THE CASTAWAY

“Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
’Tis woman’s whole existence....” p. [95].

THE
CASTAWAY

THREE GREAT MEN RUINED IN
ONE YEAR—A KING, A CAD AND
A CASTAWAY

By
HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES
Author of Hearts Courageous, A Furnace of Earth, etc., etc.

Illustrated by
HOWARD CHANDLER CHRISTY

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1904
The Bobbs-Merrill Company

May

The price of this book at retail is One Dollar net.
No dealer is licensed to sell it at a less price, and a
sale at a less price will be treated as an infringement
of the copyright.

The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

TO
POST WHEELER, LITT. D.

My history will furnish materials for a pretty little Romance which shall be entitled and denominated the loves of Lord B.

Byron, 1804

I hate things all fiction; and therefore the Merchant and Othello have no great associations to me; but Pierre has. There should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric, and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.

Byron, 1817

CONTENTS

THE CASTAWAY

CHAPTER I
THE FEAST OF RAMAZAN

A cool breeze slipped ahead of the dawn. It blew dim the calm Greek stars, stirred the intricate branches of olive-trees inlaid in the rose-pearl façade of sky, bowed the tall, coral-lipped oleanders lining the rivulets, and crisped the soft wash of the gulf-tide. It lifted the strong bronze curls on the brow of a sleeping man who lay on the sea-beach covered with a goatskin.

George Gordon woke and looked about him: at the pallid, ripple-ridged dunes, the murmuring clusters of reeds; at the dead fire on which a kid had roasted the night before; at the forms stretched in slumber around it—Suliotes in woolen kirtles and with shawl girdles stuck with silver-handled pistols, an uncouth and savage body-guard; at his only English companion, John Hobhouse, who had travelled with him through Albania and to-morrow was to start back to London, asleep now with a saddle for a pillow. While he gazed, day broke effulgent, like light at the first hour, and the sun rose, pouring its crimson wine into the goblet of the sea’s blue crystal.

For a full year Gordon had roughed it in the wilderness, sleeping one night in a pasha’s palace, the next in a cow-shed—a strange choice, it seemed, for a peer of twenty-two, who had taken his seat in the House of Lords and published a book that had become the talk of London. Yet now, as he rose to his feet and threw back his square-set shoulders, his colorless face and deep gray-blue eyes whetted with keen zest.

“This is better than England,” he muttered. “How the deuce could anybody make such a world as that, I wonder? For what purpose were there ordained dandies and kings—and fellows of colleges—and women of a certain age—and peers—and myself, most of all?” His thought held an instant’s thin edge of bitterness as his look fell: his right boot had a thicker sole than the left, and he wore an inner shoe that laced tightly under the shrunken foot.

Stepping gingerly lest he waken his comrade he threaded the prostrate forms to the shambling rock-path that led, through white rushes and clumps of cochineal cactus, to the town. A little way along, it crossed a ledge jutting from the heel of the hill. Under this shelf the water had washed a deep pool of limpid emerald. He threw off his clothing and plunged into the tingling surf. He swam far out into the sea, under the sky’s lightening amethyst, every vein beating with delight.

Before he came from the water, the sunrise had gilded the tops of the mountains; while he dressed on the rock it was kindling golden half-moons on the minarets of Missolonghi, a mile away.

As his eyes wandered over the scene—the strange stern crags, the nearer fields broidered with currant-bushes, the girdling coast steeped in the wild poignant beauty of an Ionian October—they turned with a darker meaning to the town, quiet enough now, though at sunset it had blazed with Mussulman festivity, while its Greek citizens huddled in shops and houses behind barred doors. It was the feast of Ramazan—a time for the Turks of daily abstinence and nightly carousal, a long fast for lovers, whose infractions were punished rigorously with bastinado and with the fatal sack. Till the midnight tolled from the mosques the shouts and muskets of the faithful had blasted the solitude. And this land was the genius-mother of the world, in the grip of her Turkish conqueror, who defiled her cities with his Moslem feasts and her waters with the bodies of his drowned victims!

Would it always be so? Gordon thought of a roll of manuscript in his saddle-bag—verses written on the slopes of those mountains and in the fiery shade of these shores. Into the pages he had woven all that old love for this shackled nation which had been one of the pure enthusiasms of his youth and had grown and deepened with his present sojourn. Would the old spirit of Marathon ever rearise?

He went back to the sandy beach, sat down, and drawing paper from his pocket, began to write, using his knee for a desk. The spell of the place and hour was upon him. Lines flowed from his pencil:

“The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!

Where burning Sappho loved and sung,

Where grew the arts of war and peace,—

Where Delos rose, and Phœbus sprung!

Eternal summer gilds them yet,

But all, except their sun, is set.

The mountains look on Marathon—

And Marathon looks on the sea;

And musing there an hour alone,

I dreamed that Greece might still be free;

For, standing on the Persians’ grave,

I could not deem myself a slave.”

His gaze fell on the figures about the dead fire, wrapped in rough capotes—rugged descendants of a once free race, hardier than their great forefathers, but with ancient courage overlaid, cringing now from the wands of Turkish pashas. A somber look came to his face as he wrote:

“’Tis something, in the death of fame,

Though linked among a fettered race,

To feel at least a patriot’s shame,

Even as I sing, suffuse my face;

For what is left the poet here?

For Greeks a blush—for Greece a tear.

Must we but weep o’er days more blessed?

Must we but blush? Our fathers bled.

Earth! Render back from out thy breast

A remnant of the Spartan dead!

Of the three hundred grant but three

To make a new Thermopylæ!”

He looked up. The crescents on the spires of the town were dazzling points of light in the gold-blue air, the morning full-blown, clean and fragrant with scents of sun and sea. In the midst of its warmth and beauty he shivered. An odd prescient sensation had come to him like a gelid breath from the upper ether. He started at a voice behind him:

“More poetry, I’ll lay a guinea!”

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:

“When I get home I’ll decide whether to put it into the fire or to publish. If it doesn’t make fuel for me it will for the critics.”

“You gave them cause enough. You’ll admit that.”

“They should have let me alone.” Gordon’s voice under its lightness hid a note of unaffected feeling, and his eyes gathered spots of fire and brown. “It wasn’t much—that first poor little college book of mine! But no! I was a noble upstart—a young fool of a peer that needed taking down! So they loosed their literary mountebanks to snap at me! Is it any wonder I hit back? Who wouldn’t?”

“At least,” averred Hobhouse, “very few would have done it so well. There was no quill-whittler left in the British Isles when you finished that Satire of yours. None of the precious penny-a-liners will ever forgive you.”

The other laughed. “I was mad, I tell you—mad!” he said with humorous ferocity. “I wrote in a passion and a sirocco, with three bottles of claret in my head and tears in my eyes. Besides, I was two years younger then. Before I sailed I suppressed it. I bought up the plates and every loose volume in London. Ah well,” he added, “one’s youthful indiscretions will pass. When I come back, I’ll give the rascals something better.”

He paused, his eyes on the stony bridle-path that led from the town. “What do you make of that?” he queried.

Hobhouse looked. Along the rugged way was approaching a strange procession. In advance walked an officer in a purple coat, carrying the long wand of his rank. Following came a file of Turkish soldiers. Then a group of servants, wearing the uniform of the Waywode—the town’s chief magistrate—and leading an ass, across whose withers was strapped a bulky brown sack. After flocked a rabble of all degrees, Turks and Greeks.

“Queer!” speculated Hobhouse. “It’s neither a funeral nor a wedding. What other of their hanged ceremonials can it be?”

The procession halted on the rock-shelf over the deep pool. The soldiers began to unstrap the ass’s brown burden. A quick flash of horrified incredulity had darted into Gordon’s eyes. The ass balked, and one of the men pounded it with his sword-scabbard. While it flinched and scrambled, a miserable muffled wail came from somewhere—seemingly from the air.

Gordon stiffened. His hand flew to the pistol in his belt. He leaped to his feet and dashed up the scraggy path toward the rock, shouting in a voice of strained, infuriate energy:

“By God, Hobhouse, there’s a woman in that sack!”

CHAPTER II
“MAD, BAD AND DANGEROUS TO KNOW.”

At Lady Jersey’s town house, in Portman Square, the final course had been served and the gentlemen’s glasses were being replenished. Lady Jersey gave the signal. The gentlemen rose and bowed, the three ladies withdrew to the drawing-room; then the host, the earl, said, cracking a walnut:

“I heard the other day that George Gordon is on his way back to London. You were with him in the East some time, weren’t you, Hobhouse?”

There were but three besides the host: Sheridan, the playwright, looking the beau and wit combined, of a clarety, elderly, red complexion, brisk and bulbous—William Lamb, heir of the Melbourne title, a personified “career” whose voice was worn on the edges by public speaking—and Hobhouse, whom the earl addressed.

The young man bowed. “I left him in Greece just a year ago.”

“Is it true,” asked Lamb, sipping his Moët with finical deliberation, “that he drinks nothing but barley-water and dines on two soda biscuits?”

