The padre had been nonplussed at the quick movement and its result. Gordon could not surmise what the whispered words had been, but at Teresa’s paleness he felt his muscles grow rigid.
To her accuser her agitation meant but one thing. He released her wrist with a cracked laugh, distempered jealousy convulsing his features. He hissed one word at her—“Wanton!”
The syllables were live coals flung upon her breast. She cried out and put her hands to her ears as if to shut out the sound.
At that epithet and her cry, Gordon’s countenance turned livid. His fingers hardened to steel. The air swam red. But the girl divined; she sprang before him and laid her fingers on his arm. His hands dropped to his sides; he remembered suddenly that his antagonist was aged, decrepit. What had he been about to do?
For one heart-beat Teresa held Gordon’s glance. When she faced her distraught husband, her eyes were like blue-tempered metal. Those weeks of baffled quest had been slipping the leash of girlhood. That one word had left her all a woman. Her lips were set, and resentment had drenched her cheeks with vivid color.
“Signore,” she said, “I would to God it were still yesterday!”
She turned, and went proudly down the path by which she had come.
The old man had not moved. Now he raised his stick and struck Gordon with it across the brow. A white mark sprang where it fell, but the other did not lift his hand. Then Teresa’s husband, with an imprecation, spat on the ground at the friar’s feet and followed her toward the gondolas.
The whole scene had been breathless and fate-like. To the padre, it was a flurry of hellish passions loosed from the pit. The storm past, still shocked from the violence of its impact, his mind wrestled with a doubt. His first glance at the faces of the man and the woman, as he emerged from the gate, had been full of suggestion. They had not seemed to spell guilt, yet could he tell? What had been the husband’s whispered charge? Was the bearing of the woman, which seemed to mirror innocence, really one of guile? The man here before him, accused of what specious crimes he could only guess! Why had he come to the monastery? Had there been, indeed, more than chance in this encounter at the shrine?
He looked at Gordon, but the latter, staring out with a gaze viewless and set across the lagoon, seemed unconscious of the scrutiny. “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers!” That had been the monastery’s creed. Aye, but if it should be entertaining an angel of evil unawares? He thought of the lifted stone—the man’s hand had just now dropped it back into place at his approach. He remembered that when he called Gordon from the gate on the morning of his coming, he had seen him bending over the shrine. The fact seemed to disclose significance. Had this stranger used that holy emblem to further a clandestine and sinful tryst? Had he hidden an endearing message there for the wife to find to-day if he should be observed?