The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, May 7, 1905, Page 3

THE SAN FRANCISCO SUNDAY CALL. S tailnent Hallie most by the ewhere in the chanically e of what it arged agony in the doing > monk Gordon then awake as sation leaped snatched at nt to its label—“Man- culate cry he sprang e nearest window and ically with his fist. The ss cut his hand. but he He caught a fragment | with fearful test rnish, out through the s to the fountain Goldish fiirted and filled the bowl > hurried back, nds into its - her face, drowned lungs to to action hal torpor of ihe bella- the forehead, promise to re- pation. He re- 1 said a drachm. To doubly sure, might 1g her features—the be loosen! the softening its outlines. e still. In de- rm lips closé u her lungs ain and again. trembling now The lungs, responding to to ® old ones and at expiration, a himself, that 1 ed effort, had begun to renew their function. Her bosom rose and slowly, but still it was life. He 1 her fac d chafed her hands . She commenced to naturally and rhythm- 1 she sighed and stirred A of tears blinded Gardor\" eyes—the first he had shed since the night In London when he had bent above the little empty. snow silent bed that had held Ada. He dashed them aw secing that Teresa's eyes were rush hand, wavering, touched his wet y love!” he said. “My lov The first fact that came to her out of “led lock crossed her brow. is well. Do you 1 bewildered, raised her- They two dusk the shud- weep- fiber buried on m shaken wi 1 reached half be me had Another would 1 choi hands. et whith ach its borders in would be beyond , out of the states »rdon, ‘‘are you strong enough to w4 irred v, though ut one will come. in his a eadily We ns y es, must ins no longe: went noislessly to the stables. eaded meeting some one, 1 je, beside herseif with had run to watch for se who > come from Ravenna and the rest of the servants, dazed by the ca- d in the kitchen. Gordon returned were huddl the horse, rms about Teresa i y for an instant He was feeling a call ver felt before, the call that and civilization have man deep as the desire ng, the song of the s idess, whose marble chapel held he had n nature in night he had made that fatal trothing i bel, had been t kened by his thrown inkwell—Vesta, the per- sonification of the hearthstone, = of home. [ 4 Teresa suddenly -nt that to him! Home! Npt such a on as he had known at Newstead Abbey, with Hob- house and Sheridan and Moore. Not a gray moated pile wound with the tragic fates of his own blood—a house of mirth, tut not of happinegs! Not like the one in Piccacilly Terrace, where he had lived with Annabel that one year of fever and heartsickness 1 fading ideals! No, but a home and that should be no part of his past; a nook enisled, where spying eyes might not enter, here ' e should redeem those barren pledges he had once made to in the coin of real love. ” he s “from the journey we begin this hour there can be no re- turn. It is out of the world you have lived in and known! If there were any other way for you—save that one “My life!” she whispered. The soft-voiced passion of her tender- ness thrilled him. u go to exile,” he went on, “to an alien place—" “There is no exile, except from you, nor alien place where you are! The world that disowns you may cast me out—ah, I shall be glad!” He laughed a low laugh of utter con- tent. Lightly as she had been a chii he lifted her into the saddle. ng her at first, he led the horse > turf and into the driveway where his own waited. Then mounting, his hand holding her bridle, they rode into the velvety dark. Old Elise, tearfully watching the Ra- venna road, heard horses coming from the villa grounds. From the selvedge of the hedge, she saw the faces of Teresa and Gordon, pallid in the star- 's breath failed her. All the servants’ tales of the English- man, whom she had seen at the casa, recurred to her superstitious imagina- tion. He was a fiend, carrying off the dead body of her mistress! She crouched against the ground, P ed with fright, till the muffled hoof-beats died away. Then she rose and ran, stumbling with fear, to the house. As Gordon and Teresa rode through the azure gloom of the Italian night, a girlish moon was tilting over the dis- tant purple of the mountains, beyond whose many-folded fastnesses lay Tus cany and Pisa. Her weakness ha pasced and she kept her saddle more certainly. The darkness was friendly; before the sun rose they would be be- yond pursuit. As the villa slipped behind them and the odorous forest shut them round, Gordon rode closer and clasped her in his arms with a rush of joy, straining her tight to him, feeling the fervid beating of her heart, his own exulting with the flerce, primordial flame of pos- session. ‘Mine!” he eried. “My very own at last—now and always.” CHAPTER XLVIIL P The All of Love. Spring, the flush wooer, was come again. The prints