In its course it passed a noble country-seat, the hermitage of a woman who had once burned an effigy before a gay crowd in Almack’s Assembly Rooms. Lady Caroline Lamb, diseased in mind as in body, discerned the procession from the terrace. As the hearse came opposite she saw the crest upon the pall. She fainted and never again left her bed.
The cortège halted at Hucknall church, near Newstead Abbey, and there the earthly part of George Gordon was laid, just a year from the hour he had bidden farewell to Teresa in the Pisan garden, where now a lonely woman garnered her deathless memories.
At the close of the service the two friends who had shared that last journey—Dallas, now grown feeble, and Hobhouse, recently knighted and risen to political prominence—stood together in the lantern-lighted porch.
“What of the Westminster chapter?” asked Dallas. “Will they grant the permission?”
A shadow crossed the other’s countenance. Popular feeling had undergone a great revulsion, but clerical enmity was outspoken and undying. He thought of a bitter philippic he had heard in the House of Lords from the Bishop of London. His voice was resentful as he answered:
“The dean has refused. The greatest poet of his age and country is denied even a tablet on the wall of Westminster Abbey!”
The kindly eyes under their white brows saddened. Dallas looked out through the darkness where gloomed the old Gothic towers of Newstead, tenantless, save for their raucous colonies of rooks.
“The greatest poet of his age and country!” he repeated slowly. “After all, we can be satisfied with that.”