There was a cry—the Fornarina had flung herself on her knees on the flagging. A stir came from the crowd.
L’Inglese maligno! For the girl who stood so moveless, the exclamation had blotted joy from the universe. It was as though all terrors gripped her bodily in a molten midnight. Dreams, faiths, prayer, and tender things unguessed, seemed to be shrivelling in her. She shivered, put out her hands and wavered on her feet.
“Dio!” she said in a low voice. “You, the wicked milord!”
Gordon, in aching misery, stretched out his arms toward her, though he saw her eyes were closed, with a broken word that was lost in a tumult, as a gigantic form plowed through the circle, a form from whose rush maskers fell away like tenpins.
It was Tita, enraged, bull-like. He gathered the crumpling, veilless figure in his arms, thrust his burly shoulder against the crowd and bore her quickly to the water-stairs where lay the dark gondola.
He set her on the cushions and plied the oar till it smoked in its socket.
The bright canals fled by—she had not moved. By darker passages he went now and very slowly, threading stagnant unlighted alleys. The way opened out, a swish of trailing tendrils swept across the oar—they were under a vine-trellised bridge. The lampless gondola crept along the wall, stole with sudden swiftness across a patch of moonbeams and darted into the shadowy water-gate.
Tita had thought the canal quite deserted. But beyond the moonlight another craft had been drowsing by. The old man under its tenda had been musing on the loveliness of a girl within those walls whom he should soon possess, and with her a dowry, set aside at her birth, which the waning fortunes of her family had preserved intact. He saw the dark bulk shoot into the gilded water-gate and peered out.
THE ILLUSION OF A HALO WAS INSTANT AND AWE-INSPIRING. p. [215].