THE COMING OF DALLAS
“Go on, Dallas,” said Gordon.
He was standing in his study, its windows thrown open to the stifling
air, the blinds drawn against the pitiless sun that beat hotly up
from the sluggish Arno and loaded the world with fire. In the parched
orange-trees in the garden cicalas shrilled and from the dusty street
came the chant of a procession of _religiosi_, bearing relics and
praying for rain.
The man who sat by the table wore the same kindly, scholarly face
that Gordon had known of old, though his soft white hair was sparer
at the temples. To make this journey he had spent the last of a check
he had once received for six hundred pounds. His faith in Gordon had
never wavered. Now, as he looked at the figure standing opposite, clad
in white waistcoat and tartan hussar-braided jacket of the Gordon
plaid, young and lithe, though with brown locks grayed, and with eyes
brilliantly haunting and full of a purpose they had never before
possessed, his own gaze misted with hope and wistfulness. He had had an
especial object in this long journey to Italy.
“Hobhouse is still with his regiment,” he proceeded. “He’ll be in
Parliament before long. We dined together just a month ago to-night at
White’s Club. Lord Petersham is the leader of the dandies now. Brummell
left England for debt.”
In that hour’s conversation Gordon had seen faded pictures fearfully
distinct. He seemed to be standing again in his old lodgings in St.
James Street--a red carnation in his buttonhole--facing Beau Brummell
and Sheridan. He remembered how he had once let the old wit down in
his cocked hat at Brookes’--as he had long ago been let down into his
grave! He smiled painfully while he said with slowness:
“Three great men ruined in one year: Bonaparte, Brummell and I. A king,
a cad, and a castaway!” His eyes were fixed on the empty fireplace as
he spoke, but what they saw was very far away.
“How is Murray?” he asked presently.
“I visited him a fortnight before I left. He had just published the
first part of ‘Don Juan’.”
Gordon winced. “Well?” he asked.
“He put only the printer’s name on the title-page. The day it appeared
he went to the country and shut himself up. He had not even dared open
his letters.”
“I can’t blame him;”--Gordon’s voice was metallic--“Moore wrote me the
attorney-general would probably suppress it.”
“I carried him the reviews,” continued Dallas.
“I can guess their verdict!”
The other shook his head with an eager smile that brightened his
whole countenance. “A few condemned, of course. Many hedged. But the
_Edinburgh Review_--”
“Jeffrey. What did _he_ say?”
The answer came with a vibrant emphasis: “That every word was touched
with immortality!”
Gordon turned, surprised into wonder. His ancient detractor, whose
early blow had struck from the flint in his soul that youthful flash,
his dynamic Satire. The literary Nero whose nod had killed Keats.
Was the old sneer become praise--now? Immortality!--not “damned to
everlasting fame”? A glow of color came to his face.
The older man got up hastily and laid his hand affectionately on the
other’s shoulder. It seemed the moment to say what was on his mind. His
voice shook:
“George, come back to England! Do not exile yourself longer. It is
ready to forget its madness and to regret. Public feeling has changed!
When Lady Caroline Lamb published ‘Glenarvon,’ her novel that made you
out a man-monster, it did not sell an edition. She appeared at Lady
Jersey’s masquerade as Don Juan in the costume of a Mephistopheles, and
the crowd even hissed. London is waiting for you, George! All it gave
you once shall be yours again. You have only to come back!”
It was out at last, the purport of his journey.
Gordon felt his muscles grow rigid. The meaning of other things Dallas
had told--gossip of society and the clubs--was become apparent. Could
the tide have turned, then? Could it be that the time had come when his
presence could reverse the popular verdict, cover old infamy and quench
in renewed reputation the poisoned enmity that had poured desolation
on his path? The fawning populace that had made of his domestic life
only a shredded remnant, hounded him to the wilds and entombed him in
black infamy--did it think now to reëstablish the dishonored idol on
its pedestal?
For an instant the undiked memory of all he had undergone swept over
him in a stifling wave. The months of self-control faded. The new man
that had been born in the forest of La Mira fell away. The old rage
rose to clutch at his throat--the fiery, ruthless defiance that had
lashed his enemies in Almack’s Assembly Rooms. It drove the color from
his face and lent flame to his eyes as he answered hoarsely:
“No! Never--never again! It is over forever. When I wrote then, it was
not for the world’s pleasure or pride. I wrote from the fullness of my
mind, from passion, from impulse. And since I would not flatter their
opinions, they drove me out--the shilling scribblers and scoundrels of
priests, who do more harm than all the infidels who ever forgot their
catechisms, and who, if the Christ they profess to worship reappeared,
would again crucify Him! Since then I have fed the lamp burning in my
brain with tears from my eyes and with blood from my heart. It shall
burn on without them to the end!”
His old tutor’s hand had dropped from his shoulder. Dallas was
crestfallen and disconcerted. He turned away to the window and looked
out sadly over the Arno, where a ship’s launch floated by with band
instruments playing.
For Gordon the rage passed as quickly as it had come. The stubborn
demon that had gnashed at its fetters fell back. A feeling of shame
suddenly possessed him. “Scoundrels of priests!” He thought of Padre
Somalian with a swift sense of contrition that his most reckless
phraseology had never roused in the old days.
Standing there, regaining his temperate control, a sound familiar, yet
long unheard, floated in from out of doors. It was a strain belonging
to the past that had come so sharply home to him--the sound of the
music on the launch in the river playing “God save the King.”
