The castaway

Teresa stood chained with horror—the cry frozen on her lips. As the silver flash had flown she had seen a dark, oriental face disappear between the bracken and had recognized it.

Gordon had shuddered as the blow struck, then stood perfectly still, his arms about her. In that instant he remembered the scene he had witnessed at the Ravenna osteria, and his heart said within him: “Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?”

Her voice came then in a scream that woke the place and brought Tita rushing up the path.

When he reached them, her fingers had drawn out the wet blade and were striving desperately to stanch the blood with her handkerchief, as, white to the lips with pain, Gordon leaned against a tree. After that first cry, in which her whole being had sounded its terror, she had not spoken. Now she turned to Tita, who stood dumfounded.

“Tita, quickly! You and I must help his lordship to the road. He is wounded.”

“Teresa,”—Gordon sought for words through the dizziness that was engulfing him,—“leave me. My horse is in the edge of the forest. At Bologna I shall find a surgeon.”

“You cannot ride. It would kill you. My carriage is near the convent gate.”

He shook his head. “You have risked enough for me. Tita,—”

“He can bring the horse around,” she answered. “Come!” She drew one of Gordon’s arms about her shoulder, feeling him waver. “That is right—so!”

With Tita on the other side, they began the descent. She walked certainly along the difficult path, though every nerve was thrilling with agony, her mind one incessant clamor. At the expense of his own heart he had stayed away. And this was what their chance meeting to-day had brought him. This!

Gordon was breathing hard at the foot of the hill. He had fought desperately to retain consciousness, but a film was clouding his eyes.

“It is only a few steps now,” she said, “to the carriage.”

He stopped short.

“You must obey me,” she insisted wildly, her voice vibrating. “It is the only way! You must go to Ravenna!”

“Tita—bring my horse!”

It was the last stubborn flash of the will, fainting in physical eclipse. With the words his hand fell heavily from her shoulder and Tita caught him in his arms.

At a sign from Teresa, the servant lifted him into the carriage.

“Home!” she commanded, “and drive swiftly.”

Through the miles of rapid motion under the ebon shadows deepening to twilight she sat chafing Gordon’s hands, her eyes, widened with a great suspense, upon the broadening stain crimsoning his waistcoat.

In that interminable ride her soul passed through a furnace of transformation. The touch of his lips upon hers had been the one deathless instant of life’s unfolding. In that kiss she had felt poured out all the virginal freshness of a love renaissant and complete, no more to be withheld than a torrent leaping to the sea. But the awful instant that followed, with its first glimpse into the hideous limbo of possibilities, showed her all else that might lie in that love, of the irreparable, the disastrous, the infinitely terrifying. Her marriage had been a baleful bond of ring and book, seasoned with hate, empty of sanctity. His had been sunk somewhere in the black slough of the past, a stark dead thing. That they two should love each other—she had imagined no further. She had known her own heart, but that hour on the hill had been the complete surety that Gordon loved her fully in return.

Born of his extremity, there swelled in her now the wondrous instinct of the lioness that is a part of every woman’s love. It lent her its courage. All fear, save the one surpassing dread that gnawed her heart, slipped from her.

Dark fell before they reached the town, and in the quiet street the freight of the carriage was not noted. Before the entrance of Casa Guiccioli stood her father’s chaise.

Count Gamba met her in the hall, to start at her a strained look and at the pallid face of the man Tita carried—a face unknown to him. Paolo was behind him; by this she knew her husband was returned.

She scarcely heeded her father’s ejaculations. “Bring linen and water quickly to the large chamber in the garden wing,” she directed, “and send for Doctor Aglietti.”

Paolo went stealthily to inform his master.

When Count Guiccioli crossed the threshold of the candle-lighted room he came upon a strange scene. Teresa bent over the bed, her face colorless as a mask. Her father, opposite, to whom she had as yet told nothing, was tying a temporary bandage. Between them lay the inert form of the man against whom his own morbid rage had been amassing. His eyes flared. Where had she found him? Had Trevanion bungled or betrayed? Did she guess? And guessing, had she brought him to this house, in satanic irony, to die before his very sight?

At the suspicion the fever of his moody eyes flew to his face. His countenance became distorted. He burst upon them with a crackling exclamation: “The Venetian dog! Who has dared fetch him here?”

“Zitto!” said Count Gamba pettishly. “Don’t you see the man is wounded?”

“Wounded or whole, by the body of Bacchus! He shall go back to-night to Bologna!” He took a menacing step forward.

“How did you know he was lodged there?”

Teresa’s steely inquiry stayed him. She had lifted her face, calm as a white moon. He stopped, nonplussed.

