THE RESTRAINING HAND
An east wind blew from the Adriatic. It churned the shadow lagoon to
an ashen yeast of fury, hurled churlish waves against the sand-reef
of the Lido and drove fleering rain-gusts over the lonely canals and
deserted squares of Venice to drench the baffled and bedraggled pigeons
huddled under the columns of the Doges’ Palace. It beat down the early
blossoms in the garden of the Palazzo Albrizzi till they lay broken and
sodden about the arbor and the wet stone benches. It charged against
the closed shutters of the Palazzo Mocenigo, where Fletcher, obedient
though foreboding, awaited the return of his master. The sky was piled
with dreary portents, clouds titanic, unmixed, like avalanches of gray
falling cliffs, and beneath it Venice lay as ghostly and as gray, all
its miracle hues gone lackluster, its glories palled, its whole face
pallid and corpse-like.
In the old monastery of San Lazzarro, in the bare white-washed room
used as a library, with wide windows fronting the sea, Gordon sat
bending over a table. He had been trying to write, but could not for
the thoughts that flocked between him and the paper.
They were thoughts of Teresa, of what he had innocently brought upon
her. To save her pain he would himself have gone through immeasurable
miseries, but no pang of his could lighten hers, or ward the jealous
fury that might sting and embitter her life. Where was she? Behind some
cold palazzo wails of Venice, suffering through him? He knew not even
her name now. Should they never meet again?
She loved him. When and how she had crossed that indistinguishable
frontier mattered nothing. The fact remained. When had he ever been
loved before, he thought. Not Lady Caroline Lamb; hers was an aberrant
fancy, an orchid bred of a hothouse life in London. Not Annabel, his
wife; she had loved the commiseration of her world more than she loved
him. Not Jane Clermont--he shuddered as he thought of her. For he knew
that not for one ephemeral moment of that reckless companionship had a
real love furnished extenuation.
“Now,” he told himself, “I, who could not love when I might, may not
when I can. Yet in spite of the black past that bars my life from
such as Teresa’s--I love her! In spite of all--though for both of us
it is an impossible condition, impossible then since I was chained to
a marriage in England, doubly impossible now since she is bound by a
marriage here. I love her and she loves me! And our love can be only
what the waves of hell were to Tantalus!”
He struck the littered sheets of paper with his hand, as a heavier
gust of wet wind rattled the casement. “Darkness and despair!” he said
aloud. “That is all my pen can paint now!”
A door opened and Padre Somalian entered.
The friar surveyed the scene of tempest from the window a moment in
silence; then approached the table and sat down.
“You are at work, my son?” he inquired in English.
The tone was mild as a child’s. Since his penance after that scene by
the shrine, the eye of the padre had seen truer. But he had asked the
man before him nothing.
“Only idle verses, Padre.”
“Why idle?”
“Because they cannot express what I would have them.”
The friar pondered, his fingers laced in his beard. To-day, in the
dreariness of the elemental turmoil without, he longed intensely to
touch some chord in this lonely man that would vibrate to confidence.
“What would you have them express?” he asked at length.
“A dream of mine last night, Padre.”
A dream! Dreams were but the reflex of the waking mind. The friar felt
suddenly nearer his goal.
“Will you tell it to me, my son?”
Gordon rose, went to the window and looked out as the other had done.
His face was still turned seaward as he began:
“It was a dream of darkness. The sun was extinguished, and moon and
stars went wandering into space. It was not the darkness of storm and
night, Padre, for in them is movement. In my dream there was none.
Without the sun, rivers and lakes lay stagnant. The waves were dead,
the tides were in their graves. Ships rotted on the sea till their
masts fell. The very winds were withered. Darkness was everything--it
was the universe! That was my dream.”
“There is no darkness in God’s universe,” said Padre Somalian, after a
pause. “It is only in the human heart. ‘Men love darkness rather than
light’ says the Book. Did men welcome it in your dream?”
“Morning came,” went on Gordon; “came, and went, and came, but it
was not day. Men forgot their hates and passions. They prayed only
for light--but it did not come. They lived by watch-fires, and when
their fuel was gone, they put the torch to their own homes to see one
another’s faces. Huts and palaces and thrones blazed for beacons.
Whole cities burned at once. The forests were set on fire and their
crackling trunks dropped and faded hour by hour. As the ember-flashes
fell by fits on the men who watched them, their faces looked unearthly.
