Hallie Erminie Rives

“ Gordon uttered an astonished and bewildered exclamation:
“Caro! What mad masquerade is this?”
She drew back under the pale intensity, the controlled agitation of his face. “Forgive me! forgive me!” Tumult was looking from her eyes, and her shoulders were heaving. “I could not help it! I have tried to forget you during all this past year. I cannot bear to see you only at Melbourne House and at parties and on the street. How pale you always are!” she went on. “Like a statue of marble, and your dark hair such a contrast. I never see you without wanting to cry. ”

“ The rainy season set in with all its rigors. Missolonghi became a pestilential mud-basket beside which the dikes of Holland were a desert of Arabia for dryness. An unknown plague fastened on the bazaar and terrified the townspeople. But in all conditions, Gordon seemed inspirited with a calm cheerfulness.
He thought of Teresa continually. Oddly enough, she stood before him always as he had once seen her on a square in Venice, with moonlight tangling an aureole in her gold hair, her face now not frozen with mute horror—that picture had vanished forever!—but serene with love and abnegation. ”

“ Had Shelley been right? Was death, for Christian or pagan, only a part of the inwoven design, glad or sad, on that veil which hides from us some high reality? Was Dallas—was Padre Somalian—nearer right than his own questioning that had ended in negation? Had Sheridan found the girl-wife he longed for—beyond the questioning and the stars? And was that serene soul, whose body now sifted to its primal elements, walking free somewhere in a universe of loving intelligence [376] which to him, George Gordon, had been at most only “The Great Mechanism”? ”

“ When he had quitted London, life—the life of wife and home—had seemed ended. He had thought only of Ada, his child, when he had signed that paper which put it forever out of his power alone to break the tie which bound him to Annabel. Between him and Teresa reared the law, a cold brazen wall between two hearts of fire. “I cannot!” he said. “The old tie holds. It is too late! Because one woman’s pitiless pureness has ruined me, shall I ruin another woman’s pitying purity?”
So while the dark wore away to dawn, his thought began and ended with the same desolate cry. ”

“ THE FEAST OF RAMAZAN
A cool breeze slipped ahead of the dawn. It blew dim the calm Greek stars, stirred the intricate branches of olive-trees inlaid in the rose-pearl façade of sky, bowed the tall, coral-lipped oleanders lining the rivulets, and crisped the soft wash of the gulf-tide. It lifted the strong bronze curls on the brow of a sleeping man who lay on the sea-beach covered with a goatskin.
George Gordon woke and looked about him: at the pallid, ripple-ridged dunes, the murmuring clusters of reeds; at the dead fire on which a kid had roasted the night before ”

“ As she stood again at the altar, the phial in her hand, a bleak fear crossed her soul. What if it had never been anything but a story? Perhaps Juliet had never awakened really, but had died when she drank the potion! Suppose it were a poison, from which there was no awaking!
She shivered as if with cold. Better even that than life—without him!
Perhaps, too, Gordon had jested or had been mistaken. ”

“ With a flare of unrecking impertinence, and a racing recollection of a first dinner at Melbourne House, when he had given Lady Caroline Lamb such a blossom from his coat, Gordon drew the carnation from his buttonhole and handed it to Jane Clermont.
The crowd had looked to see him enter with the others; now as the vehicle rolled away, leaving him standing alone, the clamor, sharpened by his nonchalant act and by the smile which they could not translate, rose more derisive, more boldly mixed with insult. They were overcoming that dull inborn fear of the clod for the noble. ”

“ The news by this time had reached the casa in Ravenna. Another half-hour at most and choice would be taken from their hands. They must lose no time. Yet whither? Where could he go, that hatred would not pursue? To what Ultima Thule could he fly, that the poison barb would not follow to wound her happiness? Where to live? Never in England! In the East,—in Greece, perhaps, the land of his youthful dreams? It was a barbarian pashawlik, under the foot of Ottoman greed; neither a fit nor secure habitation. In Italy, where her soul must always be? ”

