“Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! I have heard hyenas and jackals in the ruins of Asia, Albanian wolves and angry Mussulmans! Theirs is sweet music beside the purr of England’s scandal-mongers. I have hated your cant, despised your mediocrity and scoffed at your convention, and now, lacking the dagger and the bowl,—when deliberate desolation is piled upon me, when I stand alone on my hearth with my household gods shivered around me,—you gather your pomp and rabblement of society to bait me!”
There was a stir at the door. Lady Jersey had entered, and John Hobhouse sprang to her side. She saw the blazing puppet and divined instantly the cruel farce that had been enacted. Her indignation leaped, but he caught her arm.
“No, no,” he said, “it is too late.”
The stinging sentences went on:
“So have you dealt with others, those whose names will be rung in England when your forgotten clay has mixed with its earth! Let them be gently born and gently minded as they may—as gentle as Sheridan, whom a year ago you toasted. He grew old and you covered him with the ignominy of a profligate, abandoned him to friendless poverty and left him to die like a wretched beggar, while bailiffs squabbled over his corpse! What mattered to him the crocodile tears when you laid him yesterday in Westminster Abbey? What cared he for your four noble pall-bearers—a duke, a pair of earls and a Lord Bishop of London? Did it lighten his last misery that you followed him there—two royal highnesses, marquises, viscounts, a lord mayor and a regiment of right-honorables? Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
“So you dealt with Shelley—the youth whose songs you would not hear! You hounded him, expelled him from his university, robbed him of his father and his peace, and drove him like a moral leper from among you! You write no pamphlets in verse—nor read them if a canon frowns! You sit in your pews on Sunday and thank Fate that you are not as Percy Bysshe Shelley, the outcast! God! He sits so near that Heaven your priests prate of that he hears the seraphs sing!
“And do you think now to break me on your paltry wheel? You made me, without my search, a species of pagod. In the caprice of your pleasure, you throw down the idol from its pedestal. But it is not shattered; I have neither loved nor feared you! Henceforth I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you. Attribute to me every phase of your vileness! Charge me with profligacy and madness! Make of my career only a washed fragment in the hartshorn of your dislike! Drive your red-hot plowshares, but they shall not be for me! May my bones never rest in an English grave, nor my body feed its worms!”
The livid sentences fell quivering, heavy with virile emphasis, like the defiance of some scorned augur, invoking the Furies in the midnight of Rome.
Hardly a breath or movement had come from those who heard. They seemed struck with stupor at the spectacle of this fiery drama of feeling. Lady Caroline was still standing, the center of the group of imp-pages, and above her hovered a slate-colored cloud, the smoke from the effigy crumbling into shapeless ashes. Her gaze was on the speaker; her teeth clenched; the mockery of her face merged into something apprehensive and terror-smitten.
In the same strained silence, looking neither to right nor left, Gordon passed to the entrance. Hobhouse met him half-way and turned with him to Lady Jersey. Gordon bent and kissed her hand, and as he went slowly down the stair, Lady Jersey’s eyes filled with tears.