The feminine touch in tone and gesture brought Gordon at one time a smile and a pang. It had not occurred to him that Shakespeare could be unknown to her. “All Englishmen love her,” he said gravely; “she was one of the great lovers of the world. She died five hundred years ago.”
Her face was flushed more deeply now. “Will you tell me about her?”
Sitting there, the revelation of the early morning enfolding them, he told her the undying story of those tragic loves and deaths that the great Anglo-Saxon gave to all ages.
“There were two noble families in Verona,” he began, “who for generations had been at enmity—the Capulets and the Montagues. Juliet was the daughter of Lord Capulet. She was so beautiful her fame went throughout the country. Romeo, scion of the house of Montague, heard of her beauty, and to see it, went masked to a fête given by her father. Among the Veronese ladies, he saw one who shone amid the splendor like a jewel in an Ethiop’s ear. They danced together, and he kissed her hand. Not till they parted did either know the other was an enemy. That night, Romeo, unable to stay from the house where he had left his heart, scaled the wall of its garden and they plighted troth upon her balcony. Next day they were secretly married by a monk whom Romeo had prevailed upon.
“There had been one, however, who, beneath his mask, recognized the uninvited guest—a nephew of Lord Capulet himself. He kept silence then, but the day of the marriage he met Romeo, forced a quarrel, and was killed by him. For this, Romeo was sentenced to banishment. That night he gained Juliet’s chamber from the garden. Only these few hours were theirs; at dawn he fled to Mantua, till the monk could make public their marriage.
“Lord Capulet meanwhile had selected another for Juliet’s husband and bade her prepare for the nuptials. She dared not tell the truth, and in her extremity appealed to the monk. He counselled her to consent to her father’s plans, and on the night before the marriage to drink the contents of a phial he gave her. The potion, he told her, would cause a death-like trance, in which apparently lifeless state she should be laid in the family vault. Thither he would bring Romeo in the night and she should awaken in his arms.”
Teresa’s eyes had grown brighter. The lovers’ meeting among the maskers, the garden trothing and the constrained marriage seemed somehow to fit her own case. She leaned forward as he paused. “And she took the potion?”
“Yes. Love and despair gave her courage. It happened partly as the monk had said. But unluckily the news that Juliet was dead travelled to Mantua faster than his letters. Romeo heard, and heart-broken, came to Verona at midnight, broke open her tomb and swallowed poison by her side. A few moments later she awoke, saw the cup in his hand, and, guessing how it had befallen, unsheathed the dagger he wore and died also by her own hand. So the monk found them, and over their bodies the lords of Capulet and Montague healed the feud of their houses.”
The bruised petals of a rose Teresa had plucked fluttered down. “How she loved him!” she said softly.
He remembered that among the volumes in the portmanteau he had opened had been the “Romeo and Juliet,” which he had put into his pocket the night he left England. “I have the book,” he said rising; “I will give it to you.”