“He eats very little,” assented Hobhouse; “dry toast, water-cress, a glass of claret—that was usually his regimen.”

“What an infernal pose!” Lamb exclaimed, rousing. “A ghoul eating rice with a needle! He does it to be eccentric. Why, at Cambridge they say he used to keep a tame bear! His appetite is all apiece with his other fopperies abroad that the papers reprint here. One week he’s mopish. Another, he’s for being jocular with everybody. Then again he’s a sort of limping Don Quixote, rowing with the police for a woman of the town—like that Greek demirep of his he rescued from the sack, that Petersham tells about.”

“Nobody believes Petersham’s yarns!” growled Sheridan.

“I was on the ground when that incident occurred. I’m sorry the clubs got hold of it. It’s a confounded shame.”

Hobhouse spoke explosively. Lord Jersey’s shrewd deep-set eyes gathered interest, and Sheridan paused with a pinch of snuff in transit.

“It happened one sunrise, when we were camped on the sea-beach just outside Missolonghi. That is a Greek town held by the Turks, who keep its Christian citizens in terror of their lives. The girl in the case was a Greek by birth, but her father was a renegado, so she came under Moslem law.”

“I presume she was handsome,” drawled Lamb caustically. “I credit Gordon with good taste in femininity, at least.”

Hobhouse flushed, but kept his temper.

“It’s nonsense,” he went on,—“the story that it was any affair of his own. There was a young Arab-looking ensign who had fallen in with us, named Trevanion—he had deserted from an English sloop-of-the-line at Bombay. He had disappeared the night before, and we had concluded then it was for some petticoat deviltry he’d been into. I didn’t like the fellow from the start, but Gordon wouldn’t give an unlucky footpad the cold shoulder.”

Sheridan chuckled. “That’s Gordon! I remember he had an old hag of a fire-lighter at his rooms here—Mrs. Muhl. I asked him once why he ever brought her from Newstead. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘no one else will have the poor old devil.’”

“Come, come,” put in Lamb, waspishly. “Let’s hear the new version; we’ve had Petersham’s.”

“We had seen Trevanion talking to the girl,” Hobhouse continued, “in her father’s shop in the bazaar. We didn’t know, of course, when we saw the procession, whom the Turkish scoundrels were going to drown. I didn’t even guess what it was all about till Gordon shouted to me. His pistol was out before you could wink, and in another minute he had the fat leader by the throat.”

“With Mr. Hobhouse close behind him,” suggested the earl.

“I hadn’t a firearm, so I was of small assistance. We had some Suliote ragamuffins for body-guard, but they are so cowed they will run from a Turkish uniform. They promptly disappeared—till it was all over. Well, there was a terrible hullabaloo for a while. I made sure they would butcher us out and out, but Gordon kept his pistol clapped on the purple coat and faced the whole lot down.”

“Wish he had shot him,” rumbled Sheridan, “and appealed to the resident! In the year of Grace 1810 it’s time England took a hand and blew the Turk out of Greece, anyway!”

“I presume there was no doubt about the offense?” asked the earl.

“It seemed not. Trevanion was a good-looking, swarthy rogue, and had been too bold. Though he got away himself, he left the girl to her fate. It was the feast of Ramazan, and he must have known what that fate would be. The time made interference harder for Gordon, since both law and religion were against him. He had learned some of their palaver. He told them he was a pasha-of-three-tails himself in his own country, and at last made the head butcher cut open the sack. The girl was a pitiful thing to see, with great almond eyes sunk with fright—fifteen years old, perhaps, though she looked no more than twelve—and her chalk-white cheeks and the nasty way they had her hands and feet tied made my blood boil. There was more talk, and Gordon flourished the firman Ali Pasha had given him when we were in Albania. The officer couldn’t read, but he pretended he could and at last agreed to go back and submit the matter to the Waywode. So back we all paraded to Missolonghi. It cost Gordon a plenty there, but he won his point.”

“That’s where Petersham’s account ends, isn’t it?” The earl’s tone was dry.

“It’s not all of it,” Hobhouse answered with some heat. “Gordon was afraid the rascally primate might repent of his promise (the Mussulman religion is strenuous) so he took the girl that day to a convent and as soon as possible sent her to Argos to her brother. She died, poor creature, two months afterward, of fever.”

Lamb sniffed audibly.

“Very pretty! He ought to turn it into a poem. I dare say he will. If you hadn’t been there to applaud, Hobhouse, I wager the original program wouldn’t have been altered. Pshaw! He always was a sentimental harlequin,” he went on contemptuously, “strutting about in a neck-cloth and delicate health, and starving himself into a consumption so the women will say, ‘Poor Gordon—how interesting he looks!’ Everything he does is a hectic of vanity, and all he has written is glittering nonsense—snow and sophistry.”

Sheridan’s magnificent iron-gray head, roughly hacked as if from granite, turned sharply. “He’s no sheer seraph nor saint,” he retorted; “none of us is, but curse catch me! there’s no sense in remonstering him! He’ll do great things one of these days. He was born with a rosebud in his mouth and a nightingale singing in his ear!”

The other shrugged his shoulders, but at that moment the protestant face of the hostess appeared.

“How interesting men are to each other!” Lady Jersey exclaimed. “We women have actually been driven to the evening papers.”

The four men followed into the drawing-room, furnished in ruby and dull gold—a room perfect in its appointments, for its mistress added to her innate kindness of heart and tact a rare taste and selection. It showed in the Sèvres-topped tables, the tawny fire-screens, the candelabra of jasper and filigree gold, and in the splendid Gainsborough opposite the door.

The whole effect was a perfect setting for Lady Jersey. In it Lady Caroline Lamb appeared too exotic, too highly colored, too flamboyant—like a purple orchid in a dish of tea-roses; on the other hand, it was too warmly drawn for the absent stateliness of Annabel Milbanke, Lady Melbourne’s niece and guest for the season. The latter’s very posture, coldly fair like a sword on salute, seemed to chide the sparkle and glitter and color that radiated, a latent impetuosity, from Lady Caroline.

“I see by the Courier,” observed Lady Jersey, “that George Gordon is in London.”

“Speak of the devil—” sneered Lamb; and Sheridan said:

“That’s curious; we were just discussing him.”

Miss Milbanke’s even voice entered the conversation. “One hears everywhere of his famous Satire. You think well of it, don’t you, Mr. Sheridan?”

“My dear madam, for the honor of having written it, I would have welcomed all the enemies it has made its author.”

“What dreadful things the papers are always saying about him!” cried Lady Jersey, with a little shudder. “I hope his mother hasn’t seen them. I hear she lives almost a recluse at Newstead Abbey.”

“With due respect to the conventions,” Lamb interposed ironically, “there’s small love lost between them. His guardian used to say they quarrelled like cat and dog.”

“He never liked the boy,” disputed the hostess, warmly. “Why, he wouldn’t stand with him when he took his seat in the Lords. I am right, am I not, Mr. Hobhouse?”

“Yes, your ladyship. Lord Carlisle refused to introduce him. The Chancellor, even, haggled absurdly over his certificate of birth. Gordon came to Parliament with only one friend—an old tutor of his—entered alone, took the peer’s oath and left. He has never crossed the threshold since.”

“What a shame,” cried Lady Caroline, “that neither Annabel nor I have ever seen your paragon, Lady Jersey! Mr. Hobhouse, you or Mr. Sheridan must bring him to dinner to Melbourne House.”

“If he’ll come!” said Lamb, sotto voce, to the earl. “They say he hates to see women eat, because it destroys his illusions.”

Lady Jersey shrugged. “It is vastly in his favor that he still has any,” she retorted, rising. “Come, Caro, give us some music. We are growing too serious.”

Lady Caroline went to the piano, and let her hands wander over the keys. Wild, impatient of restraint, she was a perpetual kaleidoscope of changes. Now an unaccountably serious mood had captured her. The melody that fell from her fingers was a minor strain, and she began singing in a voice low, soft and caressing—with a feeling that Annabel Milbanke had never guessed lay within that agreeable, absurd, perplexing, mad-cap little being:

“Maid of Athens, ere we part,

Give, oh, give me back my heart!

Or since that has left my breast,

Keep it now and take the rest!

Hear my vow before I go,

Zoë mou, sas agapo!

By thy tresses unconfined,

Wooed by each Ægean wind!

By those lids whose jetty fringe,

Kiss thy soft cheeks’ blooming tinge!

By those wild eyes like the roe,

Zoë mou, sas agapo!

By those lips I may not taste!

By that zone-encircled waist!

By all token-flow’rs that tell

(Word can never speak so well!)

By love’s changing joy and woe,

Zoë mou, sas agapo!”

She sang the lines with a strange tenderness—a haunting accent of refrain, that had insensibly moved every one in the room, and surprised for the moment even her own matter-of-fact husband. A womanly softness had misted Lady Jersey’s gaze, and Annabel Milbanke looked quickly and curiously up at the singer as she paused, a spot of color in her cheeks and her hazel eyes large and bright.

