George Gordon, at the monastery of San Lazzarro, looked out of washed eyes upon an altered condition. He was conscious of new strength and new weaknesses. The man, emerging from the slough of those months of lawless impulses and ungoverned recklessnesses, had found no gradual rejuvenation. After weeks of remorse, temptation had flung itself upon him full armed. The memory of a prayer had vanquished it. In that instant of moral resistance, conscience had been reborn. It was the sharp sword dividing forever past from present. The past of debauchery was henceforth impossible to him. What future was there? He had not only to bear unnumbed the despair he had tried to drown, but an anguish born of the newer yesterday.
The wholesome daily life of the friars, their homely occupations and studies, varied by little more than matutinal visits of fish-boats of the lagoon, aided him insensibly. His thought needed something craggy to break upon and he found it in the Armenian language which he studied under the tutelage of Padre Somalian, aiding the friar in turning into its rugged structure the sonorous periods of “Paradise Lost.”
[224]But from time to time, in this routine, a searing memory would recur and he would see in shifting chiaroscuro, the scene on the Piazza San Marco: the faces of the maskers, the slight, shrinking form of Teresa, the angry dark eyes of the Fornarina, a hand snatching at a veil—then the streaming moonlight tangling to a halo about a girl’s shocked face so innocently touched with horror, a face that would always be distinct to him!
If he could have spared her the indignity of that one coarse scene! If he could only have told her himself, and gently! But even that, Fate had denied him—the dogging Nemesis that stalked him always! But for its decree, they had not met that night. He would have remained in her mind as she had seen him by the side of little Pasquale—a kindly shadow, a mystery beckoning her sympathy, then haply forgot. Now she would remember him always. Not as the wretched and misunderstood being for whom she had prayed at La Mira, but with shrinking and self-reproach, as a veritable agency of evil—the true milord maligno, who had bought her interest with the spurious coin of hypocrisy. So his tormented thought raced out along the barren grooves of surmise.
As he walked under the orchard’s rosy roof, the prior called to him:
“A wedding party is coming to the south landing,” he said. “Our monastery is fortunate this month. This is the third.”
Gordon looked. There, rounding the sea-wall, was a procession of gondolas, decked superbly, the foremost draped wholly in white and trailing bright streamers[225] in the water, like some great queen bird leading a covey of soberer plumage. By the richness of the banners and embroidered tenda, it was the cortège of some noble bridal. As he gazed, the faint music of stringed instruments drifted across the walls.
Gathering closer the coarse brown monastery robe he had thrown about him, Gordon followed the padre through the garden to the further entrance, where the brethren, girdled and cowled, were drawn up, a benign row. The bride would wait among the ladies on the beach, since beyond that portal no woman’s foot must go; the bridegroom would enter, to leave his gifts and to drink a glass of home-pressed violet-scented wine in the great hall.
Gordon paused a little way from the water-stairs and looked down over the low wall at the white gondola. One day, he mused, Teresa would marry—some noble like this no doubt, for she had rank and station—one whom she would love as she might have loved him. Perhaps she would celebrate her marriage in the Venetian way, come in a gondola procession maybe to this very monastery, never guessing that he once had been within it! In what corner of the world would he be then?
Under the edge of the tenda he could see the shimmering wedding-gown of the bride, cloth of gold heavy with seed pearls. The gentlemen had already entered the close. As he gazed, the gondola swung round and he caught a fleeting glimpse of her face.
“Teresa!” he gasped, and his hand clutched the wall.
She—so soon! A sudden pain, not vague but definite, seized him. She had not cared, then. Her heart[226] had not suffered, after all! On that night, when she had swayed forward into the gondolier’s arms, it had been only horror at her discovery, not a nearer grief! What for that quivering instant he had thought he read in her exclamation had not been there. Fool! To think his face could have drawn her for an hour! Doubly fool to sorrow for her hurt! Better so. She must not see him; no reminder of shame and affront should mar this day for her.
He turned, crossed the garden, opened the wall-gate and came out by the niched shrine upon the shore path which semi-circled the monastery.
A gust of self-raillery shook him. Inside, the friars were gravely drinking a health to the bride, in cups kept burnished for the purpose, made of pure gold. He, though only a guest, should be among them in robe and girdle to cheer these nuptials! He had drunk many a bumper in such costume in the old Newstead days, with Sheridan and Tom Moore!
The bitter laugh died on his lips. Why should he remember so well? In such a gabardine he had drunk the toast Annabel had heard, the night he had asked her to marry him. And he had drunk it from a death’s-head! The emblem, truly enough, had typified the tragedy marriage was to be to him!
He leaned forward, resting his forehead against the mossed stone, as if its coolness might allay the fever that held him. Would marriage have meant such for him if the words that had bound him to Annabel had linked him to a heart like Teresa’s, of fire and snow, of simple faith, of tenderness and charity? If he could have loved one like her!
