Sitting apart on the yellow sand, his eyes on the flame quivering upward like an offering of orisons and aspirations, tremulous and radiant, the refrain of Ariel came to Gordon:
“Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls, that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”
Had Shelley been right? Was death, for Christian or pagan, only a part of the inwoven design, glad or sad, on that veil which hides from us some high reality? Was Dallas—was Padre Somalian—nearer right than his own questioning that had ended in negation? Had Sheridan found the girl-wife he longed for—beyond the questioning and the stars? And was that serene soul, whose body now sifted to its primal elements, walking free somewhere in a universe of loving intelligence which to him, George Gordon, had been at most only “The Great Mechanism”?
At length he rose. The group in the lee of the tent had approached the pyre. He heard wondering exclamations. Going nearer, he saw that of Shelley’s body there remained only a heap of white ashes—and the heart. This the flames had refused to touch.
He felt a strange sensation dart through every nerve. Trevanion thrust in his hand and took it from the embers.
Gordon turned to the barouche, where Dallas leaned back watching, pale and grave. He had brought an oaken box from Pisa, and returning with this to the beach, he gathered in it the wine-soaked ashes and laid the heart upon them. His pulses were thrilling and leaping to a wild man-hysteria.