Just then a single vociferate voice rose to dominant speech in the room—a reckless, ribald utterance like one thickened with liquor. It conveyed an invitation to everybody within hearing to share its owner’s punch. Laughter followed, and from outside a flutter of withdrawing skirts and a masculine exclamation of affront.
With a puzzled wonder the man in the arbor listened, while the voice within lifted in an uncertain song:
“Fare thee well! and if forever.
Still forever fare thee well;
Even though unforgiving, never
’Gainst thee shall my heart rebel.”
“Shameless brute!” came from the porch. “I wouldn’t have believed it!”
Smothering a fierce ejaculation, Gordon strode to the window and gazed into the room. The singer broke off with a laugh:
“That’s the song I always warble, gentlemen, when I’m in my cups. I wrote it to my wife—when I was a Bond Street lounger, a London cicisbeo and fan-carrier to a woman.”
The man who stared across the sill with a painful fascination was witnessing a glaring, vulgar travesty of himself. Not the George Gordon he was, or, indeed, had ever been, but the George Gordon the world believed him; the abandoned profligate of wassail and blackguardism, whom tourists boasted of having seen, and of whom an eleventh commandment had been promulgated for all British womankind—not to read his books. And this counterpart was being played by a man whose Moorish, theatric face he knew—a man he had flung from his path at Geneva, when he stood with Jane Clermont by the margin of the lake on the night he and she had fled together. A man who hated him!