in Ravenna, and—a husband.
But, somehow, this reflection brought no satisfaction. The old count she had seen more than once driving by in state when she played as a child in the convent woods; and that he with his riches should desire her, had given her father great pride, which was reflected in her. Her suitor had brought his age and ailments to La Mira on the very day she had met the stranger at the shrine—the day her heart had beat so oddly—and with his arrival, her marriage had projected itself out of the hazy future and become a dire thing of the present. She felt a fresh distaste of his sharp yellow eyes, his cracked laugh. His eighty wiry years seemed as many centuries. She became moody, put her father off and took refuge in whims. The contessa advised the city, and the week’s end saw the Albrizzi palazzo thrown open.
In Venice, Teresa’s spirits rose. She loved to watch the bright little shops opening like morning-glories, the sky-faring pigeons a silver quiver of wings; to lie in the gondola waiting while her father drank his brandy at the piazzetta caffè; to buy figs from little lame Pasquale, who watched for her at a shop-door in a narrow calle near at hand; to see the gaudy flotillas of the carnival, and the wedding processions, fresh from the church, crossing the lagoon to leave their gifts at the various island-convents; or, propelled by Tita’s swinging oar, to glide slowly in the purpling sunset shadows, by the Piazza San Marco, around red-towered San Giorgio, and so home again on color-soaked canals in the gleaming ruby of the afterglow, through a city bubbling[193] with ivory domes and glistening like an opal’s heart under its tiara of towers.
She scarcely told the secret to her own heart—that it was one face she looked to see, one mysterious stranger whose image haunted every campo, every balcony and every bridge. She flushed whenever she thought of that kiss on her fingers; in the daytime she felt it there like a sentient thing; at night when she woke, her hand burned her cheek.
Who was he? Why had he asked her for the prayer? What had he done with it? Was he still in Venice? Should she see him again? She wondered, as, parting the gondola tenda, she watched her father cross the pave for his cognac.
“Are there many English in Venice, Tita?”
The gondolier, lounging like a brilliant-hued lizard, shrugged his shoulders. “Bellissima, there are hundreds in the season. They come and go. They are all lasagnoni, these Englishmen!”
Teresa’s sigh checked itself. Tita suddenly turned his head. Across the piazzetta a crowd was gathering. It centered before the shop at whose front the five-year-old fig-seller was used to watch for her.
“He fell from the scaffolding!” said a voice.
“If it should be little Pasquale!” cried Teresa, and springing out, ran quickly forward. Tita waited to secure the gondola before he followed her.
A sad accident had happened. Before the calle a platform had been erected from which spectators might watch the flotillas of the carnival. Little Pasquale’s delight was a tame sparrow, whose home was a wicker cage, and climbing to sun his pet when he had been left[194] to tend the empty shop, the child had slipped and fallen to the pavement.
Teresa broke through the circle of bystanders and knelt by the tumbled little body, looking at the tiny face now so waxen. The neighbors thronged about, stupefied and hindering. A woman ran to fetch the mother, gossiping with a neighbor. Another called loudly for a priest.
The girl, looking up, was bewildered by the tumult. “He must be got in,” she murmured, half helplessly, for the people ringed them round.
A voice answered close beside her: “I will carry him, Signorina”—and a form she knew bent beside her, and very gently lifted the small bundle in his arms.
Teresa’s heart bounded. Through these days she had longed to hear that voice again how vainly! Now, in this moment, she was brought suddenly close to him. She ceased to hear the sounds about her—saw only him. She sprang up and led the way through the press, down the close damp calle and to the shop where the child lived.
“Dog of the Virgin! He need touch no finger to child of mine!” swore a carpenter from the adjoining campo.
“Nor mine!”
“Why didn’t you carry him in yourself, then?” growled Giuseppe, the fruit-vender. “Standing there like a bronze pig! What have you against the Englishman? Didn’t he buy your brother-in-law a new gondola when the piling smashed it?”
“Scellerato!” sneered the carpenter. “Why is his[195] face so white? Like a potato sprout in a cellar! He is so evil he fears the sun!”
The fruit-vender turned away disdainfully. His foot kicked a shapeless wicker object—it was little Pasquale’s cage smashed flat. The sparrow inside was gasping. He picked up the cage and carried it to the shop.
In the inner, ill-lighted room, Gordon laid the child on a couch. He had spoken no further word to Teresa. At the first sight of her, kneeling in the street, he had started visibly as he had done in the forest of La Mira when he recognized her face as that of the miniature. Now he was feeling her presence beside him with a curious thrill not unlike her own—a pleasure deeply mixed with pain that was almost a physical pang.
Since that dawn walk above the plane-treed Brenta he had been treading strange ways. In the hours that followed, remorse had been born in him. And as the first indrawn breath racks the half-drowned body with agony greater than that of the death it has already tasted, so the man had suffered. During a fortnight, words written on a sheet of paper that he carried in his pocket had rung through his brain. Day after day, as he sat in his gloomy palazzo, he had heard them; night after night they had floated with him as his gondola bore him through the waterways ringing with the estro of the carnival. To escape them he had fled again and again to the black phial, but when he awoke the pain was still with him, instinct and unrenounceable. It was more acute at this moment than it had ever been.
Teresa scarcely noted the fruit-vender as he put the battered cage into her hand just before its feathered occupant breathed its last. Her look, fixed on Gordon,[196] was still eloquent with the surprise. She saw the same pale face, the same deep eyes, the same chiselled curve of lips. His voice, too, as he despatched the kind-hearted Giuseppe for a surgeon on the Riva, had the same cadence of sadness. She had noticed that his step halted as he walked, as though from weakness. And surely there was illness in his face, too! Had there been any tender hands near him—as tender as those with which he now examined the unconscious child?
As Gordon bent above him, little Pasquale opened his eyes. His gaze fell first not on the man or on Teresa, but on the broken cage beside him, where the bird lay still, one claw standing stiffly upright. He tried to lift his head, and called the sparrow’s name.
There was no answering chirp. The claw was very still.
Then little Pasquale saw the faces about him and knew what had happened.
“He’s dead!” he shrilled, and burst into tears.
[197]