[227]He had no knowledge of how long he stood there. He was recalled by a voice from the path behind him—between him and the gate, his only way of escape—a voice that held him spellbound.
“Father, give me your blessing!”
With an overmastering sense of the fatality that had beckoned her to the lagoon path at just this moment to mistake him for one of the padres, he turned slowly. She was kneeling, the exquisite fabric of her dress sweeping the moist shingle, her eyes on the ground, awaiting the sign.
He reached out his hand with a hoarse cry:
“Not that! Teresa! It is I—I—who should kneel to you!”
The words broke from him at sight of her bent face, not as a bride’s should be, but weary and listless. Underneath the cry was a quick thrill of triumph. Though she was that day another man’s wife, yet she had suffered! But the thrill died in a pang of reproach. If she did care, better the harshest thought of him now!
She had sprung to her feet in passionate amaze. “You!” she exclaimed; “ah, you!”
In the exclamation there was a great revulsion and greater joy. Her gaze swept his pallid features, his costume—her sick imagination had pictured him in scenes of ribaldry, with evil companions! She began to murmur broken sentences:
“I have wronged you! That night on the square—it was not the you that I had known! You had tried to leave that life behind—the past that had given you that name! You are not what they say,—not now! Not now!”
[228]He stopped her with a gesture.
“It is I who have wronged you,” he said in a voice hard from repression. “Do not judge me by this robe; it means less than nothing. I am here by the veriest accident. Not for penance or shriving.”
For an instant she recoiled, instinct groping in the maze of doubt. What was he, erring angel or masquerading devil? It was the question she had cried to herself all this time, blindly, passionately, her judgment all astray—the query that silence had at last answered with the conviction in which her long-planned marriage had seemed as acceptable a fate as any. Now her soul, wavering anew, spoke its agony in a direct appeal:
“Tell me! tell me the truth!” she pleaded piteously. “I have suffered so since that night. I have not known—how could I know?—what to think. I believed what you said at La Mira, every word! And it is not your past I think of now; it is only what you were that very hour and since,—and what you are to-day. Was it only a play—to make me sorry? Did you pretend it all?”
“Teresa!” he entreated.
“You said that night that I must forget we had ever met. Did that mean you merely pitied and spared me? That you are still to be—all that Venice says?”
“It was what I had been that counted!”
“No, no!” she protested. “Can’t you see that does not matter to me now? It is only what you were then that counts to me! Your voice, your eyes, what you said—you made me care! Was it all a lie?”
He felt his heart contract at this visible suffering whose root was so unselfish a desire. His resolve crumbled.
[229]“Teresa,” he said in a tone as strained as her own, “whatever of evil I have done, has not been since I have known you. You have waked something in me that would not sleep again. It was this you saw and heard and felt. I could not hide it. It has stayed with me ever since! It will always be with me now, whether I will or no. I did come here by accident. But I have stayed because the past—Venice and my life there—is hateful to me! It has been so since that morning at La Mira!”
“Oh!” she breathed, “then when you asked me for the prayer—you did not—you meant—”
“It was because it was almost the only unselfish and unworldly thing I had ever known. Because it was a thought for the scorned and unshriven; because of the very hurt it gave; because it was a prayer of yours—for me!”
While he spoke, a great gladness illumined her face. “Have you kept it?”
He turned from her instinctively to the shrine, his hand outstretched to raise the flat stone. But as suddenly he paused. He had placed it there in a half-sardonic mockery; not with the pure faith she would infer from the action. He could not stand in a false light before her.
He let the stone fall back into its place.
As he turned again to answer, he confronted two figures coming through the gateway a few paces off. One was an old man, his bent form dressed gaily. The other was Padre Somalian. The latter, in advance, had alone seen the lifted stone.
Both, however, saw the emotion in the two faces before[230] them. The padre stood still; the other sprang forward, his posture instinct with an unhealthy passion, his piercing eyes on the pair with evil inquiry.
The attitude of ownership was unmistakable. Gordon felt his veins clog with ice. This senile magnifico Teresa’s husband! This—a coerced Venetian mating of name, of rank, of lands alone—for her? The sight smote him painfully, yet with a strange, bitter comfort.
There was even more in the old noble’s look than Gordon guessed: more than anger at her presence here, this young bride of his, apart from the gondolas. He had recognized the man in the monk’s robe. His voice rose in a snarl:
“Unbaptized son of a dog! What is he doing on holy ground?” He pointed his stick at Gordon. “The abandoned of Venice! Has not his past fame penetrated here, Padre, that you lend him asylum? Call my gondoliers and I will have him flung into the lagoon!”
The friar stood transfixed, shocked and pained. Never since he had met Gordon on that very spot at sunrise, had he asked even his name. Suppose the stranger were all the other said. What difference should it make? The fixed habit of the monk answered:
“What he has been is of no question here.”
The grandee sneered at the padre’s answer.
