“I will let you know as soon as I find a place,” he said. “Of course I wish to support myself, to be removed from all society, except those persons whom I must see, and to wait my time in penance. You understand it all, Annette. I no longer exist in the ordinary life of men. I am either in purgatory or in hell—I do not yet feel sure which.”
He was going away, but turned at a little distance, and looked at her once again. “My dear,” he said faintly, “good-by!”
She could not utter a word, could only clasp her hands over her face, and so lose his last glance. For as he spoke that farewell, and as she heard his retreating step, the door of her sealed and frozen heart burst open, and her dead love, stirring uneasily in its grave during these last days, rose up stronger than ever before, and resumed the throne it was never again to abdicate. There, at last, was a man worth loving!
The next evening she received his new address; and he added: “I shall be out to-morrow, and the padrona will admit you, if you wish to come.”
Of course she went; but, what had not been to her a matter of course, the place pleased her. The house was in an old and crowded part of the city, where the streets swarmed with poor people; but the room was at the very top, in an odd corner quite removed from noise and communication with any other apartment, and had an eastern and a northern window that looked off over palace roofs and through towers and domes to the beautiful mountains. Close to its southern wall pressed a church tower, and on a level with its windows rose the sculptured façade, wreathed with angels. Once there, one might easily forget the steep, dark stair, the squalid street below, and even the bare walls and floor of the room itself.
Annette had not allowed herself to bring any article of comfort, still less of adornment, though her heart had ached with longing to do so. But she placed a beautiful crucifix on the one poor table, and left a volume of lives of saints beside it. A bunch of roses hung at her belt, and her fingers lingered on them in doubt for a moment. But she checked that impulse also. How much might roses breathe of woman's presence there and all the graces and sweetnesses of life! But before leaving, she hung over an arm of the crucifix a single small bud, where the petals showed like a drop of blood oozing through the green.
As she was placing this last souvenir, her tears dropping over flowers and cross, there was a sound as though a hurricane should draw in its breath before blowing, the floor of the room trembled, then there came a tremendous and reverberating stroke. The great bell in the tower was striking the hour of noon, and the chamber shook as a bird's nest shakes when a storm sweeps over the tree in which it is built. For the moment everything in the universe was obliterated but sound. She breathed its tremulous waves, she was enveloped and borne up by its strong tide; the very sunshine and the blue of the sky were like bright, resounding tones. Then the stroke ceased; and, circling round and round in fainting rings, the music of the bells went out to join the music of the spheres, perhaps to creep with a golden ripple up the shores of heaven.
The woman who had opened the door wondered much to see the pale signora come down with a face flushed with weeping; but a liberal gift disposed her to think the best of everything.
“You must be very good to him, and not allow any one to intrude,” Annette said to her. “I shall come to the church here below every morning at seven o'clock; and if he should be ill, or any accident should happen to him, I wish you to come there and tell me. But you must not talk to him. Speak to him only when he asks you to.”
That evening she wrote to her mother: “Lawrence has left me, and is in the arms of God. That is all I can say, except that I trust he has won a perfect forgiveness.