THE FAREWELL
In the garden the roses were as fragrant, the orange-trees as
spicy-sweet as ever, every sound and scent as in so many evenings past.
Yet Teresa’s eyes were heavy, her heart like lead within her breast.
Since the hour she had sung to her harp--it lay beside her now--when
Gordon had found her there and told her the outcome of that library
conference in which she had had no part, it seemed as though dreary
decades had passed. She had lain in his arms at first breathless,
stricken with a weight of voiceless grief, while he spoke, hopefully,
calmly, of the cause and his determination. The great cry into which
her agony bled at length had gripped his soul. She had felt his heart
leap and quiver against her, shaken with her sobs, and knew he suffered
with her in every pang. It was a realization of this that had finally
given her self-control and a kind of calmness.
In the time that followed: weeks of preparation, correspondence with
the Revolutionary Committees and with Mavrocordato, who had preceded
Gordon to Greece, selection of stores, the chartering and freighting
of the brig _Hercules_ at Genoa--all the minutiæ that visualized the
departure that must come--the two sides of her love had struggled
together.
Sometimes the smaller, the less unselfish personal passion, gained
temporary mastery. What was she to him if she were not more than
everything else? What was Greece to her? Once he had said that all he
should ever write would spring from her love. Was that love fit only to
inspire poems upon paper? Now he left her and forsook that love to go
to a useless danger--and she had given him all! The thought sobbed in
her. She was a woman, and she struggled with a woman’s anguish.
Then her greater soul would conquer. She would remember that night on
the square in Venice, the glimpse of his tortured self-amendment at
San Lazzarro, and the calmer strength she had felt growing in him from
the day their lips met on the convent hill. Her instinct told her this
determination of his was only a further step in that soul-growth whose
first strivings she had herself awakened. This gave her a melancholy
comfort that was sometimes almost joy. In his face of late she had
distinguished something subtle and significant, that carried her
back to the night she had left his book at the feet of Our Lady of
Sorrows. It was the veiled look she had then imagined the object of
her petition, the fallen angel sorrowing for his lost estate, would
wear--the patience and martyrdom of renunciation.
These struggles of hers had been the ultimate revealment, as the hour
she had held Gordon’s bleeding body in her arms had been life’s primal
comprehension. That had shown her love’s heights and depths; this
taught her all its breadth, its capacity for self-abnegation, its wild,
unselfish yearning for the best good of the thing beloved.
As she and Fletcher prepared the bare necessities he was to take with
him, his buried London life had risen before her. The woman who should
have loved him most--his wife--had sent him into a cruel ostracism,
hating and despising him. She whom the law’s decree forbade that he
should love, was sending him away, too, but to a noble cause and with a
breaking heart. She had made his present better than his past. Should
not his future be even more to her than the present?
All had at last been put in readiness. Waiting the conversion of
his English properties, Gordon had utilized all his Italian funds.
Ammunition, horses from his own stable, field-guns and medicines for
a year’s campaign had been loaded under his tireless supervision.
Lastly, he had taken aboard with his own hands ten thousand crowns in
specie and forty thousand in bills of exchange. Four days before, with
himself and Fletcher aboard, the brig had sailed from Genoa, whence
swift couriers had daily brought Teresa news, for he had small time
for pen work. To-day the vessel had cast anchor at Leghorn, her final
stop, only a few hours away. To-night, since she put to sea with the
dawn-tide, Gordon was to come for a last farewell.
As Teresa sat waiting in the garden, she tried not to think of the
to-morrow, the empty, innumerable to-morrows. It was already quite
dark, for there was no moon; she was thankful for this, for he could
not so readily see her pallor. He should carry away a recollection of
hope and cheerfulness, not of agony or tears. With a memory of what
she had been singing the night of Blaquiere’s coming, she lifted her
harp and began softly and bravely, her fingers finding their way on the
strings by touch:
“Then if thou wilt--no more my lonely Pillow,
In one embrace let these arms again enfold him,
And then expire of the joy--but to behold him!
Oh! my lone bosom!--oh!--my lonely Pillow!”
The effort was too great. The harp rebounded against the ground. She
bowed her head on the arm of the bench and burst into sobbing.
The twang of the fallen harp called loudly to one whose hand was on the
postern gate while he listened. He came swiftly through the dark.
She felt his arms close about her, her face, torn with crying, pressed
against his breast. So he held her till the vehemence of her weeping
stilled, and her emotion appeared only in long convulsive breaths, like
a child’s after a paroxysm of grief.
When Gordon spoke, it was to tell of sanguine news from the English
Committee, of the application of French and German officers to serve
under him, cheerful detail that calmed her.
A long pause ensued. “What are you thinking?” he asked at length.
She answered, her eyes closed, a mere murmur in his ear: “Of the
evening you came to the garden at Ravenna.”
“It was moonlight,” he replied.
“You kissed a curl of my hair,” she whispered. “I slept with it across
my lips that night.”
He bent and kissed her eyelids, her mouth, her fragile fingers. “My
love!” he exclaimed.
“I wanted to be strong to-night,” she said piteously.
“You _are_ strong and brave, too! Do I not know how you brought me to
the casa--how you drank the mandragora?”
She shivered. “Oh, if it were nothing but a potion to-night--to drink,
and to wake in your arms! Now I shall wake alone, and you--”
“I shall be always with you,” he answered. “By day, on the sea or in
the camp. At night I shall wander with you among the stars.”
“I shall ask the Virgin to watch over you. Every hour I shall pray to
God to have you in His keeping, and to guard you from danger.”
