CHAPTER LVITHE FAREWELL
In the garden the roses were as fragrant, the orange-trees as spicy-sweet as ever, every sound and scent as in so many evenings past. Yet Teresa’s eyes were heavy, her heart like lead within her breast.
Since the hour she had sung to her harp—it lay beside her now—when Gordon had found her there and told her the outcome of that library conference in which she had had no part, it seemed as though dreary decades had passed. She had lain in his arms at first breathless, stricken with a weight of voiceless grief, while he spoke, hopefully, calmly, of the cause and his determination. The great cry into which her agony bled at length had gripped his soul. She had felt his heart leap and quiver against her, shaken with her sobs, and knew he suffered with her in every pang. It was a realization of this that had finally given her self-control and a kind of calmness.
In the time that followed: weeks of preparation, correspondence with the Revolutionary Committees and with Mavrocordato, who had preceded Gordon to Greece, selection of stores, the chartering and freighting of the brigHerculesat Genoa—all the minutiæ that visualizedthe departure that must come—the two sides of her love had struggled together.
Sometimes the smaller, the less unselfish personal passion, gained temporary mastery. What was she to him if she were not more than everything else? What was Greece to her? Once he had said that all he should ever write would spring from her love. Was that love fit only to inspire poems upon paper? Now he left her and forsook that love to go to a useless danger—and she had given him all! The thought sobbed in her. She was a woman, and she struggled with a woman’s anguish.
Then her greater soul would conquer. She would remember that night on the square in Venice, the glimpse of his tortured self-amendment at San Lazzarro, and the calmer strength she had felt growing in him from the day their lips met on the convent hill. Her instinct told her this determination of his was only a further step in that soul-growth whose first strivings she had herself awakened. This gave her a melancholy comfort that was sometimes almost joy. In his face of late she had distinguished something subtle and significant, that carried her back to the night she had left his book at the feet of Our Lady of Sorrows. It was the veiled look she had then imagined the object of her petition, the fallen angel sorrowing for his lost estate, would wear—the patience and martyrdom of renunciation.
These struggles of hers had been the ultimate revealment, as the hour she had held Gordon’s bleeding body in her arms had been life’s primal comprehension. That had shown her love’s heights and depths; thistaught her all its breadth, its capacity for self-abnegation, its wild, unselfish yearning for the best good of the thing beloved.
As she and Fletcher prepared the bare necessities he was to take with him, his buried London life had risen before her. The woman who should have loved him most—his wife—had sent him into a cruel ostracism, hating and despising him. She whom the law’s decree forbade that he should love, was sending him away, too, but to a noble cause and with a breaking heart. She had made his present better than his past. Should not his future be even more to her than the present?
All had at last been put in readiness. Waiting the conversion of his English properties, Gordon had utilized all his Italian funds. Ammunition, horses from his own stable, field-guns and medicines for a year’s campaign had been loaded under his tireless supervision. Lastly, he had taken aboard with his own hands ten thousand crowns in specie and forty thousand in bills of exchange. Four days before, with himself and Fletcher aboard, the brig had sailed from Genoa, whence swift couriers had daily brought Teresa news, for he had small time for pen work. To-day the vessel had cast anchor at Leghorn, her final stop, only a few hours away. To-night, since she put to sea with the dawn-tide, Gordon was to come for a last farewell.
As Teresa sat waiting in the garden, she tried not to think of the to-morrow, the empty, innumerable to-morrows. It was already quite dark, for there was no moon; she was thankful for this, for he could not so readily see her pallor. He should carry away a recollectionof hope and cheerfulness, not of agony or tears. With a memory of what she had been singing the night of Blaquiere’s coming, she lifted her harp and began softly and bravely, her fingers finding their way on the strings by touch:
“Then if thou wilt—no more my lonely Pillow,In one embrace let these arms again enfold him,And then expire of the joy—but to behold him!Oh! my lone bosom!—oh!—my lonely Pillow!”
“Then if thou wilt—no more my lonely Pillow,In one embrace let these arms again enfold him,And then expire of the joy—but to behold him!Oh! my lone bosom!—oh!—my lonely Pillow!”
“Then if thou wilt—no more my lonely Pillow,
In one embrace let these arms again enfold him,
And then expire of the joy—but to behold him!
Oh! my lone bosom!—oh!—my lonely Pillow!”
The effort was too great. The harp rebounded against the ground. She bowed her head on the arm of the bench and burst into sobbing.
The twang of the fallen harp called loudly to one whose hand was on the postern gate while he listened. He came swiftly through the dark.
She felt his arms close about her, her face, torn with crying, pressed against his breast. So he held her till the vehemence of her weeping stilled, and her emotion appeared only in long convulsive breaths, like a child’s after a paroxysm of grief.
When Gordon spoke, it was to tell of sanguine news from the English Committee, of the application of French and German officers to serve under him, cheerful detail that calmed her.
A long pause ensued. “What are you thinking?” he asked at length.
She answered, her eyes closed, a mere murmur in his ear: “Of the evening you came to the garden at Ravenna.”
“It was moonlight,” he replied.
“You kissed a curl of my hair,” she whispered. “I slept with it across my lips that night.”
He bent and kissed her eyelids, her mouth, her fragile fingers. “My love!” he exclaimed.
“I wanted to be strong to-night,” she said piteously.
“Youarestrong and brave, too! Do I not know how you brought me to the casa—how you drank the mandragora?”
She shivered. “Oh, if it were nothing but a potion to-night—to drink, and to wake in your arms! Now I shall wake alone, and you—”
“I shall be always with you,” he answered. “By day, on the sea or in the camp. At night I shall wander with you among the stars.”
