The libation I would pour
Should be peace with thine and mine.
And—a health to thee, Tom Moore!”
“Gordon, you eavesdropper, have you read the papers?” Sheridan shouted.
“Not a line!”
“Curse catch me, you’ve heard us talking then! George, George, you’ve waked to find yourself famous!”
Gordon hardly felt their hand-clasps or heard their congratulatory small-talk. He almost ran to the window and flung it open, drawing the cool air into his lungs with a great respiration. His sleep had been crumpled and scattered by the fall of a walking-stick, as the crackling of thin ice will spill and dissipate a crowd of skaters. He had caught snatches of conversation indistinctly as he shook off the leaden stupor of the intoxicant. “Every newspaper in town clapping its hands!” “All London mad over George Gordon!” His mind had conned the sentences dully at first, then with a gasping dart of meaning. His speech? No, it could not be that. Moore had spoken the name of his book, and he had known—realized in a flash, while he lay quivering. Then it was that he had leaped to his feet. Then he had voiced that impromptu toast, declaimed while he fought hard to repress his exultation, with every nerve thrilling a separate, savage triumph of its own.
He looked down. It was as fine a day as that on which Paradise was made, and the streets were alive. Several pedestrians stopped to stare up at him curiously. A carriage was passing, and he saw the gentleman it held speak to the lady by his side and point toward the building. Fame! To clamp shut the mouths of the scoundrels who maligned him and his! To feel the sting of the past covered with the soothing poultice of real reputation! To fling back the sneers of his enemies into their teeth. To be no longer singular, isolated, excommunicate—to have the world’s smiles and its praise!
Yesterday seemed a dream. It was fading into an indistinguishable background, with the face of the bright-eyed youth in the Fleet Prison—and the dull shame he had felt at dawn.
He turned. “Pardon me if I play the host poorly to-day,” he said; “I am ridiculously, fine-ladically nervous. I fear I must have retired drunk—a good old gentlemanly vice—and am now at the freezing point of returning soberness.”