The castaway

“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!” Her sending of Pietro had given her comfort. She subsisted upon his frequent letters, upon the rarer, dearer ones of Gordon, and upon the remembrance of the great issue to which she had resigned him.

One day a message came from a great Venetian banking-house. It told of a sum of money held for her whose size startled her. She, who had possessed but a slender marriage-portion, was more than rich in her own right. An accompanying letter from Dallas told her the gift was Gordon’s. A wild rush of tears blurred the page as she read.

That night she dreamed a strange dream; yet it was not a dream wholly, for she lay with open eyes staring at the crucifix that hung starkly, a murky outline, against the wall. Suddenly she started up in the bed. Where the ivory image had glimmered against the ebony was another face, colorless, sharp-etched, a wavering light playing upon it. It was Gordon’s, deep-lined, haggard, as though in mute extremity. His eyes looked at her steadily, appealingly.

She held out her arms with a moan. Then the light faded, the phantom merged again into the shadow, and in the darkness she hid her eyes and swayed and wept. She slept no more. A blind terror held her till dawn.

At noon Tita brought her a Pisan paper, with a column of Greek news. It stated that the English loan, on which depended the hopes of the revolutionists, was still unsubscribed in London. The measure would doubtless be too late to stay the descent of Yussuff Pasha’s armies. Dissensions were rife at Missolonghi. At Constantinople the sultan, in full divan, had proclaimed George Gordon an enemy to the Porte and offered a pashawlik and the three-horse-tailed lance for his head.

The English loan—too late! Its speedy coming had been a certainty in Gordon’s mind before his departure. Was it the agony of failure she had seen on the face that looked at her from the darkness? Was he even now crucified on the cross of a despairing crisis?

A quick thought came to her. The sum he had made hers—a fortune, almost a hundred thousand pounds of English money! Might not that serve, at least until the loan came? If she could help him thus!

There was no time for correspondence, banking routine—no time for delays of any sort. It must go now! A daring plan was born in her mind. She could take it herself, direct to his necessity. Why not? Such a brig as Gordon had chartered was no doubt to be found at Leghorn. Yet she could not make the voyage with but a single servant for escort. To whom could she appeal? To whom else could that far-away cause be near?

A figure flashed before her with the directness of a vision—a man she had seen but once, when with her husband, he had confronted her on a monastery path one dreadful buried day. The friar of San Lazzarro! She recalled the clear deep eyes, the venerable head, the uncompromising honesty of the padre’s countenance. He had known the man she loved—had seen his life in that retreat. Was he still there? Would he aid her?

An hour more and she was riding with Tita toward Leghorn harbor. By the next sunrise she was on her way to Venice. Three days later Tita’s oar swung her gondola to the wharf of the island of Saint Lazarus.

She stepped ashore and rang a bell at the wall-door beside which, in its stone shrine, stood the leaden image of the Virgin, looking out across the gray lagoon.

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.

“What do you seek, my daughter?”

As Teresa told her errand, looking into the soluble eyes bent on her, the breeze stirred the young leaves, and the tiny waves lapped the margin-stones in a golden undercurrent of sound. Her words, unstudied and tense with feeling, acquired an unconscious eloquence. A great issue in perilous straits; she, with empty affluence that might save it—but alone, without companion for such a journey.

The friar listened with a growing wonder. In the seclusion of that solitude he had long since heard of the Greek rebellion—had yearned for its success. But it had been a thing remote from his lagoon island. He? To leave the peace of his studies to accompany a woman, to a land in the throes of war? A strange request! Why had she come to him?

“Have I ever seen you before, my daughter?”

Her heart beat heavily. “Yes, Father.”

She was leaning against the rock, her face lifted to his. The posture, the pathetic purity of her features, brought recollection.

Padre Somalian’s eyes lighted. Since that unforgotten scene on the path, he had often wondered what would be this woman’s wedded life, so tragically begun. By her face, she had suffered. Her husband had been old then—doubtless was dead. It was a mark of grace that she came now to him—a holy man—before others. If, alone in the world, she chose to consecrate her wealth thus nobly, well and good. If there had been fault back of that rich marriage, such an act would be in the line of fitting penance.

If there had been fault! The friar’s eyes turned away. He was thinking of the stranger whose brow her husband’s blow had marked—of the paper he himself had lifted from beneath the stone. Since the gusty day when he found the abandoned robe, he had prayed unceasingly for that unknown man’s soul.

“You will go?”

The question recalled his thought, gone afar.

“My daughter,” he demurred, “who am I, bred to quiet and contemplation, to guide you in such an enterprise?”

Tears had come to Teresa’s eyes. “Then the hope of Greece will perish! And he—its leader, who has given his all—will fail!”

The padre’s look clouded. It was the undying war of Christendom against the idolater, the fight the church militant must wage daily till the reign of the thousand golden years began. Yet noble as was the Grecian struggle, to his mind it had been smirched by a name famed for its evil.

“I would so fair a cause had a better champion!” he said slowly.

Her tears dried away. “And you say that?” she cried, her tone vibrating. “You who saw him, and with whom he lived here?—you?”

He thought her distrait. “He here? What do you mean?”

“Do you not know? Father, he who leads the Greeks is the man with whom I stood that day beside this shrine!”

The friar started. Rapid emotions crossed his face. For many a month a sore question had turned itself over and over in his mind. Had he stumbled in his duty to that man who had come in hopelessness and departed with despair unlightened? Day after day he had seen the misery reflected in the countenance. He knew now that he had been witnessing the efforts of a fallen soul to regain its lost estate—a soul that was now fighting in the ranks of the Cross! In his own self-reproach he had prayed that it might be given him again to hold before his eyes the symbol of the eternal suffering. Was this not the answer to that prayer?

His eyes suffused.

“Wait for me here, my daughter,” he said. “I shall not be long. We go together. Who knows if the summons you bring be not the voice of God!”