The house that sheltered the old wit was dark as Gordon ascended the steps, and the hollow echoes from the knocker, reverberating through the hall, chilled him with dread. “He died an hour ago, your lordship,” the servant said.
An hour! And but for the delay, he would have been in time! As Gordon entered, a prey to this reflection, a thick-set man dressed shabbily, ascended the steps. He had once been the dead man’s groom, he explained, and begged awkwardly to be allowed to look upon his face. The servant hesitated, but at the grief in the stranger’s voice, he let him in, and the new-comer pushed quickly past Gordon and entered the darkened bedroom before him.
There his profound emotion vanished. He drew a bailiff’s wand from beneath his coat and touching the rigid figure that lay there, proclaimed with gruff triumph: “I arrest this body in the king’s name, for five hundred pounds.”
The exultant bailiff started at the touch of fingers gripping his wrist. Something in Gordon’s face, though now distorted with feeling, was familiar.
“Why,” he said, “I’m a turnkey, if you ain’t the gent that took the young ladies into the Fleet!”
“Come with me,” rasped Gordon between his teeth, and the bailiff followed. In the next room he drew from his pocket a draft from John Murray, his publisher, for four hundred and eighty guineas. Without a word he indorsed this and handed it to the bailiff, who scrutinized it and counted out the four pounds change.
“Now go!” said Gordon.
The clock of St. Paul’s was pealing the hour of eleven as the hackney-coach drove back to the house on Piccadilly Terrace. A light low-lying mist softened the outlines of the alley-ways and purified the filth of the street. Overhead, it frayed into a night of wonderful starshine, where, beyond the soiled sordidness of the clamorous city, the sky spread a web of diamonds and sifted gold dust.
While the wheels rattled onward, Gordon’s white whimsical face, lifted to those presences above the smoky roofs, gradually lost its bitter glaze and expressed a curious wistfulness—a vague, appealing weariness and speculation.