It fell on Gordon’s ear with a strange thrill. A tinge of softer
warmth crept back slowly to his cheeks. For the first time in these
years the hatred of his country that had darkled in the silt of
ignominy vanished and a tenderer feeling took its place. It was the
inalienable instinct of the Englishman, the birthright of English
blood, transmitted to him through long lines of ancestry, from Norman
barons who came with William the Conqueror, welling up now, strong and
sweet and not to be denied. England! He had loved it once! In spite of
a rebellious birth, an acid home, a harsh combative youth, he had loved
it! How often he had heard that air--at Vauxhall--in the Mall--on the
Thames! It brought back the smell of primroses, of blossoming yellow
thorn and hazel-catkins quivering in the hedges. Some lost spring
of recollection, automatically touched, showed him the balcony of
his house on Piccadilly Terrace on the regent’s birthday--below, the
rattling of curbs and scabbards, the Hussar band playing that tune--he
himself sitting with Annabel, and in her arms, Ada, his child! There
were questions, unvoiced as yet, which he had longed but dreaded to
ask. His hand strayed to his breast. There, always worn, was a tress
of baby’s hair. What might his rehabilitation have meant to her, as she
grew and took her place in the world?
He approached the window and touched the man who looked out.
“Dallas!” he said. “--Dallas!”
The other turned. His eyes were moist. He saw the alteration in
Gordon’s mood.
“George,” he urged huskily, “do you not owe it to some one else?”
There _was_ some one else--not the one Dallas meant--some one he had
not seen! Gordon’s gaze turned, too, to the river, flowing now like
liquid lead with an oily scum under a smoky char that, while they
talked, had been swiftly rising to paint out the quivering track of the
sun. The launch was speeding for the opposite landing, the musicians
covering their instruments. Even if all Dallas said were true! Go
back--and leave Teresa? For Ada’s sake, who would live to bear his
name, to return to an empty reinstatement, and stifle with the pulpy
ashes of dead fires this love that warmed his new life! For Ada’s
sake--go back, and leave Teresa?
The visitor spoke again. When he had asked that question, a child not a
woman had been in his thought. He had not told all he had come to say.
“I have been to Seaham, George; I went to Lady Noël’s funeral.”
His hearer started. “You saw Ada?” he asked, his features whitening.
“You saw her?” He clutched Dallas’ wrist. “She is six years old. Did
she speak my name, Dallas? What do they teach her of me?”
The other’s tone was almost as strained; the story he had to tell was a
hard one.
“Your portrait, the large one painted the year you were married, hung
above the mantelpiece. It was covered with a heavy curtain. Lady Noël’s
will forbade that the child should see it before her twentieth year.
Laddie, _Ada has never heard your name!_”
Dallas stopped abruptly at the look on Gordon’s face. No anger showed
there, only the dull gray of mortal hurt. A curious moaning sound had
arisen, forerunner of the sultry tempest that had been gathering, rapid
as anger. The cicalas had ceased shrilling from the garden. A peculiar
warm dampness was in the air and a drop of rain splashed on the marble
sill.
“Do you wonder,” Dallas continued after a pause, “that I want you to go
back?”
Gordon made no reply. His eyes were focused on a purple stain of storm
mounting to the zenith, like some caryatid upholding a caldron of
steam, all ink and cloud color, while before it slaty masses of vapor
fled like monstrous behemoths, quirted into some gigantic sky-inclosure.
Dallas pulled the window shut.
With the action, unheralded as doom, a great violet sword of lightning
wrote the autograph of God across the sky, and a shock of thunder,
instantaneous and crashing like near ordnance, shook the walls of
the palace. It loosed the vicious pandemonium of the tropic air into
tornado, sudden and appalling.
While the echoes of that detonation still reverberated, into the room,
as though hurled from the wing of the unleashed wind, came Mary
Shelley, drenched with the rain, bareheaded, gasping.
“Shelley’s boat has not returned!” she wailed. “He is at sea in the
storm. Oh, I am afraid--afraid--afraid!”
Teresa entered at the moment with a frightened face, loose-haired and
pale, and Mary ran to her, sobbing.
Gordon had turned from the window, but his countenance was void and
expressionless. “Shelley?” he repeated vacantly, and sat down heavily
in the nearest chair.
Teresa suddenly put the arms of the weeping girl aside and ran to him.
“Gordon!” she cried, as Dallas hurried forward in alarm. “Gordon, what
is it?”
“England--Teresa--” he said. Then his head fell forward against her
breast.
* * * * *
For twelve hours, while the wild, typhoon-like storm raved and shrieked
over Pisa, Gordon lay seemingly in a deep sleep. He did not wake till
the next dawn was breaking, wetly bright and cool. When he woke, it was
to healthful life, without recollection of pain or vision.
And yet in those hours intervening, strange things happened hundreds of
leagues away in England.
Has genius, that epilepsy of the soul, a shackled self, which under
rare stress can leave the flesh for a pilgrimage whose memory is
afterward hidden in that clouded abyss that lies between its waking and
its dreaming? Did some subtle telepathy exist between his soul in Italy
and the soul that he had transmitted to his child? Who can tell?
But that same afternoon, while one George Gordon lay moveless in
the Lanfranchi library, another George Gordon wrote his name in the
visitor’s book at the king’s palace, in Hyde Park, London. Lady
Caroline Lamb, from her carriage seat, saw him entering Palace Yard and
took the news to Melbourne House. The next morning’s papers were full
of his return.
That night, too, she who had once been Annabel Milbanke woke
unaccountably in her room at Seaham, in the county of Durham, to find
the trundle-bed in which her little daughter Ada slept, empty.
She roused a servant and searched. In the drawing-room a late candle
burned, and here, in her nightgown, the wee wanderer was found,
tearless, wide-awake and unafraid, gazing steadfastly above the
mantelpiece.
The mother looked and cried out. The curtain had fallen from its
fastenings, and the child was looking at her father’s portrait.