From the coming of Gordon on that unforgettable night to the garden, Teresa’s pulse began to beat more tumultuously. To offset the humiliation of her daily life indoors and the tireless surveillance in the person of Paolo of well-nigh her every excursion, she had the buoyant memory of that hour and the promise of her appeal to the Church’s favor. The three essentials of woman’s existence—love, hope and purpose—were now hers in spite of all.
More than one new problem perturbed her. There was the swarthy visitor coming and going mysteriously, closeted with her husband weekly. His strange entrance into the casa that day of all days—the stranger ruse that had been practised through him upon her—seemed to connect him in some occult, uncanny way with the man of whom, every hour of day and night, she mused and dreamed. Thinking of this, and weighing her husband’s hatred, at first she hoped Gordon would not return to Ravenna.
There had befallen another matter, too, which seemed to have absorbed much of the old count’s attention, and[277] which, to her relief, took him from the city for days at a time.
Teresa knew what this matter was. In every visit to her father he had talked of it triumphantly—the rising of the Italian peoples and the breaking of the galling yoke of Austria. During this spring strange rumors had prevailed. Twice, morning had found placards posted on the city walls: “Up with the Republic!” and “Down with the Pope!” The foreign police were busy; houses were searched and more than one Ravennese was seized under suspicion of membership in the Carbonari, whose mystic free-masonry hid the secrets of enrolling bands and stores of powder. Knowledge of the sycophant part her husband was currently suspected of playing came to Teresa bit by bit, in sidelong looks, as her carriage rolled through the town, and more definitely from Tita. The Austrian wind blew strongest and Count Guiccioli trimmed his sails accordingly.
But replete with its one image, Teresa’s heart left small space to these things. Gordon’s face flushed her whole horizon. And as the empty weeks linked on, she began, in spite of her fears, to long passionately to see him again. That her letter had reached its destination she knew, for the Contessa Albrizzi paused an hour for a visit of state at the casa—on her way to Rome. But no word came from its bearer, and each day Tita returned from the osteria messageless.
She could not guess the struggle that had torn Gordon—the struggle between reasoning conscience and unreasoning desire—or how fiercely, the letter once delivered by Fletcher, he had fought down the longing to return to Ravenna, which held his child, and her. He[278] had been able to aid her once, prompted Desire; she might need him again. If he stayed away in her trouble, what would she deem him? Suppose by chance she should hear of the orgy he had witnessed at the osteria? This reflection maddened him. “Yet,” Reason answered, “not to see her is the only safety. She is unhappy now; but can I—because life is ended for me—to bring her present comfort, run the risk of embittering her life further?” So he had argued.
There came a week for Teresa when Paolo was summoned to Faenza, whither her husband had gone two days before. The espionage of the casa relaxed, and on her birthday, with Tita on the box, she drove alone through the afternoon forest to the Bagnacavallo convent with a gift for the Mother Superior, the only mother her childhood had known.
When she issued from the gate again she carried her birthday gift, a Bible, and a German magazine given her by the nun who had taught her that tongue. In her heart she bore a far heavier burden, for in that hour she had held a child in her arms and listened to a story that had sunk into her soul. Her face was deathly white and her limbs dragged.
Calling to Tita to wait, she left the road and climbed a path that zigzagged up a wooded knoll overlooking the narcissus-scented valley and the hurrying river that flowed past the convent walls. The briers tore her hands, but she paid no heed, climbing breathlessly.
The sparser crown of the hillock was canopied by shaggy vine-festoons and dappled by the shadow-play of firs, whose aged roots were covered with scalloped fungus growths. As a child this had been her favorite spot.[279] With one of these giant tree-fungi for a seat she had loved to day-dream, gazing down across the convent inclosure and the stream that flowed silverly on, past Ravenna, to the sea. She stood a moment knee-deep in the bracken, her form tense with suffering, then dropped the books on the ground and throwing herself down, burst into tears. She wept long and passionately, in utter desolation.
