Gordon did not smile. The chill was still creeping in his veins. He thrust the paper into his pocket as Hobhouse threw himself down by his side.
The latter noticed his expression. “What is it?” he asked.
“Only one of my moods, I fancy. But just before you spoke I had a curious feeling; it was as though this spot—that town yonder—were tangled in my destiny.”
The barbaric servants had roused now and a fire was crackling.
“There’s a simple remedy for that,” the other said. “Come back to London with me. I swear I hate to start to-morrow without you.”
Gordon shook his head. He replied more lightly, for the eerie depression had vanished as swiftly as it had come:
“Not I! You’ll find it the same hedge-and-ditch old harridan of a city—wine, women, wax-works and weather-cocks—the coaches in Hyde Park, and man milliners promenading of a Sunday. I prefer a clear sky with windy mare’s-tails, and a fine savage race of two-legged leopards like this,”—he pointed to the fire with its picturesque figures. “I’ll have another year of it, Hobhouse, before I go back.”
“You’ll have spawned your whole quarto by then, no doubt!”
“Perhaps. I am like the tiger; if I miss the first spring I go growling back to my jungle. I must take the fit as it offers. Composition comes over me in a kind of frenzy, and if I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. Poetry is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an earthquake. Much the little envious knot of parson-poets who rule the reviews know about it!” he continued half satirically.
Hobhouse smiled quizzically. The man beside him had had a short and sharp acquaintance with England’s self-constituted authorities in poetic criticism. Two years before, fresh from college, he had published a slender volume of verses. In quality these had been indifferent enough, but the fact that their author was a peer offered an attractive text for the gibes of the reviewers. Their ridicule pierced him. His answer had been immediate and stunning—a poetical Satire, keen as a rapier, polished as a mirror, pitiless as the Inquisition, which flayed his detractors one by one for the laughter of London. The book had been the talk of the year, but while at the very acme of popularity, the youthful author had withdrawn it, and, still smarting from the sneers which had been its inspiration, had sailed for the Levant. A thought of this sensitiveness was in Hobhouse’s mind as Gordon continued: