In the room from which Trevanion had rushed, Teresa put her hand on her brother’s arm. Back of Gordon’s only words and his own involuntary and unexpected action, she had divined some joyful circumstance of which she was ignorant. What it was she was too relieved to care.
“Come,” she said gently; “we have much to say to each other.”
She sent one swift glance at Gordon; then the door closed between them.
CHAPTER L
CASSIDY FINDS A LOST SCENT
On Gordon, in the shock of the fatal news Teresa had brought, the menace of that fateful onslaught had fallen numbly. No issue at that moment would have mattered greatly to himself. But in her piteous cry: “You are aiming at my heart,” he had awakened. That parting glance, shining with fluctuant love, relief and assurance, told him what that tragedy might have meant to her. Absorbed in his grief he had scarcely cared, had scarcely reckoned, of her.
As he stood alone the thought stung him like a sword. He remembered with what tenderness she had tried to blunt the edge of her mournful message.
His reverie passed with the entrance of Fletcher, still uncertain on his feet, and with a look of vast relief at the placid appearance of the apartment. A messenger brought a request from the Rev. Dr. Nott, a name well-known to Gordon in London. The clergyman, just arrived in Pisa, asked the use of the ground floor of the Lanfranchi Palace—he understood it was unoccupied—in which to hold service on the following Sunday.
Over the smart of his sorrow, the wraith of a satiric smile touched Gordon’s lips. He, the unelect and unregenerate, to furnish a tabernacle for Pisan orthodoxy? The last sermon he had read was one preached by a London divine and printed in an English magazine; its text was his drama of “Cain,” and it held him up to the world as a denaturalized being, who, having drained the cup of sensual sin to its bitterest dregs, was resolved, in that apocalypse of blasphemy, to show himself a cool, unconcerned fiend.
And yet, after all, the request was natural enough. The palace that housed him was the most magnificent in Pisa, in proportions almost a castle. And, in fact, the lower floor was empty and unused. Was he to mar this saner existence, in which he felt waking those old inspirations and ideals, with the crude spirit of combativeness in which his bruised pride took refuge when popular clamor thrust him from his kind? If he refused, would not the very refusal be made a further weapon against him?