There was a moment of silence—a blank which Hobhouse broke:

“He wrote that when we were travelling together in Albania. I’m glad I sent it to you, Lady Caroline. I didn’t know how beautiful it was.”

Miss Milbanke turned her head.

“So that is George Gordon’s,” she said. She had felt a slight thrill, an emotion new to her, while the other sang. “Mr. Hobhouse, what does he look like?”

The young man, who was by nature and liking something of an artist, took a folded paper from his wallet and spread it out beneath a lamp.

“I made this sketch the last night I saw him in Greece,” he said, “at Missolonghi, just a year ago.”

Lady Caroline Lamb and Miss Milbanke both bent to look at the portrait. When they withdrew their eyes, the calmer, colder features showed nothing, but Lady Caroline’s wore a deep, vivid flush.

“Mad, bad and dangerous to know!” her brain was saying, “yet—what a face!”

CHAPTER III
THE BOOMERANG

“George Gordon!”

There was an unaffected pleasure in the exclamation, and its echo in the answer: “Sherry! And young as ever, I’ll be bound!”

“I heard last night at Lady Jersey’s you were in London,” said Sheridan, after the first greetings. “So you’ve had enough of Greece, eh? Three years! What have you done in all that time?”

“I have dined the mufti of Thebes, I have viewed the harem of Ali Pasha, I have kicked an Athenian postmaster. I was blown ashore on the island of Salamis. I caught a fever going to Olympia. And I have found that I like to be back in England—the oddest thing of all!”

Gordon ended half-earnestly. Threading the familiar thoroughfares, tasting the city’s rush, its interminableness, its counterplay and torsion of living, he had felt a sense of new appreciation. His months of freer breathing in the open spaces of the East had quickened his pulses.

The pair strolled on together chatting, the old wit linking his arm in the younger man’s. He had always liked Gordon and the appearance of his famous tour de force had lifted this liking into genuine admiration.

“Hobhouse says you’ve brought back another book,” said he, presently.

“I’ve a portmanteau crammed with stanzas in Spenser’s measure, but they’re likely to be drivelling idiotism. I must leave that to the critics. I have heard their chorus of deep damnations once,” Gordon added ruefully. “But no doubt they’ve long ago forgotten my infantile ferocities.”

Sheridan shot a keen glance under his bushy brows. Could the other, he wondered, have so undervalued the vicious hatred his cutting Satire had raised in the ranks of the prigs and pamphleteers it pilloried? In his long foreign absence had he been ignorant of the flood of tales so assiduously circulated in the London newspapers and magazines?

His thought snapped. Gordon had halted before a book-shop which bore the sign of “The Juvenile Library,” his eye caught by printed words on a pasteboard placard hung in its window.

“Sherry!” he cried, his color changing prismatically. “Look there!”

The sign read:

“Queen Mab.”

For writing the which Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley
Stands lately expelled from University College, Oxford.

2s, 6d.

Also

“English Bards and Scotch Reviewers”
A Poetical Satire
By a Noble Lord Travelling Abroad.
A few copies of this work
(Suppressed by the Author at great expense)
which can be bought nowhere else in London—1 guinea.

“Devil take the blackguard!” blurted Sheridan. He followed the other into the musty shop where a stooped, agate-eyed old man laid aside a black-letter volume of Livy’s Roman History and shuffled forward to greet them.

Gordon’s face was pallid and his eyes were sparkling. He had written the book the pasteboard advertised in a fit of rage that had soon cooled to shame of its retaliative scorn. He had believed every copy procurable destroyed before he left England. He had thought of this fact often with self-congratulation, dreaming this monument of his youthful petulance rooted out. To-day it was almost the first thing he confronted. The sedulous greed that hawked his literary indiscretion to the world roused now an old murderous fury that had sometimes half-scared him in his childhood. He was battling with this as he pointed out the second item of the sign.

“How many of these have you?” he asked the proprietor shortly.

“Twelve.”

“I will take them all.” Gordon put a bank-note on the counter.

The bookseller regarded him sagely as he set the books before him. It was a good day’s bargain.

A doorway led from the shop into a binding-room, where stood a stove with glue-pots heating upon it. With a word to Sheridan, Gordon seized his purchase and led the way into this room. The dealer stared and followed.

He saw the purchaser tear the books cover from cover, and thrust them one by one into the fiery maw of the stove. And now, at the stranger’s halting step and the beauty of his face, sudden intelligence came to him. Five—ten—twenty guineas apiece he could have got, if he had only found the wit to guess! The knowledge turned his parchment visage saffron with suppressed cupidity, anger and regret.

The bell in the outer room announced a customer, and the bookseller went into the shop, leaving the door ajar. Through it came a voice—a lady’s inquiry. She was asking for a copy of the Satire whose pages were shrivelling under Sheridan’s regretful eye.

Gordon’s hand held the last volume. He had turned to look through the door—a fine, tall, spirit-looking girl, he thought. His observant eye noted her face—a cool, chaste classic, and her dress, rich, but with a kind of quiet and severity.

Yielding to some whimsical impulse, he went rapidly out to the pavement. She was seating herself in her carriage beside her companion as he approached.

“I had just secured the last copy,” he stated gravely, almost apologetically. “I have another, however, and shall be glad if you will take this.”

A glimmer of surprise had shadowed the immobile face, but it passed.

“You are very kind,” she said. “It seems difficult to procure. We saw the sign quite by accident!” She was demurring—on prudential grounds. She hesitated only a moment—just long enough for him to become aware of another personality beside her, an impression of something wild, Ariel-like, eccentric yet pleasing—then she searched her purse and held out to him a golden guinea.

“That is the price, I think,” she added, and with the word “Melbourne House” to the coachman, the carriage merged in the stream of the highway.

Annabel Milbanke’s complaisant brow was undisturbed. She was very self-possessed, very unromantic, very correct. As the chestnut bays whirled on toward Hyde Park Corner, she did no more than allow her colorless imagination to ask itself: “Who is he, I wonder?”

Her fragile, overdressed companion might have answered that mental question. As Gordon had come from the doorway, his step halting, yet so slightly as to be unnoticed by one who saw the delicate symmetry of his face, a quick tinge had come to Lady Caroline Lamb’s cheeks. The brown curls piled on the pale oval of brow, the deep gray eyes, the full chiselled lips and strongly modelled chin—all brought back to her a pencil sketch she had once seen under a table-lamp. The tinge grew swiftly to a flush, and she turned to look back as they sped on, but she said nothing.

Gordon had seen neither the flush nor the backward look. His eyes, as he surveyed the golden guinea in his hand, held only the picture of the calm girl who had given it to him.

“Melbourne House,” he repeated aloud. “What a stately beauty she has—the perfection of a glacier! I wonder now why I did that,” he thought quizzically. “I never saw her before. A woman who wants to read my Satire; and I always hated an esprit in petticoats! It was impulse—pure impulse, reasonless and irresponsible. God knows what contradictions one contains!”

He tossed the coin in the air abstractedly, caught it and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket as Sheridan rejoined him. The latter had not seen the carriage and its occupants.

“A fine ash-heap we’ve made,” said the wit, “and a pity too! Curse catch me, I wish I’d written it! If it were mine, instead of suppressing, I’d print a new edition and be damned to them. If they won’t forget this, cram another down their throats and let them choke on it! Come and drink a bottle of vin de Graves with me at the Cocoa-Tree,” he continued persuasively. “Tom Moore is in town. We’ll get him and go to the Italian Opera afterward. What do you say?”

Gordon shook his head. “Not to-day. I have an appointment at my rooms. Hobhouse pretends he wants to read my new manuscript.”

“To-morrow, then. I want to get the rights of the latest apocryphal stories of you the clubs are relishing.”

“Stories? What stories?”

Sheridan cleared his throat uneasily. “Surely, letters—newspapers—must have reached you in Greece?”

“Newspapers!” exclaimed Gordon. “I haven’t read one in a year. As for letters—well, it has been little better. So the newspapers have been talking of me, eh?”

“Not that any one in particular believes them,” interposed his companion hastily, “or anything the Scourge prints, for that matter!”

“The Scourge? That was the worst of the lot before I left. It’s still mud-flinging, is it? I suppose I might have expected it. There’s scarcely a witling-scribbler in London I didn’t grill with that cursed Satire of mine, that they won’t let stay in its grave. But the newspaper wiseacres—what under the canopy can they know of my wanderings? I haven’t set eyes on a journalist since I left.”

“Of course, they’re perfectly irresponsible!”

“What are they saying, Sherry?”

Sheridan hesitated.

“Come, come; out with it!”

“The Morning Post reported last week that the pasha of the Morea had made you a present of a Circassian girl—”

“It was a Circassian mare!”

“And that you had quarters in a Franciscan nunnery.”

