She did not undeceive him, but handed him his great-coat, and gathered the volumes tossed on to the couch to stuff into its bulging pockets.
Jane had been scrutinizing the room. “What’s that?” she inquired, pointing to a plate of food which sat on the far end of the mantel, as though it had been impatiently pushed aside.
The youth colored uneasily. “Why, I suppose that was my supper,” he said shamefacedly; “I must have forgotten to eat it.”
Jane laughed, picked up the pamphlet for which the meal had been forgotten, and read the title aloud. “‘Twelve Butchers for a Jury and a Jeffreys for a Judge. An Appeal against the Pending Frame-Breakers Bill to legalize the Murder of the Stocking-Weavers. By Percy Bysshe Shelley!’”
“Frame-Breakers!” she finished disdainfully. “Stocking-Weavers!”
Shelley’s delicate face flushed as he folded the pamphlet.
“Are they not men?” he exclaimed. “And being men, have they no natural rights? Is British law to shoot them down like wild beasts for the defense of their livelihood? Oh, if I were only a peer, with a voice in Parliament!” He spoke with fierce emphasis, but in tone soft, vibrating and persuasive—a sustained, song-like quality in it.
“Percy Bysshe Shelley!” Gordon’s mind recited the name wonderingly. He remembered a placard he had seen in a book-shop window: “For writing the which he stands expelled from University College, Oxford.” So this was the heir to a baronetcy, the author of “Queen Mab,” the stripling iconoclast who had laughed at fulminating attorney-generals, had fled to Lynmouth beach—where he had spent his days making little wooden boxes, inclosed in resined bladders, weighted with lead and equipped with tiny mast and sail, and had sent them, filled with his contraband writings, out on the rollers of the Atlantic in the hope that they might reach some free mind on the Irish shore or on some ocean brig.
Gordon left his post and went slowly down the stair, past the blackened office, wherein the warden sat admiringly fingering the brooch that had wiped out a debt to old William Godwin the bookseller, and into the street.
The words of the youth he had seen sounded in his brain: “If I were only a peer, with a voice in Parliament!”