“I will saddle and fetch a horse for you to the chapel door.”
She was feeling the sharp edge of fear again. “I shall be quite strong presently,” she assured him. “Let us wait no longer.”
He went noiselessly to the stables. He had dreaded meeting some one, but old Elise, beside herself with grief, had run to watch for those who should come from Ravenna, and the rest of the servants, dazed by the calamity, were huddled in the kitchen. Leading the horse, Gordon returned speedily.
He put his arms about Teresa in the chapel doorway for an instant and held her close. He was feeling a call he had never felt before, the call that nature and civilization have planted in man deep as the desire for offspring, the song of the silver-singing goddess, whose marble image, on the night he had made that fatal trothing with Annabel, had been blackened by his thrown ink-well—Vesta, the personification of the hearthstone, of home.
Teresa suddenly meant that to him. Home! Not such a one as he had known at Newstead Abbey, with Hobhouse and Sheridan and Moore. Not a gray moated pile wound with the tragic fates of his own blood—a house of mirth, but not of happiness! Not like the one in Piccadilly Terrace, where he had lived with Annabel that one year of fever and heart-sickness and fading ideals! No, but a home that should be no part of his past; a nook enisled, where spying eyes might not enter, where he should redeem those barren pledges he had once made to life, in the coin of real love.
“Teresa,” he said, “from the journey we begin this hour there can be no return. It is out of the world you have lived in and known! If there were any other way for you—save that one—”
“My life!” she whispered.
The soft-voiced passion of her tenderness thrilled him. “You go to exile,” he went on, “to an alien place—”
“There is no exile, except from you, nor alien place where you are! The world that disowns you may cast me out—ah, I shall be glad!”
He laughed a low laugh of utter content. Lightly as if she had been a child, he lifted her into the saddle. Supporting her at first, he led the horse over the turf and into the driveway where his own waited.