“You forgave because you loved,” he answered gently. “Your love has been around me ever since. I was unworthy of it then—I am unworthy now.”
“England never knew you,” she protested, “as I know you. Your soul is good! Whatever your acts, I know it has always been so!”
He sighed. “My soul was full of glorious dreams, once—this dream of Greece’s freedom was its dearest. But they were tainted with regnant passion and foolish pride and ingrain recklessness. When the world flattered me, I threw away all that could have helped me rise. I sold my birthright for its mess of pottage. When it turned, I scoffed and hated it and plunged further away from all that was worthy. Men do more harm to themselves than ever the devil could do them. I sunk my soul deeper and deeper in the mire—because I did not care, because I had nothing and no one to care for—till you found me, Teresa, that day in the wood at La Mira! You pointed me to myself, to all I might and should have been. You taught me first remorse, then the idle indolence of regret; now, at last, the wish to do, to be! Neither success nor failure, praise nor scorn, could do this. If there is anything good in me now, it is because of that, Teresa! If the future ever forgets to know me as wicked and wastrel, and remembers better things I have done or tried to do—”
“You are the noblest man in the world!”
A quick spasm crossed his face in the darkness. Noble! Yet how little popular esteem seemed to him at that moment! He went on hurriedly, for what he had to say must be in few words:
“Always—whatever happens—you will remember what I have said, Teresa?”
Whatever happens! She threw her arms about his neck, mute with the anguish that was fighting with her resolution.
“—that you are all to me. That I love you—you only; that I shall love you to the end.”
“If I forgot that, I could not live!” she said chokingly.
The great clock struck ponderously from the palace hall—a clamorous reminder that he must hasten, for the night was almost without a star, and a wreathing nebulous mist forbade rapid riding. Through all his preparations this hour had reared as the last harbor-light of home. It had come and gone like a breath on glass. In the still night the chime sounded like a far spired bell. Some banal freak of memory brought to Gordon’s mind the old church dial jutting over Fleet Street in London, and the wooden wild men which had struck the hour with their clubs as he issued from John Murray’s shop the night of his maiden speech in Parliament.