There came a week for Teresa when Paolo was summoned to Faenza, whither her husband had gone two days before. The espionage of the casa relaxed, and on her birthday, with Tita on the box, she drove alone through the afternoon forest to the Bagnacavallo convent with a gift for the Mother Superior, the only mother her childhood had known.
When she issued from the gate again she carried her birthday gift, a Bible, and a German magazine given her by the nun who had taught her that tongue. In her heart she bore a far heavier burden, for in that hour she had held a child in her arms and listened to a story that had sunk into her soul. Her face was deathly white and her limbs dragged.
Calling to Tita to wait, she left the road and climbed a path that zigzagged up a wooded knoll overlooking the narcissus-scented valley and the hurrying river that flowed past the convent walls. The briers tore her hands, but she paid no heed, climbing breathlessly.
The sparser crown of the hillock was canopied by shaggy vine-festoons and dappled by the shadow-play of firs, whose aged roots were covered with scalloped fungus growths. As a child this had been her favorite spot. With one of these giant tree-fungi for a seat she had loved to day-dream, gazing down across the convent inclosure and the stream that flowed silverly on, past Ravenna, to the sea. She stood a moment knee-deep in the bracken, her form tense with suffering, then dropped the books on the ground and throwing herself down, burst into tears. She wept long and passionately, in utter desolation.
She had listened to the Superior’s story with her face buried in the child’s frock, now burning, now drenched with cold. The touch had given her a wild delight and yet an agony unfathomable. As she lay and wept, tenderness and torture still mingled inextricably in her emotions. She knew now why Gordon had been in Ravenna that spring day. He had told the truth; it had been with no thought of her.
A sudden memory of his words in the casa garden came with sickening force: “By a tie that holds me, and by a bond you believe in, I have no right to stand here now.” Was this the tie he had meant? Not the unloving wife in England, but the mother of this child—a later, nearer one? When he had come that once to her, was it at best out of pity? Did he love this other woman? Was this why she herself had seen him no more?
Before the acute shaft of this pain the facts she had learned of his life in London fell unheeded. They belonged to that far dim past that he had forsaken and that had forsaken him! But the one fact she knew now had to do with his present, here in Italy—the present that held her! She was facing for the first time in her life the hydra, elemental passion—jealousy. And in the grip of its merciless talons everything of truth in her wavered.
For a moment she lost hold on her own heart, her instinct, her trust in Gordon’s word, the faith that had returned to her at San Lazzarro. What if all—all—what the whole world said, what this magazine told of him—were true after all, and she, desolate and grieving, the only one deceived? What if it were! She drew the magazine close to her tear-swollen eyes, only to thrust it from her desperately.
“No, no!” she said. “Not that! It is a lie! I will not believe it!”
In her anguish she sat up, flinging her hat aside, and leaned against a tree. Her glance fell on the great saffron fungus that jutted, a crumpled half-disk, above its roots. Into the brittle shiny surface words had been etched with a sharp point—lines in English, almost covering it. She began to read the unfamiliar tongue aloud, deciphering the words slowly at first, then with more confidence: