CHAPTER LXITHE RENUNCIATION
Gordon entered his bleak room with mind strangely numbed. Gamba, now acting as his adjutant, was waiting, and him he dismissed without dictating his usual correspondence. The struggle he had fought had bitten deeply into his fund of physical resistance. A tremor was in his hands—a cold sweat on his forehead.
Riding, with the ashes of denial on his lips, it had come to him that in this temptation he had met his last and strongest enemy. It had found him in his weakness, and that weakness it would not be given him to surmount. The sword was wearing out the scabbard. His own hand should never lead the Greece he loved to its freedom—should never marshal it at its great installation. None but himself knew how fearfully illness had grown upon him or with what difficult pain he had striven to conceal its havoc. Only he himself had had no illusions. He knew to-night that the final decision had lain between the cause and his life itself. The one thing which might have knit up his ravelled health—the abandonment of this miasma-breeding town for the wholesome unvitiated hill air of Salona, of the active campaign for passive trust to foreign dictation—hehad thrust from him. And in so doing, he had made the last great choice.
“Lyon!” he said—“Lyon!” The shepherd-dog by the hearth raised his head. His eyes glistened. His tail beat the stone. He whined uneasily as his master began to pace the floor, up and down, his step uneven, forcing his limbs to defy their dragging inertia.
As the long night-watch knelled wearily away, drop by drop Gordon drank this last and bitter cup of renunciation. Love and life he put behind him, facing unshrinkingly the grisly specter that looked at him from the void.
He thought of Teresa singing to her lonely harp in a far-off fragrant Italian garden. His gaze turned to a closet built into the corner of the room. In it was a manuscript—five additional cantos of “Don Juan” written in that last year at Pisa, the completion of the poem, on which he had lavished infinite labor. He remembered an hour when her voice had said: “One day you will finish it—more worthily.” Had he done so? Had he redeemed those earlier portions which, though his ancient enemy had declared them “touched with immortality,” yet rang with cadences long since grown painful to him? The world might judge!
He thought of his Memoirs, completed, which he had sent from Italy by Dallas for the hand of Tom Moore in London. These pages were a brief for the defense, submitted to the Supreme Bench of Posterity.
“For Ada!” he muttered. “The smiles of her youth have been her mother’s, but the tears of her maturity shall be mine!”
His life for Greece! And giving it, it should be histo strike at least one fiery blow, to lead one fierce dash of arms! He looked where a glittering helmet hung on the wall, elaborately wrought and emblazoned, bearing his own crest and armorial motto: “Crede Gordon”—a garish, ostentatious gewgaw whose every fragile line and over-decoration was a sneer. It had been brought him in a satin casket by the hand of the suave Paolo, the last polished sting of his master, the Count Guiccioli. He would bring to naught that gilded mockery of hatred that scoffed at his purpose! A few more hours and preparations would be completed for the attack on Lepanto. To storm that stronghold, rout the Turkish forces, sound this one clear bugle-call that would ring on far frontiers—and so, the fall of the curtain.
At length he sat down at the table and in the candle-light began to write. What he wrote in that hour has been preserved among the few records George Gordon left behind him at Missolonghi.
“My days are in the yellow leaf;The flowers and fruits of love are done;The worm, the canker and the griefAre mine alone!The hope, the fear, the jealous care,The exalted portion of the painAnd power of love, I cannot share.I wear the chain.Yet see—the sword, the flag, the field!Glory and Greece around me see!The Spartan, borne upon his shield,Was not more free.Awake! (not Greece—sheisawake!)Awake my spirit! Think through whomThy life-blood tracks its parent lake.And then strike home!Up to the battle! There is foundA soldier’s grave—for thee the best;Then look around and choose thy ground.And take thy rest!”
“My days are in the yellow leaf;The flowers and fruits of love are done;The worm, the canker and the griefAre mine alone!The hope, the fear, the jealous care,The exalted portion of the painAnd power of love, I cannot share.I wear the chain.Yet see—the sword, the flag, the field!Glory and Greece around me see!The Spartan, borne upon his shield,Was not more free.Awake! (not Greece—sheisawake!)Awake my spirit! Think through whomThy life-blood tracks its parent lake.And then strike home!Up to the battle! There is foundA soldier’s grave—for thee the best;Then look around and choose thy ground.And take thy rest!”
“My days are in the yellow leaf;The flowers and fruits of love are done;The worm, the canker and the griefAre mine alone!
“My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are done;
The worm, the canker and the grief
Are mine alone!
The hope, the fear, the jealous care,The exalted portion of the painAnd power of love, I cannot share.I wear the chain.
The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
The exalted portion of the pain
And power of love, I cannot share.
I wear the chain.
Yet see—the sword, the flag, the field!Glory and Greece around me see!The Spartan, borne upon his shield,Was not more free.
Yet see—the sword, the flag, the field!
Glory and Greece around me see!
The Spartan, borne upon his shield,
Was not more free.
Awake! (not Greece—sheisawake!)Awake my spirit! Think through whomThy life-blood tracks its parent lake.And then strike home!
Awake! (not Greece—sheisawake!)
Awake my spirit! Think through whom
Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake.
And then strike home!
Up to the battle! There is foundA soldier’s grave—for thee the best;Then look around and choose thy ground.And take thy rest!”
Up to the battle! There is found
A soldier’s grave—for thee the best;
Then look around and choose thy ground.
And take thy rest!”
The pen fell from his fingers. A sudden icy breath seemed to congeal from the air. He rose—tried to walk, but felt his limbs failing him. He fixed his eyes upon a bright spot on the wall, fighting desperately against the appalling faintness that was enshrouding him. It gyrated and swam before his vision—a burnished helmet. Should the battle after all evade him? Was it denied him even to fall upon the field? A roaring rose in his ears.
He steadied himself against the table and shut his teeth. The quiver of convulsion was upon him again—and the movement against Lepanto began to-morrow! It must not come—not yet,not yet! The very life of the cause was wound in his. He would not yield!
The shepherd-dog had risen whining from the hearth; Gordon felt the rough tongue licking his hand—felt but could not see. He staggered toward the couch. Darkness had engulfed him, a black giddiness from whose depths he heard faintly a frantic barking and hurried footsteps on the stair.