He spoke calmly enough, but a hundred thoughts were ricochetting through his mind. Pulpits had fulminated against him, priest and laic had thundered him down, but when—in London, in Geneva, in Venice—had a single disinterested voice been lifted in a prayer for him before? And this girl had never seen him.
“If there be!” Her thought stirred protestingly. “Ah, Signore, surely there is Some one who hears! How could one live and pray otherwise?”
How indeed? To such a one as she, to pray and to live were one and the same thing. Prayer to her was not a mental process—it was as instinctive and unconscious as breathing. For such as she, shrines like this were erected; not for him! So, across the riot in his breast, Gordon’s waked habit paused to smile—a satire-smile, at itself, at the new sweet flower that was lifting head there amidst desert ruins.
The girl caught the mixed feeling in his face. He was not Italian—his accent had told her that. He was an Englishman, too, perhaps. “Do you know him, Signore?”
His head turned quickly toward her. In truth, had he ever really known himself? “Yes,” he answered after a pause. “I know him, Signorina—far better than most of the world.”
She was gazing with varied feelings, her heart beating strangely, curiosity and wonder merging. In her few short weeks at La Mira, fresh from the convent, the Englishman of whom all Venice told tales had been but a dim and unsubstantial figure. She had thought of the grim Palazzo Mocenigo with a kind of awe, as a child regards a mysterious cavern bat-haunted and shunned. Into her poetic world of dreams had fallen the little book, and thereafter the shadowy figure that roamed nightly Venice had taken on the brilliant and piteous outline of a fallen angel. Here, wonderfully, was a man who knew him, whose speech could visualize the figure that had grown to possess such fascination. Questions were on her tongue, but she could not frame them. She hesitated, opening and closing the book in her hands.
“Is he all they say of him?”
“Who knows, Signorina?”
It was an involuntary exclamation that sounded like acquiescence. The girl’s face fell. In her thought, the man of her dreaming, lacking an open advocate, had gained the secret one of sympathy. Was it all true then? Her voice faltered a little.
“I have not believed, Signore, that with a heart all evil one could write—so!”