CHAPTER XXVIII
THE HAUNTED MAN
The majestic gateway of the Palazzo Mocenigo was dark as Gordon entered save for the single lamp always lit at nightfall. Fletcher served his master’s supper in the great upper room, but to-night, as too often happened, it was scarcely tasted. Long after the valet had retired, his watchful ear heard the uneven step pacing up and down, up and down, on the echoing floor.
A restless mood was upon Gordon, the restlessness of infinite yearning and discontent. He was tasting anew the gall and wormwood of self-reproach.
He had felt the touch of Teresa’s hand as it lay against the couch in that squalid room—had known it trembled—and the low words she had spoken in the street, standing, as it seemed to him, with that forest shrine ever for background, were still in his ears.
He had seen her but twice, for but a few brief moments. Once she had come to him on the wings of a prayer; and again to-day over the hurt body of a child. Each meeting had touched the raw nerve in him which had first throbbed to anguish at sight of her miniature. Each time he had heard a voice call to him as if it were the ghost of some buried thing he had one day known and lost, speaking a tongue sweet though untranslatable.
Hours went by. Gordon’s step flagged. He approached the desk on which were scattered distraught leaves of manuscript, blotted and interlined. He swept these into his hand and read for a moment. Beneath the outer crust of flippancy and satire a strange new development had begun. But the mental habit had persisted strong during the moral bouleversement, as the polar glaze spreads its algid mockery above the warm currents of an Arctic spring. How his muse had bemocked him, he thought. A drama of madness, whose dramatis personae were magicians and spirits of the nether world—stanzas hovering between insane laughter and heart-broken sobs, between supplications and blasphemies—cantos whose soul was license, though their surpassing music thrilled like the laughter of a falling Lucifer!
He flung the sheets down, went to the window and threw it open, leaning out across the balcony that hung over the canal. It was a night of Italian sorcery, the sky an infinite wistaria canopy nailed with white-blown stars; of musical water shimmering into broken bits of moon; of misty silver air. Around and beneath him spread the enchanted city, a marvel of purple and mother-of-pearl, a jewel in verd and porphyry. Gondolas, dim in the muffled shadow, or ablaze with strung lanterns and echoing with tinkling virginals and softer laughter, glided below, on their way to the masked ball of the Cavalchina. The fleeting thrill, the bubble pageant; what did they all—what did anything mean now for him?
Looking out, Gordon’s gaze went far. He had a vision of England as he had last seen it across the jasper channel—green fields and white cliffs in a smother of vapors; of London with its pomp, its power, its calumnies, its wicked magical vitality. And he spoke to it, murmuring sentences not sneering now, but broken with a stranger soft emotion:
“What you have done—you island of home! If I could tell you! I had the immortal flame—the touch of the divine! It was mine—all mine, for the world! You took me—my boyhood and embittered it, my youth and debauched it, my manhood and robbed it! You jeered my first songs and it stung me, and when I cried out in pain, you laughed and flattered. When you tired of me, you branded me with this mark and cast me out!” He turned again to the desk where lay the manuscript. “What I write now has the mark of the beast! It is the seraph’s song with the satyr laugh cutting up through it, and the cloven hoof of the devil of hatred that will not down in me! And yet I wrote the poem that she loves! I wrote that—I! My God! It was only two years ago! And now—shall I never hear that voice singing in my soul again? Shall I never write so again? Never—never—never?”
A pungent, heavy smell of flowers filled his nostrils. He turned from the window, quivering. Fletcher had entered behind him and was arranging a mass of blooms in a bowl.
The Fornarina! She had returned from Naples, then. It was her barbaric way of announcing her coming, for she could not write. She had been absent a month—how much had happened in that month!
The man, with the excoriate surface of recollection exposed, with the quick of remorse bid open, suddenly could not bear it. He threw a cloak about him and went rapidly down to the water-stairs.
The gondolier came running to the steps, catching up the long oar as he sprang to position.
“Whither, Excellence?” he asked.
A burst of music, borne on the air across roofs and up echoing canals, came faintly to Gordon from the far-away Square of St. Mark.
“To the Piazza,” he said.