The castaway

A cool breeze slipped ahead of the dawn. It blew dim the calm Greek stars, stirred the intricate branches of olive-trees inlaid in the rose-pearl façade of sky, bowed the tall,...

At Lady Jersey’s town house, in Portman Square, the final course had been served and the gentlemen’s glasses were being replenished. Lady Jersey gave the signal. The gentlemen r...

“I heard last night at Lady Jersey’s you were in London,” said Sheridan, after the first greetings. “So you’ve had enough of Greece, eh? Three years! What have you done in all t...

It was in Gordon’s apartment in Reddish’s Hotel. The table was strewn with loose manuscript--the verses he had laughingly told Sheridan were “likely to be drivelling idiotism.”...

Two hours later Gordon sat alone in the room, looking out on the softening sun-glare of St. James Street. In the chastened light the brilliant dark-auburn curls that clustered o...

Gordon was alone in the vehicle, for Fletcher rode outside. He set his face to the fogged pane, catching the panorama of dark hedges, gouged gravelly runnels and stretches of mu...

Behind the closed shutters of the book-shop which bore the sign of “The Juvenile Library,” in the musty room where George Gordon had burned the errant copies of his ubiquitous S...

John Murray, _anax_ of publishers, sat that evening in his shop in Fleet Street. He was in excellent humor, having dined both wisely and well. His hair was sparse above a smooth...

The sharp jostle of the pavement; the rattle of the crossings; the “this way, m’lord!” of dodging link-boys and the hoarse warning of the parochial watch to reckless drivers; st...

Beau Brummell, from his seat in the bow-window, bowed with _empressement_ as Gordon alighted from his carriage and ascended the steps of White’s Club from an early dinner at Hol...

The late sun, rosying the lake beside the ruined cloister, had drawn its flame-wrought curtains across the moor that lay about Newstead, and the library was full of shadows as G...

Sheridan, his robe thrown open from his capacious frame, sat with knees wide apart, his chair tilted back, his face crumpling with amusement. Hobhouse sat cross-legged on the st...

All turned astonished faces. Just inside the oaken door swung wide open to the night, stood her ladyship, her features expressing a sense of humor struggling with dignity, and j...

Gordon read the lines in the diary he held, by the fading daylight. He sat in the primrosed garden of his town house on Piccadilly Terrace, beside a wicker tea-table. The day wa...

Since the scene with Annabel whose dark aftermath had been the illness of his old friend, a deeper sense of pain had oppressed him. His marriage had sprung from an inarticulate...

As his hackney-coach sped through the night, Gordon’s anger at the inhumanity that had kept from him the sick man’s message, faded gradually into a duller resentment that held m...

Over the great, crow-footed face of London, full of tragedies, a heavy fog had fallen. Dismal and murky, it lay like a bodiless incubus, shutting out the shining sun and the swe...

Jane Clermont had reached it before him, her eyes a storm of anger. She tore the silver ornaments from her costume, and dashed them at the feet of the manager. “How dare they! H...

Bean Brummell, pattern of the dandies, stood in Almack’s Assembly Rooms, bowing right and left with the languid elegance of his station. The night before, in play at the Argyle,...

He went heavily into the library, gazing at the book-shelves with eyes listless and dull. Presently, with the same nerveless movements, he unlocked a drawer and took therefrom s...

From London to Ostend, and through Flanders, a swart shadow trailed George Gordon slowly but unerringly. It was the man whose dark, reckless face had once turned with jealous pa...

When Gordon descended the stair he came upon a striking group at the villa entrance. Shelley, with his wife beside him, confronted the severe-faced syndic, who stood stolidly wi...

As he took the two missives the girl handed him Gordon caught his breath, for one he saw was directed in Annabel’s hand. For a moment a hope that overleaped all his suffering ro...

It was Fletcher’s usual inquiry, repeated night and morning--the same words that on the Ostend packet had told his master that his wanderings were shared. After these many month...

Through the twittering dawn, with its multitudinous damp scents, its stubble-fields of maize glimpsed through the stripped ilex trees, whose twigs scrawled black hieroglyphics o...

Her unmothered childhood and the placid convent school years at Bagnacavallo, near Ravenna, had known no mystery other than her day-dreams had fashioned. She had dreamed much: o...

Tears, too, had rushed to Teresa’s eyes, with a sweet, glad sense of something not akin to grief. Her hand on the couch in the semi-darkness touched another and she drew it away...

The majestic gateway of the Palazzo Mocenigo was dark as Gordon entered save for the single lamp always lit at nightfall. Fletcher served his master’s supper in the great upper...

Teresa, meanwhile, had been facing her problem--how to warn the Englishman of his danger. During the slow hours while Gordon sat gazing into the distorted mirror of his own thou...

All night Gordon’s gondola floated over the dark lagoon. All night the star-silvered dip of the oar broke into ripples the glassy surface. All night Gordon sat silent, goring ou...

George Gordon, at the monastery of San Lazzarro, looked out of washed eyes upon an altered condition. He was conscious of new strength and new weaknesses. The man, emerging from...