Some lay down in the ashes and howled and hid their eyes. Some rested
their chins on their clenched hands and smiled. Others hurried to and
fro feeding the flames, looking up only to curse the sky--the pall of
a past world. Wild birds fluttered on the baked ground, and brutes
crawled tame and tremulous. Vipers hissed under foot and did not sting.
They were killed for food. War was everywhere, for every meal was
bought with blood, and each man sat apart sullenly, and gorged himself
in the darkness. One thought ruled--death, quick and ignominious.
Famine came. Men died and lay unburied. The starving devoured the
starved. There was no human love left. There was only one unselfish,
faithful thing. It was a dog, and he was faithful to a corpse. He had
no food himself, but he kept beasts and famished men at bay till he
too died, licking his master’s dead hand.”
The words had fallen measuredly, deliberately, as if each aspect of the
fearful picture, on the background of the tempest that gloomed out of
doors, stood distinct.
There was a moment’s silence. Then the friar asked: “Was that the
dream’s end?”
Gordon had turned from the window and picked up one of the written
fragments. He read the last few lines aloud:
“The crowd was famished by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heaped a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they raked up,
And shivering, scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other’s aspects--saw, and shrieked, and died--
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Despair had written ‘Fiend.’”
There was no sound for a while when he finished. The padre sat
motionless, his head bent. To him the picture drawn in these terse
lines expressed a black inferno of human hopelessness into which he had
never looked--the very apotheosis of the damned. He rose, came to where
Gordon stood, and laid a hand on his shoulder.
“My son,” he said gently, “there was one darkest hour for the world.
But it was in that hour that light and hope for men were born. Every
man bears a cross of despair to his Calvary. But He who bore the
heaviest saw beyond. What did He say? _Not my will, but Thine!_”
Gordon seemed to hear Annabel’s voice repeating an old question: “What
do you believe in that is good, I should like to know?” The friar had
not asked questions; he had spoken as if voicing a faith common to them
both and to all men.
Padre Somalian said no more. He left the room slowly.
The man standing by the window had made no reply. In the old days
he would have smiled. Now his brow frowned haggardly. The age-old
answer of the churchman! To what multitudinous human miseries it had
proffered comfort! The sinless suffering and its promise. What an
unostentatiously beautiful belief--if it were only true. _If it were
only true!_
“What an advantage,” he thought, “its possession gives the padre here!
If it is true, he will have his reward hereafter; if there is no
hereafter, he at the worst can be but with the infidel in his eternal
sleep, having had the assistance of an exalted hope through life
without subsequent disappointment. I have no horror of the awakening.
In the midst of myriads of living and dead creations, why should I be
anxious about an atom? It will not please the great ‘I’ that sowed the
star-clusters to damn me for an unbelief I cannot help, to a worse
perdition than that I walk through now--and shall walk through as long
as I live!”
He spoke the last phrase half-aloud. “As long as I live.” Why should
it be for long? Here--despair; there--no worse, if not a dreamless
sleep!
“Why not?” he said to himself with grim humor. “I should many a good
day have blown my brains out but for the recollection that it would
pleasure Lady Noël,--and even then, if I could have been certain to
haunt her!”
He turned and threw the window open and a scurry of rainy wind whirled
the sheets of paper about the floor. He looked out and down. On that
side of the island the beach had been only a narrow weedy ribbon soaked
by every storm. Now the wind that had driven the sea into the pent
lagoon, had piled it deep in the turbid shallows, and the wall fell
sheer into the gray-green heave.
“Of what use is my life to any one in the world?” he argued calmly.
“Who is there of all that have come nearest to me to whom I have not
been a curse? I am bound to a wife who hates me. Years will make my
memory a reproach to my child. Through me my enemies stabbed my sister.
Shelley, my only comrade in that first year of ostracism, I hurt and
disappointed. Teresa, whom I love, and have no right to love--what have
I made her life! It is a fitting turn to such a page.”
The inner shutter of the window fastened with a massive iron bolt. He
drew the latter from its place, put it into his pocket, and buttoned
his coat tightly. A sentence oddly recurred to him at the moment--a
verse from a quaint old epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians, unknown
to the Vulgate, which, written in Armenian, he had found in the
monastery library and translated to torture his mind to attention:
“Henceforth, no one can trouble me further; for I bear on my body this
fetter.” A seemly text for him it would be soon!
He approached the window.
There was a step behind him and Padre Somalian’s voice startled him.
“My son, a message for you.”
Gordon turned heavily, the chill of that intercepted purpose cold
upon him. He took the slender roll of parchment the friar handed him
and opened it. It was officially ruled and engrossed--a baptismal
certificate:
AT ST. GILES’-IN-THE-FIELDS, LONDON.
