As the wheels clattered on, Gordon’s mind was running in channels of discontent.
“I am ennuyé,” he thought, “beyond my usual tense of that yawning verb I am always conjugating. At six-and-twenty one should be something—and what am I? Nothing but six-and-twenty, and the odd months. Six-and-twenty years, as they call them—why, I might have
been a pasha by this time!”
The coach turned a corner, and he saw, a little way off, the lighted front of Drury Lane Theater. In the shadow of its stage-door stood a couple his sight did not distinguish, but the keen black eyes of one of them—a vivid, creole-looking girl—had noted with a quick instinctive movement the approach of the well-known carriage, now tangled in the moving stream.
The gaze of the man beside her—defiant, furtive, theatric and mustachioed, with hair falling thickly and shortly like a Moor’s—followed her look.
“He was in the greenroom last night, too!” he said, with angry jealousy. “I saw him coming away.”
“Suppose you did?” flung the girl with irritation. “Who are you, that I must answer for whom I see or know—yes, and for anything else? He was here, and so was Mr. Sheridan and Captain Brununell. I should like to know what you have to say about it!”
The other’s cheek had flushed darkly.
“You used to have more time for me, Jane,” he answered sullenly, “before you took up with the theater—when you lived over the old book-shop and hadn’t a swarm of idling dandies about you.”
“I suppose his lordship there is an ‘idling dandy’!” she retorted with fine sarcasm. “A dandy, and the most famous man in England! An idler, who gets a guinea a line for all he writes. What do you spend, pray, that your father in Wales didn’t leave you? Tell me,” she said curiously, her tone changing; “you were in the East when you were in the navy. Are all the stories they tell of George Gordon in Greece true? They say he himself is Conrad, the hero of his ‘Corsair.’ Was he so dreadfully wicked?”
He turned away his head, gnawing his lip. “I don’t know,” he returned doggedly, “and I care less. I know he’s only amusing himself with you, Jane, and you know it, too—”