“No; bring some cognac, Fletcher.”
The valet obeyed, though with covert concern. He had seen the inroads that year had made; they showed in the lines on the pallid face, in the brown hair now just flecked with gray, in the increasing fire in the deep eyes. The brandy sat habitually at his master’s elbow in these days.
It was two hours past midnight, for to Gordon day and night were one, and sleep only a neutral inertness, worse with its dreams than the garish day he dreaded. On the hearth a fire blazed, whose flame bred crimson marionettes that danced over the noble carved ceiling panels, the tall Venetian mirrors supported by gilt lions, the faded furnishings and the mildew-marked canvases whose portraits looked stonily from the walls.
A gust of voices and the sound of virginals, flung up from the canal, came faintly through the closed casement. He moved his shoulders wearily. Yesterday had been Christmas Day. To-night was the eve of St. Stephen, the opening of the carnival season, with every corner osteria a symphony of fiddles, when Venice went mad in all her seventy islands. What were holidays, what was Christmas to him?
Even in the warm blaze Gordon shivered. Ghosts had troubled him this day. Ghosts that stalked through the confused mist and rose before him in the throngs that passed and repassed before his mind’s eye. Ghosts whose diverse countenances resolved themselves, like phantasmagoria, into a single one—the pained eager face of Shelley. The recurring sensation had brought a sick sense of awakening, as of something buried that stirred in its submerged chrysalis, protesting against the silt settling upon it.
But brandy had lost its power to lay those ghosts. He went to the desk which held the black phial, the tiny glass comforter to which he resorted more and more often. Once with its surcease it had brought a splendor and plenitude of power; of late its relief had been lent at the price of distorted visions. As he drew out the thin-walled drawer, its worm-eaten bottom collapsed and its jumble of contents poured down on the mahogany.
He paused, his hand outstretched. Atop of the mélange lay a silver-set miniature. He picked it up, holding it nearer the light. A girl’s face, hued like a hyacinth, looked out of his palm, painted on ivory. A string of pearls was about her neck.
For an instant he regarded the miniature fixedly, his recollection travelling far. The pearls aided. It was the one he had found in the capsized boat at Villa Diodati! He had purposed sending it after the two strangers. The events of that wild night had effaced the incident from his mind, as a wet sponge wipes off a slate. Fletcher, finding the oval long ago in a pocket lining, had put it in the desk-drawer for safe-keeping, where until this moment it had not met his master’s eye.
“Teresa.” Gordon suddenly remembered the name perfectly. With the memory mixed a sardonic reflection: the man who had lost the miniature that day in Switzerland had hastened away with clothing scarce dried. Well, if that brother had deemed himself too good to linger with the outcast, the balance had been squared. The sister, perforce, had made a longer stay!
He put down the miniature, found the phial of laudanum and uncorked it, but the face drew him back. It was not the external similitude now, but something beneath, unobserved the day he had found it—the pure sensibility, shining unsullied through the transparent media. A delicate convent slip, she seemed, not yet transplanted to the unsifted soil of the world! A strange portrait for him to gaze upon here in this palace of ribaldry—him, the moral Caliban, the dweller in Golgotha on whose forehead was written the hic jacet of a dead soul!