----------+-----------+-----------+------------+----------+----------
Christian | Parents’ | | Father’s | Father’s |
Name. | Christian | Surname. | Residence. | Rank. | By Whom.
| Names. | | | |
----------+-----------+-----------+------------+----------+----------
| Rt. Hon. | | | |
| George | | Travelling | | Percy
Allegra. | Gordon | Clermont. | on the | Peer. | Bysshe
| (Reputed) | | Continent. | | Shelley.
| by Jane. | | | |
----------+-----------+-----------+------------+----------+----------
The man who read snatched at the top of the paper. The date was March
ninth, 1818. He felt a mist before his eyes. Almost two years ago,
and he had not known! For two years he had had a daughter from whom
he was not necessarily debarred, whom hatred in England could not
touch. A thrill ran through him. He felt a recrudescence of all those
tender impulses that had stirred in him when Ada was born. The mother’s
dislike or indifference had doubtless concealed the fact from him. And
indeed, when in that time had he deserved otherwise? Why was he told
now? Who had brought this record?
The padre, watching him curiously, saw the pang that shot across his
face--the pang of the new remorseful conscience.
“The gentleman in the gondola,” he said, “asked to see you.”
“I will go down,” Gordon answered. He closed the window, drew the iron
bar from his coat and slipped it back between its staples.
“A wild day to have crossed the lagoon,” the friar observed.
“Stay--take this.” He threw off the outer robe he wore and held it out.
“It will shed the rain.”
Gordon went rapidly through the wall-gate to the wharf where he had
first set foot on the island. His own gondola, battered and tossing,
lay there.
He stopped abruptly, for he recognized a figure standing by it,
blue-coated, bareheaded, his long hair streaming in the wind. It was
Shelley. His hand was outstretched, and with a quick movement Gordon
strode forward and took it. A swift glance passed between the troubled,
hollow eyes under the graying hair, and the clear, wild blue ones.
Shelley’s held no reproach, only comprehension.
“Fletcher told me where to find you,” he said; “you must forgive him.”
“Where is the child?”
“In the convent of Bagnacavallo, near Ravenna.”
“And--Jane?”
“She is with us now in Pisa.”
A question he could not ask hung on Gordon’s lips as the other added:
“She is going to America with a troupe of players.”
She no longer wished the child, then! Allegra might be his. His, to
care for, to teach to love him, to come in time to fill a part, maybe,
of that void in his heart which had ached so constantly for Ada,
further from him now than any distance measurable by leagues!
He looked again at the scrap of paper still in his hand, heedless of
the wind that tore at his robe and lashed him with spume plucked from
the tunnelled waves like spilt milk from a pan. Why had it come at
just that moment to stay his leap into the hereafter? Was there, after
all, deeper than its apparent fatalism, an obscure purpose in what man
calls chance? Was this daughter, born out of the pale as he himself was
beyond the pale, to give him the comfort all else conspired to deny? A
slender hope grew tendril-like in him.
While Shelley waited, Gordon untied the girdle about his waist,
stripped off the brown robe and, folding it, placed it out of the rain,
in the niche where stood the leaden Virgin. From his pocket he took
some bank-notes--all he had with him--laid them on top of the robe and
weighted them carefully with fragments of rock.
Last he lifted the flat stone under which was Teresa’s prayer. The
paper was wet and blistered from the spray. He put it carefully in his
pocket. Then with one backward glance at the monastery, he leaped into
the gondola beside Shelley and signed to the gondolier to cast off.
* * * * *
For an hour the padre sat alone in the library, musing, wondering what
manner of message had called that conflict of emotion to the other’s
face. As he rose at length, the wind rattled the casement and called
his attention.
He paused before it. “Why did he have the iron bolt?” he said to
himself. “The window was open, too.”
Standing, a thought came that made him start. He crossed himself and
hastened out of the room.
A few moments later he was at the wharf. The gondola was gone, but by
the shrine he found what Gordon had left.
He lifted the silver crucifix that hung at his girdle and his lips
moved audibly:
“O Thou who quieted the tempest!” he prayed in his native tongue. “Thou
didst send this racked heart to me in Thy good purpose. Have I failed
in aught toward him? Did I, in my blindness, offer him less than Thy
comfort? Grant in Thy will that I may once more minister to him and
that when his storm shall calm, I may hold before his eyes this symbol
of Thy passion and forgiveness!”