The news was soon told. Her father had had a syncope at daybreak and the doctor was then with him.
Tita did not tell her the whole: she did not learn till she reached the villa that Count Gamba, suspected of fomenting the revolution, had received notice from the government to quit Romagna within ten days.
CHAPTER XLIII
ONE GOLDEN HOUR
“To-day—to-day!” Teresa’s heart said. “To-day he will come!”
Just a month ago she had left Casa Guiccioli forever; now she sat in the fountained garden of the Gamba villa, a few miles from Ravenna, rose-pale, cypress-slender, her wanness accentuated by the black gown she wore—the habit of mourning. The sentence of exile against Count Gamba had never been carried out; a greater than Austria had intervened. Since that morning when a servant had found him unconscious among the cold retorts of his laboratory, clasping the decree that had broken his heart, he had revived, but only to fail again. The end had come soon. A week ago Teresa had followed him to the narrow home over which no earthly power claimed jurisdiction.
As she sat, drenched with the attar of the September afternoon, in her lap the “Romeo and Juliet” which Gordon had given her on their last meeting, gladness crept goldenly through her grief. The book had lain on the arbor bench during the night, and this morning she had found a letter written on its blank title-page. For the hundredth time she perused it now:
“I have found this book in your garden and re-read it in the moonlight. You were absent, or I could not have done so. Others would understand these words if I wrote them in Italian, but you will interpret them in English. You will recognize, too, the handwriting of one who loves you and will divine that over any book of yours he can think only of that fact. In that word, beautiful in all languages, but most so in yours—amor mio—is comprised my existence here and hereafter. My destiny has rested with you, and you are a woman, nineteen years of age, and but two out of a convent. Fate has separated us, but to weigh this is now too late. I love you and cannot cease to love you. Will you think of me if the Alps and the ocean divide us? Ah,—but they never can unless you wish it!”
This letter had been wrung from him by the thought of idle loss and loneliness in which he could not comfort her; beneath its few words lay the strain and longing of the old struggle. He had told himself at first that her separation could make no difference with his going. But now she was alone, bereft, saddened. If he went, could she love him any the less? So he had wrestled as Jacob wrestled with the angel.
As Teresa read, a moving shadow fell on the page. She looked up to see him coming between the clipped yew hedges. In another moment he had caught her hands in his.
“How you have suffered!” he said, his gaze searching her face, to which a glad flush had leaped.