The castaway

As he took the two missives the girl handed him Gordon caught his breath, for one he saw was directed in Annabel’s hand. For a moment a hope that overleaped all his suffering rose in his brain. Had those months wrought a change in her? Had she, too, thought of their child? Had the cry he voiced on the packet that bore him from England struck an answering chord in her? He opened its cover. An inclosure dropped out.

He picked it up blankly. It was the note he had pencilled on the channel, returned unopened.

The sudden revulsion chilled him. He broke the seal of the second letter and read—read while a look of utter sick whiteness crept across his face, a look of rage and suffering that marked every feature.

It was from his sister, a letter written with fingers that soiled and creased it in their agony, blotted and stained with tears. For the thing it told of was a dreadful thing, a whispered charge against him so damning, so satanic in its cruelty, that though lip might murmur it to a gloating ear, yet pen refused to word it. The whole world turned black before him, and the dusk seemed shot through with barbed and flaming javelins of agony.

He crushed the letter in his hand, and, with a gesture like a madman’s, thrust it into Shelley’s, turning to him a countenance distorted with passion, gauche, malignant, repulsive.

“Read it, Shelley,” he said in a strangled voice. “Read it and know London, the most ineffable centaur ever begotten of hypocrisy and a nightmare! Read what its wretched lepers are saying! There is a place in Michael Angelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ in the Sistine Chapel that was made for their kind, and may the like await them in that of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ—Amen!”

With this fearful imprecation he flung away from their startled faces along the winding vineyarded lane, on into the dusk, lost to a sense of direction, to everything save the blackness in his own soul.

The night fell, odorous with grape-scents, and the moon stained the terraces to amber. It shone on Gordon as he sat by the little wharf where the skiff rocked in the ripples, his eyes viewless, looking straight before him across the lake.

For him there was no sanctuary in time or in distance. The passage he had read at Newstead Abbey in his mother’s open Bible, beside her body, flashed through his mind: And among these nations shall thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest.... In the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! He had found—should find—no ease nor rest! The captive of Chillon had been bound only with fetters of iron to stone pillars. He was chained with fiery links of hate to the freezing walls of the world’s contumely!

Footsteps went by along the shadowy lane. Shelley’s voice spoke: “He will come back soon, and we must comfort him if we can.”

The words came distinctly as the footsteps died away.

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? Let the moralists have it so, since they stickled so lustily for endless brimstone. Fool? He would be so, then! His brain should lie fallow and untilled—he would write no more!

With a quick gesture he drew from his pocket his commonplace-book. He laid it against the disfigured sign-board, pencilled a few words on its cover and, turning, hurled it far from him into the shrubbery.

A twig snapped. He looked around. Jane Clermont stood near him, her eyes smiling into his, fringed with intoxication and daring.

“I know,” she said; “they are hounding you still. They hated me, too!” She came quite close to him. “What need we care? What are they all to us?”

It was the Jane of the Drury Lane greenroom he saw now—the Jane whose brilliance and wit had held him then; but there was something deeper in her look that he had never seen before: a recklessness, an invitation and an assent.

“Jane!” he exclaimed.

She touched his hand. “Why should we stay here? Let us go away from them all—where they cannot follow us to sting!”

Gordon stared at her, his eyes holding hers. To go away—with her? To slip the leash of all that was pagan in him? What matter? He was damned anyway—a social Pariah; why strive to undeserve the reputation? His thought was swirling through savage undercurrents of vindictive wrath, circling, circling like a Maelstrom, about this one dead center: Civilization had cast him off. Henceforth his life was his own, to live to himself, for his own ends, as the savage, as the beast of the field. To live and to die, knowing that no greater agony than was meted to him now could await him, even in that nethermost reach where the lost are driven at the end.

“We must comfort him if we can!” The words Shelley had spoken seemed to vibrate in the stillness like the caught key of an organ. He turned to where Villa Diodati above them slept in the long arms of the night shadows, listening to the contending voices within him. Comfort? The placid comfort of philosophy for him whose flesh was fever and his blood quicksilver? In this girl life and action beckoned to him—life full and abundant—forgetfulness, wandering, and pleasure, fleeting surely, but still his while it should last! And yet—

The girl’s hand was on the skiff. On a sudden a cry of fear burst from her lips and she shrank back as a disordered figure broke from the darkness and clutched Gordon’s arm fiercely.

“Where are you taking her now?”

Gordon’s thought veered. In his numbness of feeling there scarce seemed strangeness in the apparition. As he looked at the oriental, mustachioed face, haggard and haunted, his lips rather than his mind replied:

“Who knows?”

“You lie! You ruined her career and stole her away from London and from me! Now you want to take her from these last friends of hers—for yourself! But you cannot go where I will not find you! And where you go the world shall know you and despise you!”

Jane’s eyes flashed upon the speaker. “You!” she cried in contemptuous anger. “You hated him even in London; now you have followed him here. It is you who have set the peasants to spy upon us! It is you who have spread tales through Geneva! You whose lies sent the syndic to-day!”

Gordon had been staring at the Moorish, theatric face with a gaze of singular inquiry, his brain searching, searching for a lost clue. All at once the haze lightened. His thought leaped across a chasm of time. He saw a reckless youth, a deserter from the navy, whom he had befriended in Greece—a youth who had vanished suddenly from Missolonghi during the feast of Ramazan. He saw a shambling, cactus-bordered road to the seashore—a file of Turkish soldiers, the foremost in a purple coat, and carrying a long wand—a beast of burden bearing a brown sack—

“Trevanion!” he said. “Trevanion—by the Lord!”

He burst into a laugh, reëchoing, sardonic, a laugh now of absolute, remorseless unconcern, of crude recklessness flaunting at last supreme over crumbled resolve—the laugh of a zealot flagellant beneath the lash, a derisive Villon on the scaffold.

“So I stole her from you! You, even you, dare to accuse me. Out of my sight!” he said, and flung him roughly from the path.

Gordon held out his hand to Jane Clermont, lifted her into the skiff, and springing in, sent the slim cockle-shell shooting out into the still expanse like an arrow on the air.

Then he took up the oars and turned its prow down the lake to where the streaming lights of the careless city wavered through the mists, pale green under the moonbeams.

The journal which Gordon had hurled from him lay in the vine-rows next morning when Shelley, with a face of trouble and foreboding, passed along the dewy lane. He read the words written on its cover:

“And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. I will keep no record of that same hesternal torch-light; and to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I throw away this volume, and write in Ipecacuanha: Hang up justice! Let morality go beg! To be sure, I have long despised myself and man, but I never spat in the face of my species before—‘O fool! I shall go mad!’”