An east wind blew from the Adriatic. It churned the shadow lagoon to an ashen yeast of fury, hurled churlish waves against the sand-reef of the Lido and drove fleering rain-gust...

The storm-clouds were gone. An Italian spring was painting the hills with April artistry. Myrtle hedges had waked to childish green, lusty creepers swung callow tendrils, meadow...

Under the trees, as Gordon listened to the gondolier, the night grew deeper. The moonlight that mellowed over the pine forests spectrally outspread, the burnished river and the...

The close was still--only the flutter of moths and the plash of a fountain tinkling wetly. Here and there in the deeper shade of cloistral walks, the moonlight, falling through...

The osteria, as Gordon approached, seemed gurgling with hilarity. At its side the huge unhitched diligence yawned, a dark hulk waiting for the morrow’s journey. Some of the pass...

Trevanion, the drunkenness slipped from his face and the irksome limp discarded, came from the osteria door. His audience dwindled, he was minded for fresh air and a stroll. Beh...

From the coming of Gordon on that unforgettable night to the garden, Teresa’s pulse began to beat more tumultuously. To offset the humiliation of her daily life indoors and the...

Teresa came to her feet with a cry. Her mingled emotions were yet so recent that she had had no time to recover poise. Gordon’s face was as strangely moved. Surprise edged it, b...

Teresa stood chained with horror--the cry frozen on her lips. As the silver flash had flown she had seen a dark, oriental face disappear between the bracken and had recognized it.

Gordon’s wound had proven deep, but luckily not too serious, thanks to a rough fragment of stone in his pocket, which the surgeon declared had turned the heavy blade, and which...

Gordon threw the window wide. The sun had broken through the mist, the lilies were awake in their beds, and the acacias were shaking the dew from their solemn harmonies of green...

Just a month ago she had left Casa Guiccioli forever; now she sat in the fountained garden of the Gamba villa, a few miles from Ravenna, rose-pale, cypress-slender, her wanness...

A couple of soldiers cocked their guns and would have hindered him, but he put them aside. On the pavement lay a man in uniform, shot through the breast. Over him bent a beardle...

“It is the Mother Superior come from Bagnacavallo,” she thought. As she sprang up, she heard old Elise calling. Slipping the “Romeo and Juliet” into her pocket, she went hastily...

The declining sun shone dimly through the painted windows. The chapel was in half-dark. Teresa went slowly to where the two candles winked yellowly. She had often knelt there, b...

“Self-slain!” The words of the priest, as Gordon stood there, seemed to reëcho about him with infinite variations of agony. He had ridden vacant of purpose, destitute of plan--t...

Spring, the flush wooer, was come again. The prints of gentian showed where his blue-sandalled feet had trod, and the wild plum and cherry blooms announced the earth his bride....

The two men who burst into the room had been intimately yet appositively connected with Gordon’s past. One had tried to take his life with a Malay kriss; the life of the other G...

On Gordon, in the shock of the fatal news Teresa had brought, the menace of that fateful onslaught had fallen numbly. No issue at that moment would have mattered greatly to hims...

It was a thirsty afternoon. Teresa and Mary Shelley--the latter, bonneted and gloved--sat at an upper window of the palace, watching through the Venetian blinds the English resi...

In sending Trevanion that day to the barracks on the Lung’ Arno--whose door Cassidy had once seen him enter and in whose vicinity the naval surgeon, following this clue, had pos...

He was standing in his study, its windows thrown open to the stifling air, the blinds drawn against the pitiless sun that beat hotly up from the sluggish Arno and loaded the wor...

Over the hillocks, under the robed boughs of the Pisan forest, went a barouche, drawn by four post-horses ready to drop from the intensity of the noonday sun. In it were Gordon...

In the Lanfranchi library with Gordon four men were seated in attitudes of interest and attention. Dallas’ chair was pushed far back in the shadow and his hand shaded his eyes f...

In the garden the roses were as fragrant, the orange-trees as spicy-sweet as ever, every sound and scent as in so many evenings past. Yet Teresa’s eyes were heavy, her heart lik...

From a vessel lying beyond the shallows that stretched three miles from the Greek shore, a puff of smoke broke balloon-like, to be followed, a moment after, by a muffled report.

The _Courier_ had printed a single sneering paragraph in which had been compressed the rancor of William Godwin, the bookseller. This stated that George Gordon was not even in G...

“Help me to remember that it is for Greece--and for himself most of all!” That was Teresa’s cry through those dreary weeks alone. The chill instinct that had seized her as Gordo...

The night was still, the air sopped with recent rain, the sky piled with sluggish cloud-strata through whose rifts the half-moon glimpsed obliquely, making the sea-beach that cu...

Gordon entered his bleak room with mind strangely numbed. Gamba, now acting as his adjutant, was waiting, and him he dismissed without dictating his usual correspondence. The st...

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...

All in that Grecian port knew of her love and the purpose that had upheld her in her journey. To the forlorn town her wordless grief seemed a tender intimate token of a loss sti...

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 s...