THE GREAT SILENCE
Blaquiere stood beside Teresa in the windowed chamber which had been
set apart for her, overlooking the courtyard.
All in that Grecian port knew of her love and the purpose that had
upheld her in her journey. To the forlorn town her wordless grief
seemed a tender intimate token of a loss still but half comprehended.
It had surrounded her with an unvarying thoughtfulness that had fallen
gently across her anguish. She had listened to the muffled rumble of
cannon that the wind brought across the marshes from the stronghold of
Patras, where the Turks rejoiced. She had seen the palled bier, in the
midst of Gordon’s own brigade, borne on the shoulders of the officers
of his corps to the Greek church, to lie in state beside the remains of
Botzaris--had seen it borne back to its place amid the wild mourning of
half-civilized tribesmen and the sorrow of an army.
The man she had loved had carried into the Great Silence a people’s
worship and a nation’s tears. Now as she looked out across the massed
troops with arms at rest--across the crowded docks and rippling
shallows to the sea, where two ships rode the swells side by side,
she hugged this thought closer and closer to her heart. One of these
vessels had borne her hither and was to take her back to Italy. The
other, a ship-of-the-line, had brought the man who stood beside her,
with the first installment of the English loan. It was to bear to an
English sepulture the body of the exile to whom his country had denied
a living home. Both vessels were to weigh with the evening tide.
Blaquiere, looking at the white face that gazed seaward, remembered
another day when he had heard her singing to her harp from a dusky
garden. He knew that her song would never again fall with such a
cadence.
At length he spoke, looking down on the soldiery and the people that
waited the passing to the water-side of the last cortège.
“I wonder if he sees--if he knows, as I know, Contessa, what the part
he acted here shall have done for Greece? In his death faction has
died, and the enmities of its chiefs will be buried with him forever!”
Her eyes turned to the sky, reddening now to sunset. “I think he
knows,” she answered softly.
Padre Somalian’s voice behind them intervened: “We must go aboard
presently, my daughter.”
She turned, and as the friar came and stood looking down beside
Blaquiere, passed out and crossed the hall to the room wherein lay her
dead.
She approached the bier--a rude chest of wood upon rough trestles, a
black mantle serving for pall. At its head, laid on the folds of a
Greek flag, were a sword and a simple wreath of laurel. A dull roar
shook the air outside--the minute-gun from the grand battery, firing a
last salute-and a beam of fading sunlight glanced through the window
and turned to a fiery globe a glittering helmet on the wall.
Gently, as though a sleeping child lay beneath it, she withdrew the
pall and white shroud from the stainless face. She looked at it with an
infinite yearning, while outside the minute-gun boomed and the great
bell of the Greek church tolled slowly. Blaquiere’s words were in her
mind.
“_Do_ you know, my darling?” she whispered. “Do you know that Greece
lives because my heart is dead?”
She took from her bosom the curl of flaxen hair and the fragment of
paper that had fallen from his chilling fingers and put them in his
breast. Then stooping, she touched in one last kiss the unanswering
marble of his lips.
At the threshold she looked back. The golden glimmer from the helmet
fell across the face beneath it with an unearthly radiance. A touch of
woman’s pride came to her--the pride that sits upon a broken heart.
“How beautiful he was!” she said in a low voice. “Oh, God! How
beautiful he was!”