He thought of a picture in England, hidden behind a curtain lest his daughter should grow up to know the features of her father. “By their deeds ye shall know them”—the saying possessed him. Far kinder his going for her memory of him!
Better for Teresa. Her brother remained to care for her. She had in her own right only the dowry returned to her from the Guiccioli coffers with her papal separation. But by selling Newstead Abbey—Dallas could arrange that—he could put her beyond the reach of want forever. Better far for her! In her recollection it would cover the stain of that life in Venice from which her hand had drawn him, and leave her love a higher, nobler thing.
He lifted his head suddenly and addressed Blaquiere:
“I will go,” he said.
CHAPTER LVI
THE FAREWELL
In the garden the roses were as fragrant, the orange-trees as spicy-sweet as ever, every sound and scent as in so many evenings past. Yet Teresa’s eyes were heavy, her heart like lead within her breast.
Since the hour she had sung to her harp—it lay beside her now—when Gordon had found her there and told her the outcome of that library conference in which she had had no part, it seemed as though dreary decades had passed. She had lain in his arms at first breathless, stricken with a weight of voiceless grief, while he spoke, hopefully, calmly, of the cause and his determination. The great cry into which her agony bled at length had gripped his soul. She had felt his heart leap and quiver against her, shaken with her sobs, and knew he suffered with her in every pang. It was a realization of this that had finally given her self-control and a kind of calmness.
In the time that followed: weeks of preparation, correspondence with the Revolutionary Committees and with Mavrocordato, who had preceded Gordon to Greece, selection of stores, the chartering and freighting of the brig Hercules at Genoa—all the minutiæ that visualized the departure that must come—the two sides of her love had struggled together.
Sometimes the smaller, the less unselfish personal passion, gained temporary mastery. What was she to him if she were not more than everything else? What was Greece to her? Once he had said that all he should ever write would spring from her love. Was that love fit only to inspire poems upon paper? Now he left her and forsook that love to go to a useless danger—and she had given him all! The thought sobbed in her. She was a woman, and she struggled with a woman’s anguish.
Then her greater soul would conquer. She would remember that night on the square in Venice, the glimpse of his tortured self-amendment at San Lazzarro, and the calmer strength she had felt growing in him from the day their lips met on the convent hill. Her instinct told her this determination of his was only a further step in that soul-growth whose first strivings she had herself awakened. This gave her a melancholy comfort that was sometimes almost joy. In his face of late she had distinguished something subtle and significant, that carried her back to the night she had left his book at the feet of Our Lady of Sorrows. It was the veiled look she had then imagined the object of her petition, the fallen angel sorrowing for his lost estate, would wear—the patience and martyrdom of renunciation.