Jane Clermont had reached it before him, her eyes a storm of anger. She tore the silver ornaments from her costume, and dashed them at the feet of the manager. “How dare they! How dare they!” she flamed.
“Don’t talk!” he snapped. “I must go on with the play or they will be in here in five minutes. Don’t wait to change your dress—go! go, I tell you! Do you think I want my theater tumbled about my ears?”
He cursed as the dulled uproar came from beyond the dropped curtain.
Curious eyes had turned to Gordon, faces zestful, relishing, as he paused in the doorway. The girl had not seen him. But at that moment hurried steps came down the passage—a youth darted past Gordon and threw an arm about her.
“Jane!” he cried, “we were there—Mary and I—we saw it all! It is infamous!”
A flash of instant recollection deepened the vivid fire in Gordon’s look as it rested on the boyish, beardless figure, whose quaint dress and roving eyes, bright and wild like a deer’s, seemed as incongruous in that circle of paint and tinsel as in the squalor of the Fleet Prison. Shelley went on rapidly through Jane’s incoherent words:
“Jane, listen! We’re not poor now. We came to the play to-night to tell you the news. Old Sir Bysshe, my grandfather, is dead and the entail comes to me. We sail for the continent at daybreak. Mary is waiting in the carriage. Come with us, Jane, and let England go.”
On the manager’s face drops of perspiration had started. “Aye, go!” he foamed. “The quicker the better! His lordship is waiting—”
He shrank back, the sneer throttled on his lips, for there was that in Gordon’s colorless features, his sparkling eyes, at which the man’s tongue clove to the roof of his mouth.
“George Gordon!” exclaimed Shelley under his breath.