“There was no change in Mr. Sheridan’s condition, Rushton?” asked Gordon.
“Change, my lord?” the boy stammered. “Why, I—” He looked from him to the others, his jaw dropped.
Lady Noël shifted her cane. “I received Rushton’s report. I thought it a pity anything should interfere with your lordship’s evening engagement.”
“Mr. Sheridan was thought to be dying, my lord,” said the boy, “and had asked for you.”
CHAPTER XVI
THE DESPOILING
As his hackney-coach sped through the night, Gordon’s anger at the inhumanity that had kept from him the sick man’s message, faded gradually into a duller resentment that held most of grief.
The words of his wife recurred to his mind: “A doddering old man!” She had seen only the uncertain walk, the trembling hand, the dying down of the brilliance and fire into crumbling ashes. Not the past, the career in Parliament, the masterly craft of the playwright, the years of loyalty to his friends. Social morality had been a lifelong jest to Sheridan—a veritable “School for Scandal” from which he drew his choicest bon-mots, yet his whole character had been sweetened with the milk of human kindness. Annabel walked a moral princess of parallelograms, viciously virtuous, mercilessly inflexible. “And the greatest of these is charity”—whose was it? Annabel’s or Sheridan’s?
On the steps of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West stood Dr. Cassidy with his friend, the under-curate, and he caught a glimpse of the coach that whirled by.
“Yonder,” said Cassidy, “rides London’s poet-apostate, known by his limp and his profligacy. The devotees are tiring. How long can the idol stand?”
The other turned to gaze. “Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you!” he quoted, “for so did their fathers, to the false prophets!” He also was a sanctimonious young man.