of gentian showed where his blue-sandaled feet had trod, and the wild plum and cherry blooms announced the earth his bride. In the tranquil streets of Pisa, where the chains of red-liveried convicts toiled not, voung grass sprouted. Beneath a sky serenely, beautifully blue, the yel- low Arno bore its lazy sails under stHl b-idges and between bright houtes, LSHe CA & sreen-shuttered Round about lay new against the sun. cornfields busy with rlet-hodiced peasants, forests and h green with olive, and furthe lear Carrara peaks and the solemn hoary Apennines. At night a breeze fragrant as wood-smoke, cool- ing the myrtle hedges flecked with the first. pale-green meteors of the fireflies. The foew English residents had long grown used to the singular figure of Sheliey, beardless and hatless, habited like a boy in stinted jadket and trou- sers—that mild philosopher at war with a fresher di- vertissement had stirred them when the old Lanfranchi Palace, built by Michael Angelo, on the Lung’ Arno, was thrown open in the autumn for a new occupant—a man whose striking face and halting step made him mark- ed. The news flew among the gossips in a day. Geoyge Gordon was not alone, it was whispered over Indignant teacups; with him was a Ravannese Contessa Wwhy had eloped by his aid out of Romagna. Report averred that he had duelled with her husband, and after spiriting her beyond the frontier, had returned to Ravenna to shoot down a military commandant who had attempted to interfere. Luckily for him, the story ran, the official had recovered, and the police, relieved to be quit of him, had allowed the execrated peer to depart unmotested with his chattels. For a time the Lanfranchi neighborhood was avoided, but at length, curiosity over- * came rigid decorum; femininity forgot its prudence and watched with open eagerness. Its reward, however, was meager. Except for Shelley and his young wife, Gordon chose secluston even from the Italian circles, where title was an open sesame and uninsular laxity not un- forgiven. This fact became unmis- takable when a billet from no less a personage than the Grand Duchess, a Princess of the House of Saxony, brought from the Lanfranchi Palace a clear declination. The gossips held up their hands and subsided. For the primal object of this curiosity the winter, with its thaws and siroccos, had passed swiftly. In the present, so full of sweet surprise and unfolding, even Teresa's long anxiety because of her brother's non-appearance and the buding with which Cordon watched for a sign from Trevanion, or from Count Guiccioli—who he knew would read rightly the enigma of her reputed death and after disappearance—had softened finally to an undisturbed content. The full measure of love was theirs. The outer world, with its myriad into- nations, had dulled away, and Pisa and the old Lanfranchi pile constituted an inner voseate haven belonging wholly and only to themselves. A cloistered city, its old grandeur de- parted and seemingly. but half in- habited; the riyer drifting by, the house of the Sheleys on the opposite bank; boats and horses; a garden sweet with orange trees and gushes of violets along shady wolks; a few servants marshaled by Fletcher and Tita; a study and books—and Te- resa. It was the home Gordon had dreamed of when his arms were around her at the villa chapel, but more satisfying, more complete. Sometimes, in this Elyslan life of theirs, as he felt her head against his knee while he read her new verses of his—for now he knew oftener the old- melodic pen-mood that at Venice had seemed vanished forever and that had first returned in the hour he had etched those lines on the fungus—he was conscious of a sudden tightening of the heart. Could it-last? The poi- son of his fame had gone deep. He lived at peace only by sufferance of military authority, now busy aveng- ing its late alarm by the black sen- tence and proscription. At any mo- maes. i might recommence in Tus- Yo wilrE~LIVERED Foox ! SORFED JTREVANION Wy oI YOu FHOOL € cany the persecution with which the police of Romagna had visited him; the yelping terrlers of the Continental press, a upas-growth of proces-verbal, recrimination, hateful surveillance. Entering his restful study one day from 2 gallop with Shelley, Gordon wondered whether this retreat, too— whether each retreat he might find— would in the end be denied him and he condemned, a modern son of Shem, to pitch his tent in the wilderness. For himself it did not matter; but for her? She was happy now—only with him, even if beyond the pale. But could she always remain so?