The marriage arranged for her with Count Guiccioli, the oldest and richest nobleman of Ravenna, a miser and twice a widower, had aroused an interest in her mind scarce greater than had the tales of the Englishman of the Palazzo Mocenigo. Such marriages were of common occurrence in the life she knew: the “wicked milord” was a stranger thing—one to speculate more endlessly upon.
It was Tita, the gigantic black-bearded gondolier and door-porter, a servant in the Gamba family since she was born, whom she had brought with her as her own attendant—one who worshiped her devoutly, and in whose care her father entrusted her more confidently than to any duenna—who had first pointed out to her the gloomy building which shielded that mysterious occupant, and had piqued her interest with weird tales: how in his loneliness for human kind the outcast surrounded himself with tamed ravens and paroquets, and used for a wine cup a human skull, that of a woman he had once loved. With her rapt eyes on the palazzo front, Teresa had wondered and shuddered in never ending surmise.
The little volume from the Paduan press had deepened her curiosity and given it virgin fields in which to wander. The English books in her father’s library were prose and for the most part concerned his pet hobby, chemistry. This volume, given her on a saint’s day by the Contessa Albrizzi, who took pride in her protégée’s scholarship, was her first glimpse of English poetry, and her pulses had leaped at the new charm. Thereafter the personality of the contradictory being who had written it had lived in her daily thought. She retained the faiths of her childhood unshattered, and the prayer she had left at the shrine of Our Lady of Sorrows sprang from an impulse as natural as it was significant.
But that meeting in the wood had turned the course of her imaginings. “A wanderer—like him”; the words had bridged the chasm between the dreaming and the real. The secret thought given to the “wicked milord” found itself absorbed by a nearer object. The palazzo on the Grand Canal grew more remote, and the stranger she had seen stepped at a single stride into a place her mind had already prepared.
The blush with which she had taken the book from Gordon’s hand was one of mere self-consciousness; the vivid, burning color which overspread her face as she ran back through the trees was something very different. It was a part of her throbbing heart, of the tremulous confusion that overran her whole body, called into life by the touch of those palely carved lips upon her fingers. His colorless face—a face with the outline of the Apollo Belvedere—the gray magnetic eyes, the words he had said and their accent of sadness, all were full of suggestive mystery. Why was he a wanderer—like that other? Not for a kindred reason, surely! He could not be evil also! Rather it must have been because of some loss, some hurt of love which time might remedy.
Her agile fancy constructed more than one hypothesis, spun more than one romance, all of like ending. A new love would heal his heart. Sometime he would look into a woman’s eyes—not as he had looked into hers; some one would feel his lips—not as he had kissed her hand. She in the meantime would be no longer a girl; she would be the Contessa Guiccioli, with a palazzo of her own in Ravenna, and—a husband.
But, somehow, this reflection brought no satisfaction. The old count she had seen more than once driving by in state when she played as a child in the convent woods; and that he with his riches should desire her, had given her father great pride, which was reflected in her. Her suitor had brought his age and ailments to La Mira on the very day she had met the stranger at the shrine—the day her heart had beat so oddly—and with his arrival, her marriage had projected itself out of the hazy future and become a dire thing of the present. She felt a fresh distaste of his sharp yellow eyes, his cracked laugh. His eighty wiry years seemed as many centuries. She became moody, put her father off and took refuge in whims. The contessa advised the city, and the week’s end saw the Albrizzi palazzo thrown open.
In Venice, Teresa’s spirits rose. She loved to watch the bright little shops opening like morning-glories, the sky-faring pigeons a silver quiver of wings; to lie in the gondola waiting while her father drank his brandy at the piazzetta caffè; to buy figs from little lame Pasquale, who watched for her at a shop-door in a narrow calle near at hand; to see the gaudy flotillas of the carnival, and the wedding processions, fresh from the church, crossing the lagoon to leave their gifts at the various island-convents; or, propelled by Tita’s swinging oar, to glide slowly in the purpling sunset shadows, by the Piazza San Marco, around red-towered San Giorgio, and so home again on color-soaked canals in the gleaming ruby of the afterglow, through a city bubbling with ivory domes and glistening like an opal’s heart under its tiara of towers.
She scarcely told the secret to her own heart—that it was one face she looked to see, one mysterious stranger whose image haunted every campo, every balcony and every bridge. She flushed whenever she thought of that kiss on her fingers; in the daytime she felt it there like a sentient thing; at night when she woke, her hand burned her cheek.
Who was he? Why had he asked her for the prayer? What had he done with it? Was he still in Venice? Should she see him again? She wondered, as, parting the gondola tenda, she watched her father cross the pave for his cognac.