The castaway

The two men who burst into the room had been intimately yet appositively connected with Gordon’s past. One had tried to take his life with a Malay kriss; the life of the other Gordon had once saved. They were Trevanion and Count Pietro Gamba, Teresa’s brother.

The former had come many times stealthily to Pisa; for the master of Casa Guiccioli, cheated of his dearest plan, had had recourse to the umbrage of Tuscan officialism. On this day, as it happened, Trevanion had been closeted with the police commandant when that official had been called upon to visé the passports of two strangers: Prince Mavrocordato, a tall commanding Greek, and a slighter, blond-bearded Italian, at whose name the listener had started—with the leap of a plan to his brain. Trevanion had followed the young Count Gamba to his hotel, picked acquaintance and, pretending ignorance of the other’s relationship, had soon told him sufficient for his purpose: that the young and lovely Contessa Guiccioli, lured from Ravenna and her husband, was living at that moment in Pisa—the light-of-love of an English noble whose excesses in Venice had given him the appellation of the milord maligno.

The story had turned the brother’s blood to fire. All he demanded was to be shown the man. Trevanion led him to the palace, where only Fletcher had met their entry, and now the opening of a door had brought this winged vengeance and its object face to face.

The sight of her long-absent brother—Trevanion behind him—the pistol the former held levelled at Gordon’s breast—froze Teresa with sudden comprehension. She stood stock-still, unable to utter a word. Trevanion sprang forward, his finger pointing.

“There he is!” he spat savagely. “There’s your Englishman!”

Gordon had made no move. Unarmed, resistance would have been futile in presence of the poised weapon. So this was the way that lurking Nemesis of his past was to return to him! He was looking, not at Trevanion, but at his companion, fixedly; recalling, with an odd sensation of the unreal, a windy lake with that face settling helplessly in the ripples as he swam toward it, the water roaring in his ears. The outré thought flashed across him how sane and just the homilists of England would call it that he should meet his end in such inglorious fashion at the hands of this particular man.

“You white-livered fool!” scoffed Trevanion. “Why don’t you shoot?”

His companion had paused, eying Gordon in astounded inquiry. His outstretched arm wavered.

The paralysis of Teresa’s fear broke at the instant. She ran to him, throwing her arms around him, snatching at the hand that held the pistol.

“Pietro! Pietro!” she screamed. “Ah, God of love! Hear me, first! Hear me!”

He thrust her to her knees, and again, as Trevanion sneered, his arm stiffened. But the negative of that Genevan picture was before his eyes, too—its tones reversed. He saw himself rising from the beach clasping the hand of his rescuer—heard his own voice say: “You have given me my life; I shall never forget it!”

His arm fell.

“Signore,” said Gordon steadily, “I long ago released you from any fancied obligation.”

“Pietro!” Teresa’s voice was choked with agony. “It is not him alone you would kill! You are aiming at my heart, too! Pietro!”

Amazedly, as she staggered to her feet, she saw her brother hurl the pistol through the open window and cover his face with his hands.

Trevanion stared, almost believing Gordon an adept in some superhuman diablerie, by which in the moment of revenge he had robbed this cat’s-paw of courage. Then laughing shrilly and wildly, he turned and lurched past Fletcher—leaning against the wall, dazed from the blow that had sent him reeling from the landing—down the stair.

In the street he picked up the fallen pistol. The touch of the cool steel ran up his arm. He turned back, a devilish purpose in his eye. Why not glut his hate once and for all? He had tried before, and failed. Why not now, more boldly? Italian justice would make only a pretense of pursuit. Yet British law had a long reach. Its ships were in every quarter of the globe. And Gordon, above all else, was a peer.

A sudden memory made his flesh creep. He remembered once having seen a murderer executed in Rome. It came back to him as he stood with the weapon in his hand: the masked priests; the half-naked executioner; the bandaged criminal; the black Christ and his banner; the slow procession, the scaffold, the soldiery, the bell ringing the misericordia; the quick rattle and fall of the ax.

Shuddering, he flung the pistol into the river with an imprecation.

Looking up he saw a gaitered figure that moved briskly along the street, to stop at the Lanfranchi doorway. Trevanion recognized the severely cut clerical costume, the clean-shaven face with its broad scar, the queerish, insect-like, inquisitive eyes. He glanced down the river with absurd apprehension, half expecting to see His Majesty’s ship Pylades anchored in its muddy shallows—the ship from which he had deserted at Bombay once upon a time, at the cost of that livid scar on Dr. Cassidy’s cheek.

He had shrunk from Cassidy’s observation in the lights of a London street; but in Italy he had no fear. He looked the naval surgeon boldly in the face, as he passed on to the police barracks.

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.