CHAPTER LXIV
“OF HIM WHOM SHE DENIED A HOME, THE GRAVE”
Greece was nevermore a vassal of the Turk. In the death of the archistrategos who had so loved her cause, the chieftains put aside quarrels and buried private ambitions—all save one. In the stone chamber at Missolonghi wherein that shrouded form had lain, the Suliote chiefs swore fealty to Mavrocordato and the constitutional government as they had done to George Gordon.
Another had visited that chamber before them. This was a dark-bearded man in Suliote dress, who entered it unobserved while the body of the man he had so hated lay in state in the Greek church. Trevanion forced the sealed door of the closet and examined the papers it contained. When he took horse for Athens, he bore with him whatever of correspondence and memoranda might be fuel for the conspiracy of Ulysses—and a roll of manuscript, the completion of “Don Juan,” which he tore to shreds and scattered to the four winds on a flat rock above a deep pool a mile from the town. He found Ulysses a fugitive, deserted by his faction, and followed him to his last stronghold, a cavern in Mount Parnassus.
But fast as Trevanion went, one went as fast. This was a young Greek who had ridden from Salona to Missolonghi with one Lambro, primate of Argos. Beneath the beard and Suliote attire he recognized Trevanion, and his brain leaped to fire with the memory of a twin sister and the fearful fate of the sack to which she had once been abandoned. From an ambush below the entrance of Ulysses’ cave, he shot his enemy through the heart.
On the day Trevanion’s sullen career was ended, along the same highway which Gordon had traversed when he rode to Newstead on that first black home-coming, a single carriage followed a leaden casket from London to Nottinghamshire.
In its course it passed a noble country-seat, the hermitage of a woman who had once burned an effigy before a gay crowd in Almack’s Assembly Rooms. Lady Caroline Lamb, diseased in mind as in body, discerned the procession from the terrace. As the hearse came opposite she saw the crest upon the pall. She fainted and never again left her bed.
The cortège halted at Hucknall church, near Newstead Abbey, and there the earthly part of George Gordon was laid, just a year from the hour he had bidden farewell to Teresa in the Pisan garden, where now a lonely woman garnered her deathless memories.
At the close of the service the two friends who had shared that last journey—Dallas, now grown feeble, and Hobhouse, recently knighted and risen to political prominence—stood together in the lantern-lighted porch.
“What of the Westminster chapter?” asked Dallas. “Will they grant the permission?”
A shadow crossed the other’s countenance. Popular feeling had undergone a great revulsion, but clerical enmity was outspoken and undying. He thought of a bitter philippic he had heard in the House of Lords from the Bishop of London. His voice was resentful as he answered:
“The dean has refused. The greatest poet of his age and country is denied even a tablet on the wall of Westminster Abbey!”
The kindly eyes under their white brows saddened. Dallas looked out through the darkness where gloomed the old Gothic towers of Newstead, tenantless, save for their raucous colonies of rooks.
“The greatest poet of his age and country!” he repeated slowly. “After all, we can be satisfied with that.”
AFTERMATH
Springs quickened, summers sped their hurrying blooms, autumns hung scarlet flags in the coppice, winters fell and mantled glebe and moor. Yet the world did not forget.
There came an April day when the circumstance of a sudden shower set down from an open carriage at the porch of Newstead Abbey a slender girl of seventeen, who had been visiting at near-by Annesley.
Waiting, in the library, the passing of the rain, the visitor picked up a book from the table. It was “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.”
For a time she read with tranquil interest—then suddenly startled:
She looked for the name of its author and paled. Thereafter she sat with parted lips and tremulous, long breathing. The master of the house entered to find an unknown guest reading in a singular rapt absorption.
Her youth and interest beckoned his favorite topic. He had been one of the strangers who, year by year in increasing numbers, visited the little town of Hucknall—travelers who, speaking the tongue in which George Gordon had written, trod the pave of the quiet church with veneration. He had purchased Newstead and had taken delight in gathering about him in those halls mementoes of the man whose youth had been spent within them.
While the girl listened with wide eyes on his face, he told her of the life and death of the man who had written the book. He marvelled while he talked, for it appeared that she had been reared in utter ignorance of his writings, did not know that he had lived beneath that very roof, nor that he lay buried in the church whose spire could be seen from the mole. He waxed eloquent as he told her how the gilded rank and fashion of London had found comfort in silence—how Tom Moore, long since become one of its complacent satellites, had read its wishes well: how he had stood in a locked room and given the smug seal of his approbation while secret flame destroyed the self-justification of a dead man’s name, the Memoirs which had been a last bequest to a living daughter.
The shower passed, the sun came out rejoicing—still the master of the Abbey talked. When he had finished he showed his listener a portrait, painted by the American, Benjamin West. When she turned from this, her face was oddly white; she was thinking of another portrait hidden by a curtain, which had been one of the unsolved mysteries of her childhood.
On her departure her host drove with her to Hucknall church, and standing in the empty chancel she read the marble tablet set into the wall:
IN THE VAULT BENEATH
LIE THE REMAINS OF
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
THE AUTHOR OF “CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE”.
HE WAS BORN IN LONDON ON THE 22nd OF
JANUARY, 1788.
HE DIED AT MISSOLONGHI IN WESTERN GREECE,
ON THE 19th OF APRIL, 1824,
ENGAGED IN THE GLORIOUS ATTEMPT TO
RESTORE THAT
COUNTRY TO HER ANCIENT FREEDOM AND
RENOWN.
HIS SISTER PLACED THIS TABLET TO HIS
MEMORY.
A long time the girl stood silent, her features quivering with some strange emotion of reproach and pain. Behind her she heard her escort’s voice. He was repeating lines from the book she had been reading an hour before:
Could he whose ashes lay beneath that recording stone have seen the look on the girl’s face as she listened—could he have seen her shrink that night from a woman’s contained kiss—he would have known that his lips had been touched with prophecy when he said:
“The smiles of her youth have been her mother’s, but the tears of her maturity shall be mine!”