The other caught at the straw. “They say you swam the Hellespont, and outdid Leander.”
“I’m obliged to them! I wonder they didn’t invent a Hero to wait for my Leandering!” The voice held a bitter humor, the antithesis of the open pleasantry of their meeting. “I presume that version will not be long in arriving,” Gordon added, and held out his hand.
Sheridan grasped it warmly. “I shall see you to-morrow,” he said, and they parted.
From the edge of his show-window, William Godwin, the bookseller, with a malignant look in his agate eyes, watched Gordon go.
In the inner room he raked the fragments of charred leather from the stove, thinking of the guineas he had let slip through his fingers. Then he sat down at his desk and drawing some dusty sheets of folio to him began to write, with many emendations. His quill pen scratched maliciously for a long time. At last he leaned back and regarded what he had written with huge satisfaction.
“The atheistical brat of a lord!” he muttered vindictively. “I’ll make his ribs gridirons for his heart! I’ll send this as a leader for the next issue of the Scourge!”
CHAPTER IV
THE LITTLE BOY IN ABERDEEN
“It is magnificent!” Hobhouse looked up as he spoke.
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.” Over these Hobhouse had bent for an hour, absorbed and delighted, breathing their strange spirit of exhilaration, of freedom from rhythmic shackles, of adventure into untried poetic depths. They stood out in sharp relief—original, unique, of classic model yet of a genre all their own. It would be a facer for Jeffrey, the caustic editor of the Edinburgh Review, and for all the crab-apple following Gordon’s boyish rancor had roused to abuse. Now he said: