“What are you mooning over?” he asked. “Got a new poem in mind?”
“No. To-day I have thrown two into the fire to my comfort, and smoked out of my head the plan of another.”
“Sentimental?”
“Not I. I was thinking of the East. I wish I might sail for Greece in the spring—provided I neither marry myself nor unmarry any one else in the interval.”
“Why not the first?” the other pursued. “I tried it younger than you.”
The speaker sighed presently, and locking his hands behind his head, leaned back against the cushions, his fine, rugged face under its shock of rough gray hair, turned tender. “My pretty maid of Bath!” he said softly. “Elizabeth, my girl-wife that I fought a duel for at Kingsdown and who ran away with me to France when I hadn’t a pound! It’s twelve years since she died. This is an anniversary to me, my boy. Forty years ago to-day she married me. I hadn’t written ‘The Rivals’ then, nor gone to Parliament—nor grown old!”
Gordon was silent. Sheridan’s face, in the candle-light, was older than he had ever seen it. Age was claiming him, though youth was still in the foppish dress, the brilliant sparkle of the eye, the sharp quickness on the tongue. But the wife he remembered at that moment had belonged to a past generation.
A muffled call came—“Sherry! Sherry!” and at the summons the gray head lifted and the gleam of incorrigible humor shot again across the thin cheeks. “The rogues are whooping for me!” he chuckled, and hurried out.
Gordon stared into the gloom of the open window opposite in a reverie. That echo of still-living memory struck across his whimsical mood with strange directness, like a voice speaking insistently of simple human needs.
“To love, to marry—” he reflected. “It is the recourse of the highest intellect as well as the lowest. There is Sheridan. He is brain at its summit. He puts more intellect into squeezing a new case of claret out of a creditor tradesman than the average man has in his whole brain-box. He has written the very best drama and delivered the very best single oration ever conceived or heard in England. And now, without his pretty wife, he is a prey to debt, to gaining and to the bailiffs! Peace and single possession, the Eden-right of man—the having and holding from all the world of one warm, human sympathy—that is the world’s way, the clear result of ages of combined experience.”