“A monastery!” Gordon laughed—an unmirthful laugh. “With one Capuchin friar, a bandy-legged Turkish cook, a couple of Albanian savages and a dragoman! What tales are they telling at the clubs?”

“That’s about all that’s new—except Petersham. He has some tale of a Turkish peri of yours that you saved from a sack in the Ægean.”

Gordon’s lips set tight together. The pleasure he had felt at his return had been shot through with a new pain that spoke plainly in his question:

“Sherry! Is there no story they tell of these two years that I need not blush at?”

The other caught at the straw. “They say you swam the Hellespont, and outdid Leander.”

“I’m obliged to them! I wonder they didn’t invent a Hero to wait for my Leandering!” The voice held a bitter humor, the antithesis of the open pleasantry of their meeting. “I presume that version will not be long in arriving,” Gordon added, and held out his hand.

Sheridan grasped it warmly. “I shall see you to-morrow,” he said, and they parted.

From the edge of his show-window, William Godwin, the bookseller, with a malignant look in his agate eyes, watched Gordon go.

In the inner room he raked the fragments of charred leather from the stove, thinking of the guineas he had let slip through his fingers. Then he sat down at his desk and drawing some dusty sheets of folio to him began to write, with many emendations. His quill pen scratched maliciously for a long time. At last he leaned back and regarded what he had written with huge satisfaction.

“The atheistical brat of a lord!” he muttered vindictively. “I’ll make his ribs gridirons for his heart! I’ll send this as a leader for the next issue of the Scourge!”

CHAPTER IV
THE LITTLE BOY IN ABERDEEN

“It is magnificent!” Hobhouse looked up as he spoke.

It was in Gordon’s apartment in Reddish’s Hotel. The table was strewn with loose manuscript—the verses he had laughingly told Sheridan were “likely to be drivelling idiotism.” Over these Hobhouse had bent for an hour, absorbed and delighted, breathing their strange spirit of exhilaration, of freedom from rhythmic shackles, of adventure into untried poetic depths. They stood out in sharp relief—original, unique, of classic model yet of a genre all their own. It would be a facer for Jeffrey, the caustic editor of the Edinburgh Review, and for all the crab-apple following Gordon’s boyish rancor had roused to abuse. Now he said:

“Nothing like it was ever written before. Have you shown it to a publisher yet?”

Gordon glanced at the third person in the room—a gray-haired elderly man with kindly eyes—as he replied:

“Dallas, here, took it to Miller. He declined it.”

“The devil!” shot out Hobhouse, incredulously.

“John Murray will publish it,” Gordon continued. “I had his letter with the copyhold an hour ago.” He took a paper from his pocket and held it up to view.

“I congratulate you both,” Hobhouse said heartily.

Gordon shrugged acridly, and rising, began to pace the room. The sore spot had been rankling since that walk with Sheridan.

“Wait till the critics see it. They will have other opinions, no doubt Well, never mind,” he added. “I was peppered so highly once that it must be aloes or cayenne to make me taste. They forced me to bitterness at first; I may as well go through to the last. Væ victis! I’ll fall fighting the host. That’s something.”

The gray-haired man had picked up his hat. It was not a hat of the primest curve, nor were his clothes of a fashionable cut. They were well-worn, but his neck-cloth was spotless, and though his face showed lines of toil and anxiety, it bore the inextinguishable marks of gentility. Gordon had not told him that he had spent a part of the day inquiring into the last detail of invalid wife and literary failure; now his glance veiled a singular look whose source lay very deep in the man.

“Don’t hasten,” he said. “I have a reputation for gloom, but my friends must not be among the reputants! Least of all you, Dallas.”

The other sat down again and threw his hat on the table, smiling. “Gloom?” he asked. “And have you still that name? You were so as a little laddie in Aberdeen, but I thought you would have left off the Scotch blues long ago with your tartan.”

“I wish I could,” cried Gordon, “as I left off the burr from my tongue. How I hated the place—all except Dee-side and old Lachin-y-gair! That pleased me for its wildness. If God had a hand in its valleys, the devil must have had a hoof in some of its ravines, for the clouds foamed up from their crevices like the spray of the ocean of hell. Dallas,” he said, veering, “what a violent, unlovely little wretch it was we used to know so many years ago,—you never saw him, Hobhouse!—that little boy in Aberdeen!”

Hobhouse looked up. There was a curious note in the voice, a sort of brooding inquiry, of regret, of wistfulness all in one. It was a tone he had never heard so plainly but once before—a night when they two had sat together before a camp-fire on the Greek sea-coast, when Gordon had talked of old Cambridge days, and of Matthews, his classmate, destined to be drowned. It was this tone Hobhouse heard.

The older man’s eyes had a retrospective haze, which he winked away, as he smoothed down the frayed edges of his waistcoat with a hesitating hand, as though half-embarrassed under the other’s gaze.

“A little misshapen unit of a million,” continued Gordon, “a miserable nothing of something, who dreamed barbarous fantasies and found no one who understood him—no one but one. Do you remember him, Dallas?”

The other nodded, his head turned away. “He was not so hard to understand.”

“Not for you, Dallas, and it’s for that reason most of all I am going to paint his picture. Will it bore you, Hobhouse?” he asked whimsically. “To discuss childhood is such a snivelling, popping small-shot, water-hen waste of powder to most people.”

Hobhouse shook his head, and the speaker went on:

“First of all, I wish you would witness a signature for me,”—and handed him the paper he had taken from his pocket.

As the young man glanced at it, he looked up with quick surprise, but checked himself and, signing it, leaned back in his chair.

Gordon returned to his slow pace up and down the room, and as he went he talked:

“The fiercest animals have the smallest litters, and he was an only child, though he had been told he had a half-sister somewhere in the world. He was unmanageable in temper, sullenly passionate, a queer little bundle of silent rages and wants and hates—the sort people call ‘inhuman.’ There was never but one nurse, if I remember, who could manage him at all. He had a twisted foot—the gift of his mother, and added to by a Nottingham quack. He lived in lodgings,—cursed fusty they were, too, the fustiest in Aberdeen,—with his mother. He had never set eyes on his father; how he knew he had one, I can’t imagine. When he was old enough, he was sent to ‘squeel’, as they called it in Aberdeen dialect—day-school, where he learned to say:

‘God—made—man.

Let—us—love—Him,’

and to make as poor a scrawl as ever scratched over a frank. He was a blockhead, a hopeless blockhead! The master,—how devout and razor-faced and dapper he was! he was minister to the kirk also,—used to topsy-turvy the class now and then, and bring the lowest highest. These were the only times the boy was at the head. Then the master would say, ‘Now, George, man, let’s see how soon you can limp to the foot again!’ This was a jest, but when the others shouted, the boy used to turn cold with shame. Small wonder he didn’t learn, for he didn’t want to. A pity, too, Dallas, for in those days three words and a half-smile would have changed him. I venture it would take more than that to-day!”

He paused, his brows frowning, his lips drawn softly. When he went on, it was in a more constrained tone:

“One year, suddenly, everything changed. His guardian took him from the school and he had a tutor—a very serious, saturnine young man, with spectacles,”—Dallas had taken off his own and was polishing them earnestly with his handkerchief,—“who didn’t make the boy hate him—a curious thing! He was a great man already in the boy’s eyes, because he had been in America when the Colonies were fighting King George. The boy would have liked to be a colonist too—he had never been introduced to the gaudy charlatanry of kings and the powwowishness of rank. He hadn’t become a lord then, himself.

“This marvel of a tutor wasn’t pestilently prolix. He taught him no skimble-skamble out of the catechism, though he was a good churchman; but the first time the boy looked in those big horn spectacles, he knew there was one man in the world who could understand him. The tutor made him want to learn, too, and strangest of all, he never seemed to notice that his pupil was lame. How did he perform that miracle, Dallas?”

The older man set his glasses carefully on the ridge of his nose, as he shook his head with a little graceful, deprecating gesture that was very winning. Hobhouse’s eyes were tracing the design of the carpet.

“I remember once,” Gordon continued, “a strange thing happened. The boy’s father came to Aberdeen. One day—the boy was walking up the High Street with his tutor—some one pointed him out. To think that splendid-looking man in uniform was his father! He felt very pitiful-hearted, but he plucked up courage and went up to him and told him his name.”

Dallas, who had shifted uneasily in his chair, cleared his throat with some energy, rose and stood looking out of the window.

“The splendid gentleman forgot to take the boy in his arms. He looked him over and lisped: ‘A pretty boy—but what a pity he has such a leg!’ A queer thing to say, wasn’t it, Hobhouse!

“One of those fits of rage that made all right-minded people hate him came over the boy when he heard that. ‘Dinna speak of it! Dinna speak of it!’ he screamed, and struck at the man with his fist. Then he ran away—off to the fields, I think—as fast as he could, and that was the first and the last time he ever saw his father.

“He had forgotten all about his tutor, but the tutor ran after him, and found him, and took him for a wonderful afternoon—miles away, clear to the seaside, where they lay on the purple heather and he read to him out of the history—what was it he read to the boy, Dallas?”

