For twelve hours, while the wild, typhoon-like storm raved and shrieked over Pisa, Gordon lay seemingly in a deep sleep. He did not wake till the next dawn was breaking, wetly bright and cool. When he woke, it was to healthful life, without recollection of pain or vision.
And yet in those hours intervening, strange things happened hundreds of leagues away in England.
Has genius, that epilepsy of the soul, a shackled self, which under rare stress can leave the flesh for a pilgrimage whose memory is afterward hidden in that clouded abyss that lies between its waking and its dreaming? Did some subtle telepathy exist between his soul in Italy and the soul that he had transmitted to his child? Who can tell?
But that same afternoon, while one George Gordon lay moveless in the Lanfranchi library, another George Gordon wrote his name in the visitor’s book at the king’s palace, in Hyde Park, London. Lady Caroline Lamb, from her carriage seat, saw him entering Palace Yard and took the news to Melbourne House. The next morning’s papers were full of his return.
That night, too, she who had once been Annabel Milbanke woke unaccountably in her room at Seaham, in the county of Durham, to find the trundle-bed in which her little daughter Ada slept, empty.
She roused a servant and searched. In the drawing-room a late candle burned, and here, in her nightgown, the wee wanderer was found, tearless, wide-awake and unafraid, gazing steadfastly above the mantelpiece.
The mother looked and cried out. The curtain had fallen from its fastenings, and the child was looking at her father’s portrait.
CHAPTER LIV
THE PYRE
Over the hillocks, under the robed boughs of the Pisan forest, went a barouche, drawn by four post-horses ready to drop from the intensity of the noonday sun. In it were Gordon and Dallas. They had been strangely silent during this ride. From time to time Dallas wiped his forehead and murmured of the heat. Gordon answered in monosyllables.