As they strolled among the dahlias, straight and tall as the oleanders in the river beds of Greece, she told him of her father’s last hours, and her life in the villa, brightened only by Tita’s daily visits from the casa.
“What have you been writing?” she questioned. “Has it been ‘Don Juan?’”
He shook his head. The hope she had expressed—that he would some day finish it more worthily—had clung to him like ivy. With an instinct having its root deeper than his innate hatred of hypocrisy, he had forwarded the earlier cantos whose burning she had prevented to John Murray in London for publication. This instinct was not kin to the bravado with which he had sent “Cain” from Venice; it was a crude but growing prescience that he must one day stand before the world by all he had written and that the destruction even of its darker pages would mutilate his life’s volume. But he had not yet continued the poem. Thinking of this he sighed before he asked her:
“Have you read all the books I sent?”
“Many of them. But I liked this”—she touched the “Romeo and Juliet”—“most of all.”
“It is scarce a tale for sad hours,” he said, laying his hand over hers on the slim leather.
Her fingers crept into his, as she went on earnestly: “The stone you brought from Verona makes it seem so true! Do you suppose it really happened so? What do you think was the potion the monk gave her?”
“A drachm of mandragora, perhaps. That is said to produce the cataleptic trance. I wish Juliet’s monk mixed his drafts in Ravenna now,” he added with a touch of bitterness; “I shall often long for such a nepenthe before the next moon, Teresa.”
He felt her fingers quiver. The thought of the coming long month shook her heart. “You will go from Ravenna before that,” she whispered, “shall you not?”
“From the casa, perhaps. Not from near you. The day you left Casa Guiccioli I had made up my mind to leave Italy. But now—now—the only thing I see certainly is that I cannot go yet. Not till the skies are brighter for you.”