The man by the window jumped. “Bless my soul,” he said, wiping his eyes vigorously; “I do believe it was the battle of Lake Regillus!”

“Yes, it was, Dallas! And they went in swimming and had supper at a farmhouse—”

“So they did! So I believe they did!”

“And they didn’t get home till the moon was up. Ah—Dallas!”

Gordon went over and laid his hand on the other’s arm. “Do you think I shall ever forget?” he said.

“I imagine that was the end of the tutorship,” observed Hobhouse.

“Yes, the idiots!” Gordon laughed a little, as did the elder man, though there was a suspicious moisture in the latter’s eyes. “They said he was spoiling me. You came to London, Dallas, and wrote books—moral essays and theology—too good to give you money or fame. Yes, yes,”—as Dallas made a gesture of dissent,—“much too good for this thaw-swamped age of rickety tragedy and canting satire! But when you left Aberdeen, you left something behind. It was a pony—four sound straight legs, Dallas, to help out a crooked one—a fat, frowsy, hard-going little beast, I’ve no doubt, but it seemed the greatest thing in all Scotland to me.”

“Pshaw!” protested Dallas. “It laid me only four pounds, I’ll swear.”

“Well,” pursued Gordon, “the boy finally dropped back into the old stubborn rut. He went to Harrow and came out a solitary, and to Cambridge and they called him an atheist. Life hasn’t been all mirth and innocence, milk and water. I’ve seen nearly as many lives as Plutarch’s, but I’m not bilious enough to forget, Dallas. You were the first of all to write and congratulate me when the critics only sneered. When I came to London to claim my seat in the Lords (a scurvy honor, but one has to do as other people do, confound them!) without a single associate in that body to introduce me—I think a peer never came to his place so unfriended—you rode with me to the door, Dallas, you and I alone, and so we rode back again.”

He paused, took up the paper Hobhouse had signed and handed it to the man who still stood by the window.

“Dallas,” he said, “you gave me my first ride in the saddle. I’ve been astride another bigger nag lately—one they call Pegasus; this is its first real gallop, and I want you to ride with me.”

With a puzzled face Dallas looked from the speaker to the paper. It was Gordon’s copyhold of the verses that lay there in manuscript, legally transferred to himself.

As he took in its significance, a deep flush stole into his scholarly-pale cheeks, and tears, unconcealed this time, clouded his sight. He put out one uncertain hand, while Hobhouse made a noisy pretense of gathering together the loose leaves under his hands.

“It’s for six hundred pounds!” he said huskily; “six hundred pounds!”

CHAPTER V
AN ANYTHINGARIAN

Two hours later Gordon sat alone in the room, looking out on the softening sun-glare of St. James Street. In the chastened light the brilliant dark-auburn curls that clustered over his colorless face showed a richer brown and under their long black lashes his eyes had deepened their tint. Near-by, where Park Place opened, a fountain played, on whose bronze rim dusty sparrows preened and twittered. The clubs that faced the street were showing signs of life, and on the pave a newsboy, for the benefit of late-rising west-end dandies, was crying the papers.

Gordon was waiting for Hobhouse. They were to sup together this last night. To-morrow he was to leave for Newstead Abbey and the uncomfortable ministrations of his eccentric and capricious mother, whom he had not yet seen. He had come back to his land and place to find that enmity had been busy envenoming his absence, and the taste of home had turned unsweet to his palate.

As he sat now, however, Gordon had thrust bitterness from his mood. He was thinking with satisfaction of the copyhold he had transferred. He had always declared that for what he wrote he would take no money. If these verses—the first in which he felt he had expressed something of his real self—if these brought recompense, it was a fitting disposition he had made. He had paid an old debt to the man with the worn waistcoat and kindly, studious face—almost the only debt of its kind he owed in the world.

The words with which Dallas had left him recurred to him—“God bless you!”

“Poor old plodding Dallas!” he mused reflectively. “It’s curious how a man’s sense of gratitude drags up his religion—if he has any to drag up. He thinks now the Creator put into my heart to do that—doesn’t give himself a bit of credit for it!”

He laughed reminiscently.

“I don’t suppose he has seen six hundred pounds to spend since he bought that pony! He has had a hard row to hoe all his life, and never did an ounce of harm to any living thing, yet at the first turn of good luck, he fairly oozes thankfulness to the Almighty. He is a churchman clear through. He believes in revealed religion—though no religion ever is revealed—and yet he doesn’t mistake theology for Christianity. He positively doesn’t know the meaning of the word cant. Ah—there goes another type!”

Gordon was looking at a square, mottle-faced man passing slowly on the opposite side of the street, carrying a bundle of leaflets from which now and then he drew to give to a passer-by. He was high-browed, with eyes that projected like an insect’s and were flattish in their orbits. He wore a ministerial cloak over his street costume.

“There’s Cassidy,” he said to himself. “Dr. James Cassidy, on shore leave, distributing his little doctrinal tracts. I remember him well. He is in the navy medical service, but it’s the grief of his life he can’t be a parson. He talked enough pedantry over the ship’s table of the Pylades, while I was coming home from Greece, to last me till the resurrection. He is as ardent a predestinarian as any Calvinistic dean in gaiters, and knows all the hackneyed catch-phrases of eternal punishment. He has an itch for propaganda, and distributes his tracts, printed at his own expense, on the street-corner for the glory of theology. He is the sort of Christian who always writes damned with a dash. And yet, I wonder how much real true Christianity he has—Christianity like Dallas’, I mean. I remember that scar on his cheek; it stands for a thrashing he got once at Bombay from a deserting ensign named Trevanion—a youth I met in Greece afterward, and had cause to remember, by the way!”

His eyes had darkened suddenly. His brows frowned, his firm white hand ran over his curls as though to brush away a disagreeable recollection.

“Cassidy would travel half around the globe to find the deserter that thrashed him and land him in quod. That man would deserve it richly enough, but would Cassidy’s act be for the good of the king’s service? No—for the satisfaction of James Cassidy. Is that Christianity? Dallas never treasured an enmity in his life. Yet both of them believe the same doctrine, worship the same God, read the same Bible. Does man make his beliefs? Or do his beliefs make him? If his beliefs make man, why are Dallas and Cassidy so different? If man makes his beliefs, why should I not make my own? I will be an Anythingarian, and leave dreams to Emanuel Swedenborg!”

His gaze, that had followed the clerical figure till it passed out of sight, returned meditatively to the slaty white buildings opposite.

“Some people call me an atheist—I never could understand why, though I prefer Confucius to the Ten Commandments and Socrates to St. Paul,—the two latter happen to agree in their opinion of marriage,—and I don’t think eating bread or drinking wine from the hand of an earthly vicar will make me an inheritor of Heaven. Dallas would tell me not to reason, but to believe. You might as well tell a man not to wake but to sleep. Neither Cicero nor the Messiah could ever have altered the vote of a single lord of the bed-chamber! And then to bully with torments and all that! The menace of hell makes as many devils as the penal code makes villains. All cant—Methodistical cant—yet Dallas believes it. And both he and Cassidy belong to the same one of the seventy-two sects that are tearing each other to pieces for the love of the Lord and hatred of each other—the sects that call men atheists because the eternal why will creep into what they write. If it pleases the Church—I except Dallas—to damn me for asking questions, I shall be only one with some millions of scoundrels who, after all, seem as likely to be damned as ever. As for immortality, if people are to live, why die? And our carcases, are they worth raising? I hope, if mine is, I shall have a better pair of legs than I have moved on these three-and-twenty years, or I shall be sadly behind in the squeeze into Paradise!”

There was a knock at the door. He rose and opened it. It was Hobhouse. Gordon caught up his hat and they left the hotel together.

As they crossed Park Place a woman, draggled and gin-besotted, strayed from some Thames-side stews, sat on the worn stone base of the fountain, leaning uncertainly against its bronze rim. Her swollen lids hid her eyes and one hand, palm up, was thrown out across her lap. Gordon drew a shilling from his pocket, and passing his arm in Hobhouse’s, laid it in the outstretched hand. At the touch of the coin, the drab started up, looked at him stupidly an instant, then with a ribald yell of laughter she flung the shilling into the water and shambled across the square, mimicking, in a hideous sort of buffoonery, the lameness of his gait.

Gordon’s face turned ashen. He walked on without a word, but his companion could feel his hand tremble against his sleeve. When he spoke, it was in a voice half-smothered, forbidding.

“The old jeer!” he said. “The very riffraff of the street fling it at me! Yet I don’t know why they should spare that taunt; even my mother did not. ‘Lame brat!’ she called me once when I was a child.” He laughed, jarringly, harshly. “Why, only a few days before I sailed from England, in one of her fits of passion, she flung it at me. ‘May you be as ill-formed in mind as you are in body!’ Could they wish me worse than she?”

“Gordon!” expostulated the other. “Don’t!—”

He had no time to finish. A grizzled man in the dress of an upper servant was approaching them, his rubicund face bearing an unmistakable look of haste and concern.

