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:
“Is thy face like thy mother’s, my fair child!
Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart?
When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled,
And then we parted,—not as now we part,
But with a hope.—”
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:
“My hopes of being remembered are entwined
With my land’s language: if too fond and far
These aspirations in their scope inclined—
If my fame should be, as my fortunes are,
Of hasty blight, and dull Oblivion bar
My name from out the temple where the dead
Are honored by the nations—let it be—
And light the laurels on a loftier head!
Meantime, I seek no sympathies, nor need;
The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree
I planted. They have torn me—and I bleed.
My task is done—my song hath ceased—my theme
Has died into an echo; it is fit
The spell should break of this protracted dream.
The torch shall be extinguished which hath lit
My midnight lamp—and what Is writ, is writ.
Farewell! a word that must be, and hath been—
A sound which makes us linger;—yet—farewell
Ye! who have traced the Pilgrim to the scene
Which is his last, if in your memories dwell
A thought which once was his, if on ye swell
A single recollection, not in vain
He wore his sandal-shoon, and scallop-shell!”
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!”
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.