“You lie! You ruined her career and stole her away from London and from me! Now you want to take her from these last friends of hers—for yourself! But you cannot go where I will not find you! And where you go the world shall know you and despise you!”
Jane’s eyes flashed upon the speaker. “You!” she cried in contemptuous anger. “You hated him even in London; now you have followed him here. It is you who have set the peasants to spy upon us! It is you who have spread tales through Geneva! You whose lies sent the syndic to-day!”
Gordon had been staring at the Moorish, theatric face with a gaze of singular inquiry, his brain searching, searching for a lost clue. All at once the haze lightened. His thought leaped across a chasm of time. He saw a reckless youth, a deserter from the navy, whom he had befriended in Greece—a youth who had vanished suddenly from Missolonghi during the feast of Ramazan. He saw a shambling, cactus-bordered road to the seashore—a file of Turkish soldiers, the foremost in a purple coat, and carrying a long wand—a beast of burden bearing a brown sack—
“Trevanion!” he said. “Trevanion—by the Lord!”
He burst into a laugh, reëchoing, sardonic, a laugh now of absolute, remorseless unconcern, of crude recklessness flaunting at last supreme over crumbled resolve—the laugh of a zealot flagellant beneath the lash, a derisive Villon on the scaffold.
“So I stole her from you! You, even you, dare to accuse me. Out of my sight!” he said, and flung him roughly from the path.
Gordon held out his hand to Jane Clermont, lifted her into the skiff, and springing in, sent the slim cockle-shell shooting out into the still expanse like an arrow on the air.
Then he took up the oars and turned its prow down the lake to where the streaming lights of the careless city wavered through the mists, pale green under the moonbeams.
The journal which Gordon had hurled from him lay in the vine-rows next morning when Shelley, with a face of trouble and foreboding, passed along the dewy lane. He read the words written on its cover: