The castaway

From London to Ostend, and through Flanders, a swart shadow trailed George Gordon slowly but unerringly. It was the man whose dark, reckless face had once turned with jealous passion to Jane Clermont as they had watched a carriage approaching Drury Lane; he who, on a later night, had pursued the same vehicle, then a mark for jeers, to Piccadilly Terrace. The question he had uttered as he saw Gordon alight alone, had rang in his brain through his after-search: “Where has he left her?” The London newspapers had not been long in chronicling Gordon’s arrival in Ostend, and thither he followed, making certain that in finding one he should find the other.

The chase at first was not difficult. Evil report, carried with malicious assiduity by spying tourists and globe-trotting gossip-mongers, had soon overtaken his quarry, and Gordon’s progress became marked by calumnious tales which hovered like obscene sea-birds over the wake of a vessel. Gordon had gone from Brussels in a huge coach, copied from one of Napoleon’s taken at Genappe, and purchased from a travelling Wallachian nobleman. The vehicle was a noteworthy object, and early formed the basis of lying reports. A paragraph in the Journal de Belgique met the pursuer’s eye on his first arrival in Ostend.

It stated with detail that a Flemish coachmaker had delivered to the milor Anglais a coach of the value of two thousand eight hundred francs; that on going for payment, he found his lordship had absconded with the carriage; that the defrauded sellier had petitioned the Tribunal de Première Instance for proper representation to other districts, that the fugitive might be apprehended and the stolen property seized. With this clipping in his pocket the man who tracked Gordon followed up the Rhine to the confines of Switzerland. Here he lost a month, for the emblazoned wagon de luxe had turned at Basle, and, skirting Neufchâtel, had taken its course to Lake Geneva.

Gordon had travelled wholly at random and paused there only because the shimmering blue waters, the black mountain ridges with their epaulets of cloud and, in the distance, the cold, secular phantom of Mont Blanc, brought to his jaded senses the first hint of relief. In the Villa Diodati, high above the lake, the English milord with the lame foot, the white face and sparkling eyes, stayed his course, to the wonder of the country folk who speculated endlessly upon the strange choice which preferred the gloomy villa to the spires and slate roofs of the gay city so near. And here, to his surprise, Gordon found ensconced, in a cottage on the high bank, Shelley and his young wife, with the black-eyed, creole-tinted girl whom the Drury Lane audience had hissed.

So had chance conspired to color circumstance for the rage of tireless hatred that was following.

The blows that had succeeded the flight of Annabel with his child had left Gordon stunned. The flaming recoil of his feeling, in that fierce denunciation at Almack’s, had burned up in him the very capacity for further suffering, and for a time the quiet of Diodati, set in its grove above the water like a bird’s nest among leaves, was a healing anodyne.

From his balcony Mont Blanc and its snowy aiguilles were screened, but the sun sank roseate behind the Jura, and it lifted again over vineyarded hills which echoed the songs of vine-dressers and the mellow bells of sauntering herds. Below, boats swept idly in the sun, or the long lances of the rain marched and marshalled across the level lake to the meeting and sundering of the clouds.

There came a time too soon, when the dulled nerves awoke, when the whole man cried out. In the sharpest of these moods Gordon found respite at the adjacent cottage, where Shelley, whose bright eyes seemed to drink light from the pages of Plato or Calderon, read aloud, or Jane Clermont, piquant and daring as of old, sang for them some song of Tom Moore’s. Or in the long days the two men walked and sailed, under a sky of garter-blue, feeling the lapping of the waves, living between the two wondrous worlds of water and ether, till for a time Gordon laid the troubled specters of his thoughts in semi-forgetfulness.

One day they drove along the margin of the lake to Chillon and spent a night beneath the frowning château walls that had entombed Bonnivard. On the afternoon of their return, sitting alone on the balcony with the gloom of those dungeons still upon him, gazing far across the lake, across the mountains, toward that home from which he had been driven, Gordon, for the first time since he had left England, found relief in composition. He wrote of Chillon’s prisoner, but the agony in the lines was a personal one:

He wrote in the dimming luster of a perfect day. Below him rippled the long lake churning an inarticulate melody, and a tiny island with trees upon it rested the eye. As he gazed, beyond the dazzling beryl foliage, set in the sunset, a spot rivetted his look. A moment before the white sail of a boat had glanced there; now a confused flat blur lay on the water.

Gordon thrust his commonplace-book into his pocket and leaned forward, shading his eyes from the glow. The blot resolved itself into a capsized hull and two black figures struggling in the water, one with difficulty supporting the other.

The next moment he was dashing down the bank, hallooing for Fletcher, peeling off coat and waistcoat as he went.

“There’s a boat swamped,” he shouted, as the valet came through the garden. “Where is the skiff?”

“Miss Clermont has it, my lord.”

Gordon plunged in, while Fletcher ran to summon the Shelleys. They came hurrying along the vineyard lane with frightened faces, Mary to watch from the high bank, and Shelley, who could no more swim than Fletcher, to stride up and down, his long hair streaming in the wind. The excitement brought a picturesque dozen of goitred vine-dressers from the hillside, who looked on with exclamations.

All were gazing fixedly on the lake, or they might have seen two men enter the grounds from the upper road. Of these, one was a Swiss with a severe, thin face and ascetic brow, the syndic of Cologny, the nearest town—a bigot functionary heartily disliked by the country people. The other was a Genevan attorney. From the road they had not seen the catastrophe, and the overturned boat, the struggling figures, and the swimmer forging to the rescue came to their view all at once.

Gordon was swimming as he had never done save once—when he had swum the Hellespont years before, and in mid-channel a strange, great piebald fish had glided near him. The lawyer saw him reach and grasp the helpless man, and, supporting him, bring him to shore. He sniffed with satisfaction.

“Only one man in the canton can swim like that,” he said, “and that’s the one you came to see. No wonder the peasants call him ‘the English fish’!”

The young man whom Gordon had aided wore a blonde curling beard, contrasting strongly with his older companion’s darker shaven cheeks and bushy black Greek eyebrows. The unseen spectators on the terrace saw him drink from his rescuer’s pocket-flask—saw him rise and grasp the other’s hand and knew that he was thanking him. As they watched, a servant ran to the coach-house, and the syndic observed:

“He’s sending them into town by carriage. They’re going indoors now. We’ll go down presently.”

“Take my advice,” urged the attorney above the terrace, “and let the Englishman alone. Haven’t we court business enough in Switzerland, that we must work for Flanders? What have we to do with the complaints of Brussels coachmakers? And how do you know it’s true, anyway?”

The syndic’s lips snapped together.

“I know my business,” he bridled. “He is a worshiper of Satan and a scoffer at religion.”

“And you’d burn him with green wood if you could, as Calvin did Servetus in the town yonder, eh?”

“He has committed every crime in his own country,” went on the other angrily. “He has formed a conspiracy to overthrow by rhyme all morals and government. My brother wrote me from Copet that one of Madame de Staël’s guests fainted at seeing him ride past, as if she had seen the devil. They say in Geneva that he has corrupted every grisette on the rue Basse! Do you think he is too good to be a thief? Murderer or absconder or heretic, it is all one to me. Cologny wants none such on her skirts. Let us go down,” he added, rising; “it will be dark soon.”

The counsellor shrugged his shoulders and followed the other over the sloping terrace.