“Well, Fletcher?” inquired Gordon.

“I thought your lordship had gone out earlier. I have been inquiring for you at the clubs. This message has just come from Newstead.”

His master took the letter and read it. A strange, slow, remorseful look overspread the passion on his face.

“No ill news, I hope,” ventured Hobhouse.

Gordon made no reply. He crushed the letter into his pocket, turned abruptly and strode up St. James Street.

“His lordship’s mother died yesterday, Mr. Hobhouse,” said the valet in a low voice.

“Good God!” exclaimed the other. “What a contretemps.”

A knot of loungers were seated under the chandeliers in the bow-window of White’s Club as Gordon passed on his way to the coach. Beau Brummell, élégant, spendthrift, in white great-coat and blue satin cravat exhaling an odor of eau de jasmin, lifted a languid glass to his eye.

“I’ll go something handsome!” cried he; “I thought he was in Greece!”

“He’s the young whelp of a peer who made such a dust with that Satire he wrote,” Lord Petersham informed his neighbor. “Hero of the sack story I told you. Took the title from his great-uncle, the madman who killed old Chaworth in that tavern duel. House of Lords tried him for murder, you know. Used to train crickets and club them over the head with straws; all of them left the house in a body the day he died. Devilish queer story! Who’s the aged party with the portmanteaus? Valet?”

“Yes,” asserted some one. “The old man was here a while ago trying to find Gordon—with bad news. His lordship’s mother is dead.”

“Saw her once at Newstead Abbey,” yawned Brummell, wearily, dusting his cuffs. “Corpulent termagant and gave George no end of a row. He used to call her his ‘maternal war-whoop.’ My own parents—poor good people!—died long ago,” he added reflectively; “—cut their throats eating peas with a knife.”

CHAPTER VI
WHAT THE DEAD MAY KNOW

Gordon was alone in the vehicle, for Fletcher rode outside. He set his face to the fogged pane, catching the panorama of dark hedges, gouged gravelly runnels and stretches of murky black, with occasional instantaneous sense of detail—dripping bank, sodden rhododendron and mildewed masonry—vivid in a dull, yellow, soundless flare of July lightning. A gauze of unbroken grayness, a straggling light—the lodge. A battlemented wall plunging out of the darkness—and Gordon saw the Abbey, its tiers of ivied cloisters uninhabited since Henry the Eighth battered the old pile to ruin, its gaunt and unsightly forts built for some occupant’s whim, and the wavering, fog-wreathed lake reflecting lighted windows. This was Newstead in which the bearers of his title had lived and died, the gloomy seat of an ancient house stained by murder and insanity, of which he was the sole representative.

What was he thinking as he sat in the gloomy dining-room, with Rushton, the footman he had trained to his own service, standing behind his chair? Of his mother first of all. He had never, even as a child, distinguished a sign of real tenderness in her moments of tempestuous caresses. His maturer years had grown to regard her with a half-scornful, half good-humored tolerance. He had shrugged at her tempers, dubbing her “The Honorable Kitty” or his “Amiable Alecto.” His letters to her had shown only a nice sense of filial duty: many of them began with “Dear Madam”; more had been signed simply with his name. Yet now he felt an aching hope that in her seclusion she had not seen the unkindest of the stories of him. His half-sister—now on her way from the north of England—absorbed with her family cares, would have missed the brunt of the attacks; his mother had been within their range. He recalled with a pang that she had treasured with a degree of pride a single review of his earliest book which had not joined in the sneering chorus.

He pushed back his chair, dismissed the footman, and alone passed to the hall and ascended the stair. At the turn of the balustrade a shaded lamp drowsed like a monster glow-worm. In his own room a low fire burned, winking redly from the coronetted bed-posts, and a lighted candle stood on the dressing-table. He looked around the familiar apartment a moment uncertainly, then crossed to a carved cabinet above a writing-desk and took therefrom a bottle of claret. The cabinet had belonged to his father, dead many years before. Gordon thought of him as he stood with the bottle in his hand, staring fixedly at the dull, carved ebony of the swinging door.

His father! “Mad Jack Gordon” the world had called him when he ran away with the Marchioness of Carmathen to break her heart! Handsome he had been still when he married for her money the heiress of Gight, Gordon’s mother. A stinging memory recalled the only glimpse he had ever had of that father—a tall man in uniform on an Aberdeen street, looking critically at a child with a lame leg.

Gordon winced painfully. He felt with a sharper agony the sensitive pang of the cripple, the shame of misshapenness that all his life had clung like an old-man-of-the-sea. It had not only stung his childhood; it had stolen from him the romance of his youth—the one gleam that six years ago had died.

Six years! For a moment time fell away like rotten shale from about a crystal. The room, the wine-cabinet, faded into a dim background, and on this, as if on a theater curtain, dissolving pictures painted themselves flame-like.

He was back in his Harrow days now, at home for his last vacation.

“George,” his mother had remarked one day, looking up from a letter she was reading, “I’ve some news for you. Take out your handkerchief, for you will need it.”

“Nonsense! What is it?”

“Mary Chaworth is married.”

“Is that all?” he had replied coldly; but an expression, peculiar, impossible to describe, had passed over his face. He had never afterward seen her or spoken her name.

“Mary!” he murmured, and his hand set down the bottle on the table. Love—such love as his verses told of—he had come to consider purely subjective, a mirage, a simulacrum to which actual life possessed no counterpart. Yet at that moment he was feeling the wraith of an old thrill, his nostrils smelling a perfume like a dead pansy’s ghost.

He withdrew his hand from the bottle and his fingers clenched. How it hurt him—the sudden stab! For memory had played him a trick; it had dragged a voice out of the past. It was her voice—her words that she had uttered in a careless sentence meant for other ears, one that through those years had tumbled and reëchoed in some under sea-cavern of his mind—“Do you think I could ever care for that lame boy?”

He smiled grimly. She had been right. Nature had set him apart, made him a loup-garou, a solitary hob-goblin. He had been unclubbable, sauvage, even at Cambridge. And yet he had had real friendships there; one especially.

Gordon’s free hand fumbled for his fob and his fingers closed on a little cornelian heart. It had been a keepsake from his college classmate, Matthews, drowned in the muddy waters of the Cam.

He released the bottle hurriedly, strode to the window and flung it open. A gust of rain struck his face and spluttered in the candle, and the curtain flapped like the wing of some ungainly bird. Out in the dark, beneath a clump of larches, glimmered whitely the monument he had erected to “Boatswain,” his Newfoundland. The animal had gone mad.

“Some curse hangs over me and mine!” he muttered. “I never could keep alive even a dog that I liked or that liked me!”

A combined rattle and crash behind him made him turn. The wind had blown shut the door of the cabinet with a smart bang, and a yellow object, large and round, had toppled from its shelf, fallen and rolled to his very feet.

He started back, his nerves for the instant shaken. It was a skull, mottled like polished tortoise-shell, mounted in dull silver as a drinking-cup. He had unearthed the relic years before with a heap of stone coffins amid the rubbish of the Abbey’s ruined priory—grim reminder of some old friar—and its mounting had been his own fancy. He had forgotten its very existence.

Now, as it lay supine, yet intrusive, the symbol at one time of lastingness and decay, it filled him with a painful fascination.

Picking it up, he set it upright on the desk, seized the bottle, knocked off its top against the marble mantel and poured the fantastic goblet full.

“Death and life!” he mused. “One feeds the other, each in its turn. Life! yet it should not be too long; I have no conception of any existence which duration would not render tiresome. How else fell the angels? They were immortal, heavenly and happy. It is the lastingness of life that is terrible; I see no horror in a dreamless sleep.”

He put out his hand to the goblet, but withdrew it.

“No—wait!” he said, and seating himself at the desk, he seized a pen. The lines he wrote, rapidly and with scarcely an alteration, were to live for many a long year—index fingers pointing back to that dark mood that consumed him then:

“Start not—nor deem my spirit fled:

In me behold the only skull,

From which, unlike a living head,

Whatever flows is never dull.

I lived, I loved, I quaffed, like thee:

I died: let earth my bones resign.

Fill up—thou canst not injure me;

The worm hath fouler lips than thine.

Better to hold the sparkling grape,

Than nurse the earth-worm’s slimy brood;

And circle in the goblet’s shape

The drink of gods, than reptile’s food.

Quaff while thou canst: another race,

When thou and thine, like me, are sped,

May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,

And rhyme and revel with the dead.”

He repeated the last stanza aloud and raised the goblet in both hands.

“Rhyming and revelling—what else counts? To drink the wine of youth to the dregs and then—good night! Is there anything beyond? Who knows? He who cannot tell! Who tells us there is? He who does not know!”

Did the dead know?

He set the wine down, pushing it from him, sprang up, seized the candle and entered the room on the other side of the corridor. The bed-curtains were drawn close and a Bible lay open on the night-stand. He wondered with a kind of impersonal pity if the book had held comfort for her at the last.

