In the words was not now the arrogant and passionate hostility of the old George Gordon. There was the deadly quietness of grief, but also something more. In that moment of numbing intelligence it was borne in upon him with searing force, that death, perhaps, had acted not unkindly, that it had chosen well. What perils might that young life have held, springing from those lawless elements compounded in her nature: recklessness, audacity, the roving berserker foot, contempt for the world’s opinion, demoniac passions of hatred and reprisal? The subtle, unerring divination of death had taken her in youthfulness, a heavened soul, from the precincts of that past of his to which nothing pure should have a mortal claim.
So he thought, as feeling Teresa’s arms about him, his lips repeated more slowly and with a touch of painful resignation—the first he had felt in all his life:
“I understand!”
That was all. He was looking out across the mistily-moving Arno, silent, his hand on her bowed head. She lifted it after a time, feeling the silence acutely. Her eyes, swimming with changeless love and pitying tenderness, called his own.
At the wordless appeal, a swift rush of unshed tears burned his eyelids. “Death has done his work,” he said in a low voice. “Time, perhaps, may do his. Let us mention her no more.”
Just then both heard a noise on the stairway—the choked voice of Fletcher and a vengeful oath.
Teresa sprang to her feet with a sharp exclamation.
Gordon rose and threw open the door.
CHAPTER XLIX
“YOU ARE AIMING AT MY HEART!”
The two men who burst into the room had been intimately yet appositively connected with Gordon’s past. One had tried to take his life with a Malay kriss; the life of the other Gordon had once saved. They were Trevanion and Count Pietro Gamba, Teresa’s brother.