Teresa could not speak. Her horrified gaze was on the sinister face, the red cap like a sans-culotte, the eye glancing under it tigerishly. Little Pasquale was dead then! The father blamed the Englishman. His look was one of murder! He would kill him—of whom she had thought and dreamed, the man in whose heart had been only tenderness! Kill him? A panging dread seized her. She felt as if she must cry out; and all the time Tita’s oar swept her on through the dusk, further away from him whom danger threatened—him whom, in some way, no matter how, she must warn!
A strange helplessness descended upon her. She did not even know his name, or his habitation. To her he was but one of the hundreds Tita had said were in Venice. That the gondolier himself could have enlightened her did not cross her mind. She felt the impossibility of appealing to her father—she had not even dared tell him she had left the gondola. What could she do? Trust to Tita to find him? Could he know every line of that face as did she? Even in the dark—in crowds—she told herself that she would know him, would somehow feel his presence. But how to do it? How to elude the surveillance at home? And if she could do so, where to look for him?
Her reverie was broken by the gondola’s bumping against the landing. Her father’s talk had been running on like a flowing spout.
“A palazzo in Ravenna finer than this,” he was saying, “and you the Contessa Guiccioli! Shall we not be proud—eh, my Teresa?”
She realized suddenly of what he had been babbling. As she disembarked at the water-stairs, she looked up at the balcony. There, beside the stately Contessa Albrizzi, an old man was leaning, hawk-eyed, white-haired and thin. He blew her a kiss from his sallow fingers.
Her nervous tension relaxed in a sudden quiver of aversion.
“No, no!” she said in a choked voice, with clenched fingers. “I will not marry till I choose! Why must every one be in such haste?”
And with these broken sentences, that left her father standing in blank astonishment, she hurried before him into the house.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE HAUNTED MAN
The majestic gateway of the Palazzo Mocenigo was dark as Gordon entered save for the single lamp always lit at nightfall. Fletcher served his master’s supper in the great upper room, but to-night, as too often happened, it was scarcely tasted. Long after the valet had retired, his watchful ear heard the uneven step pacing up and down, up and down, on the echoing floor.