THE MARK OF THE BEAST
“Your coffee, my lord?”
It was Fletcher’s usual inquiry, repeated night and morning--the same
words that on the Ostend packet had told his master that his wanderings
were shared. After these many months in Venice, where George Gordon had
shut upon his retreat the floodgates of the world, the old servant’s
tone had the same wistful cadence of solicitude.
Time for Gordon had passed like wreckage running with the tide. The few
fevered weeks of wandering through Switzerland with Jane Clermont--he
scarcely knew where or how they had ended--had left in his mind only a
series of phantom impressions: woods of withered pine, Alpine glaciers
shining like truth, Wengen torrents like tails of white horses and
distant thunder of avalanches, as if God were pelting the devil down
from Heaven with snowballs. And neither the piping of the shepherd, nor
the rumble of the storm; not the torrent, the mountain, the glacier,
the forest or the cloud, had lightened the darkness of his heart or
enabled him to lose his wretched identity in the Power and the Glory
above and beneath him.
In that night at Geneva the tidal wave of execration which had rolled
over his emerging manhood had left as it ebbed only a bare reef across
which blew cool, infuriate winds of avid recklessness; and through
these insensate blasts he moved in a kind of waking somnambulism, in
which his acts seemed to him those of another individual, and he, the
real actor, poised aloft, watching with a sardonic speculation.
At Rome his numbed senses awakened, and he found himself alone,
and around him his human kind which he hated, spying tourists and
scribblers, who sharpened their scavenger pencils to record his
vagaries. He fled from them to Venice, where, thanks to report,
Fletcher had found his master.
But it was a changed Gordon who had ensconced himself here, a Gordon
to whom social convention had become a sneer, and the praise or
blame of his fellows idle chaff cast in the wind. He ate and drank
and slept--not as other men, but as a gormand and _débauché_. Such
letters as he wrote--to his sister, to Tom Moore, to Hobhouse--were
flippant mockeries. Rarely was he seen at opera, at _ridotto_, at
_conversazione_. When he went abroad it was most often by night, as
though he shunned the daylight. More than one cabaret in the shadow of
the Palace of the Doges knew the white satiric face that stared out
from its terrace over the waterways, where covered gondolas crept like
black spiders, till the clock of St. Mark’s struck the third hour of
the morning. And more than one black and red-sashed boatman whispered
tales of the Palazzo Mocenigo on the Grand Canal and the “_Giovannotto
Inglese_ who spent great sums.”
The _gondolieri_ turned their heads to gaze as they sculled past the
carved gateway. Did not the priests call him “the wicked milord”? And
did not all Venice know of Marianna, the linen-draper’s wife of the
street Spezieria, and of Margarita Cogni, the black-eyed _Fornarina_,
who came and went as she pleased in the milord’s household? They
themselves had gained many a coin by telling these tales to the
tourists from the milord’s own country, who came to watch from across
the canal with opera-glasses, as if he were a ravenous beast or a
raree-show; who lay in wait at nightfall to see his gondola pass to the
wide outlying lagoon, haunted the sand-spit of the Lido where he rode
horseback, and offered bribes to his servants to see the bed wherein he
slept. They took the tourists’ _soldi_ shamefacedly, however, for they
knew other tales, too: how he had furnished money to send Beppo, the
son of the fruit peddler, to the art school at Naples; how he had given
fifty _louis d’or_ to rebuild the burned shop of the printer of San
Samuele.
“Your coffee, my lord?” Fletcher repeated the inquiry, for his master
had not heard.
“No; bring some cognac, Fletcher.”
The valet obeyed, though with covert concern. He had seen the inroads
that year had made; they showed in the lines on the pallid face, in the
brown hair now just flecked with gray, in the increasing fire in the
deep eyes. The brandy sat habitually at his master’s elbow in these
days.
It was two hours past midnight, for to Gordon day and night were
one, and sleep only a neutral inertness, worse with its dreams than
the garish day he dreaded. On the hearth a fire blazed, whose flame
bred crimson marionettes that danced over the noble carved ceiling
panels, the tall Venetian mirrors supported by gilt lions, the faded
furnishings and the mildew-marked canvases whose portraits looked
stonily from the walls.
A gust of voices and the sound of virginals, flung up from the canal,
came faintly through the closed casement. He moved his shoulders
wearily. Yesterday had been Christmas Day. To-night was the eve of St.
Stephen, the opening of the carnival season, with every corner osteria
a symphony of fiddles, when Venice went mad in all her seventy islands.
