The storm-clouds were gone. An Italian spring was painting the hills with April artistry. Myrtle hedges had waked to childish green, lusty creepers swung callow tendrils, meadows were afire with the delicate, trembling anemone, and the rustling olive copses were a silver firmament of leaves. The immemorial pine woods that stretched about Ravenna, with the groves and rivers which Boccaccio’s pen had made forever haunted, were bathed in sun and noisy with winged creatures.
Under the boughs of the balsamic forest, through the afternoon, from the convent of Bagnacavallo into Ravenna, a wagonette had been driven. It had carried a woman, young, dark-haired and of Spanish type—she who once had ruled the greenroom of Drury Lane. Time had made slight change in Jane Clermont’s piquant beauty. A little deeper of tone and fuller of lip she was, perhaps a little colder of look; but her black eyes snapped and sparkled with all their old daring.
The convent road met the highway on the skirt of the town. At the juncture sat a prosperous osteria half surrounded by trellised arbors, blowsy with yellow snap-dragons and gilly-flowers, and bustling all day long with the transient travel of tourists, to whom Ravenna with its massive clusters of wide-eaved houses and dun-colored churches, its few streets of leisurely business, its foliaged squares and its colonnaded opera-house, were of less interest than the tomb of Dante. The inn held a commanding position. The post-road that passed its door curved southward toward Pisa; northward, it stretched to Venice. From both directions through Ravenna, lumbered diligence and chaise.
At the osteria the wagonette halted, made a detour and was finally drawn up in the shadow of the arbors where it was unobserved from the inn and yet had a screened view of both roads. For hours the vehicle sat there while the driver dozed, the occupant nesting her chin in her gloved hand and from time to time restlessly shifting her position.
Her patience was at last rewarded. Two men on horseback had paused at the cross-road. One was Shelley, astride the lank beast that had borne him from Pisa to Venice. The other was George Gordon.
“So he did come!” she muttered, peering through the screen of silver twigs. “I thought he would. I wonder what he will say when he finds I have changed my mind and settled Allegra’s affairs another way.”
She watched the pair as they parted. The dropping sun danced in tiny flashes from the brass buttons on Shelley’s blue coat. “Poor philosopher!” she soliloquized with pitying tolerance. “You are going back to your humdrum Pisa, your books and your Mary. The world attracts you no more now with your money than it did when we found you in the debtors’ prison. Well, every one to his taste! I wonder why you always troubled yourself about George Gordon.”
Her eyes narrowed as they lingered on the other figure, turning alone into the forest road from which her wagonette had come.
“I would like to see your lordship’s face when you get there!” she said half-aloud. “My authority is the convent’s now. You may take your daughter—if you can!”
Not till both riders were out of sight did the wagonette draw into the highway.