In her own room she unlocked a metal frame that stood on her dressing-table. It held a pencil portrait, begged long before from Hobhouse. A vivid, conscious flush was in her cheeks as she looked at it.
“For a woman of fire and dreams!” she murmured. “Not for a thing of snow! Never—never!”
CHAPTER IX
GORDON WAKES AND FINDS HIMSELF FAMOUS
The sharp jostle of the pavement; the rattle of the crossings; the “this way, m’lord!” of dodging link-boys and the hoarse warning of the parochial watch to reckless drivers; street lamps flaring redly in the raw and heavy night; the steaming tap-rooms along the Thames; the cut-throat darkness and the dank smell of the slow turgid current under London bridge. Still Gordon walked while the hours dragged till the traffic ebbed to midnight’s lull—on and on, without purpose or direction. It was dawn before he entered his lodgings, fagged and unstrung, with blood pumping and quivering in his veins like quicksilver.
He let himself in with his own key. The door of the ante-chamber which his valet occupied was ajar. Fletcher had been waiting for his master; he was dressed and seated in a chair, but his good-humored, oleaginous face was smoothed in slumber.
Gordon went into his sitting-room, poured out a half goblet of cognac and drank it to the last drop, feeling gratefully its dull glow and grudging release from nervous tension.
His memory of his speech was a sort of rough-drawn composite impression whose salient points were color and movement: the wide groined roof, the peaked and gilded throne, the crimson woolsack, the long, red morocco sofas set thickly, the rustle in the packed galleries, and peers leaning in their seats to speak in low tones with their neighbors.
The majority there had not known him, but his paleness, his beauty, his curling hair, and most of all his lameness, told his name to the few. The few whispered it to the many, they in turn gazed and whispered too, and almost before he had uttered a word, the entire assemblage knew that the speaker was the notorious writer of the famous Satire whose winged Apollonian shafts had stung the whole poetic cult of England—the twenty-four-year-old lord whose name was coupled in the newspapers with unlovely tales of bacchanals in Madrid, duellos in Malta and Gibraltar, and harem intrigues in Constantinople; tales half-believed even by those who best knew what enemies his vitriolic pen had made and their opportunities for slander.
Gordon had acted in a mental world created by excitement. His pride had spurred him, in a moment of humiliation, to thrust himself into the place he of right should occupy. Mere accident had chosen the debate; the casual circumstance of a visit to the Fleet Prison had determined his position in it. Given these, his mind had responded clearly, spontaneously, with a grasp and brilliancy of which he himself had been scarcely conscious. He remembered, with a curious impersonal wonder as he walked, the sharp, straining, mental effort before that battery of glances coldly formal at first, then surprised into approval and at length warmed to enthusiastic applause; the momentary hush as he sat down; the buzz of undammed talk crisped by the tap of the gavel; the press of congratulations which followed him to the outer air.
Now, as he stood in his room in the gray light of the early morning, a feeling of distaste came over him. Why had he spoken? Had it been from any sympathy for the cause he championed? Was it not rather in a mere spirit of hurt pride and resentment—the same resentment that had made him refuse to eliminate the bitter stanzas from his book? A flush rose to his brow. How unworthy had been his motive beside that of the stripling who had written against that same bill!