“’Fore gad,” admired the dandy, “what a coat! It becomes him as if he’d been hatched in it.”
Lord Petersham at his elbow gazed with seconding approval. The somber elegance of the black velvet dress-coat, which Gordon wore close-buttoned, and the white rolling collar left open so as to expose the throat, served to heighten the pallor of his skin and set in high relief the handsome, patrician face above it.
“Still on his pedestal,” observed Petersham. “Before long his vertex sublimis will displace enough stars to overthrow the Newtonian system! I hear Caro Lamb is not tired doing homage. His affair with Lady Oxford seems to be tapering.”
“Women!” ejaculated Brummell. “He’s a martyr to them. Stap my vitals, the beauties run after him because he won’t make up to them. Treat women like fools, and they’ll all worship you!”
To the pinnacle this implied, Gordon had risen at a leap. He was the idol of fashionable London, the chief topic of frivolous boudoir gossip and intellectual table-talk. His person, his travels spangled with romantic tales, his gloom, his pride, his beauty, and the dazzle of his prodigious success, combined to bring him an unheard-of homage. His newest book was on every drawing-room table in the kingdom. He was made much of by Lady Jersey. Hostesses quarrelled over entertaining him, and ladies of every title below the blood-royal asked to be placed next him at dinner. The regent himself had asked him to Carlton House.
Each of his publications since that February day when he woke to fame and when the chariot of the incomparable Captain Brummell had set him down at Melbourne House, had had a like history. Each had won the same rapt praise, the same wondering homage to talent. If they missed the burning fervor of those earlier impassioned lines on Grecian liberty, if they held, each more clearly, an under-note of agnosticism, it was overlooked in delight at their freedom, their metrical sweep and seethe of feeling, the melancholy sea-surge and fret of their moods. His ancient detractors, whom his success had left breathless, constrained to innuendo, had added to his personality the tang of the audacious, of bizarre license, of fantastic eccentricity, that beckoned even while it repelled.
One would have thought Gordon himself indifferent to praise as to censure. The still dissatisfaction that came to him in the night hours in his tumbled study, when he remembered the strength and purpose that had budded in his soul in those early weeks at Newstead, he alone knew. The convention that had carped at him before his fame he trod under foot. He frequented Manton’s shooting-gallery, practised the broad sword at Angelo’s, sparred with “Gentleman Jackson,” the champion pugilist, in his rooms in Bond Street, and clareted and champagned at the Cocoa-Tree with Sheridan and Moore till five in the matin. Other men might conceal their harshest peccadilloes; Gordon concealed nothing. What he did he did frankly, with disdain for appearances. Hypocrisy was to him the soul’s gangrene. He preferred to have the world think him worse than to think him better than he was.
His enemies in time had plucked up courage, revamped old stories and invented new; these seemed to give him little concern. He not only kept silence but declined to allow his friends, such as Sheridan and Hobhouse, to champion him. When the Chronicle barbed a sting with a reference to the enormous sums he was pocketing from his copyholds, he shrugged his shoulders. John Murray, his publisher, knew that the earnings of “The Giaour” had been given to a needy author; that “Zuleika” had relieved a family from the slavery of debt and sent them, hopeful colonists, to Australia.
Gordon passed into the club, bowing to the group in the bow-window with conventional courtesy, and entered the reading-room. It was September, but the night had turned cool, and he dropped into a chair before the hearth.
“Why does Lady Holland always have that damned screen between the whole room and the fire?” he grumbled half-humorously. “I who bear cold no better than an antelope, and never yet found a sun quite done to my taste, was absolutely petrified, and couldn’t even shiver. All the rest, too, looked as if they were just unpacked, like salmon from an ice-basket!”