Dr. Nott’s service had been well advertised, and a pardonable curiosity to gain a view, however limited, of the palace’s interior, swelled the numbers. Besides this, one of the Lanfranchi servants had had an unlucky fracas with a police sergeant which, within a few hours of its occurrence, rumor had swollen to a formidable and bloody affray: Gordon had mortally wounded two police dragoons and taken refuge in his house, guarded by bulldogs; he had been captured after a desperate resistance; forty brace of pistols had been found in the palace. These tales had been soon exploded, but the affair nevertheless possessed an interest on this Sunday afternoon.
The pair at the window conversed on various topics: Pietro, the new member of the household, and his rescue in Lake Geneva, of which Mary had told Teresa; Prince Mavrocordato, his patron, exiled from Wallachia, and watching eagerly the plans of the primates, now shaping to revolution, in Greece, his native country; Shelley’s new sail-boat, the Ariel, anchored at the river-bank, a stone’s throw from where they sat. As they talked they could hear from the adjoining study Gordon’s voice reading aloud and the sharp, eager, explosive tones of Shelley as he commented or admired.
Both watchers at length fell silent. The sight of the people below, soberly frocked and coated, so unmistakably British in habiliment and demeanor, had brought pensive thoughts to Mary Shelley of the England and Sabbaths of her girlhood. Teresa was thinking of Gordon.
Since the hour he had learned that melancholy news from Bagnacavallo he had not spoken of Allegra, but there had been a look in his face that told how sharply the blow had pierced.
If there had been a lurking jealousy of his past in which she had no part, it had vanished forever when he had said, with that patient pathos that wrung her heart: “I understand.” The words then had roused in her something even deeper than the maternal instinct that had budded when she took him wounded to Casa Guiccioli, deeper than the utter joy with which she had felt his arms as they rode through the night from the villa where he had waked her from that death-like coma. It was a sense of more intimate comprehension to which her whole being had vibrated ever since.
Not but that she was conscious of straggles in him that she did not fully grasp. But to-day, as she sat silent by the window, her heart was saying: “His old life is gone—gone! I belong to his new life. I will love him so that he will forget! We shall live always in Italy together, and he will write poems that the whole world will read. And some day it will know him as I do!”
The sound of a slow hymn rose from the floor below, and Teresa’s companion stole to the hall where the words came clearly up the marble staircase:
“O spirit of the living God,
In all Thy plenitude of grace,
Where’er the foot of man hath trod.