“You left the gondola, to be sure, to pray,” he said to Teresa, then turned to Gordon who waited in constrained quiet: “Wolf in sheep’s clothing! Did you come for the same purpose?”
Teresa felt in Gordon’s silence a control that stilled her own violence of feeling. Her husband saw her[231] glance and a maniacal suspicion darted like lava through his brain. If this meeting were planned, they had met before—she and this maligno whom he had seen on the Piazza San Marco. Two hectic spots sprang into his sallow cheeks. A woman’s veiled form had stood by this man then! He remembered the derisive story with which the caffès had rung the next day. That same night the unlighted gondola had crept through the water-gate into the garden of the Palazzo Albrizzi!
He leaped forward and gripped Teresa’s wrist with shaking fingers, as the padre opened his mouth to speak. He leaned and whispered words into her ear—words that, beside himself as he was, he did not choose that the friar should hear.
The hazard told. Her color faded. A startled look sped to her eyes. He knew that she had met Gordon at night on the square! She read monstrous conclusions in the gaze that held her. Innocent as that errand had been, he would never believe it! A terror struck her cold. This old man who possessed her, that instant ceased to be an object of tolerance and became an active horror, baleful, secretive and cruel. She stood still, trembling.
The padre had been nonplussed at the quick movement and its result. Gordon could not surmise what the whispered words had been, but at Teresa’s paleness he felt his muscles grow rigid.
To her accuser her agitation meant but one thing. He released her wrist with a cracked laugh, distempered jealousy convulsing his features. He hissed one word at her—“Wanton!”
[232]The syllables were live coals flung upon her breast. She cried out and put her hands to her ears as if to shut out the sound.
At that epithet and her cry, Gordon’s countenance turned livid. His fingers hardened to steel. The air swam red. But the girl divined; she sprang before him and laid her fingers on his arm. His hands dropped to his sides; he remembered suddenly that his antagonist was aged, decrepit. What had he been about to do?
For one heart-beat Teresa held Gordon’s glance. When she faced her distraught husband, her eyes were like blue-tempered metal. Those weeks of baffled quest had been slipping the leash of girlhood. That one word had left her all a woman. Her lips were set, and resentment had drenched her cheeks with vivid color.
“Signore,” she said, “I would to God it were still yesterday!”
She turned, and went proudly down the path by which she had come.
The old man had not moved. Now he raised his stick and struck Gordon with it across the brow. A white mark sprang where it fell, but the other did not lift his hand. Then Teresa’s husband, with an imprecation, spat on the ground at the friar’s feet and followed her toward the gondolas.
The whole scene had been breathless and fate-like. To the padre, it was a flurry of hellish passions loosed from the pit. The storm past, still shocked from the violence of its impact, his mind wrestled with a doubt. His first glance at the faces of the man and the woman, as he emerged from the gate, had been full of suggestion. They had not seemed to spell guilt, yet could he[233] tell? What had been the husband’s whispered charge? Was the bearing of the woman, which seemed to mirror innocence, really one of guile? The man here before him, accused of what specious crimes he could only guess! Why had he come to the monastery? Had there been, indeed, more than chance in this encounter at the shrine?
He looked at Gordon, but the latter, staring out with a gaze viewless and set across the lagoon, seemed unconscious of the scrutiny. “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers!” That had been the monastery’s creed. Aye, but if it should be entertaining an angel of evil unawares? He thought of the lifted stone—the man’s hand had just now dropped it back into place at his approach. He remembered that when he called Gordon from the gate on the morning of his coming, he had seen him bending over the shrine. The fact seemed to disclose significance. Had this stranger used that holy emblem to further a clandestine and sinful tryst? Had he hidden an endearing message there for the wife to find to-day if he should be observed?
Lines of sternness sharpened the friar’s features. He strode forward, caught up the stone and lifted the folded paper.
The sternness smoothed out as he read the simple penned sentences, and a singular look crept to his face. It was more than contrition; it was the self-accusatory sorrow of a mind to whom uncharity is a heinous sin before high Heaven.
He turned, flushing painfully. Gordon’s back was still toward him.
Then the padre laid the paper gently back in its place,[234] reset the stone over it, and silently, with bowed head entered the gate.
That night there were two who did not close eye in the monastery of San Lazzarro. One was Padre Somalian, who prayed in penance. The other was a stranger who walked the stone floor of his chamber, the prey to an overmastering emotion.
That scene on the path, like a lightning flash in a dark night, had shown Gordon his own heart. He knew now that a force stronger even than his despair had been at work in him without his knowledge. A woman’s face cried to him beyond all gainsaying. Teresa’s voice sounded in every lurch of wind against the sea-wall—in every wave that beat like a passing bell upon the margin-stones.
Far, far deeper than the burn of the white welt on his forehead throbbed and thrilled a bitter-sweet misery. In spite of his desire, he had brought shame and agony upon her—and whether for good or ill, he loved her!
[235]