“What an unfortunate advertisement!” quoth that gentleman, pulling his nose. “Eh?”
John Murray brought his fist down on the desk with a force that made the ink-well leap. “By the foot of Pharaoh!” he swore, “we’ll take advantage of it; it will discount that attack in the Scourge. The papers have their copies of the book already. I’ll send them word. We’ll not wait till to-morrow. We’ll issue TO-NIGHT!”
He rang the bell sharply and gave a clerk hurried orders which in a few moments made the office a scene of confusion.
When Lady Melbourne entered Melbourne House with her daughter-in-law that evening—about the time a swarm of messengers were departing from the Fleet Street shop carrying packages of books addressed to the greatest houses of London—she found her stately niece, Annabel Milbanke, reading in the drawing-room.
Lady Caroline’s eyes were very bright as she threw off her wraps. She went to the piano and played softly—long dissolving arpeggios that melted into a rich minor chord. Presently she began to sing the same Greek air that she had sung once before with a pathos that had surprised and stirred even the colder, calculate Annabel.
“Caro, what is that?” asked Lady Melbourne, unclasping her sables before the fireplace. The singer did not hear her.
“It’s a song Mr. Hobhouse sent her when he was traveling in the East,” Annabel volunteered.
Lady Melbourne’s thoughts were not wholly on the song. She had seen the book her niece had been reading—it was George Gordon’s long famous Satire. She picked it up, noting the name on the title-page with approval. She had been pondering since she left the ladies’ gallery of the House of Lords, and her thoughts had concerned themselves intimately with its author, the young peer whose maiden speech had challenged such surprise and admiration. His name went perpetually accompanied by stories of eccentricities and wild life at college, of tamed bears and hidden orgies at Newstead with Paphian dancing girls, of a secret establishment at Brighton, of adventures and liaisons the most reckless in cities of the Orient. Yet he had stanch supporters, too.
“Annabel,” she said presently, and with singular emphasis, “George Gordon is in town. He spoke in Parliament this evening. I am going to ask him to dinner here to-morrow—to meet you.”
The refrain Lady Caroline was singing broke queerly in the middle, and her fingers stumbled on the keys. The others did not see the expression that slipped swiftly across her face, the rising flush, the indrawn, bitten under lip, nor did they catch the undertone in her laugh as she ran up the stair.