But her puzzle fell away as she gazed out into the soft night with its peace and somnolent incense. From the garden below, where she and Gordon had sat, came the beat of a night-bird bending the poppies. Overhead tiny pale clouds drifted like cherry-blossoms in the breeze. Far off the moon dropped closer to the velvet clasp of the legend-haunted hills. To-night, foreboding seemed treason while her heart held that one meeting, as the sky the stars, inalienable, eternal. Gordon was safe, on his way to Venice, and with him was her letter—on which hung her hope for a papal separation,—all that was possible under the seneschalship of Rome.
At length she closed the shutter, knelt at the ivory crucifix that hung in a corner of the raftered chamber, and crept into bed.
She fell asleep with a curl—the one he had kissed—drawn across her lips.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
THE HEART OF A WOMAN
From the coming of Gordon on that unforgettable night to the garden, Teresa’s pulse began to beat more tumultuously. To offset the humiliation of her daily life indoors and the tireless surveillance in the person of Paolo of well-nigh her every excursion, she had the buoyant memory of that hour and the promise of her appeal to the Church’s favor. The three essentials of woman’s existence—love, hope and purpose—were now hers in spite of all.
More than one new problem perturbed her. There was the swarthy visitor coming and going mysteriously, closeted with her husband weekly. His strange entrance into the casa that day of all days—the stranger ruse that had been practised through him upon her—seemed to connect him in some occult, uncanny way with the man of whom, every hour of day and night, she mused and dreamed. Thinking of this, and weighing her husband’s hatred, at first she hoped Gordon would not return to Ravenna.
There had befallen another matter, too, which seemed to have absorbed much of the old count’s attention, and which, to her relief, took him from the city for days at a time.
Teresa knew what this matter was. In every visit to her father he had talked of it triumphantly—the rising of the Italian peoples and the breaking of the galling yoke of Austria. During this spring strange rumors had prevailed. Twice, morning had found placards posted on the city walls: “Up with the Republic!” and “Down with the Pope!” The foreign police were busy; houses were searched and more than one Ravennese was seized under suspicion of membership in the Carbonari, whose mystic free-masonry hid the secrets of enrolling bands and stores of powder. Knowledge of the sycophant part her husband was currently suspected of playing came to Teresa bit by bit, in sidelong looks, as her carriage rolled through the town, and more definitely from Tita. The Austrian wind blew strongest and Count Guiccioli trimmed his sails accordingly.
But replete with its one image, Teresa’s heart left small space to these things. Gordon’s face flushed her whole horizon. And as the empty weeks linked on, she began, in spite of her fears, to long passionately to see him again. That her letter had reached its destination she knew, for the Contessa Albrizzi paused an hour for a visit of state at the casa—on her way to Rome. But no word came from its bearer, and each day Tita returned from the osteria messageless.
She could not guess the struggle that had torn Gordon—the struggle between reasoning conscience and unreasoning desire—or how fiercely, the letter once delivered by Fletcher, he had fought down the longing to return to Ravenna, which held his child, and her. He had been able to aid her once, prompted Desire; she might need him again. If he stayed away in her trouble, what would she deem him? Suppose by chance she should hear of the orgy he had witnessed at the osteria? This reflection maddened him. “Yet,” Reason answered, “not to see her is the only safety. She is unhappy now; but can I—because life is ended for me—to bring her present comfort, run the risk of embittering her life further?” So he had argued.