CHAPTER LV
THE CALL
In the Lanfranchi library with Gordon four men were seated in attitudes of interest and attention. Dallas’ chair was pushed far back in the shadow and his hand shaded his eyes from the early candles. Opposite was Count Pietro Gamba, his alert profile and blond beard looking younger than ever beside the darker Asiatic comeliness of Mavrocordato. At the table, a map spread before him, his clean-cut, wiry features full in the light, sat the stranger who had left the card—Lieutenant Blaquiere, of London, spokesman of the Greek Revolutionary committee. The latter went on now, with a certain constrained eagerness, his hand thrown out across the mahogany:
“The standard was raised when Hypsilantes invaded Wallachia and declared Greece free. The defeat of his ten thousand means little. The spirit of the nation is what counts, and that, my lord, through all the years of Turkish dominion, has never died.”
For an hour the visitor had talked, sketching graphically and succinctly the plans and hopes of the revolutionists in Greece, the temporary organization effected, the other juntas forming, under the English committee’s leadership, in Germany and Switzerland. He was deliberate and impressive. Pietro, enthusiastic for the cause of his patron, Mavrocordato, had been voluble with questions. Even Dallas had asked not a few. Gordon, the host, had been of them all most silent.
He had felt an old vision of his youth grow instinct again. Blaquiere’s words seemed now not to be spoken within four walls, but to ring out of the distance of an uncouth shore, with strange stern mountains rising near, a kettle simmering on a fire of sticks, and calm stars looking down on a minaretted town.
“The mountains look on Marathon—
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dreamed that Greece might still be free!”
The verse hummed in his mind. Was it years ago he had written that? Or only yesterday? A dream—that had been all! It had faded with his other visions, one day when he had waked to fame, when he had bartered them for the bubble of celebrity, the flitter-gold of admiration! In those old days, he thought with bitterness, he would have been an eager spirit in the English movement. Then he had sat in Parliament; now he was an expatriate adventurer, a disqualified attaché of the kingless Court of Letters!