George Gordon was not alone, it was whispered over indignant tea-cups; with him was a Ravennese contessa who had eloped by his aid out of Romagna. Report averred that he had duelled with her husband, and after spiriting her beyond the frontier, had returned to Ravenna to shoot down a military commandant who had attempted to interfere. Luckily for him, the story ran, the official had recovered, and the police, relieved to be quit of him, had allowed the execrated peer to depart unmolested with his chattels. For a time the Lanfranchi neighborhood was avoided, but at length, curiosity overcame rigid decorum; femininity forgot its prudence and watched with open eagerness.
Its reward, however, was meager. Except for Shelley and his young wife, Gordon chose seclusion even from the Italian circles, where title was an open sesame and uninsular laxity not unforgiven. This fact became unmistakable when a billet from no less a personage than the grand duchess, a princess of the House of Saxony, brought from the Lanfranchi Palace a clear declination. The gossips held up their hands and subsided.
For the primal object of this curiosity the winter, with its thaws and siroccos, had passed swiftly. In the present, so full of sweet surprise and unfolding, even Teresa’s long anxiety because of her brother’s non-appearance and the boding with which Gordon watched for a sign from Trevanion, or from Count Guiccioli—who he knew would read rightly the enigma of her reputed death and after disappearance—had softened finally to an undisturbed content.
The full measure of love was theirs. The outer world, with its myriad intonations, had dulled away, and Pisa and the old Lanfranchi pile constituted an inner roseate haven belonging wholly and only to themselves. A cloistered city, its old grandeur departed and seemingly but half inhabited; the river drifting by, the house of the Shelleys on the opposite bank; boats and horses; a garden sweet with orange-trees and gushes of violets along shady walks; a few servants marshalled by Fletcher and Tita; a study and books—and Teresa. It was the home Gordon had dreamed of when his arms were around her at the villa chapel, but more satisfying, more complete.
Sometimes, in this Elysian life of theirs, as he felt her head against his knee while he read her new verses of his,—for now he knew oftener the old melodic pen-mood that at Venice had seemed vanished forever and that had first returned in the hour he had etched those lines on the fungus,—he was conscious of a sudden tightening of the heart. Could it last? The poison of his fame had gone deep. He lived at peace only by sufferance of military authority, now busy avenging its late alarm by the black-sentence and proscription. At any moment it might recommence in Tuscany the persecution with which the police of Romagna had visited him: the yelping terriers of the Continental press, a upas-growth of procés-verbal, recrimination, hateful surveillance.
Entering his restful study one day from a gallop with Shelley, Gordon wondered whether this retreat, too—whether each retreat he might find—would in the end be denied him and he condemned, a modern son of Shem, to pitch his tent in the wilderness.
For himself it did not matter; but for her? She was happy now—only with him, even if beyond the pale. But could she always remain so? Drop by drop, as erosion wears the quartz, would not the trickling venom waste her soul? Were the specters of that further past when his life had run, like a burning train, through wanderings, adventure and passion—the ghosts of his own weaknesses and wilful tempers—not laid? Could they stalk into this halcyon present to pluck them asunder?
The ghosts of his own weaknesses! Clarity of vision had come to Gordon in these months. He had grown to see his old acts, not gaunt and perverse, projections of insistent caprice, but luminous with new self-solution. He had learned himself: what he had never known, either in his London life of success and failure, or in its ignoble Venetian aftermath.
Looking out toward the purpling Apennines, where the sun sank to his crimson covert, he felt a mute aching wish: an intense desire that the world—not his contemporaries, but a later generation—should be able to look beneath the specious shadow of opprobrium that covered him and see the truth.
It could do this only through himself; through pages he should write. The journals he had kept in London, when he had lived centered in a tremulous web of sensitiveness and wayward idiosyncrasy, had recorded his many-sided, prismatic personality only in fragments, torn, jagged morsels of his brain. In these memoirs he should strive to paint justly the old situations for which he had been judged. And these pages would persist, a cloud of witnesses, when he was beyond earthly summons and verdict.