“ Gordon had been looking at him steadily—looking, but with a strange irrelevance, seeing really himself, [137] standing in his own room at a long-ago dawn, a goblet of brandy in his hand, and in his heart a determination rising anew—a wish to be like the youth whose clasp now met his own, with a like serenity and purpose, a soul to which fame meant least, truth and right all! In that year of dazzle before his marriage he had quenched that determination. He had worshiped the Great Beast. He had lived the world’s life and played its games and accepted its awards. ”

“ A cloistered city, its old grandeur departed and seemingly but half inhabited; the river drifting by, the house of the Shelleys on the opposite bank; boats and horses; a garden sweet with orange-trees and gushes of violets along shady walks; a few servants marshalled by Fletcher and Tita; a study and books—and Teresa. It was the home Gordon had dreamed of when his arms were around her at the villa chapel, but more satisfying, more complete. ”

“ Gordon closed his eyes. Such a narrow span between this life and the unbridged gulf, between the old questioning and the great solution. An hour, and he should test the worth of Dallas’ creed, should know if the friar of San Lazzarro had been right. An hour, and life would be behind him, with its errors ended, its longings quenched.
Its largest endeavor had been defeated: that was the closest sting. In his weakness all else sank away beside the thought that he had tried—and failed. Even the one blow he might not strike. The nation was in straits, the loan delayed, the campaign unopened. ”

“ The mainspring of the woman’s hatred leaped. The world had coupled their names long ago, when the girl had first stolen away from the dreary Godwin house to the glamour and allurements of Drury Lane! And the world no doubt told the truth. If she could help to ruin him, line for line, name and fame—as he had ruined Jane Clermont!
In her vision rose the stooped figure of William Godwin, Jane’s foster-father. He hated Gordon, she knew—and he had a connection with the Courier, the bitterest of them all. ”

“ Something clutched tangibly at Gordon’s soul. In that instant his gaze, lifted, rested on a white square in the moonlight. It was a familiar enough object, but now it appeared odd and outré. He rose and approached it. It had been a sign-post bearing an arrow and the words “Villa Diodati.” Now malice had painted out the name and replaced it with new and staring characters.
“Atheist and Fool.” It glared level at him with a baleful malevolence that chilled the moment’s warmer softening into ice. Atheist! Without God. What need, then, had he for man? ”

“ Gordon’s mind, racing over the pages, was catching glimpses of heterogeneous elements which blended in a dim, dread futurity. He saw suddenly the inertia of Annabel’s passive correctness—saw why his own name, with its eccentric dazzle, had stood forth blackly against her even ways, her spotless, conventional pureness. The mute contrast had always been there, and he had suffered accordingly. To the world she stood a martyr—a stony pillar, once a woman, who had looked back to catch some lurid fume from doomed cities sinking under Dead Sea waters. ”

“ The place was very still. Peach-blooms hung their glistening spray above the orchard close, and swallows circled about a peaceful spire from which a slow mellow note was striking. It seemed to Teresa that only yesterday she had stood there face to face with Gordon. With a sudden impulse she sank to her knees before the shrine.
When she rose she was not alone; he who she had prayed might still be within those walls stood near—the same reverend aspect, the benignant brow, the coarse brown robe. ”

“ IN WHICH TERESA MAKES A JOURNEY
“Help me to remember that it is for Greece—and for himself most of all!” That was Teresa’s cry through those dreary weeks alone. The chill instinct that had seized her as Gordon held her in that last clasp had never left her. She struggled always with a grim sense of the inevitable. At times she fought the desire to follow, even to Greece, to fold him in her arms, to entreat: “Give up the cause! Come back to me—to love!” ”

“ 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! ”

“ While the wheels rattled onward, Gordon’s white whimsical face, lifted to those presences above the smoky roofs, gradually lost its bitter glaze and expressed a curious wistfulness—a vague, appealing weariness and speculation.
“Matter is eternal,” he reflected, “always changing, but reproduced and eternal. May not mind be also? Is its inner spark celestial? Or, like the cells that produce it, is it a creature of the mold, doomed to extinction with the brain, sinking as the candle-flame perishes when the wick falls? ”