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[438] 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.
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?”
[439]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.”