CHAPTER LIIITHE COMING OF DALLAS
“Go on, Dallas,” said Gordon.
He was standing in his study, its windows thrown open to the stifling air, the blinds drawn against the pitiless sun that beat hotly up from the sluggish Arno and loaded the world with fire. In the parched orange-trees in the garden cicalas shrilled and from the dusty street came the chant of a procession ofreligiosi, bearing relics and praying for rain.
The man who sat by the table wore the same kindly, scholarly face that Gordon had known of old, though his soft white hair was sparer at the temples. To make this journey he had spent the last of a check he had once received for six hundred pounds. His faith in Gordon had never wavered. Now, as he looked at the figure standing opposite, clad in white waistcoat and tartan hussar-braided jacket of the Gordon plaid, young and lithe, though with brown locks grayed, and with eyes brilliantly haunting and full of a purpose they had never before possessed, his own gaze misted with hope and wistfulness. He had had an especial object in this long journey to Italy.
“Hobhouse is still with his regiment,” he proceeded.“He’ll be in Parliament before long. We dined together just a month ago to-night at White’s Club. Lord Petersham is the leader of the dandies now. Brummell left England for debt.”
In that hour’s conversation Gordon had seen faded pictures fearfully distinct. He seemed to be standing again in his old lodgings in St. James Street—a red carnation in his buttonhole—facing Beau Brummell and Sheridan. He remembered how he had once let the old wit down in his cocked hat at Brookes’—as he had long ago been let down into his grave! He smiled painfully while he said with slowness:
“Three great men ruined in one year: Bonaparte, Brummell and I. A king, a cad, and a castaway!” His eyes were fixed on the empty fireplace as he spoke, but what they saw was very far away.
“How is Murray?” he asked presently.
“I visited him a fortnight before I left. He had just published the first part of ‘Don Juan’.”
Gordon winced. “Well?” he asked.
“He put only the printer’s name on the title-page. The day it appeared he went to the country and shut himself up. He had not even dared open his letters.”
“I can’t blame him;”—Gordon’s voice was metallic—“Moore wrote me the attorney-general would probably suppress it.”
“I carried him the reviews,” continued Dallas.
“I can guess their verdict!”
The other shook his head with an eager smile that brightened his whole countenance. “A few condemned, of course. Many hedged. But theEdinburgh Review—”
“Jeffrey. What didhesay?”
The answer came with a vibrant emphasis: “That every word was touched with immortality!”
Gordon turned, surprised into wonder. His ancient detractor, whose early blow had struck from the flint in his soul that youthful flash, his dynamic Satire. The literary Nero whose nod had killed Keats. Was the old sneer become praise—now? Immortality!—not “damned to everlasting fame”? A glow of color came to his face.
The older man got up hastily and laid his hand affectionately on the other’s shoulder. It seemed the moment to say what was on his mind. His voice shook:
“George, come back to England! Do not exile yourself longer. It is ready to forget its madness and to regret. Public feeling has changed! When Lady Caroline Lamb published ‘Glenarvon,’ her novel that made you out a man-monster, it did not sell an edition. She appeared at Lady Jersey’s masquerade as Don Juan in the costume of a Mephistopheles, and the crowd even hissed. London is waiting for you, George! All it gave you once shall be yours again. You have only to come back!”
It was out at last, the purport of his journey.
Gordon felt his muscles grow rigid. The meaning of other things Dallas had told—gossip of society and the clubs—was become apparent. Could the tide have turned, then? Could it be that the time had come when his presence could reverse the popular verdict, cover old infamy and quench in renewed reputation the poisoned enmity that had poured desolation on his path? The fawning populace that had made of hisdomestic life only a shredded remnant, hounded him to the wilds and entombed him in black infamy—did it think now to reëstablish the dishonored idol on its pedestal?
For an instant the undiked memory of all he had undergone swept over him in a stifling wave. The months of self-control faded. The new man that had been born in the forest of La Mira fell away. The old rage rose to clutch at his throat—the fiery, ruthless defiance that had lashed his enemies in Almack’s Assembly Rooms. It drove the color from his face and lent flame to his eyes as he answered hoarsely:
“No! Never—never again! It is over forever. When I wrote then, it was not for the world’s pleasure or pride. I wrote from the fullness of my mind, from passion, from impulse. And since I would not flatter their opinions, they drove me out—the shilling scribblers and scoundrels of priests, who do more harm than all the infidels who ever forgot their catechisms, and who, if the Christ they profess to worship reappeared, would again crucify Him! Since then I have fed the lamp burning in my brain with tears from my eyes and with blood from my heart. It shall burn on without them to the end!”
His old tutor’s hand had dropped from his shoulder. Dallas was crestfallen and disconcerted. He turned away to the window and looked out sadly over the Arno, where a ship’s launch floated by with band instruments playing.
For Gordon the rage passed as quickly as it had come. The stubborn demon that had gnashed at its fetters fell back. A feeling of shame suddenly possessed him.“Scoundrels of priests!” He thought of Padre Somalian with a swift sense of contrition that his most reckless phraseology had never roused in the old days.
Standing there, regaining his temperate control, a sound familiar, yet long unheard, floated in from out of doors. It was a strain belonging to the past that had come so sharply home to him—the sound of the music on the launch in the river playing “God save the King.”
