The castaway

The osteria, as Gordon approached, seemed gurgling with hilarity. At its side the huge unhitched diligence yawned, a dark hulk waiting for the morrow’s journey. Some of the passengers it had carried were gathered on the porch before the open windows, listening, with postures that indicated a more than ordinary curiosity and interest, to sounds from the tap-room. There were women’s forms among them.

Tourists were little to Gordon’s liking. They had bombarded his balcony at Diodati with spy-glasses, had ambushed him at Venice when he went to opera or ridotto. To him they stood for the insatiable taboo of public disesteem—the chuckling fetishism that mocked him still from beyond blue water. He skirted the inn in the shade of the cypresses and passed to an arbor which the angle of the building screened from the group.

On its edge he paused and gazed out over the fields and further forest asleep. With what bitterness he had ridden scarce three hours before from those woods! Now it was shot through with an arrow of cardinal joy whose very rankle was a painful delight. In the jar of conflicting sensations he had not reasoned or presaged; he could only feel.

What was the import of Teresa’s letter, he wondered. Much depended on it, she had said in that agitated moment. A thought flitted to him. The Contessa Albrizzi had lived much in Rome—was, he remembered, cousin to a cardinal. Could this message be an appeal for deliverance from an impossible position? Might Teresa yet be free; not from her marriage bond, but at least from this hourly torture in Casa Guiccioli? With the quick feeling of relief for her, wound a sharp sense of personal vantage. For him that would mean the right to see her often and unopposed. Yet, he argued instantly with self-reproach, was not this the sole right he could not possess, then or ever? What would it be but tempting her love on and on, only to leave it naked and ashamed at last?

A gust of noise rose behind him. It issued from a window opening out of the tap-room into the arbor. On the heels of the sound he caught shattered comments from the peering group on the front porch—feminine voices speaking English:

“I’ve always wanted to see him. We watched three whole days in Venice. How young he looks!”

“What a monster! And to think he is a peer and once wrote poetry. There! See—he’s looking this way!”

Gordon started and half turned, but he had not been observed; the angle of the wall hid him effectually.

Just then a single vociferate voice rose to dominant speech in the room—a reckless, ribald utterance like one thickened with liquor. It conveyed an invitation to everybody within hearing to share its owner’s punch. Laughter followed, and from outside a flutter of withdrawing skirts and a masculine exclamation of affront.

With a puzzled wonder the man in the arbor listened, while the voice within lifted in an uncertain song:

“Shameless brute!” came from the porch. “I wouldn’t have believed it!”

Smothering a fierce ejaculation, Gordon strode to the window and gazed into the room. The singer broke off with a laugh:

“That’s the song I always warble, gentlemen, when I’m in my cups. I wrote it to my wife—when I was a Bond Street lounger, a London cicisbeo and fan-carrier to a woman.”

The man who stared across the sill with a painful fascination was witnessing a glaring, vulgar travesty of himself. Not the George Gordon he was, or, indeed, had ever been, but the George Gordon the world believed him; the abandoned profligate of wassail and blackguardism, whom tourists boasted of having seen, and of whom an eleventh commandment had been promulgated for all British womankind—not to read his books. And this counterpart was being played by a man whose Moorish, theatric face he knew—a man he had flung from his path at Geneva, when he stood with Jane Clermont by the margin of the lake on the night he and she had fled together. A man who hated him!

The clever effrontery of the deception showed how deep was that hatred. Gordon understood now how Tita had heard of his presence at the osteria before he had entered it. The farceur inside did not know the man he impersonated was in Ravenna to-night. This, then, was not the only caravansary at which the burlesque had been played. Nor were these tourists smirking in the tap-room, or listening open-mouthed outside to the clumsy farrago, the only ones to return to England with clacking tongues. This was how the London papers had bristled with garbled inventions! This scene was only a step in a consistent plan to blacken his name anew throughout the highways of continental travel!

A guttural whisper escaped his lips. It would be another bar between him and possession of Allegra. And Teresa? If these post-house tales reached her ears! A crimson mist grew before his eyes.

A more reckless and profane emphasis had come now to the carouser within. He had risen and approached the porch window, simulating as he walked an awkward limp.

“Take a greeting to England, you globe-trotters! Greeting from Venice, the sea-Sodom, to London! Hell is not paved with its good intentions. Slabs of lava, with its parsons’ damned souls for cement, make a better causeway for Satan’s corso!”

Again he turned to his fellows in the tap-room: “When I shuffle off it will be like the rascals to dump me into Westminster Abbey. If they do, I’ll save them the trouble of the epitaph. I’ve written it myself:

“Westminster Abbey!” said a man’s bass in disgust.

Gordon’s left hand reached and grasped the sill. His face was convulsed. His right hand went to his breast pocket.

At that instant, from behind him, a touch fell on his arm and stayed it. “A letter, Excellence.”

He turned with a long, shuddering breath, and took what Tita handed him.

“I understand, Tita,” he answered, with an effort. The other nodded and disappeared.

For a moment Gordon stood motionless. Then he passed from the arbor, through the hedges, to the spot whither the gondolier had led him two hours before. He sat down on the turf and buried his face in his hands.

He had scarcely known what shapeless lurid thing had leaped up in his soul as he gazed through the window, but the touch on his arm had told him. For the moment the pressure had seemed Teresa’s hand, as he had felt it on the path at San Lazzarro, when the same red mist had swum before his eyes. Then it had roused a swift sense of shame; now the memory did more. The man yonder he had injured. There had been a deed of shame and dastard cowardice years before in Greece—yet what had he to do with the boy’s act? By what right had he, that night in Geneva, judged the other’s motive toward Jane Clermont? Had his own been so pure a one then? Because of a fancied wrong, Trevanion had dogged him to Switzerland. Because of a real one he dogged him now.

After a time Gordon raised his head and stared out into the moonlight. “It is past,” he said aloud and with composure. “It shall never tempt me again! What comes to me thus I myself have beckoned. I will not try to avert it by vengeance. The Great Mechanism that mixed the elements in me to make me what I am, shall have its way!”

He rose slowly and walked back toward the osteria. A groom was washing out the empty diligence. He sent him for his horse, and in a few moments was in the saddle, riding toward Venice through the silent, glimmering streets of Ravenna.

A new, nascent tenderness was in him. He was riding from her, the one woman he loved—to see her when and where? Should he ever see her again? She might have hope of relief in the letter he carried, but who could tell if it would succeed? And in the meantime she was alone, as she had been alone before.

He rode on, his chin sunk on his breast, scarcely observing a coach with six white horses, that passed him, driven in the opposite direction.