Till, besmirched by the mire of his flagrant disgrace,
The front door of London flew shut in his face.
So burn, yellow flame, for an idol dethroned!
Burn, burn for a Gordon, by Muses disowned!
Burn, burn! while about thee thy imps circle fast,
And give them their comrade, recovered at last!”
At the word “burn,” the speaker seized a candle from a sconce and touched it to the figure, which blazed brightly up. The imp-pages grasped hands and began to run round and round the group. At the weird sight a tumult of applause went up from the whole multitude, which clapped and stamped and brava’d itself hoarse.
Suddenly a strange thing happened—unexpected, anomalous, uncanny. The applause hushed as though a wet blanket had been thrown over it. Faces forsook the stage. The pages ceased their circling. Women drew sharp tremulous breaths and men turned eagerly in their places to see a man advancing into the assembly with halting step and with a face pale yet brilliant, like an alabaster vase lighted from within.
Some subtle magnetism had always hung about George Gordon, that had made him the center of any crowd. Now, in the tension, this was enormously increased. His sharply chiselled, patrician features seemed to thrill and dilate, and his eyes sparkled till they could scarce be looked at. A hundred in that room he had called by name; scores he had dined and gamed with. His look, ruthless, yet even, seemed to single out and hold each one of these speechless and staring, deaf to Brummell’s sneer through the quiet.
Speech came from Gordon’s lips, controlled, yet vital with subterraneous passion—words that none of that shaken audience could afterward recall save in part—hot like lava, writhing, pitiless, falling among them like a flaying lash of whip-cords: