All night Gordon’s gondola floated over the dark lagoon. All night the star-silvered dip of the oar broke into ripples the glassy surface. All night Gordon sat silent, goring out across the low islands that barred the sea.
Something had touched his life which, sooner met, might have made existence a boon. A woman’s soul had roused him—but only to a rayless memory of what burned and rankled, as the touch of a hand wakes a prisoner from nightly lethargy to a sense of bolt and chain.
Lines from his poem which she loved—which had called forth her prayer—recurred to him:
“A light broke in upon my brain,— It was the carol of a bird; It ceased, and then it came again, The sweetest song ear ever heard; And mine was thankful till my eyes Ran over with the glad surprise, And they that moment could not see I was the mate of misery; But then by dull degrees came back My senses to their wonted track, I saw the dungeon walls and floor Close slowly round me as before.”[219]So she had come and gone, and his hands touched only walls of adamant, his ears heard only an echo rolling across blank infinities!
The moon sank. The great, linked lamps of the heavens burned brighter, faded at length, and a breath of sea-breeze, harbinger of the dawn, struck coldly on his cheek. Night became soft twilight, twilight grew to warm amethyst. Little milky clouds dappled the zenith, slowly suffused by a flush of rose that grew to vivid splendor gray-streaked, as the sun’s climbing edge touched the humid horizon.
The occupant of the gondola stirred and looked about him. The air was full of mewing swallows, and a sandy island lay before him from which rose clumps of foliage and the dim outlines of brown stone walls, gilded by the growing light. The gondolier’s voice broke the long silence:
“It is the Armenian monastery of Saint Lazarus, Excellence.”
The island lay lapped in quiet. Not a sound or movement intrenched upon its peace. Only the swallows circled shrilly about slim bell-towers, lifting like fingers pointing silently. A narrow causeway through an encircling dike led to the wharf, and beyond, by a gate, to an orchard where gnarled fruit-trees sniffed the salt air. From a chimney at one side a strand of smoke sheered slenderly.
Gordon drew a long breath. “Put me ashore,” he said.
The gondola shot alongside the tiny wharf, and he stepped on to its stone flags. He stood silent a moment, feeling the calm upon him like a tangible hand. Far to[220] the north, half a league’s distance, glowing through the bluish winter haze, shone the towers and domes of Venice, a city of white and violet, vague and unsubstantial as a dream, a field of iris painted upon a cloud.
“Go back to the city.”
The servant was startled. “And leave you, Excellence?”
“Yes, I shall send when I need you.”
The boatman leaned anxiously on his oar. “When they question, Excellence?”
“Tell no one but Fletcher where I am. Say to him it is my wish that he shall not leave the palazzo.”
He watched the gondola glide away over the lightening waters, till it was only a spot on the dimpling lagoon. He took a black phial from his pocket and threw it far out into the water. Then he turned his gaze and walked up the wharf toward the monastery, still soundless and asleep.
At the corner of the sea-wall, the stone had been hollowed with the chisel into a niche, in which, its face turned seaward, stood a small leaden image of the Virgin. He noted it curiously, with the same sensation of the unartificial he had felt at sight of the wooden shrine at La Mira. And yet with all its primitive simplicity, what a chasm between such a concrete embodiment of a personal guardianship and that agnostic altar his youth had erected “to the unknown God”!
He looked up and saw a figure hear him.
A man of venerable look stood there, bareheaded, with a wide gray beard which swept upon his coarse dark robe. His eyes were deep and pleasant, and his[221] countenance spiritual, gracious and reserved. An open gate in the wall showed the way he had come.
For a moment neither spoke. The lucent gaze confronting him seemed to Gordon to possess a strange familiarity: it was the same expression of unworldly sincerity that had shone in those London days from Dallas’ face.
“What do you seek, my son?”
Perhaps the friar had already had time to study the visitor. Perchance the clear scrutiny had read something beneath that cryptic look bent upon the shrine. What did he not seek, indeed!
When Gordon answered it was simply, in Italian as direct as the other’s question.
“The peace of your walls and fields drew me, Padre. By your leave, I would rest a while here.”
The friar’s look had not wavered. Contemplation teaches one much. It was easy to read the lines of dissipation, of evil indulgence, that marked the white face before him; but the padre saw further to the soul-sickness beneath.
“We are Armenians, Signore,” he proffered, “a community of students, who have poor entertainment; but to such as we have, the stranger is welcome. He who comes to us stays without question and fares forth again at his own will.”
As he spoke, a bell’s clear, chilly chime rose from somewhere within the walls. At the note the padre turned, bowed his knee before the leaden Virgin, and rising, with arm raised toward the lagoon, blessed the waters and the land. Then he held out his hand to Gordon.
[222]“I am Padre Sukias Somalian,” he said. “I will go and inform the prior. I will call you presently.”
He disappeared through the wall-gate.
Gordon’s eyes, following him, saw the worn motto deeply cut in the stone above it.
“O Solitudo, sola Beatitudo.”
Was it solitude that had brought that look of utter peace to the friar’s face? Or was it rather the belief that made him bow before the niche yonder?
His gaze wandered back to the shrine. Prayer to him was a fetish—a plastic rigmarole of symbols and formulæ—the modern evolution of the pre-Adamite, anthropomorphic superstition. It was far more than that to the friar. He knelt each day to that little leaden image. And before such an image she, Teresa, whose pure soul had been wounded last night, had laid that written petition.
A singular look stole to his face, half-quizzical, half-wistful. He took a leaf of paper from his pocket. He hesitated a moment, folding and unfolding it. He glanced toward the gate.
Then he went to the niche, stooped and lifted one of the loose flat stones that formed the base on which the image rested. He brushed away the sand with his hand, put the paper in the space and replaced the stone over it.
As he stood upright, a voice called to him from the gate. It was the padre, and he turned and followed him in.
[223]