“A few final words—not many. Answer I do not expect, nor does it import. But you will at least hear me. I leave in England but one being whom you have left me to part with—my sister. Wherever I may go—and I may go far—you and I can never meet in this world. Let this fact content or atone, and if accident occurs to me, be kind to her; or if she is then also nothing, to her children. For never has she acted or spoken toward you but as your friend. You once promised me this much. Do not deem the promise cancelled—for it was not a vow.
“Whatever I may have felt, I assure you that at this moment I bear you no resentment. If you have injured me, this forgiveness is something; If I have injured you, it is something more still. Remember that our feelings will have one rallying-point so long as our child lives. Teach Ada not to hate me. I do not ask for justification to her—this is probably beyond the power of either of us to give—but let her not grow up believing I am a deserving outcast from my kind, or lying dead In some forgotten grave. For the one would sadden her young mind no less than the other. Let her one day read what I have written, and so judge me. And recollect that though now it may be an advantage to you, yet it may sometime come to be a sorrow to her to have the waters or the earth between her and her father.
“Whether the offense that has parted us has been solely on my side or reciprocal, or on yours chiefly, I have ceased now to reflect upon any but two things—that you are the mother of my child, and that we shall never meet again.”
CHAPTER XXI
GORDON SWIMS FOR A LIFE
From London to Ostend, and through Flanders, a swart shadow trailed George Gordon slowly but unerringly. It was the man whose dark, reckless face had once turned with jealous passion to Jane Clermont as they had watched a carriage approaching Drury Lane; he who, on a later night, had pursued the same vehicle, then a mark for jeers, to Piccadilly Terrace. The question he had uttered as he saw Gordon alight alone, had rang in his brain through his after-search: “Where has he left her?” The London newspapers had not been long in chronicling Gordon’s arrival in Ostend, and thither he followed, making certain that in finding one he should find the other.
The chase at first was not difficult. Evil report, carried with malicious assiduity by spying tourists and globe-trotting gossip-mongers, had soon overtaken his quarry, and Gordon’s progress became marked by calumnious tales which hovered like obscene sea-birds over the wake of a vessel. Gordon had gone from Brussels in a huge coach, copied from one of Napoleon’s taken at Genappe, and purchased from a travelling Wallachian nobleman. The vehicle was a noteworthy object, and early formed the basis of lying reports. A paragraph in the Journal de Belgique met the pursuer’s eye on his first arrival in Ostend.
It stated with detail that a Flemish coachmaker had delivered to the milor Anglais a coach of the value of two thousand eight hundred francs; that on going for payment, he found his lordship had absconded with the carriage; that the defrauded sellier had petitioned the Tribunal de Première Instance for proper representation to other districts, that the fugitive might be apprehended and the stolen property seized. With this clipping in his pocket the man who tracked Gordon followed up the Rhine to the confines of Switzerland. Here he lost a month, for the emblazoned wagon de luxe had turned at Basle, and, skirting Neufchâtel, had taken its course to Lake Geneva.
Gordon had travelled wholly at random and paused there only because the shimmering blue waters, the black mountain ridges with their epaulets of cloud and, in the distance, the cold, secular phantom of Mont Blanc, brought to his jaded senses the first hint of relief. In the Villa Diodati, high above the lake, the English milord with the lame foot, the white face and sparkling eyes, stayed his course, to the wonder of the country folk who speculated endlessly upon the strange choice which preferred the gloomy villa to the spires and slate roofs of the gay city so near. And here, to his surprise, Gordon found ensconced, in a cottage on the high bank, Shelley and his young wife, with the black-eyed, creole-tinted girl whom the Drury Lane audience had hissed.
So had chance conspired to color circumstance for the rage of tireless hatred that was following.
The blows that had succeeded the flight of Annabel with his child had left Gordon stunned. The flaming recoil of his feeling, in that fierce denunciation at Almack’s, had burned up in him the very capacity for further suffering, and for a time the quiet of Diodati, set in its grove above the water like a bird’s nest among leaves, was a healing anodyne.