Several troopers passed along the roadway; following were two closed carriages. While she listened the wheels seemed to stop.
“It is the Mother Superior come from Bagnacavallo,” she thought. As she sprang up, she heard old Elise calling. Slipping the “Romeo and Juliet” into her pocket, she went hastily into the house.
Five minutes later she stood dumb and white before three persons in the villa parlor. Two were nuns wearing the dress of the order of St. Ursula. The other she had recognized—he had visited her father in his illness—as chaplain to the Cardinal of Ravenna. A letter bearing the papal arms, dropped from her hand, lay at her feet. What it contained but one other in Ravenna besides the cardinal knew: that was the military commandant who had furnished the ecclesiastic his escort of troopers disposed outside the villa, and who at that moment was walking on another errand, straight toward a musket, filed half down, waiting on a casa roof.
“We must start without delay, Contessa.” The clerical’s voice fell half-compassionately. “The villa and its servants remain at present under the vice-legate’s care. By direction, nothing may be taken with you save suitable apparel for the journey. We go only as far as Forli to-night.”
Teresa scarcely heard. Haste—when such a little time before she had been so happy! Haste—to bid farewell now to the world that held him? In her father’s death she had met the surpassing but natural misfortune of bereavement. This new blow brought a terror without presage or precedent, that seemed to grip her every sense. The convent of Saint Ursula! Not a home such as she had known at Bagnacavallo, a free abode of benignant phantom-footed monitors, but a forced retreat, a prison, secret and impregnable.
What could she do? What could she do? The question pealed in her brain as she answered dully, conscious all the time of a stinging sense of detail: the chaplain facing her; the silent religieuses beside him; the wrinkled face of Elise peering curiously from the hall; out of doors goldening sunlight, men’s voices conversing and the stamping of horses’ hoofs. Not even to see him—to tell him!
As she climbed the stair mechanically, a kind of dazed sickness in her limbs, she pictured Gordon’s returning at the hour’s end to find her gone forever. She sat down, her hands clenched, the nails striking purple crescents in the palms, striving desperately to think. If she could escape!
She ran to the window—a trooper stood smoking a short pipe at the rear of the villa. She went to the staircase and called: “Elise!”
A nun ascended the stair. “The servants are receiving His Eminence’s instructions,” she explained. “Pray let me help you.”
Teresa began to tremble. She thanked her with an effort and automatically set about selecting a few articles of clothing. The apathy of hopelessness was upon her.