“Rushton,” he shouted, “get the muffles! Let us have a bout like the old times.” He threw off his coat, pushed the chairs aside and bared his arms. “The gloves, Rushton, and be quick about it!”
The footman hesitated, a half-scared expression in his look.
“Never fear,” said Gordon, and laughed—a tightening laugh that strained the cords of his throat. “Put them on! That’s right! What are you staring at? Do you think she will hear you? Not she! Put up your hands—so! Touched, by the Lord! Not up to your old style, Rushton! You never used to spar so villainously. You will disgrace the fancy. Ah-h!” And he knocked him sprawling.
Rushton scrambled to his feet as the housekeeper entered, dismay upon her mask-like relic of a face. Gordon was very white and both noticed that his eyes were full of tears.
Long after midnight, when the place was quiet, the housekeeper heard an unaccustomed sound issuing from the chamber where the dead woman lay. She took a light and entered. The candle had burned out, and she saw Gordon sitting in the dark beside the bed.
He spoke in a broken voice:
“Oh, Mrs. Muhl,” he said, “she was my mother! After all, one can have but one in this world, and I have only just found it out!”
CHAPTER VII
THE YOUTH IN FLEET PRISON
Behind the closed shutters of the book-shop which bore the sign of “The Juvenile Library,” in the musty room where George Gordon had burned the errant copies of his ubiquitous Satire, old William Godwin sat reading by a guttering candle, Livy’s Roman History in the original. It was his favorite book, and in the early evenings, when not writing his crabbed column for the Courier, or caustic diatribes for the reviews, he was apt to be reading it. A sound in the living-room above drew his eyes from the black-letter page.