She had listened to the Superior’s story with her face buried in the child’s frock, now burning, now drenched with cold. The touch had given her a wild delight and yet an agony unfathomable. As she lay and wept, tenderness and torture still mingled inextricably in her emotions. She knew now why Gordon had been in Ravenna that spring day. He had told the truth; it had been with no thought of her.
A sudden memory of his words in the casa garden came with sickening force: “By a tie that holds me, and by a bond you believe in, I have no right to stand here now.” Was this the tie he had meant? Not the unloving wife in England, but the mother of this child—a later, nearer one? When he had come that once to her, was it at best out of pity? Did he love this other woman? Was this why she herself had seen him no more?
Before the acute shaft of this pain the facts she had learned of his life in London fell unheeded. They belonged to that far dim past that he had forsaken and that had forsaken him! But the one fact she knew now had to do with his present, here in Italy—the present that held her! She was facing for the first time in her life the hydra, elemental passion—jealousy. And[280] in the grip of its merciless talons everything of truth in her wavered.
For a moment she lost hold on her own heart, her instinct, her trust in Gordon’s word, the faith that had returned to her at San Lazzarro. What if all—all—what the whole world said, what this magazine told of him—were true after all, and she, desolate and grieving, the only one deceived? What if it were! She drew the magazine close to her tear-swollen eyes, only to thrust it from her desperately.
“No, no!” she said. “Not that! It is a lie! I will not believe it!”
In her anguish she sat up, flinging her hat aside, and leaned against a tree. Her glance fell on the great saffron fungus that jutted, a crumpled half-disk, above its roots. Into the brittle shiny surface words had been etched with a sharp point—lines in English, almost covering it. She began to read the unfamiliar tongue aloud, deciphering the words slowly at first, then with more confidence:
“River, that rollest by the ancient walls. Where dwells the lady of my love—when she Walks by thy brink, and there perchance recalls A faint and fleeting memory of me—”A color tinged her paleness; she bent closer in a startled wonder.
“What if thy deep and ample stream should be A mirror of my heart, where she may read A thousand thoughts I now betray to thee, Wild as thy wave, and headlong as thy speed! [281] What do I say—a mirror of my heart? Are not thy waters sweeping, dark, and strong? Such as my feelings were and are, thou art; And such as thou art were my passions long. And left long wrecks behind, and now again, Borne in our old unchanged career, we move; Thou tendest wildly onward to the main, And I—to loving one I should not love!”She drew herself half-upright with a sob. She was not mistaken! No other could have written those lines, rhythmically sad and passionate, touched with abnegation. He had been near her when she had not guessed—had been here, in this very nook where she now sat! Recently, too, for new growth had not blotted the characters. Her heart beat poignantly:
“The wave that bears my tears returns no more: Will she return, by whom that wave shall sweep? Both tread thy banks, both wander on thy shore, I near thy source, she by the dark blue deep. She will look on thee,—I have look’d on thee. Full of that thought: and from that moment, ne’er Thy waters could I dream of, name or see, Without the inseparable sigh for her!”For whom had he longed when he wrote? For the woman whose child—his child, denied him now!—was hidden in the convent below? No! The mist of anguish melted. She felt her bitterness ebbing fast away.
What else mattered? Nothing! Not what this convent held! Not all his past, though even the worst of all the tales she had ever heard were true; though what the pamphlet at her feet alleged were true a thousand[282] times over—though it were the worst crime of all man punished on earth! Nothing, nothing! At this moment she knew that, for all the dreams of God bred in her, without him, prayers and faiths and life itself went for naught as human hearts are made.
Clasping her hands she read to the end:
“Her bright eyes will be imaged in thy stream,— Yes! they will meet the wave I gaze on now: Mine cannot witness, even in a dream. That happy wave repass me in its flow! But that which keepeth us apart is not Distance, nor depth of wave, nor space of earth. But the distraction of a various lot, As various as the climates of our birth. My blood is all meridian; were it not, I had not left my clime, nor should I be In spite of tortures ne’er to be forgot, A slave again of love,—at least of thee!”Kneeling over the fungus, absorbed, she had not heard a quick step behind her. She heard nothing in her abandon, till a voice—his voice—spoke her name.
[283]