It fell on Gordon’s ear with a strange thrill. A tinge of softer warmth crept back slowly to his cheeks. For the first time in these years the hatred of his country that had darkled in the silt of ignominy vanished and a tenderer feeling took its place. It was the inalienable instinct of the Englishman, the birthright of English blood, transmitted to him through long lines of ancestry, from Norman barons who came with William the Conqueror, welling up now, strong and sweet and not to be denied. England! He had loved it once! In spite of a rebellious birth, an acid home, a harsh combative youth, he had loved it! How often he had heard that air—at Vauxhall—in the Mall—on the Thames! It brought back the smell of primroses, of blossoming yellow thorn and hazel-catkins quivering in the hedges. Some lost spring of recollection, automatically touched, showed him the balcony of his house on Piccadilly Terrace on the regent’s birthday—below, the rattling of curbs and scabbards, the Hussar band playing that tune—he himself sitting with Annabel, and in her arms, Ada, his child! There were questions, unvoiced as yet, which he had longed but dreaded to ask. His hand strayed to his breast. There, alwaysworn, was a tress of baby’s hair. What might his rehabilitation have meant to her, as she grew and took her place in the world?
He approached the window and touched the man who looked out.
“Dallas!” he said. “—Dallas!”
The other turned. His eyes were moist. He saw the alteration in Gordon’s mood.
“George,” he urged huskily, “do you not owe it to some one else?”
Therewassome one else—not the one Dallas meant—some one he had not seen! Gordon’s gaze turned, too, to the river, flowing now like liquid lead with an oily scum under a smoky char that, while they talked, had been swiftly rising to paint out the quivering track of the sun. The launch was speeding for the opposite landing, the musicians covering their instruments. Even if all Dallas said were true! Go back—and leave Teresa? For Ada’s sake, who would live to bear his name, to return to an empty reinstatement, and stifle with the pulpy ashes of dead fires this love that warmed his new life! For Ada’s sake—go back, and leave Teresa?
The visitor spoke again. When he had asked that question, a child not a woman had been in his thought. He had not told all he had come to say.
“I have been to Seaham, George; I went to Lady Noël’s funeral.”
His hearer started. “You saw Ada?” he asked, his features whitening. “You saw her?” He clutched Dallas’ wrist. “She is six years old. Did she speak my name, Dallas? What do they teach her of me?”
The other’s tone was almost as strained; the story he had to tell was a hard one.
“Your portrait, the large one painted the year you were married, hung above the mantelpiece. It was covered with a heavy curtain. Lady Noël’s will forbade that the child should see it before her twentieth year. Laddie,Ada has never heard your name!”
Dallas stopped abruptly at the look on Gordon’s face. No anger showed there, only the dull gray of mortal hurt. A curious moaning sound had arisen, forerunner of the sultry tempest that had been gathering, rapid as anger. The cicalas had ceased shrilling from the garden. A peculiar warm dampness was in the air and a drop of rain splashed on the marble sill.
“Do you wonder,” Dallas continued after a pause, “that I want you to go back?”
Gordon made no reply. His eyes were focused on a purple stain of storm mounting to the zenith, like some caryatid upholding a caldron of steam, all ink and cloud color, while before it slaty masses of vapor fled like monstrous behemoths, quirted into some gigantic sky-inclosure.
Dallas pulled the window shut.
With the action, unheralded as doom, a great violet sword of lightning wrote the autograph of God across the sky, and a shock of thunder, instantaneous and crashing like near ordnance, shook the walls of the palace. It loosed the vicious pandemonium of the tropic air into tornado, sudden and appalling.
While the echoes of that detonation still reverberated, into the room, as though hurled from the wing of theunleashed wind, came Mary Shelley, drenched with the rain, bareheaded, gasping.
“Shelley’s boat has not returned!” she wailed. “He is at sea in the storm. Oh, I am afraid—afraid—afraid!”
Teresa entered at the moment with a frightened face, loose-haired and pale, and Mary ran to her, sobbing.
Gordon had turned from the window, but his countenance was void and expressionless. “Shelley?” he repeated vacantly, and sat down heavily in the nearest chair.
Teresa suddenly put the arms of the weeping girl aside and ran to him.
“Gordon!” she cried, as Dallas hurried forward in alarm. “Gordon, what is it?”
“England—Teresa—” he said. Then his head fell forward against her breast.
For twelve hours, while the wild, typhoon-like storm raved and shrieked over Pisa, Gordon lay seemingly in a deep sleep. He did not wake till the next dawn was breaking, wetly bright and cool. When he woke, it was to healthful life, without recollection of pain or vision.
And yet in those hours intervening, strange things happened hundreds of leagues away in England.
Has genius, that epilepsy of the soul, a shackled self, which under rare stress can leave the flesh for a pilgrimage whose memory is afterward hidden in that clouded abyss that lies between its waking and its dreaming? Did some subtle telepathy exist between his soul in Italy and the soul that he had transmitted to his child? Who can tell?
But that same afternoon, while one George Gordon lay moveless in the Lanfranchi library, another George Gordon wrote his name in the visitor’s book at the king’s palace, in Hyde Park, London. Lady Caroline Lamb, from her carriage seat, saw him entering Palace Yard and took the news to Melbourne House. The next morning’s papers were full of his return.
That night, too, she who had once been Annabel Milbanke woke unaccountably in her room at Seaham, in the county of Durham, to find the trundle-bed in which her little daughter Ada slept, empty.
She roused a servant and searched. In the drawing-room a late candle burned, and here, in her nightgown, the wee wanderer was found, tearless, wide-awake and unafraid, gazing steadfastly above the mantelpiece.
The mother looked and cried out. The curtain had fallen from its fastenings, and the child was looking at her father’s portrait.