Then look around and choose thy ground.
And take thy rest!”
The pen fell from his fingers. A sudden icy breath seemed to congeal from the air. He rose—tried to walk, but felt his limbs failing him. He fixed his eyes upon a bright spot on the wall, fighting desperately against the appalling faintness that was enshrouding him. It gyrated and swam before his vision—a burnished helmet. Should the battle after all evade him? Was it denied him even to fall upon the field? A roaring rose in his ears.
He steadied himself against the table and shut his teeth. The quiver of convulsion was upon him again—and the movement against Lepanto began to-morrow! It must not come—not yet, not yet! The very life of the cause was wound in his. He would not yield!
The shepherd-dog had risen whining from the hearth; Gordon felt the rough tongue licking his hand—felt but could not see. He staggered toward the couch. Darkness had engulfed him, a black giddiness from whose depths he heard faintly a frantic barking and hurried footsteps on the stair.
CHAPTER LXII
GORDON GOES UPON A PILGRIMAGE
Easter afternoon and all Missolonghi was on the streets. But there were no festivities, no firing of guns nor decorations. A pall had settled on the town, a pall reflected in a sky dun-colored and brooding storm.
To-day had been fixed upon for the march against Lepanto, but now war was forgotten. The wheels of movement had stopped like those of some huge machine whose spring of action has lost its function. Silent soldiers patrolled the empty bazaar and the deserted docks. The crowds that thronged the pavements—Suliotes, their wild faces softened by grief unconcealed, gloomy officers of infantry and artillery, weeping women, and grave priests of the Greek church—conversed in low tones. Even the arrival of a new vessel in the harbor had gone unnoticed. Observation centered on the stone building fronting the shallows, from whose guarded precincts from time to time an aide issued with news which spread speedily through the desponding populace—the military headquarters where the foreign archistrategos lay sick unto death.
Through the crowds, from the wharf, three figures passed in haste. One was a gigantic Venetian servant, staggering beneath the burden of an iron-bound chest. Small wonder its weight taxed even his herculean strength, for besides bills of exchange for the sum nine times over, it contained ten thousand pounds in English sovereigns. His huge form made a way for the two who followed him: a venerable Armenian friar, bareheaded and sandalled, and a woman heavily veiled, whose every nerve was strung with voiceless suffering.
Mercifully a portion of the truth had come to Teresa at Zante, and in the few intervening hours, an eternity of suspense, she had gained an unnatural self-control. Up to the last moment of possibility she had fought the dread sense of the inevitable that was rising to shut out her whole horizon of future; but before the ominous hush of the multitudes, hope had died within her. She seemed to hear Mary Shelley crying through the voice of that Pisan storm: “O, I am afraid—afraid—afraid!”