His gaze, that had followed the clerical figure till it passed out of sight, returned meditatively to the slaty white buildings opposite.
“Some people call me an atheist—I never could understand why, though I prefer Confucius to the Ten Commandments and Socrates to St. Paul,—the two latter happen to agree in their opinion of marriage,—and I don’t think eating bread or drinking wine from the hand of an earthly vicar will make me an inheritor of Heaven. Dallas would tell me not to reason, but to believe. You might as well tell a man not to wake but to sleep. Neither Cicero nor the Messiah could ever have altered the vote of a single lord of the bed-chamber! And then to bully with torments and all that! The menace of hell makes as many devils as the penal code makes villains. All cant—Methodistical cant—yet Dallas believes it. And both he and Cassidy belong to the same one of the seventy-two sects that are tearing each other to pieces for the love of the Lord and hatred of each other—the sects that call men atheists because the eternal why will creep into what they write. If it pleases the Church—I except Dallas—to damn me for asking questions, I shall be only one with some millions of scoundrels who, after all, seem as likely to be damned as ever. As for immortality, if people are to live, why die? And our carcases, are they worth raising? I hope, if mine is, I shall have a better pair of legs than I have moved on these three-and-twenty years, or I shall be sadly behind in the squeeze into Paradise!”
There was a knock at the door. He rose and opened it. It was Hobhouse. Gordon caught up his hat and they left the hotel together.
As they crossed Park Place a woman, draggled and gin-besotted, strayed from some Thames-side stews, sat on the worn stone base of the fountain, leaning uncertainly against its bronze rim. Her swollen lids hid her eyes and one hand, palm up, was thrown out across her lap. Gordon drew a shilling from his pocket, and passing his arm in Hobhouse’s, laid it in the outstretched hand. At the touch of the coin, the drab started up, looked at him stupidly an instant, then with a ribald yell of laughter she flung the shilling into the water and shambled across the square, mimicking, in a hideous sort of buffoonery, the lameness of his gait.
Gordon’s face turned ashen. He walked on without a word, but his companion could feel his hand tremble against his sleeve. When he spoke, it was in a voice half-smothered, forbidding.
“The old jeer!” he said. “The very riffraff of the street fling it at me! Yet I don’t know why they should spare that taunt; even my mother did not. ‘Lame brat!’ she called me once when I was a child.” He laughed, jarringly, harshly. “Why, only a few days before I sailed from England, in one of her fits of passion, she flung it at me. ‘May you be as ill-formed in mind as you are in body!’ Could they wish me worse than she?”
“Gordon!” expostulated the other. “Don’t!—”
He had no time to finish. A grizzled man in the dress of an upper servant was approaching them, his rubicund face bearing an unmistakable look of haste and concern.
“Well, Fletcher?” inquired Gordon.
“I thought your lordship had gone out earlier. I have been inquiring for you at the clubs. This message has just come from Newstead.”