° Drop by drop, as erosion wears the quartz, would not the trickling venom waste her soul? Were the specters of that further past when his life had run, like a burning train, through wanderings, adventure and paaslon—the.g}mns of his own weaknesses and willful tem- pers—not laid? Could they stalk into this halcyon present to pluck them asunder. The ghostssof his own weaknesses! Clarity of visicn had come to Gordon in these months. He had grown to see his old acts, not gaunt and perverse, prejections of Insistent caprice, but luminous with new self-solution. He had learned himself: what he had never known, either in his London life of success and failure, or in its ignoble Venetian aftermath. Looking out toward the purpling Apennines, where the sun sank to his- crimson covert, he felt a mute aching wish: an intense desire that:the world —not his contemporaries, but a later generation—should be able to logk be- neath the specious shadow of oppro- brium that covered him and see the truth. 3 It could do this only through him- self; througi pages he should write. The journals he had kept in London, when he had lived centered in a tremu- lous web of sensitiveness and wayward idiosyncrasy, had recorded his many- sided, prismatic personality only in fragments, torn, jagged morsels of his’ brain. In these memoirs he, should strive to paint justly the old situations for which he had been judged. And these pages would persist, a cloud of witnesses, when he was beyond earthly summons and verdict. ‘When Teresa entered the room in a mist-white gown, his face was bent close to the paper, the candles yet un- & she He bent and kissed her in silence; the trooping vi- sions the writing had recalled made his kiss Iingeringly tender. lighted. Coming close seated herself at his feet. to him She pointed cut of the window through the million-tinted twilight. “Do you remember, dear,” she asked, her voice thrilling him strangely, “when we rode to those mountains, you and T, from Ravenna?”’ “Yes,” he replied, smiling. She had turned toward him, kneeling, her hands caressing his clustering brown-gray curls. “You have never Tide?” “Regretted it? Ah, Teresa Her face was looking up into his, a wistful questioning in it—almgcst like pain, he thought wonderingly. “You know all you said that night,” she went on hurriedly; “what I was to you? Is it as true now?” “It is more true,” he answered. “All I have dreamed, all I have written here in Pisa—and some of it will live, Ter- esa—has had its source in you. All thag I shall ever write will spring_from your love! That began to be true the day you first kissed me.” “That was when you found me on the convent hill, when we read from the Bible—the day I first knew of Allegra.” His face was averted, but she could see his shoulders lift and fall in a deep silent suspiration. “Your forgiveness then was divine!" he sald. Not such had been the for- giveness of the world! He clasped her in his arms. “You are ail things to me!” 5 “Oh,” she cried with a broken breath, “can 1 be all to you?” “Wife and home and happiness—all!" “—And "child?” She was sobbing now. He started, feeling her arms strain- ing him, seelng her blinded with tears. There suddenly seemed a woeful sig- nificance in what she had said—in her question. He felt the surging of some unexpected wave of dread which broke over his heart and washed it up in his regretted that throat. . “Dearest! Two days ago I heard there was fever in the Bagnacavallo Valley. I sent a courier at once. He has just returned.. Gordon—how can I tell you?” - For an instant she was frightened at his stony stillness. In the dusk a mor- tal grayness spread itself over his features. He pushed back his chair as if to rise, but could not for her arms. It was not Allegra’s illness—it was more, it was the worst! His arms dropped to his sides. A shudder ran through him. “I understand,” he said at length. understand. Say no more.” s In the words was nct now the arro- “r .gant and passionate hostility of the old George Gordon. There was the deadly quietness of grief, but also something more. In that moment of numbing in- telligence it was borne in upen him with searing force, that death, perhaps, had acted not unkindly, that it had chosen well. What perils might that young life have held, springing from those lawless elements compounded in her nature; recklessness, audacity, the roving berserker foot, contempt for the world’s opinion, demoniac passions of. hatred and reprisal? The subtle, unerring divination of death had taken her in youthfulness, a heavened soul, from the precincts of that past of his to which nothing pure should have a mortal claim. So he thought, as feeling Teresa's arms about him, his lips repeated more slowly and with a touch of painful resignation—the first he had feit in all his life: “I understand!