“Dog of the Virgin! He need touch no finger to child of mine!” swore a carpenter from the adjoining campo.
“Nor mine!”
“Why didn’t you carry him in yourself, then?” growled Giuseppe, the fruit-vender. “Standing there like a bronze pig! What have you against the Englishman? Didn’t he buy your brother-in-law a new gondola when the piling smashed it?”
“Scellerato!” sneered the carpenter. “Why is his face so white? Like a potato sprout in a cellar! He is so evil he fears the sun!”
The fruit-vender turned away disdainfully. His foot kicked a shapeless wicker object—it was little Pasquale’s cage smashed flat. The sparrow inside was gasping. He picked up the cage and carried it to the shop.
In the inner, ill-lighted room, Gordon laid the child on a couch. He had spoken no further word to Teresa. At the first sight of her, kneeling in the street, he had started visibly as he had done in the forest of La Mira when he recognized her face as that of the miniature. Now he was feeling her presence beside him with a curious thrill not unlike her own—a pleasure deeply mixed with pain that was almost a physical pang.
Since that dawn walk above the plane-treed Brenta he had been treading strange ways. In the hours that followed, remorse had been born in him. And as the first indrawn breath racks the half-drowned body with agony greater than that of the death it has already tasted, so the man had suffered. During a fortnight, words written on a sheet of paper that he carried in his pocket had rung through his brain. Day after day, as he sat in his gloomy palazzo, he had heard them; night after night they had floated with him as his gondola bore him through the waterways ringing with the estro of the carnival. To escape them he had fled again and again to the black phial, but when he awoke the pain was still with him, instinct and unrenounceable. It was more acute at this moment than it had ever been.
Teresa scarcely noted the fruit-vender as he put the battered cage into her hand just before its feathered occupant breathed its last. Her look, fixed on Gordon, was still eloquent with the surprise. She saw the same pale face, the same deep eyes, the same chiselled curve of lips. His voice, too, as he despatched the kind-hearted Giuseppe for a surgeon on the Riva, had the same cadence of sadness. She had noticed that his step halted as he walked, as though from weakness. And surely there was illness in his face, too! Had there been any tender hands near him—as tender as those with which he now examined the unconscious child?
As Gordon bent above him, little Pasquale opened his eyes. His gaze fell first not on the man or on Teresa, but on the broken cage beside him, where the bird lay still, one claw standing stiffly upright. He tried to lift his head, and called the sparrow’s name.
There was no answering chirp. The claw was very still.