“I hadn’t a firearm, so I was of small assistance. We had some Suliote ragamuffins for body-guard, but they are so cowed they will run from a Turkish uniform. They promptly disappeared—till it was all over. Well, there was a terrible hullabaloo for a while. I made sure they would butcher us out and out, but Gordon kept his pistol clapped on the purple coat and faced the whole lot down.”
“Wish he had shot him,” rumbled Sheridan, “and appealed to the resident! In the year of Grace 1810 it’s time England took a hand and blew the Turk out of Greece, anyway!”
“I presume there was no doubt about the offense?” asked the earl.
“It seemed not. Trevanion was a good-looking, swarthy rogue, and had been too bold. Though he got away himself, he left the girl to her fate. It was the feast of Ramazan, and he must have known what that fate would be. The time made interference harder for Gordon, since both law and religion were against him. He had learned some of their palaver. He told them he was a pasha-of-three-tails himself in his own country, and at last made the head butcher cut open the sack. The girl was a pitiful thing to see, with great almond eyes sunk with fright—fifteen years old, perhaps, though she looked no more than twelve—and her chalk-white cheeks and the nasty way they had her hands and feet tied made my blood boil. There was more talk, and Gordon flourished the firman Ali Pasha had given him when we were in Albania. The officer couldn’t read, but he pretended he could and at last agreed to go back and submit the matter to the Waywode. So back we all paraded to Missolonghi. It cost Gordon a plenty there, but he won his point.”
“That’s where Petersham’s account ends, isn’t it?” The earl’s tone was dry.
“It’s not all of it,” Hobhouse answered with some heat. “Gordon was afraid the rascally primate might repent of his promise (the Mussulman religion is strenuous) so he took the girl that day to a convent and as soon as possible sent her to Argos to her brother. She died, poor creature, two months afterward, of fever.”
Lamb sniffed audibly.
“Very pretty! He ought to turn it into a poem. I dare say he will. If you hadn’t been there to applaud, Hobhouse, I wager the original program wouldn’t have been altered. Pshaw! He always was a sentimental harlequin,” he went on contemptuously, “strutting about in a neck-cloth and delicate health, and starving himself into a consumption so the women will say, ‘Poor Gordon—how interesting he looks!’ Everything he does is a hectic of vanity, and all he has written is glittering nonsense—snow and sophistry.”
Sheridan’s magnificent iron-gray head, roughly hacked as if from granite, turned sharply. “He’s no sheer seraph nor saint,” he retorted; “none of us is, but curse catch me! there’s no sense in remonstering him! He’ll do great things one of these days. He was born with a rosebud in his mouth and a nightingale singing in his ear!”
The other shrugged his shoulders, but at that moment the protestant face of the hostess appeared.