In her vision rose the stooped figure of William Godwin, Jane’s foster-father. He hated Gordon, she knew—and he had a connection with the Courier, the bitterest of them all.
Fletcher was in the lower hall as Mrs. Clermont passed out the street door. He knew the catastrophe that had befallen. Now his honest old eyes were full of grief and perplexity.
It was long past midnight when he ascended to his master’s room. Gordon had thrown off his clothing and was stretched on the bed. He was asleep.
As the grizzled valet’s eyes rested on the recumbent figure, he could see that one foot—the lame one—was uncovered. Through all the years of his service, he had never seen the member which Gordon’s sensitiveness concealed. He had often wondered curiously what was the nature of the deformity. How did it look?
Fletcher turned away, took a counterpane from a chair and with face averted, drew it over the uncovered foot. Then he shaded the candle and went out, and as he went, a tear splashed down his seamed and weather-beaten cheek.
CHAPTER XVII
THE BURSTING OF THE STORM
Over the great, crow-footed face of London, full of tragedies, a heavy fog had fallen. Dismal and murky, it lay like a bodiless incubus, shutting out the shining sun and the sweet smells of spring and showers. To Gordon, in the house on Piccadilly Terrace, the colorless dun had seemed to reflect his own feelings. He was numbed. His mind was stumbling through wastes of dumb protest.
The links of Mrs. Clermont’s forging had held. The story of his wife’s flight which the Courier had displayed on its front page had been a masterpiece of dark hints and veiled insinuations. To Gordon, who had read it with aching eyeballs, it had seemed printed in monstrous symbols of flame.
It was to prove the opening note of a chorus whose vicious strength he had not comprehended till the following day, when the avalanche of abuse broke over him with the morning newspapers. Every personal grudge, every pygmean hater of success, every cowering enmity that had sickened under his splendor had roused. He shut himself in the library, telling Fletcher he was at home to no one, and read grimly the charges they preferred: he had carried his unprincipled profligacy into his home and ensconced beneath his own roof a Drury Lane inamorata; he had persecuted his wife with inhuman cruelties, denied her the offices of religion, fired pistols in her bedroom to frighten her while she slept—these were the lightest of their accusations.
Gordon’s mind, racing over the pages, was catching glimpses of heterogeneous elements which blended in a dim, dread futurity. He saw suddenly the inertia of Annabel’s passive correctness—saw why his own name, with its eccentric dazzle, had stood forth blackly against her even ways, her spotless, conventional pureness. The mute contrast had always been there, and he had suffered accordingly. To the world she stood a martyr—a stony pillar, once a woman, who had looked back to catch some lurid fume from doomed cities sinking under Dead Sea waters.