He held the candle higher so its rays lighted the page: But the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind.... In the morning thou shall say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning!

It stared at him plainly in black letters, an age-old agony of wretchedness. Had this been the keynote of her lonely, fitful, vehement life? Had years of misery robbed her—as it had robbed him, too? A distressed doubt, like a dire finger of apprehension, touched him; he put out his hand and drew aside the curtains.

Looking, he shuddered. Death had lent her its mystery, its ineffaceable dignity. He recognized it with a new and inexplicable feeling, like rising from the grave. Back of the placid look, in abeyance, in the stirlessness of the unringed hands—she had lost her wedding-ring years ago—some quality, strange, unintimate, lay confronting him. He remembered his words to Hobhouse in the street—words that had not been cold on his lips when he read Fletcher’s message. Ever since, they had lain rankling like a raw burn in some crevice of his brain. “Lame brat!” And yet, beneath her frantic rages, under the surface he had habitually disregarded, what if in her own way she had really loved him!

A clutching pain took possession of him, a sense of physical sickness and anguish. He dropped the curtain, and stumbled from the room, down the long stair, calling for the footman.

“Rushton,” he shouted, “get the muffles! Let us have a bout like the old times.” He threw off his coat, pushed the chairs aside and bared his arms. “The gloves, Rushton, and be quick about it!”

The footman hesitated, a half-scared expression in his look.

“Never fear,” said Gordon, and laughed—a tightening laugh that strained the cords of his throat. “Put them on! That’s right! What are you staring at? Do you think she will hear you? Not she! Put up your hands—so! Touched, by the Lord! Not up to your old style, Rushton! You never used to spar so villainously. You will disgrace the fancy. Ah-h!” And he knocked him sprawling.

Rushton scrambled to his feet as the housekeeper entered, dismay upon her mask-like relic of a face. Gordon was very white and both noticed that his eyes were full of tears.

Long after midnight, when the place was quiet, the housekeeper heard an unaccustomed sound issuing from the chamber where the dead woman lay. She took a light and entered. The candle had burned out, and she saw Gordon sitting in the dark beside the bed.

He spoke in a broken voice:

“Oh, Mrs. Muhl,” he said, “she was my mother! After all, one can have but one in this world, and I have only just found it out!”

CHAPTER VII
THE YOUTH IN FLEET PRISON

Behind the closed shutters of the book-shop which bore the sign of “The Juvenile Library,” in the musty room where George Gordon had burned the errant copies of his ubiquitous Satire, old William Godwin sat reading by a guttering candle, Livy’s Roman History in the original. It was his favorite book, and in the early evenings, when not writing his crabbed column for the Courier, or caustic diatribes for the reviews, he was apt to be reading it. A sound in the living-room above drew his eyes from the black-letter page.

“Jane!” he called morosely—“Jane Clermont!”

A lagging step came down the stair, and a girl entered, black-eyed, creole in effect. Her cheeks held the flame of the wild-cherry leaf.

“Where is your sister?”

“I have no sister.”

The old man struck the table with his open hand. “Where is Mary, I say?”

“At the door.”

“Go and see what she is doing.”

The girl stood still, regarding her stepfather with a look that under its beauty had a sullen half-contempt.

“Why don’t you do as I tell you?”

“I’m not going to be a spy for you, even if you did marry my mother. I’m tired of it.”

The anger on the old man’s face harshened. “If you were my own flesh and blood,” he said sternly, “I would flog that French impudence of yours to death. As long as you eat my bread, you will obey me.”

She looked at him with covert mockery on her full lips.

“I’m not a child any longer,” she said as she turned flauntingly away; “I could earn my bread easier than by dusting tumble-down book-shelves. Do you think I don’t know that?”

To William Godwin this defiant untutored girl had been a thorn in the side—a perpetual slur and affront to the irksome discipline he laid upon his own pliant Mary, the child of that first wife whose loss had warped his manhood. Now he saw her as a live danger, a flagrant menace whose wildness would infect his own daughter. It was this red-lipped vixen who was teaching her the spirit of disobedience!

He raised his voice and called sharply: “Mary!”

There was no answer, and he shuffled down the shabby hall to the street door. The old man glowered at the slender, beardless figure of the youth who stood with her—the brown, long coat with curling lamb’s-wool collar and cuffs, its pockets bulging with mysterious books. In a senile rage, he ordered his daughter indoors.

Passers-by stopped to stare at the object of his rancor, standing uncertainly in the semi-dusk, a brighter apparition, with luminous eyes and extravagant locks. Words came thickly to the old man; he launched into invective, splenetic and intemperate, at which the listeners tittered.

As it chanced, a pedestrian heard the name he mouthed—a man sharp-featured and ill dressed. With a low whistle he drew a soiled slip of paper from his pocket and consulted it by a street lamp, his grimy forefinger running down the list of names it contained.

“I thought so. I’ve a knack for names,” he muttered, and shouldered through the bystanders.

“Not so fast, young master,” he said, laying his hand on the youth’s arm; “t’other’s the way to the Fleet.”

The other drew back with a gesture of disgust. “The Fleet!” he echoed.

“Aye,” said the bailiff, winking to the crowd; “the pretty jug for folk as spend more than they find in pocket; with a nice grating to see your friends so genteel like.”

Breaking from her father’s hand, the girl in the doorway ran out with fear in her blue eyes.

“Oh, where are you taking him?” she cried.

The fellow smirked. “I’m just going to show his honor to a hotel I know, till he has time to see his pal Dellevelly of Golden Square to borrow a tidy eighteen pound ten, which a bookseller not so far off will be precious glad to get.”

“Eighteen pounds!” gasped the youth, with a hysteric laugh. “Debtors’ prison for only eighteen pounds! But I have the books still—he can have them back.”

“After you’ve done with ’em, eh?” said the bailiff. “Oh, I know your young gentlemen’s ways. Come along.”

“Father!” cried the girl, indignantly, as the bailiff dropped a heavy grasp on the lamb’s-wool collar. “You’ll not let them take Shelley. You’ll wait for the money, father.”

“Go into the house!” thundered the old man. “He’s a good-for-nothing vagabond, I tell you!” He thrust her back, and the slammed door shut between her and the youth standing in the bailiff’s clutch, half-wonderingly and disdainfully, like a bright-eyed, restless fox amid sour grapes.

“Go to your room!” commanded her father, and the girl slowly obeyed, dashing away her tears, while the old bookseller went back to the cluttered shop and his reading of Livy’s Roman History.

In the chamber the girl entered, Jane Clermont looked up half-scornfully.

“I heard it all,” she burst; “you are a little fool to take it—scolding you like a child, and before all those people!”

Mary opened a bureau drawer and took out a small rosewood box containing her one dearest possession. As she stood with her treasure in her hand, Jane jumped to her feet.

“I’ve borne it as long as I can myself,” she cried under her breath. “I’m going to run away before I am a fortnight older.”

“Run away? Where?”

Jane had begun to dance noiselessly on tiptoe with swift bacchante movements. “I’m going to be an actress,” she confided, as she stood at a pirouette. “I’ve been to see Mr. Sheridan—the great Mr. Sheridan—and he’s promised to get me a trial in a real part at Drury Lane!” She paused, struck with the determination in the other’s face. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to Shelley.”

“Good! I’ll go with you. But you have no money. How can you help him?”

Mary held out the little box.

“Your mother’s brooch!” cried Jane. “Do you really care as much as that for him?”—a little satirically.

Her companion was dressing for the street with rapid, uncertain fingers. “It’s all I have,” she answered.

They sat in silence till they heard the outer door bolted and knew the old man below had gone to his own room. Then they stole softly down the creaking stair, undid the outer door cautiously and went out into the evening bustle.

The pavements were crowded, and Mary clung to her companion’s arm, but Jane walked nonchalantly, her dark eyes snapping with adventure. Not a few turned to gaze at her piquant beauty. To one whose way led in the same direction it brought a thought of a distant land.

“In a Suliote shawl she might be a maid of Missolonghi!” mused George Gordon, as he strode across Fleet market behind the two girls. “Greece! I wonder when I shall see it again!”

A shade of melancholy was in his face as he walked on, but not discontent. The resentment of his London home-coming and the desolation of that first black night at Newstead he had overcome. With the companionship of his sister and in the calm freshness of frosty lake and rolling wind-washed moor he had recovered some of the buoyant spirits so suddenly stunned by the impact of the slanders that had met him. The London papers he had left unopened, from a sensitive dread of seeing the recital of his mother’s well-known eccentricities, which her death might furnish excuse for recalling. His new book, whose stanzas stood like mental mile-posts of his journey, had almost finished its progress through the press. In its verses he hoped to stand for something more than the petty cavilling of personal paragraphists. It was to his publisher’s he was bound this night when that wistful thought of the shores he best loved had shadowed his mood.

