She framed his head in her arms, just touching his strong brown curling hair with its slender threads of gray. “I knew you cared. I knew you had been near me often. I found the flowers—and this note.”
“I have been here in the garden every night. I was here that one night, too—when you were first alone.”
Tears gathered in her eyes.
“It was the decree of exile that killed him,” she said slowly. “He loved Italy and hoped for what can never be. They say the uprising in the north has failed and all its chiefs are betrayed. That is the bitterness of it: it was for nothing after all that he died! Italy will not be free. You believe it cannot, I know.”
“Sometime,” he answered gently. “But not soon. Italy’s peasants are not fighting men like the Greeks; they lack the inspiration of history. But no man champions a great cause in vain. And now,” he asked, changing the subject, “what shall you do?”
“I have sent the news to my brother Pietro. Cavadja has lost his principality and Prince Mavrocordato is in flight from Wallachia. Pietro is with him. My letters must find and bring him soon. Till then I have Elise—she was my nurse. I shall be glad when Pietro comes. How long it is since I have seen him! He would not know me now. He has only my convent miniature to remind him!”
Gordon’s thought fled back to a day when he had swum for the brother’s life and found that pictured ivory. Fate had played an intricate game. He would more than once have told her of that incident but for another hounding memory—the recollection of the mad fit of rage in which he had ground the miniature under his heel. He could not tell her that!
“I know why you have stayed on at the casa,” she said; “that it is for my sake, to spare me idle tongues. Yet I have been so afraid for you. You would never go armed!”
“I am in small danger,” he smiled. “Fletcher, and Tita whom you left me for body-guard, watch zealously. One or the other is always under foot. One would think I were Ali Pasha himself.”
He spoke half-humorously, trying to coax the smile back to her lips. He did not tell her with what danger and annoyances his days had been filled: that police spies, in whose assiduity he recognized the work of her husband and Trevanion, shadowed his footsteps; that to excite attempts at his assassination the belief had even been disseminated that he was in league with the Austrians. Nor did he tell her that this very morning Fletcher had found posted in the open market-place a proclamation too evidently inspired by secret service agents, denouncing him as an enemy to the morals, the literature and the politics of Italy. He had long ago cautioned Tita against carrying her news of these things.