Gordon saw both pictures clearly as he paused, his foot on the carriage step. Then he spoke to the coachman.
“To Lady Jersey’s,” he said, and reëntered the carriage.
CHAPTER XI
THE BEATEN PATH
The late sun, rosying the lake beside the ruined cloister, had drawn its flame-wrought curtains across the moor that lay about Newstead, and the library was full of shadows as Gordon groped in the darkness for a candle.
Dinner was scarce through, for the party he had gathered—who for a noisy fortnight had made the gray old pile resound to the richest fooleries in the range of their invention—did not rise before noon, had scarce breakfasted by two, and voted the evening still in its prime at three o’clock in the morning. The Abbey had been theirs to turn upside down and they had given rein to every erratic audacity. That very day they had had the servants drag into the dining-room an old stone coffin from the rubbish of the tumble-down priory; had resurrected from some cobwebbed corner a set of monkish dresses with all the proper apparatus of crosses and beads with which they had opened a conventual chapter of “The Merry Monks of Newstead”; and had set Fletcher to polishing the old skull drinking-cup on whose silver mounting Gordon long ago had had engraved the stanzas he had written on the night his mother lay dead. The grotesquerie had been hailed with enthusiasm, and the company had sat that evening gowned and girdled about the dinner-table, where Sheridan’s gray poll had given him the seat of honor as abbot.
Gordon wore one of the black gabardines, as he lit the candle in the utterly confused library. It was a sullen, magnificent chamber. The oak wainscoting was black with age. Tapestries and book-shelves covered one side, and floor and tables were littered with reviews and books, carelessly flung from their place.
A shout, mingled with the prolonged howls of a wolf and the angered “woof” of a bear sounded from the driveway—the guests were amusing themselves with the beasts chained on either side of the entrance. These were relics of that old, resentful season when Gordon had hermited himself there to lash his critics with his defiant Satire. The wolf, he had then vowed, should be entered for the deanery of St. Paul’s, and the bear sit for a theological fellowship at Cambridge.
For a moment, candle in hand, he listened to the mingled noises, his head on one side, a posture almost of irksomeness. He started when Sheridan’s hand fell on his shoulder.
“By the Lord!” he ejaculated. “I took you for the Abbey ghost!”
Sheridan laughed, lit the cigar Gordon handed him, and sat down, tucking the ends of his rope-girdle between his great knees. The tonsure he had contrived was a world too small for his massive head, and the monk’s robe showed inconsistent glimpses of red waistcoat and fawn-colored trousers where its edges gaped.