Then mounting, his hand holding her bridle, they rode into the velvety dark.
Old Elise, tearfully watching the Ravenna Road, heard horses coming from the villa grounds. From the selvedge of the hedge, she saw the faces of Teresa and Gordon, pallid in the starlight.
The old woman’s breath failed her. All the servants’ tales of the Englishman, whom she had seen at the casa, recurred to her superstitious imagination. He was a fiend, carrying off the dead body of her mistress!
She crouched against the ground, palsied with fright, till the muffled hoof-beats died away. Then she rose and ran, stumbling with fear, to the house.
As Gordon and Teresa rode through the azure gloom of the Italian night, a girlish moon was tilting over the distant purple of the mountains, beyond whose many-folded fastnesses lay Tuscany and Pisa. Her weakness had passed and she kept her saddle more certainly. The darkness was friendly; before the sun rose they would be beyond pursuit.
As the villa slipped behind them and the odorous forest shut them round, Gordon rode closer and clasped her in his arms with a rush of joy, straining her tight to him, feeling the fervid beating of her heart, his own exulting with the fierce, primordial flame of possession.
“Mine!” he cried. “My very own at last—now and always.”
CHAPTER XLVIII
THE ALL OF LOVE
Spring, the flush wooer, was come again. The prints of gentian showed where his blue-sandalled feet had trod, and the wild plum and cherry blooms announced the earth his bride. In the tranquil streets of Pisa, where the chains of red-liveried convicts toiled not, young grass sprouted. Beneath a sky serenely, beautifully blue, the yellow Arno bore its lazy sails under still bridges and between bright houses, green-shuttered against the sun. Round about lay new corn-fields busy with scarlet-bodiced peasants, forests and hills sagy-green with olive, and further off the clear Carrara peaks and the solemn hoary Apennines. At night a breeze fragrant as wood-smoke, cooling the myrtle hedges flecked with the first pale-green meteors of the fireflies.
The few English residents had long grown used to the singular figure of Shelley, beardless and hatless, habited like a boy in stinted jacket and trousers—that mild philosopher at war with the theories of society; a fresher divertissement had stirred them when the old Lanfranchi Palace, built by Michael Angelo, on the Lung’ Arno, was thrown open in the autumn for a new occupant—a man whose striking face and halting step made him marked. The news flew among the gossips in a day.