“The character of the author’s life permits with difficulty a just appreciation of his genius. Scarcely any one compassionates the suffering which cries out laboriously in his poems, since it arises from the phantoms of his own evil acts which trouble him. When a gold and impetuous youth, he stole the affections of a Florentine lady of quality. Her husband discovered the affair and slew his wife. But the murderer on the next night was found stabbed to death on the street, nor was there any one save the lover on whom it seemed suspicion could attach. The poet removed from Florence, but these unhappy spirits have haunted his whole life since.”
He raised his eyes from the page. Her face was turned away, her hand pulling up the grass-spears in a pathetic apprehension.
“Teresa,” he said in a smothered voice; “it is not true. I have never been in Florence.”
“I knew—I knew!” she cried, and all her soul looked into his. She had not really credited. But the tangible allegation, coming at the moment when her heart was wrenched with that convent discovery and warped from its orbit of instinct, had dismayed and disconcerted her. The balm she had longed for was not proof, it was only reassurance.
He closed the magazine. The feeling that had choked his utterance was swelling in his throat. For the rest of the world he cared little, but for her!
She leaned toward him, her eyes shining. “I know how you have suffered! You have not deserved it. I have learned so much, since I saw you last, of your life in England!”
His tone shook. “Have you learned all? That my wife left me in the night and robbed me of my child? That society shut its doors upon me? That I was driven from London like a wild beast—a scapegoat at which any man might cast a stone?”
“Yes,” she breathed, “all that, and more! I have not understood it quite, for our Italy is so different. But you have helped me understand it now! It was like this.”
She picked up the Bible from where it had fallen and turned the pages quickly. “Listen,” she said, and began to read:
“And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats.... But the goat on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.