THE DEVIL’S DEAL
As he took the two missives the girl handed him Gordon caught his
breath, for one he saw was directed in Annabel’s hand. For a moment a
hope that overleaped all his suffering rose in his brain. Had those
months wrought a change in her? Had she, too, thought of their child?
Had the cry he voiced on the packet that bore him from England struck
an answering chord in her? He opened its cover. An inclosure dropped
out.
He picked it up blankly. It was the note he had pencilled on the
channel, returned unopened.
The sudden revulsion chilled him. He broke the seal of the second
letter and read--read while a look of utter sick whiteness crept across
his face, a look of rage and suffering that marked every feature.
It was from his sister, a letter written with fingers that soiled and
creased it in their agony, blotted and stained with tears. For the
thing it told of was a dreadful thing, a whispered charge against him
so damning, so satanic in its cruelty, that though lip might murmur it
to a gloating ear, yet pen refused to word it. The whole world turned
black before him, and the dusk seemed shot through with barbed and
flaming javelins of agony.
He crushed the letter in his hand, and, with a gesture like a madman’s,
thrust it into Shelley’s, turning to him a countenance distorted with
passion, _gauche_, malignant, repulsive.
“Read it, Shelley,” he said in a strangled voice. “Read it and know
London, the most ineffable centaur ever begotten of hypocrisy and a
nightmare! Read what its wretched lepers are saying! There is a place
in Michael Angelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ in the Sistine Chapel that was made
for their kind, and may the like await them in that of our Lord and
Saviour Jesus Christ--Amen!”
With this fearful imprecation he flung away from their startled faces
along the winding vineyarded lane, on into the dusk, lost to a sense of
direction, to everything save the blackness in his own soul.
The night fell, odorous with grape-scents, and the moon stained the
terraces to amber. It shone on Gordon as he sat by the little wharf
where the skiff rocked in the ripples, his eyes viewless, looking
straight before him across the lake.
For him there was no sanctuary in time or in distance. The passage
he had read at Newstead Abbey in his mother’s open Bible, beside her
body, flashed through his mind: _And among these nations shall thou
find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest.... In the
morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt
say, Would God it were morning!_ He had found--should find--no ease
nor rest! The captive of Chillon had been bound only with fetters of
iron to stone pillars. He was chained with fiery links of hate to the
freezing walls of the world’s contumely!
Footsteps went by along the shadowy lane. Shelley’s voice spoke: “He
will come back soon, and we must comfort him if we can.”
The words came distinctly as the footsteps died away.
Something clutched tangibly at Gordon’s soul. In that instant his gaze,
lifted, rested on a white square in the moonlight. It was a familiar
enough object, but now it appeared odd and _outré_. He rose and
approached it. It had been a sign-post bearing an arrow and the words
“Villa Diodati.” Now malice had painted out the name and replaced it
with new and staring characters.
“ATHEIST AND FOOL.” It glared level at him with a baleful malevolence
that chilled the moment’s warmer softening into ice. Atheist! Without
God. What need, then, had he for man? Let the moralists have it so,
since they stickled so lustily for endless brimstone. Fool? He would be
so, then! His brain should lie fallow and untilled--he would write no
more!
With a quick gesture he drew from his pocket his commonplace-book. He
laid it against the disfigured sign-board, pencilled a few words on its
cover and, turning, hurled it far from him into the shrubbery.
A twig snapped. He looked around. Jane Clermont stood near him, her
eyes smiling into his, fringed with intoxication and daring.
“I know,” she said; “they are hounding you still. They hated me, too!”
She came quite close to him. “What need we care? What are they all to
us?”
It was the Jane of the Drury Lane greenroom he saw now--the Jane whose
brilliance and wit had held him then; but there was something deeper in
her look that he had never seen before: a recklessness, an invitation
and an assent.
“Jane!” he exclaimed.
She touched his hand. “Why should we stay here? Let us go away from
them all--where they cannot follow us to sting!”
Gordon stared at her, his eyes holding hers. To go away--with her?
To slip the leash of all that was pagan in him? What matter? He was
damned anyway--a social Pariah; why strive to undeserve the reputation?
His thought was swirling through savage undercurrents of vindictive
wrath, circling, circling like a Maelstrom, about this one dead center:
Civilization had cast him off. Henceforth his life was his own, to live
to himself, for his own ends, as the savage, as the beast of the field.
To live and to die, knowing that no greater agony than was meted to him
now could await him, even in that nethermost reach where the lost are
driven at the end.
“We must comfort him if we can!” The words Shelley had spoken seemed
to vibrate in the stillness like the caught key of an organ. He turned
to where Villa Diodati above them slept in the long arms of the night
shadows, listening to the contending voices within him. Comfort? The
placid comfort of philosophy for him whose flesh was fever and his
blood quicksilver? In this girl life and action beckoned to him--life
full and abundant--forgetfulness, wandering, and pleasure, fleeting
surely, but still his while it should last! And yet--
The girl’s hand was on the skiff. On a sudden a cry of fear burst from
her lips and she shrank back as a disordered figure broke from the
darkness and clutched Gordon’s arm fiercely.
“Where are you taking her now?”
Gordon’s thought veered. In his numbness of feeling there scarce
seemed strangeness in the apparition. As he looked at the oriental,
mustachioed face, haggard and haunted, his lips rather than his mind
replied:
“Who knows?”
“You lie! You ruined her career and stole her away from London and
from me! Now you want to take her from these last friends of hers--for
yourself! But you cannot go where I will not find you! And where you go
the world shall know you and despise you!”
Jane’s eyes flashed upon the speaker. “You!” she cried in contemptuous
anger. “You hated him even in London; now you have followed him here.
It is you who have set the peasants to spy upon us! It is you who have
spread tales through Geneva! You whose lies sent the syndic to-day!”
Gordon had been staring at the Moorish, theatric face with a gaze
of singular inquiry, his brain searching, searching for a lost
clue. All at once the haze lightened. His thought leaped across a
chasm of time. He saw a reckless youth, a deserter from the navy,
whom he had befriended in Greece--a youth who had vanished suddenly
from Missolonghi during the feast of Ramazan. He saw a shambling,
cactus-bordered road to the seashore--a file of Turkish soldiers, the
foremost in a purple coat, and carrying a long wand--a beast of burden
bearing a brown sack--
“Trevanion!” he said. “Trevanion--by the Lord!”
He burst into a laugh, reëchoing, sardonic, a laugh now of absolute,
remorseless unconcern, of crude recklessness flaunting at last supreme
over crumbled resolve--the laugh of a zealot flagellant beneath the
lash, a derisive Villon on the scaffold.
“So I stole her from _you_! You, even you, dare to accuse me. Out of my
sight!” he said, and flung him roughly from the path.
Gordon held out his hand to Jane Clermont, lifted her into the skiff,
and springing in, sent the slim cockle-shell shooting out into the
still expanse like an arrow on the air.
Then he took up the oars and turned its prow down the lake to where the
streaming lights of the careless city wavered through the mists, pale
green under the moonbeams.
* * * * *
The journal which Gordon had hurled from him lay in the vine-rows next
morning when Shelley, with a face of trouble and foreboding, passed
along the dewy lane. He read the words written on its cover:
“And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. I
will keep no record of that same hesternal torch-light; and to prevent
me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I throw away
this volume, and write in _Ipecacuanha_: Hang up justice! Let morality
go beg! To be sure, I have long despised myself and man, but I never
spat in the face of my species before--‘O fool! I shall go mad!’”