The words seemed to strike through the delirium of the fevered fantasies and calm them. The dying man’s eyes fastened on the speaker with a vague inquiry. There was silence for a moment, while outside the chamber a grizzled servant knelt by a group of officers, his seamed face wet with tears, and from the courtyard rose the plaintive howl of a dog.
Through the deepening abyss of Gordon’s senses the crumbling memory was groping for an old recollection that stirred at the question. Out of the maze grew sentences which a voice like that had once said: “Every man bears a cross of despair to his Calvary. He who bore the heaviest saw beyond. What did He say?—”
The failing brain struggled to recall. What did He say? He saw dimly the emblem which the friar’s hand held—an emblem that had hung always somewhere, somewhere in a fading Paradise of his. It expanded, a sad dark Calvary against olive foliage gray as the ashes of the Gethsemane agony—the picture of the eternal suffering of the Prince of Peace.
“Not—my will, but—Thine!”
The words fell faintly from the wan lips, scarce a murmur in the stirless room. Gordon’s form, in Teresa’s clasp, seemed suddenly to grow chill. She did not see the illumination that transformed the friar’s face, nor hear the door open to her brother and Mavrocordato. She was deaf to all save the moan of her stricken love, blind to all save that face that was slipping from life and her.
Gordon’s hand fumbled in his breast, and drew something forth that fell from his nerveless fingers on to the bed—a curling lock of baby’s hair and a worn fragment of paper on which was a written prayer. She understood, and, lifting them, laid them against his lips.
His eyes smiled once into hers and his face turned wholly to her, against her breast.
“Now,” he whispered, “I shall go—to sleep.”
A piteous cry burst from Teresa’s heart as the friar leaned forward. But there was no answer. George Gordon’s eternal pilgrimage had begun.