His arms tightened. He seemed to hear a chanted litany climbing a
marble staircase:
“From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence, and famine;
from battle and murder, and from sudden death;
“_Good Lord, deliver us._”
[Illustration: SHE BOWED HER HEAD ON THE ARM OF THE BENCH. _p. 389._]
Had he ever prayed? Not to the God of the orthodox Cassidy, of
the stern ecclesiastics who had inveighed against him. Not to the
beneficent Father that Dallas and Padre Somalian believed in. Never in
his life had he voiced a petition to a higher power. All he had known
was that agnostic casuistry of his youth, “The Unknown God”--that
fatalistic impersonality of his later career, “The Great Mechanism.”
He thought of lines Teresa’s hand had penned, that since a gray dawn
when he read and re-read them to the chuckling of a fiend within him
had never left his breast. They had opened a spiritual chasm that was
ever widening between the old and the new.
“Dearest,” he said, “I would not exchange a prayer of yours for all
else life could give. You prayed for me before you ever saw me, when
others gave me bitterness and revilings.”
“You never deserved that!”
“You forgave because you loved,” he answered gently. “Your love has
been around me ever since. I was unworthy of it then--I am unworthy
now.”
“England never knew you,” she protested, “as I know you. Your soul is
good! Whatever your acts, I know it has always been so!”
He sighed. “My soul was full of glorious dreams, once--this dream of
Greece’s freedom was its dearest. But they were tainted with regnant
passion and foolish pride and ingrain recklessness. When the world
flattered me, I threw away all that could have helped me rise. I sold
my birthright for its mess of pottage. When it turned, I scoffed and
hated it and plunged further away from all that was worthy. Men do more
harm to themselves than ever the devil could do them. I sunk my soul
deeper and deeper in the mire--because I did not care, because I had
nothing and no one to care for--till you found me, Teresa, that day
in the wood at La Mira! You pointed me to myself, to all I might and
should have been. You taught me first remorse, then the idle indolence
of regret; now, at last, the wish to do, to be! Neither success nor
failure, praise nor scorn, could do this. If there is anything good in
me now, it is because of that, Teresa! If the future ever forgets to
know me as wicked and wastrel, and remembers better things I have done
or tried to do--”
“You are the noblest man in the world!”
A quick spasm crossed his face in the darkness. Noble! Yet how little
popular esteem seemed to him at that moment! He went on hurriedly, for
what he had to say must be in few words:
“Always--whatever happens--you will remember what I have said, Teresa?”
Whatever happens! She threw her arms about his neck, mute with the
anguish that was fighting with her resolution.
“--that you are all to me. That I love you--you only; that I shall love
you to the end.”
“If I forgot that, I could not live!” she said chokingly.
The great clock struck ponderously from the palace hall--a clamorous
reminder that he must hasten, for the night was almost without a star,
and a wreathing nebulous mist forbade rapid riding. Through all his
preparations this hour had reared as the last harbor-light of home. It
had come and gone like a breath on glass. In the still night the chime
sounded like a far spired bell. Some banal freak of memory brought to
Gordon’s mind the old church dial jutting over Fleet Street in London,
and the wooden wild men which had struck the hour with their clubs as
he issued from John Murray’s shop the night of his maiden speech in
Parliament.
The strokes counted twelve--midnight. She shuddered as he rose to his
feet.
“My love--my life!” he said, and clasped her close.
“God keep you!” she breathed.
He left her and went a few steps into the darkness. She thought him
gone. But he came back swiftly, his hands groping.
He heard a shuddering sob tear its way from her heart, but she stood
motionless in his arms, her cheek grown suddenly cold against his own.
In that moment a strange feeling had come to her that they clasped each
other now for the last time. It was as though an icy hand were pressed
upon her heart, stilling its pulsations.
She felt his arms again release her and knew she was alone.
* * * * *
It lacked an hour of day when Gordon rode into Leghorn, and the first
streak of dawn strove vainly to shred the curdled mist as he stepped
from a lighter aboard the _Hercules_. The tide was at full and a rising
breeze flapped the canvas.
Standing apart on her deck, his mind abstracted, though his ears were
humming with the profane noises of creaking cordage, windlass and
capstan, he felt as if the fall of the headsman’s ax had divided his
soul in two. He saw his past rolled up like a useless palimpsest in the
giant hand of destiny--his future an unvexed scroll laid waiting for
mystic characters yet unformed and unimagined. Beneath the bitterness
of parting, be felt, strangely enough, a kind of peace wider than
he had ever known. The hatred that tracked, the Nemesis that had
harassed, he left behind him.
Absorbed in his reflections, he did not hear the bawled orders of the
ship’s mate, nor the spitting crackle of musketry from some ship’s hulk
near-by in the foggy smother. The brig was lifting and pushing as she
gained headway. The captain spoke at his elbow.
“Begging your lordship’s pardon, a man has just come aboard by the
ship’s bow-chains. He had a tough swim for it and a bullet through the
forearm. Says he was shanghaied by the _Pylades_. If we put about,
we’ll lose the tide. What are your lordship’s orders?”
“Is he Italian?”
“No, sir. He says he’s an Englishman, but he looks Lascar.”
“His name?” the demand fell sharply.
“Trevanion, your lordship.”
As Gordon stood there, breathing deeply, Teresa, at home in her room,
stretched at the foot of the crucifix, was crying in a voice of
anguish, that icy hand still pressed upon her heart: “O God! help me to
remember that it is for Greece! and for himself most of all! Help me
not to forget--not to forget!”
For only an instant Gordon hesitated. “Let him stay,” he said then to
the captain, and turned away to his cabin.