“By the Virgin! You shall return to Salona without me. I stay here and fight with the English lordos!”
He rode into Missolonghi that night, and with him were twenty of his men.
CHAPTER LXI
THE RENUNCIATION
Gordon entered his bleak room with mind strangely numbed. Gamba, now acting as his adjutant, was waiting, and him he dismissed without dictating his usual correspondence. The struggle he had fought had bitten deeply into his fund of physical resistance. A tremor was in his hands—a cold sweat on his forehead.
Riding, with the ashes of denial on his lips, it had come to him that in this temptation he had met his last and strongest enemy. It had found him in his weakness, and that weakness it would not be given him to surmount. The sword was wearing out the scabbard. His own hand should never lead the Greece he loved to its freedom—should never marshal it at its great installation. None but himself knew how fearfully illness had grown upon him or with what difficult pain he had striven to conceal its havoc. Only he himself had had no illusions. He knew to-night that the final decision had lain between the cause and his life itself. The one thing which might have knit up his ravelled health—the abandonment of this miasma-breeding town for the wholesome unvitiated hill air of Salona, of the active campaign for passive trust to foreign dictation—he had thrust from him. And in so doing, he had made the last great choice.
“Lyon!” he said—“Lyon!” The shepherd-dog by the hearth raised his head. His eyes glistened. His tail beat the stone. He whined uneasily as his master began to pace the floor, up and down, his step uneven, forcing his limbs to defy their dragging inertia.
As the long night-watch knelled wearily away, drop by drop Gordon drank this last and bitter cup of renunciation. Love and life he put behind him, facing unshrinkingly the grisly specter that looked at him from the void.
He thought of Teresa singing to her lonely harp in a far-off fragrant Italian garden. His gaze turned to a closet built into the corner of the room. In it was a manuscript—five additional cantos of “Don Juan” written in that last year at Pisa, the completion of the poem, on which he had lavished infinite labor. He remembered an hour when her voice had said: “One day you will finish it—more worthily.” Had he done so? Had he redeemed those earlier portions which, though his ancient enemy had declared them “touched with immortality,” yet rang with cadences long since grown painful to him? The world might judge!
He thought of his Memoirs, completed, which he had sent from Italy by Dallas for the hand of Tom Moore in London. These pages were a brief for the defense, submitted to the Supreme Bench of Posterity.
“For Ada!” he muttered. “The smiles of her youth have been her mother’s, but the tears of her maturity shall be mine!”