“And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. I will keep no record of that same hesternal torch-light; and to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I throw away this volume, and write in Ipecacuanha: Hang up justice! Let morality go beg! To be sure, I have long despised myself and man, but I never spat in the face of my species before—‘O fool! I shall go mad!’”
CHAPTER XXIV
THE MARK OF THE BEAST
“Your coffee, my lord?”
It was Fletcher’s usual inquiry, repeated night and morning—the same words that on the Ostend packet had told his master that his wanderings were shared. After these many months in Venice, where George Gordon had shut upon his retreat the floodgates of the world, the old servant’s tone had the same wistful cadence of solicitude.
Time for Gordon had passed like wreckage running with the tide. The few fevered weeks of wandering through Switzerland with Jane Clermont—he scarcely knew where or how they had ended—had left in his mind only a series of phantom impressions: woods of withered pine, Alpine glaciers shining like truth, Wengen torrents like tails of white horses and distant thunder of avalanches, as if God were pelting the devil down from Heaven with snowballs. And neither the piping of the shepherd, nor the rumble of the storm; not the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest or the cloud, had lightened the darkness of his heart or enabled him to lose his wretched identity in the Power and the Glory above and beneath him.
In that night at Geneva the tidal wave of execration which had rolled over his emerging manhood had left as it ebbed only a bare reef across which blew cool, infuriate winds of avid recklessness; and through these insensate blasts he moved in a kind of waking somnambulism, in which his acts seemed to him those of another individual, and he, the real actor, poised aloft, watching with a sardonic speculation.
At Rome his numbed senses awakened, and he found himself alone, and around him his human kind which he hated, spying tourists and scribblers, who sharpened their scavenger pencils to record his vagaries. He fled from them to Venice, where, thanks to report, Fletcher had found his master.
But it was a changed Gordon who had ensconced himself here, a Gordon to whom social convention had become a sneer, and the praise or blame of his fellows idle chaff cast in the wind. He ate and drank and slept—not as other men, but as a gormand and débauché. Such letters as he wrote—to his sister, to Tom Moore, to Hobhouse—were flippant mockeries. Rarely was he seen at opera, at ridotto, at conversazione. When he went abroad it was most often by night, as though he shunned the daylight. More than one cabaret in the shadow of the Palace of the Doges knew the white satiric face that stared out from its terrace over the waterways, where covered gondolas crept like black spiders, till the clock of St. Mark’s struck the third hour of the morning. And more than one black and red-sashed boatman whispered tales of the Palazzo Mocenigo on the Grand Canal and the “Giovannotto Inglese who spent great sums.”
The gondolieri turned their heads to gaze as they sculled past the carved gateway. Did not the priests call him “the wicked milord”? And did not all Venice know of Marianna, the linen-draper’s wife of the street Spezieria, and of Margarita Cogni, the black-eyed Fornarina, who came and went as she pleased in the milord’s household? They themselves had gained many a coin by telling these tales to the tourists from the milord’s own country, who came to watch from across the canal with opera-glasses, as if he were a ravenous beast or a raree-show; who lay in wait at nightfall to see his gondola pass to the wide outlying lagoon, haunted the sand-spit of the Lido where he rode horseback, and offered bribes to his servants to see the bed wherein he slept. They took the tourists’ soldi shamefacedly, however, for they knew other tales, too: how he had furnished money to send Beppo, the son of the fruit peddler, to the art school at Naples; how he had given fifty louis d’or to rebuild the burned shop of the printer of San Samuele.
“Your coffee, my lord?” Fletcher repeated the inquiry, for his master had not heard.