“Yes, the idiots!” Gordon laughed a little, as did the elder man, though there was a suspicious moisture in the latter’s eyes. “They said he was spoiling me. You came to London, Dallas, and wrote books—moral essays and theology—too good to give you money or fame. Yes, yes,”—as Dallas made a gesture of dissent,—“much too good for this thaw-swamped age of rickety tragedy and canting satire! But when you left Aberdeen, you left something behind. It was a pony—four sound straight legs, Dallas, to help out a crooked one—a fat, frowsy, hard-going little beast, I’ve no doubt, but it seemed the greatest thing in all Scotland to me.”
“Pshaw!” protested Dallas. “It laid me only four pounds, I’ll swear.”
“Well,” pursued Gordon, “the boy finally dropped back into the old stubborn rut. He went to Harrow and came out a solitary, and to Cambridge and they called him an atheist. Life hasn’t been all mirth and innocence, milk and water. I’ve seen nearly as many lives as Plutarch’s, but I’m not bilious enough to forget, Dallas. You were the first of all to write and congratulate me when the critics only sneered. When I came to London to claim my seat in the Lords (a scurvy honor, but one has to do as other people do, confound them!) without a single associate in that body to introduce me—I think a peer never came to his place so unfriended—you rode with me to the door, Dallas, you and I alone, and so we rode back again.”
He paused, took up the paper Hobhouse had signed and handed it to the man who still stood by the window.
“Dallas,” he said, “you gave me my first ride in the saddle. I’ve been astride another bigger nag lately—one they call Pegasus; this is its first real gallop, and I want you to ride with me.”
With a puzzled face Dallas looked from the speaker to the paper. It was Gordon’s copyhold of the verses that lay there in manuscript, legally transferred to himself.
As he took in its significance, a deep flush stole into his scholarly-pale cheeks, and tears, unconcealed this time, clouded his sight. He put out one uncertain hand, while Hobhouse made a noisy pretense of gathering together the loose leaves under his hands.
“It’s for six hundred pounds!” he said huskily; “six hundred pounds!”
CHAPTER V
AN ANYTHINGARIAN
Two hours later Gordon sat alone in the room, looking out on the softening sun-glare of St. James Street. In the chastened light the brilliant dark-auburn curls that clustered over his colorless face showed a richer brown and under their long black lashes his eyes had deepened their tint. Near-by, where Park Place opened, a fountain played, on whose bronze rim dusty sparrows preened and twittered. The clubs that faced the street were showing signs of life, and on the pave a newsboy, for the benefit of late-rising west-end dandies, was crying the papers.