“I shall ask the Virgin to watch over you. Every hour I shall pray to God to have you in His keeping, and to guard you from danger.”
His arms tightened. He seemed to hear a chanted litany climbing a marble staircase:
“From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death;“Good Lord, deliver us.”
“From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death;
“Good Lord, deliver us.”
SHE BOWED HER HEAD ON THE ARM OF THE BENCH.SHE BOWED HER HEAD ON THE ARM OF THE BENCH.p.389.
SHE BOWED HER HEAD ON THE ARM OF THE BENCH.p.389.
SHE BOWED HER HEAD ON THE ARM OF THE BENCH.p.389.
Had he ever prayed? Not to the God of the orthodox Cassidy, of the stern ecclesiastics who had inveighed against him. Not to the beneficent Father that Dallas and Padre Somalian believed in. Never in his life had he voiced a petition to a higher power. All he had known was that agnostic casuistry of his youth, “The Unknown God”—that fatalistic impersonality ofhis later career, “The Great Mechanism.” He thought of lines Teresa’s hand had penned, that since a gray dawn when he read and re-read them to the chuckling of a fiend within him had never left his breast. They had opened a spiritual chasm that was ever widening between the old and the new.
“Dearest,” he said, “I would not exchange a prayer of yours for all else life could give. You prayed for me before you ever saw me, when others gave me bitterness and revilings.”
“You never deserved that!”
“You forgave because you loved,” he answered gently. “Your love has been around me ever since. I was unworthy of it then—I am unworthy now.”
“England never knew you,” she protested, “as I know you. Your soul is good! Whatever your acts, I know it has always been so!”
He sighed. “My soul was full of glorious dreams, once—this dream of Greece’s freedom was its dearest. But they were tainted with regnant passion and foolish pride and ingrain recklessness. When the world flattered me, I threw away all that could have helped me rise. I sold my birthright for its mess of pottage. When it turned, I scoffed and hated it and plunged further away from all that was worthy. Men do more harm to themselves than ever the devil could do them. I sunk my soul deeper and deeper in the mire—because I did not care, because I had nothing and no one to care for—till you found me, Teresa, that day in the wood at La Mira! You pointed me to myself, to all I might and should have been. You taught me first remorse, then the idle indolence of regret; now, at last, the wish to do,to be! Neither success nor failure, praise nor scorn, could do this. If there is anything good in me now, it is because of that, Teresa! If the future ever forgets to know me as wicked and wastrel, and remembers better things I have done or tried to do—”
“You are the noblest man in the world!”
A quick spasm crossed his face in the darkness. Noble! Yet how little popular esteem seemed to him at that moment! He went on hurriedly, for what he had to say must be in few words:
“Always—whatever happens—you will remember what I have said, Teresa?”
Whatever happens! She threw her arms about his neck, mute with the anguish that was fighting with her resolution.
“—that you are all to me. That I love you—you only; that I shall love you to the end.”
“If I forgot that, I could not live!” she said chokingly.
The great clock struck ponderously from the palace hall—a clamorous reminder that he must hasten, for the night was almost without a star, and a wreathing nebulous mist forbade rapid riding. Through all his preparations this hour had reared as the last harbor-light of home. It had come and gone like a breath on glass. In the still night the chime sounded like a far spired bell. Some banal freak of memory brought to Gordon’s mind the old church dial jutting over Fleet Street in London, and the wooden wild men which had struck the hour with their clubs as he issued from John Murray’s shop the night of his maiden speech in Parliament.
The strokes counted twelve—midnight. She shuddered as he rose to his feet.
“My love—my life!” he said, and clasped her close.
“God keep you!” she breathed.
He left her and went a few steps into the darkness. She thought him gone. But he came back swiftly, his hands groping.
He heard a shuddering sob tear its way from her heart, but she stood motionless in his arms, her cheek grown suddenly cold against his own.
In that moment a strange feeling had come to her that they clasped each other now for the last time. It was as though an icy hand were pressed upon her heart, stilling its pulsations.
She felt his arms again release her and knew she was alone.
It lacked an hour of day when Gordon rode into Leghorn, and the first streak of dawn strove vainly to shred the curdled mist as he stepped from a lighter aboard theHercules. The tide was at full and a rising breeze flapped the canvas.
Standing apart on her deck, his mind abstracted, though his ears were humming with the profane noises of creaking cordage, windlass and capstan, he felt as if the fall of the headsman’s ax had divided his soul in two. He saw his past rolled up like a useless palimpsest in the giant hand of destiny—his future an unvexed scroll laid waiting for mystic characters yet unformed and unimagined. Beneath the bitterness of parting, be felt, strangely enough, a kind of peace wider than he hadever known. The hatred that tracked, the Nemesis that had harassed, he left behind him.
Absorbed in his reflections, he did not hear the bawled orders of the ship’s mate, nor the spitting crackle of musketry from some ship’s hulk near-by in the foggy smother. The brig was lifting and pushing as she gained headway. The captain spoke at his elbow.
“Begging your lordship’s pardon, a man has just come aboard by the ship’s bow-chains. He had a tough swim for it and a bullet through the forearm. Says he was shanghaied by thePylades. If we put about, we’ll lose the tide. What are your lordship’s orders?”
“Is he Italian?”
“No, sir. He says he’s an Englishman, but he looks Lascar.”
“His name?” the demand fell sharply.
“Trevanion, your lordship.”
As Gordon stood there, breathing deeply, Teresa, at home in her room, stretched at the foot of the crucifix, was crying in a voice of anguish, that icy hand still pressed upon her heart: “O God! help me to remember that it is for Greece! and for himself most of all! Help me not to forget—not to forget!”
For only an instant Gordon hesitated. “Let him stay,” he said then to the captain, and turned away to his cabin.