Gently, as though a sleeping child lay beneath it, she withdrew the pall and white shroud from the stainless face. She looked at it with an infinite yearning, while outside the minute-gun boomed and the great bell of the Greek church tolled slowly. Blaquiere’s words were in her mind.
“Do you know, my darling?” she whispered. “Do you know that Greece lives because my heart is dead?”
She took from her bosom the curl of flaxen hair and the fragment of paper that had fallen from his chilling fingers and put them in his breast. Then stooping, she touched in one last kiss the unanswering marble of his lips.
At the threshold she looked back. The golden glimmer from the helmet fell across the face beneath it with an unearthly radiance. A touch of woman’s pride came to her—the pride that sits upon a broken heart.
“How beautiful he was!” she said in a low voice. “Oh, God! How beautiful he was!”
CHAPTER LXIV
“OF HIM WHOM SHE DENIED A HOME, THE GRAVE”
Greece was nevermore a vassal of the Turk. In the death of the archistrategos who had so loved her cause, the chieftains put aside quarrels and buried private ambitions—all save one. In the stone chamber at Missolonghi wherein that shrouded form had lain, the Suliote chiefs swore fealty to Mavrocordato and the constitutional government as they had done to George Gordon.
Another had visited that chamber before them. This was a dark-bearded man in Suliote dress, who entered it unobserved while the body of the man he had so hated lay in state in the Greek church. Trevanion forced the sealed door of the closet and examined the papers it contained. When he took horse for Athens, he bore with him whatever of correspondence and memoranda might be fuel for the conspiracy of Ulysses—and a roll of manuscript, the completion of “Don Juan,” which he tore to shreds and scattered to the four winds on a flat rock above a deep pool a mile from the town. He found Ulysses a fugitive, deserted by his faction, and followed him to his last stronghold, a cavern in Mount Parnassus.
But fast as Trevanion went, one went as fast. This was a young Greek who had ridden from Salona to Missolonghi with one Lambro, primate of Argos. Beneath the beard and Suliote attire he recognized Trevanion, and his brain leaped to fire with the memory of a twin sister and the fearful fate of the sack to which she had once been abandoned. From an ambush below the entrance of Ulysses’ cave, he shot his enemy through the heart.
On the day Trevanion’s sullen career was ended, along the same highway which Gordon had traversed when he rode to Newstead on that first black home-coming, a single carriage followed a leaden casket from London to Nottinghamshire.