“You had good reason to know.” She drew from her belt a Malay kriss, its blade stained with red. “This is what struck him. It belonged to you. Am I to learn what it means to bear the name of a murderer?”

Her father stared his amazement. “Dio santissimo!” he exclaimed. Was this why she had been so pale?

Before her movement her husband had shrunk involuntarily. “I knew nothing of it,” he said in a muffled fury; “I am just come from Faenza.”

“I saw whose hand struck the blow.” She spoke with deadly quietness. “I have seen him more than once under this roof. But whose was the brain? Who furnished him this weapon? It was gone from the arras the day after you brought him to the casa to be your sicario—to do what you dared not do yourself! Fool!” Her voice rose. “Do you think a peer of England common clay for your clean-handed bravos? Are English nobles stabbed abroad without an accounting to the last soldo? Do you suppose no Romagnan noble ever went to the fortress with confiscate estates? Is your reputation so clean that if he dies you think to escape what I shall say?”

A greenish hue had overspread the fiery sallow of the old count’s face, ghastly under the candles. She had touched two vulnerable points at once—cupidity and fear. Something, too, in what she said brought a swift unwelcome memory. He recalled another—a poet, also—Manzoni, the Italian, dead by a hired assassin in Forli years before; in the night sometimes still that man’s accusing look came before him. Beads of sweat started on his forehead.

“Cheeks of the Virgin!” cried Count Gamba, who had maintained a rigid silence. “Have you no word to this?”

“He was her lover! She knew where to find him to-day. It is not the first time. He was her lover before I married her.”

The other’s hands clenched. Teresa’s accusation had astonished and shocked him. But as he saw that cowering look, speaking its own condemnation, he credited for the first time the story of that other slain man. At this affront, his gaunt, feeble form straightened with all the dignity and pride of his race.

Teresa’s answer rang with a subtle, electric energy. “That is false! You never asked—you only accused. Believing all falsehood of me, you have made every day of my life in your house a separate purgatory. I have kept silent thus long, even to my father. Now I speak before him. Father,” she said with sudden passion, “he has believed this since my wedding day. There is scarcely an hour since then that he has not heaped insult and humiliation upon me. I will bear it no longer! I have already appealed to the Curia.”

Her eyes transfixed her husband. “By the law I may not leave your roof to nurse this man, so I have brought him here. What you have believed of myself and of him is false. But now, if you will hear the truth, I will tell you! I do love him! I love him as I love my life—and more, the blessed Virgin knows!—a million times more!”

As she spoke her passion made her beauty extraordinary. It smote her father with appealing force and with a pang at his own ambitious part in her wedding. He had thought of rank and station, not of her happiness.

“You shall answer to me, Count, for this!” he said sternly.

“No, father!”

Count Gamba looked at her questioningly. He faced Count Guiccioli as Teresa went on:

“This is what I demand. If he lives he shall stay here till he is well. Not as a guest; he would accept no hospitality from this house. He shall hold this wing of the casa under rental.”

There was a moment’s pause.

“So be it.” The assent was grudging and wrathful.

“One thing more. So long as he is in the casa you will cause him no physical harm—neither you nor your servants.”

While he hesitated a sound came from the bed. Gordon’s eyes were open; they held faint but conscious knowledge.

From the abyss of nothingness those voices had called to him, like conversation in a dream. Sight had opened more fully and he had stared at the gilded rafters, puzzled. This was not the Hotel Pellegrino in Bologna. He stirred and felt a twinge of pain. With the voices grown articulate, it came flashing back—that one kiss; the flying dart of agony; the dizzy descent; Tita and—Teresa. He suddenly saw a face: the old man at San Lazzarro, Teresa’s husband! He shut his eyes to drive away the visions, and her clear tones called them wide again.

He heard fully and understandingly then; knew that Trevanion and Count Guiccioli had made common cause; realized the courage with which Teresa had brought him to her husband’s casa—all with a bitter-sweet pain of helplessness and protest against the logic of circumstances that had thrust him into the very position that by all arguments looking to her ultimate happiness he must have avoided. He heard her voice demand that grudging promise of his safety. It was then he had moaned—less with physical than mental pain.

Teresa leaned to the bed, where Gordon had lifted himself on his elbow. The effort dislodged the bandage and its edges reddened swiftly. He strove to speak, but the effort sickened him and he fell back on the pillows.

Teresa turned again upon Count Guiccioli. “Swear it, or all I know Ravenna shall know to-morrow!” She held the kriss toward him, hilt up, like a Calvary, and half involuntarily his bent fingers touched his breast.

“I swear,” he said in a stifled voice.

“Father, you hear?”

“I am witness,” said Count Gamba grimly.