What were holidays, what was Christmas to him?
Even in the warm blaze Gordon shivered. Ghosts had troubled him this
day. Ghosts that stalked through the confused mist and rose before him
in the throngs that passed and repassed before his mind’s eye. Ghosts
whose diverse countenances resolved themselves, like phantasmagoria,
into a single one--the pained eager face of Shelley. The recurring
sensation had brought a sick sense of awakening, as of something buried
that stirred in its submerged chrysalis, protesting against the silt
settling upon it.
But brandy had lost its power to lay those ghosts. He went to the
desk which held the black phial, the tiny glass comforter to which he
resorted more and more often. Once with its surcease it had brought a
splendor and plenitude of power; of late its relief had been lent at
the price of distorted visions. As he drew out the thin-walled drawer,
its worm-eaten bottom collapsed and its jumble of contents poured down
on the mahogany.
He paused, his hand outstretched. Atop of the _mélange_ lay a
silver-set miniature. He picked it up, holding it nearer the light. A
girl’s face, hued like a hyacinth, looked out of his palm, painted on
ivory. A string of pearls was about her neck.
For an instant he regarded the miniature fixedly, his recollection
travelling far. The pearls aided. It was the one he had found in the
capsized boat at Villa Diodati! He had purposed sending it after the
two strangers. The events of that wild night had effaced the incident
from his mind, as a wet sponge wipes off a slate. Fletcher, finding the
oval long ago in a pocket lining, had put it in the desk-drawer for
safe-keeping, where until this moment it had not met his master’s eye.
“Teresa.” Gordon suddenly remembered the name perfectly. With the
memory mixed a sardonic reflection: the man who had lost the miniature
that day in Switzerland had hastened away with clothing scarce dried.
Well, if that brother had deemed himself too good to linger with the
outcast, the balance had been squared. The sister, perforce, had made a
longer stay!
He put down the miniature, found the phial of laudanum and uncorked
it, but the face drew him back. It was not the external similitude
now, but something beneath, unobserved the day he had found it--the
pure sensibility, shining unsullied through the transparent media. A
delicate convent slip, she seemed, not yet transplanted to the unsifted
soil of the world! A strange portrait for him to gaze upon here in this
palace of ribaldry--him, the moral Caliban, the dweller in Golgotha on
whose forehead was written the _hic jacet_ of a dead soul!
The antithesis of the picture, bold, Medea-like, tall as a Pythoness,
with hair of night, black flashing eyes and passion blent with
ferocity, projected itself, like a materialization in a _séance_, from
the air. He turned his head with a sensation of bodily presence, though
he knew the one of whom he thought was then in Naples. If she should
enter and find him with that ivory in his hand, what a rare sirocco
would be let loose!
He tried to smile, but the old arrant raillery would not come. The
miniature blotted out the figure of the _Fornarina_. Against his will,
it suggested all the pure things that he had ever known--his youthful
romance, his dreams, Ada, his child!
Holding it, he walked to a folded mirror in a corner of the wall and
opened its panels. There had been a time when he had said no appetite
should ever rule him; the face he saw reflected now wore the lines of
incorrigible self-indulgence, animalism, the sinister badge of the
bacchanal.
“Is that you, George Gordon?” he asked.
[Illustration: “IS THAT YOU, GEORGE GORDON?” HE ASKED. _p. 178._]
The ghosts drew nearer. They peered over his shoulders. He felt their
fingers grasping at him. He cursed them. By what right did they follow
him? By what damnable chance, ruled by what infernal jugglery, came
this painted semblance to open old tombs? Something had awakened in
him--it was the side that recollected, remorseless and impenitent but
no longer benumbed, writhing with smarting vitality. Awake, it recoiled
abashed from the voiceless _vade retro_ of that symbol. What part had
he in that purity whose visible emblem mocked and derided him? What
comradeship did life hold for him save the hideous Gorgon of memory,
the Cerberus of ill fame, spirits of the dark, garish fellows of the
half-world--“they whose steps go down to hell!”
A fury, demoniac, terrible, fell on him. He seized the miniature,
dashed it on the floor, stamped it with his heel and crushed and ground
it into indistinguishable fragments.
Then he sprang up, and with an oath whose note was echoed by the tame
raven croaking on the landing, rushed down the stairway and threw
himself into his gondola.
The moon rose red as a house afire. Before it paled, he had passed the
lagoon. In the dim light that presaged the sodden dawn he leaped ashore
on the mainland, pierced the damp laurel thickets that skirted the
river Brenta and plunged into the forest.