CHAPTER XXV
TERESA MEETS A STRANGER
Through the twittering dawn, with its multitudinous damp scents, its stubble-fields of maize glimpsed through the stripped ilex trees, whose twigs scrawled black hieroglyphics on the hueless sky, Gordon strode sharply, heedless of direction.
The convulsion of rage with which he had destroyed the miniature had finished the work the latter’s advent had begun. The nerve, stirring from its opiate sleep to a consciousness of dull pain, had jarred itself to agony. His mind was awake, but the wind had swept saltly through the coverts of his passion, and their denizens crouched shivering.
The sight of a dove-tinted villa guarded by cypress spears—a gray gathering of cupolas—told him he had walked about two miles. This was La Mira, one of the estates of the Contessa Albrizzi, a great name in Venice. He turned aside into the deserted olive grove above the river. A slim walk meandered here, thick with dead leaves, with a cleared slope stretching down to where the deep-dyed Brenta twisted like a drenched ribbon on its way to the salt marshes. Fronting this breach, Gordon came abruptly upon a wooden shrine, with a weather-fretted prayer bench.
He stopped, regarding it half-absently, his surcharged thought rearranging disused images out of some dusty speculative storehouse. A more magnificent shrine rose on every campo of Venice. They stood for a priestly hierarchy, an elaborate clericalism—the mullioned worship that to his life seemed only the variform expression of the futile earth-want, the satiric hallucination of finite and mortal brain that grasped at immortality and the infinite. This, set in the isolation of the place, seemed a symbol of more primitive faith and prayer, of religion rough-hewn, shorn of its formal accessories.
He went a step nearer, seeing a small book lying beside the prayer bench. He picked it up. It was a reprint in English of his own “Prisoner of Chillon,” from a local press in Padua.
A sense of incongruity smote him. It was the poem he had composed in Geneva. He readily surmised that it was through Shelley the verses had reached his publisher in England, to meet his eye a year afterward, in a foreign dress, in an Italian forest.
He turned the pages curiously, conning the scarce remembered stanzas. Could he himself have created them? The instant wonder passed, blotted out by lines he saw penned in Italian on the fly-leaf—lines that he read with a tightening at his heart and an electric-like rush of strange sensations such as he had never felt. For what was written there, in the delicate tracery of a feminine hand, and in phrases simple and pure as only the secret heart of a girl could have framed them, was a prayer:
“Oh, my God! Graciously hear me. I take encouragement from the assurance of Thy word to pray to Thee in behalf of the author of this book which has so pleased me. Thou desirest not the death of a sinner—save, therefore, him whom Venice calls ‘the wicked milord.’ Thou who by sin art offended and by penance satisfied, give to him the desire to return to the good and to glorify the talents Thou hast so richly bestowed upon him. And grant that the punishment his evil behavior has already brought him be more than sufficient to cover his guilt from Thine eyes.
“Oh blessed Virgin, Queen of the most holy Rosary! Intercede and obtain for me of thy Son our Lord this grace! Amen.”