™ That was all. He was looking out cross the mistily-moving Arno, sllent, ?u hand on her bowed head. £he lifted t after a time, feeling the silence acutely. Her eyes, swimming with changeless love and pitying tenderness, called his own. . At the wordless appeal, a swift rush of unshed tears burned his eyelids. “Death has done his work,” he said in a low voice. “Time, perhaps, may do his. Let us mention her no more.” Just then both heard a neise on the stairway—the choked voice of Fletcher and a vengeful oath. Teresa sprang to her feet with a sharp exclamation. Gordon rose and threw open the door. > CHAPTER-XLIX. “You Are Aiming at My Heart.” The two men who burst into the had been intimately yet apvettively commected with Gordon’'s past. One tried to take his life with a Malay krisst 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 com= mandant when that official had been called upon to vise the passports of two ‘strangers: Prince Mavrocordate, a tall commanding Greek, and = slighter, blond-hearted Italian, at whose name the listener had started— Wwith the leap of a plan to his braim. Trevanion had followed the young Count Camba to his hotel, picked ae~ quaintance and, pretending ignorance of the other’s relationship, had seom told him sufficlent for his purposes that the young and lovely Contesss Guiccioli, lured from Ravenna and hes 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 Fleteher had'met their entry, and now the open- ing of a door had brought this winged vengeance and its object face to face. The sight of her long-absent brother —Trevanfon behind him—the pistol ths former held leveled at Gordon's breast —{roze Teresa with sudden comprehen- slon. She stood stock-still, unable to utter a word. Trevanion sprang fos- ward, his finger pointing. “There he is!” he spat savagely. “There’s your Englishman!” Gordon had made no move. Us- armed, resistance would have been fu- tile in presence of the poised weapon. So this was the way that lurking Nem- esis of his past was to return to him' He was looking, not at Trevanion, but at his companion, fixedly; recalling. with an odd semsation of the unreal, & windy lake with that face settling help- lessly in the ripples as he swam toward it, the water roaring in his ears. The outre thought flashed across him how gane and just the homilists of England would call it that he should meet his end in such inglorious fashion at the bands of this pargicular man. *You white-livered fool!” scoffed Tre= vanion. “Why don’t you shoot?" His companion had paused, eying Gordon in astounded inquiry. His out- stretched arm wavered. The paralysis of Teresa’s fear broke at the instant. She ran to him, throw- ing her arms around him, snatching at the hand that heid the pistol. “Pletro! 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 him- self rising from the bgach clasping the band of his rescuer—heard his owmy voice say: “You have given me my lifeg I shall never forget it!" His arm fell. “Signore,” said Gordon steadily, “T long ago released you from any fanecled obligation.” “Pletro!™ Teresa's voice was choked with agony. “It is not him alone you would kil You are aiming at my heart, too! Pietro!™ Amazed as she staggered to her feet, she saw her brother hurl the pis- tol 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 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 fallem pistol. The touch of the cool steel ran up his arm. He turned back, a devil- ish purpose in his eye. Why not glut his hate once and for all? He had tried before, and failed. Why fiot 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 ail else, was a peer. A sudden memory made his fleal creep. He remembered once having seen a murderer exetuted 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 eriminal; the black Christ and his banner; the slow procession, the scaf- fold, the soldiery, the bell ringing the misericordia; the quick rattle and fall of the ax. Suddenly he flung the pistol inte the river with an imprecation. Looking up he saw a gaitered figure that moved briskly along the street, to stop at the Lanfranchi - deorway, 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 ob= servation 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 Trevaniom had rushed Teresa put her hand on her brother’s arm. Back of Gordon's only words and his own Involuntary and wnexpected action she had die vined some joyful circumstance of which she was ignorant. What it wam she was too relieved to care. “Come,” she said gently; “we have much to say to each other.” She sent one swift glance at Gory don; then the door closed betweeqy them. CHAPTER L. 3 Cassidy Finds a Lost Scent. On Gordon, in the shock of fatal news Teresa had brought, menace of that fateful onslaught fallen numbly. No issue of that mo- ment would have mattered to himself. But in her piteous ery, 'ou are aiming at my " awakened. That parting shining with fluctuant love, relief assurance, told him what that tragedy might have meant to her. Absorbed i his grief he had scarcely cared, had scareely reckoned, of her. ‘As he stood alone the thought him like a sword. He rn-mm ¢ Fletcher, still foet, :dflm-mummum phad-pmeoo{:hcm A messenger the Rev. Dr, Nott, a name well