“I swear,” he said in a stifled voice.
“Father, you hear?”
“I am witness,” said Count Gamba grimly.
CHAPTER XLI
ASHES OF DENIAL
Days went by. Summer was merging into full-bosomed autumn of turquoise heavens, more luscious foliage and ripening olives.
Gordon’s wound had proven deep, but luckily not too serious, thanks to a rough fragment of stone in his pocket, which the surgeon declared had turned the heavy blade, and which Teresa had covered with secret kisses and put carefully away. But to his weakness from loss of blood, a tertian ague had added its high temperature, and strength had been long in returning.
He had hours of delirium when Teresa and Fletcher—whom Tita had brought from Bologna with Gordon’s belongings—alternately sat by his bedside. Sometimes, then, he dictated strange yet musical stanzas which she was able to set down. It was a subconscious bubbling up from the silt-choked well of melody within him: a clouded rivulet, finding an unused way along turgid channels of fever.
More often Gordon seemed to be living again in his old life—with Hobhouse in the Greece that he had loved—in London at White’s club with Beau Brummell, or with Sheridan or Tom Moore at the Cocoa-Tree. At such times Teresa seemed to comprehend all his strivings and agonies, and wept tears of pity and yearning.
Often, too, he muttered of Annabel and Ada, and then the fierce jealousy that had once before come to her assailed her anew. It was not a jealousy now, however, of any one person; it was a stifling, passionate resentment of that past of his into which she could not enter, lying instinct and alive in some locked chamber of his brain to defy and outwit her.
Early in his betterment a subtle inducement not to hasten the going he knew was inevitable ambushed Gordon. He found folded in his writing tablet a six months’ lease of the apartments he occupied. The signature was his own, added, he readily guessed, during his fever. The stupendous rental with which the old count had comforted his covetous soul was a whet to the temptation. The thought to which he yielded, however, was the reflection that to depart without showing himself to Ravenna—whose untravelled gossips had made of his illness at the casa a topic of interest—would neither conceal the real situation nor make easier Teresa’s position. He prolonged his stay, therefore, riding with her at the hour of the corso in the great coach and six, and later appearing at the conversazioni of the vice-legate’s and at the provincial opera, to hear the “Barber of Seville” or Alfieri’s “Filippo.”