THE RENUNCIATION
Gordon entered his bleak room with mind strangely numbed. Gamba, now
acting as his adjutant, was waiting, and him he dismissed without
dictating his usual correspondence. The struggle he had fought had
bitten deeply into his fund of physical resistance. A tremor was in his
hands--a cold sweat on his forehead.
Riding, with the ashes of denial on his lips, it had come to him that
in this temptation he had met his last and strongest enemy. It had
found him in his weakness, and that weakness it would not be given
him to surmount. The sword was wearing out the scabbard. His own
hand should never lead the Greece he loved to its freedom--should
never marshal it at its great installation. None but himself knew how
fearfully illness had grown upon him or with what difficult pain he had
striven to conceal its havoc. Only he himself had had no illusions. He
knew to-night that the final decision had lain between the cause and
his life itself. The one thing which might have knit up his ravelled
health--the abandonment of this miasma-breeding town for the wholesome
unvitiated hill air of Salona, of the active campaign for passive trust
to foreign dictation--he had thrust from him. And in so doing, he had
made the last great choice.
“Lyon!” he said--“Lyon!” The shepherd-dog by the hearth raised his
head. His eyes glistened. His tail beat the stone. He whined uneasily
as his master began to pace the floor, up and down, his step uneven,
forcing his limbs to defy their dragging inertia.
As the long night-watch knelled wearily away, drop by drop Gordon drank
this last and bitter cup of renunciation. Love and life he put behind
him, facing unshrinkingly the grisly specter that looked at him from
the void.
He thought of Teresa singing to her lonely harp in a far-off fragrant
Italian garden. His gaze turned to a closet built into the corner of
the room. In it was a manuscript--five additional cantos of “Don Juan”
written in that last year at Pisa, the completion of the poem, on which
he had lavished infinite labor. He remembered an hour when her voice
had said: “One day you will finish it--more worthily.” Had he done so?
Had he redeemed those earlier portions which, though his ancient enemy
had declared them “touched with immortality,” yet rang with cadences
long since grown painful to him? The world might judge!
He thought of his Memoirs, completed, which he had sent from Italy by
Dallas for the hand of Tom Moore in London. These pages were a brief
for the defense, submitted to the Supreme Bench of Posterity.
“For Ada!” he muttered. “The smiles of her youth have been her
mother’s, but the tears of her maturity shall be mine!”
His life for Greece! And giving it, it should be his to strike at
least one fiery blow, to lead one fierce dash of arms! He looked
where a glittering helmet hung on the wall, elaborately wrought
and emblazoned, bearing his own crest and armorial motto: “Crede
Gordon”--a garish, ostentatious gewgaw whose every fragile line and
over-decoration was a sneer. It had been brought him in a satin casket
by the hand of the suave Paolo, the last polished sting of his master,
the Count Guiccioli. He would bring to naught that gilded mockery of
hatred that scoffed at his purpose! A few more hours and preparations
would be completed for the attack on Lepanto. To storm that stronghold,
rout the Turkish forces, sound this one clear bugle-call that would
ring on far frontiers--and so, the fall of the curtain.
At length he sat down at the table and in the candle-light began to
write. What he wrote in that hour has been preserved among the few
records George Gordon left behind him at Missolonghi.
“My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are done;
The worm, the canker and the grief
Are mine alone!
The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
The exalted portion of the pain
And power of love, I cannot share.
I wear the chain.
Yet see--the sword, the flag, the field!
Glory and Greece around me see!
The Spartan, borne upon his shield,
Was not more free.
Awake! (not Greece--she _is_ awake!)
Awake my spirit! Think through whom
Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake.
And then strike home!
Up to the battle! There is found
A soldier’s grave--for thee the best;
Then look around and choose thy ground.
And take thy rest!”
The pen fell from his fingers. A sudden icy breath seemed to congeal
from the air. He rose--tried to walk, but felt his limbs failing him.
He fixed his eyes upon a bright spot on the wall, fighting desperately
against the appalling faintness that was enshrouding him. It gyrated
and swam before his vision--a burnished helmet. Should the battle after
all evade him? Was it denied him even to fall upon the field? A roaring
rose in his ears.
He steadied himself against the table and shut his teeth. The quiver of
convulsion was upon him again--and the movement against Lepanto began
to-morrow! It must not come--not yet, _not yet_! The very life of the
cause was wound in his. He would not yield!
The shepherd-dog had risen whining from the hearth; Gordon felt the
rough tongue licking his hand--felt but could not see. He staggered
toward the couch. Darkness had engulfed him, a black giddiness from
whose depths he heard faintly a frantic barking and hurried footsteps
on the stair.