These struggles of hers had been the ultimate revealment, as the hour she had held Gordon’s bleeding body in her arms had been life’s primal comprehension. That had shown her love’s heights and depths; this taught her all its breadth, its capacity for self-abnegation, its wild, unselfish yearning for the best good of the thing beloved.
As she and Fletcher prepared the bare necessities he was to take with him, his buried London life had risen before her. The woman who should have loved him most—his wife—had sent him into a cruel ostracism, hating and despising him. She whom the law’s decree forbade that he should love, was sending him away, too, but to a noble cause and with a breaking heart. She had made his present better than his past. Should not his future be even more to her than the present?
All had at last been put in readiness. Waiting the conversion of his English properties, Gordon had utilized all his Italian funds. Ammunition, horses from his own stable, field-guns and medicines for a year’s campaign had been loaded under his tireless supervision. Lastly, he had taken aboard with his own hands ten thousand crowns in specie and forty thousand in bills of exchange. Four days before, with himself and Fletcher aboard, the brig had sailed from Genoa, whence swift couriers had daily brought Teresa news, for he had small time for pen work. To-day the vessel had cast anchor at Leghorn, her final stop, only a few hours away. To-night, since she put to sea with the dawn-tide, Gordon was to come for a last farewell.
As Teresa sat waiting in the garden, she tried not to think of the to-morrow, the empty, innumerable to-morrows. It was already quite dark, for there was no moon; she was thankful for this, for he could not so readily see her pallor. He should carry away a recollection of hope and cheerfulness, not of agony or tears. With a memory of what she had been singing the night of Blaquiere’s coming, she lifted her harp and began softly and bravely, her fingers finding their way on the strings by touch:
“Then if thou wilt—no more my lonely Pillow,
In one embrace let these arms again enfold him,
And then expire of the joy—but to behold him!
Oh! my lone bosom!—oh!—my lonely Pillow!”
The effort was too great. The harp rebounded against the ground. She bowed her head on the arm of the bench and burst into sobbing.
The twang of the fallen harp called loudly to one whose hand was on the postern gate while he listened. He came swiftly through the dark.