In a few moments more—a half-hour after Teresa’s letter had started on its way to the inn—his coach, with its six white horses, bearing Paolo, and followed by four of the casa servants afoot, was being driven thither by a roundabout course.
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE FACE AT THE WINDOW
The osteria, as Gordon approached, seemed gurgling with hilarity. At its side the huge unhitched diligence yawned, a dark hulk waiting for the morrow’s journey. Some of the passengers it had carried were gathered on the porch before the open windows, listening, with postures that indicated a more than ordinary curiosity and interest, to sounds from the tap-room. There were women’s forms among them.
Tourists were little to Gordon’s liking. They had bombarded his balcony at Diodati with spy-glasses, had ambushed him at Venice when he went to opera or ridotto. To him they stood for the insatiable taboo of public disesteem—the chuckling fetishism that mocked him still from beyond blue water. He skirted the inn in the shade of the cypresses and passed to an arbor which the angle of the building screened from the group.
On its edge he paused and gazed out over the fields and further forest asleep. With what bitterness he had ridden scarce three hours before from those woods! Now it was shot through with an arrow of cardinal joy whose very rankle was a painful delight. In the jar of conflicting sensations he had not reasoned or presaged; he could only feel.
What was the import of Teresa’s letter, he wondered. Much depended on it, she had said in that agitated moment. A thought flitted to him. The Contessa Albrizzi had lived much in Rome—was, he remembered, cousin to a cardinal. Could this message be an appeal for deliverance from an impossible position? Might Teresa yet be free; not from her marriage bond, but at least from this hourly torture in Casa Guiccioli? With the quick feeling of relief for her, wound a sharp sense of personal vantage. For him that would mean the right to see her often and unopposed. Yet, he argued instantly with self-reproach, was not this the sole right he could not possess, then or ever? What would it be but tempting her love on and on, only to leave it naked and ashamed at last?
A gust of noise rose behind him. It issued from a window opening out of the tap-room into the arbor. On the heels of the sound he caught shattered comments from the peering group on the front porch—feminine voices speaking English:
“I’ve always wanted to see him. We watched three whole days in Venice. How young he looks!”
“What a monster! And to think he is a peer and once wrote poetry. There! See—he’s looking this way!”
Gordon started and half turned, but he had not been observed; the angle of the wall hid him effectually.