Crossing the open space on which faced the dark brick front and barred windows of the Fleet Prison, he saw the two girlish forms pause before its dismal entrance, where stood the shirt-sleeved warden, pipe in mouth. What errand could have brought them there unaccompanied at such an hour, he wondered.

Just then the clock of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West began a ponderous stroke, and the warden knocked the ashes from his pipe.

“Eight o’clock,” he announced gruffly. “Prison’s closed.”

A cry of dismay fell from Mary’s lips—a cry freighted with tears. “Then we can’t get poor Bysshe!”

Gordon turned back and approached the dingy portal. “I have a fancy to see the inside of the old rookery, warden,” he said. “Perhaps these visitors may enter with me.” His hand was in his pocket and a jingle caught the warden’s acute ear. The gruff demeanor of the custodian merged precipitately into the obsequious. He pushed open the gate with alacrity and preceded them into the foul area of the prison.

Mary threw Gordon a quick glance of gratitude as she passed into the warden’s office—to return without the little rosewood box. Across the look had flitted a shudder at the shouts and oaths that tainted the inclosure, and as she emerged he caught the gleam of relief with which she saw him still in the court.

A moment later the bailiff, who had figured in the scene before Godwin’s shop, was leading the way along a noisome gallery. It was littered with refuse of vegetable and provision-men who cried their wares all day up and down. At one side gaped a coffee-house, at the other an ordinary, both reeking with stale odors and tobacco-smoke, and a noisy club was meeting in the tap-room. Laughter and the click of glasses floated in the air, a suffocating atmosphere of tawdry boisterousness.

Jane Clermont stole more than one sidelong glance as Gordon’s uneven step followed. At length the bailiff paused and unlocked a barred door. Mary knocked, but there was no answer; she pushed the door open and the girls entered.

From his station in the background, Gordon saw a dingy chamber, possessing as furniture only a cot, a chair, and a narrow board mantel, on which a candle was burning, stuck upright in its own tallow. Standing before this breast-high impromptu table, a pamphlet spread open, upon it, his shoulders stooped, his eyes devouring the page, was the room’s solitary occupant. He had thrown off the long coat with the lamb’s-wool trimming, his collar was open leaving his throat unfettered, and his long locks hung negligently about his face.

“Bysshe!” cried Mary, ecstatically.

The figure by the mantel turned, flinging back his tumbled hair as if to toss away his abstraction.

“Mary!” he echoed, and sprang forward. “What are you doing here?”

“We’ve come for you. The debt is cancelled. To think of your being shut up here!” she said with a shiver, as a burst of noises rose from the court below.

“Cancelled!” he repeated with a hesitating laugh. “Your father would better have let me stay, Mary. I shall be just as bad again in a month. I couldn’t resist buying a book if it meant the gallows!”

She did not undeceive him, but handed him his great-coat, and gathered the volumes tossed on to the couch to stuff into its bulging pockets.

Jane had been scrutinizing the room. “What’s that?” she inquired, pointing to a plate of food which sat on the far end of the mantel, as though it had been impatiently pushed aside.

The youth colored uneasily. “Why, I suppose that was my supper,” he said shamefacedly; “I must have forgotten to eat it.”

Jane laughed, picked up the pamphlet for which the meal had been forgotten, and read the title aloud. “‘Twelve Butchers for a Jury and a Jeffreys for a Judge. An Appeal against the Pending Frame-Breakers Bill to legalize the Murder of the Stocking-Weavers. By Percy Bysshe Shelley!’”

“Frame-Breakers!” she finished disdainfully. “Stocking-Weavers!”

Shelley’s delicate face flushed as he folded the pamphlet.

“Are they not men?” he exclaimed. “And being men, have they no natural rights? Is British law to shoot them down like wild beasts for the defense of their livelihood? Oh, if I were only a peer, with a voice in Parliament!” He spoke with fierce emphasis, but in tone soft, vibrating and persuasive—a sustained, song-like quality in it.

“Percy Bysshe Shelley!” Gordon’s mind recited the name wonderingly. He remembered a placard he had seen in a book-shop window: “For writing the which he stands expelled from University College, Oxford.” So this was the heir to a baronetcy, the author of “Queen Mab,” the stripling iconoclast who had laughed at fulminating attorney-generals, had fled to Lynmouth beach—where he had spent his days making little wooden boxes, inclosed in resined bladders, weighted with lead and equipped with tiny mast and sail, and had sent them, filled with his contraband writings, out on the rollers of the Atlantic in the hope that they might reach some free mind on the Irish shore or on some ocean brig.

Gordon left his post and went slowly down the stair, past the blackened office, wherein the warden sat admiringly fingering the brooch that had wiped out a debt to old William Godwin the bookseller, and into the street.

The words of the youth he had seen sounded in his brain: “If I were only a peer, with a voice in Parliament!”

That voice was his. When had he used it for his fellow-man?

CHAPTER VIII
A SAVAGE SPUR

John Murray, anax of publishers, sat that evening in his shop in Fleet Street. He was in excellent humor, having dined both wisely and well. His hair was sparse above a smooth-shaven, oval face, in which lurked good-humor and the wit which brought to his drawing-room the most brilliant men of literary London, as his genius as a publisher had given him the patronage of the greatest peers of the kingdom, and even of the prince regent. His black coat was of the plainest broadcloth and his neck-cloth of the finest linen. Dallas sat opposite, his scholarly face keen and animated. The frayed waistcoat was no longer in evidence, and the worn hat had given place to a new broad brim.

“Yes,” said the man of books, “we shall formally publish to-morrow. I wrote his lordship, asking him to come up to town, to urge him to eliminate several of the stanzas in case we reprint soon. They will only make him more enemies. He has enough now,” he added ruefully.

“You still think as well of it?”

The publisher pushed back his glasses with enthusiasm. “It is splendid—unique.” He pulled out a desk-drawer and took therefrom a printed volume, poising it proudly, as a father dandles his first-born, and, turning its pages, with lifted forefinger and rolling voice read:

“Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!

Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!

Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth,

And long accustomed bondage uncreate?

Not such thy sons who whilom did await,

The hopeless warriors of the willing doom,

In bleak Thermopylæ’s sepulchral strait—

Oh! who that gallant spirit shall resume,

Leap from Eurotas’ banks, and call thee from the tomb?

Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;

Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,

Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,

And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields;

There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,

The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain air;

Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds,

Still in his beam Mendeli’s marbles glare;

Art, glory, freedom fail, but Nature still is fair.

Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not

Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?

By their right arms the conquest must be wrought.

Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No!

True, they may lay your proud despoiler low,

But not for you will freedom’s altars flame.

Shades of the Helots! triumph o’er your foe!

Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still the same;

Thy glorious day is o’er, but not thine years of shame.”

He broke off abruptly. “The pamphleteers have been busy since he landed,” he admitted, a trace of shrewdness edging his tone, “but the abuse seems to have dulled now. I have been waiting for that to issue.”

“His lordship, sir,” announced a clerk, and the proprietor sprang to his feet to greet his visitor.

Gordon’s eyes lighted with pleasure as they fell on Dallas, noting the change the few months of relief from the galling pressure of poverty had wrought in the features no less than the attire. “Are the types ready?” he asked the publisher.

“Yes, my lord. We distribute to-morrow. I have marked a few stanzas, however, that I hesitate to include in a further edition. Here they are. You will guess my reason.”

The other looked, his eyes reading, but his mind thinking further than the page.

“London! Right well thou know’st the hour of prayer;

Then thy spruce citizen, washed artisan

And smug apprentice gulp their weekly air.”

The lines were bitter indeed! They had been written when he was still smarting under the lash of his earlier critics, in the first months of his journeyings, before the great wind of travel had swept his mind clear and sweet for the latter harmonies of his poesy. In them lay the hurt sneer of a personal resentment—the resentment that had been in his soul when he sailed from England; that had sprung alive again on his return, when he learned that his enemies had employed his absence to bespatter his name with lying tales.

Yet that was past. He had cast it behind him. And should he carry the old spirit into this better and nobler work, to deflect his message from its significance into cheaper channels of abuse? His thought recurred to the youth in the bare room of the Fleet. Even there, in a debtors’ prison, Shelley had forgot his own plight, and sunk individual resentment in desire for wider justice! Should he be less big in tolerance than that youth? So he asked himself, as the publisher casually fluttered the leaves of an uncut review which the clerk had laid on his desk.

All at once John Murray’s eyes stopped, fixed on a page. He made an exclamation of irritation and chagrin, and pushed it out toward Gordon. It was a fresh copy of the Scourge, and the leader Gordon read, while the publisher paced the floor with nervously angry strides, was the one in which had been steeped the anonymous venom of William Godwin the bookseller—a page whose caption was his own name:

“It may be asked whether to be a simple citizen is more disgraceful than to be the illegitimate descendant of a murderer; whether to labor in an honorable profession be less worthy than to waste the property of others in vulgar debauchery; whether to be the son of parents of no title be not as honorable as to be the son of a profligate father and a mother of demoniac temper, and, finally, whether a simple university career be less indicative of virtue than to be held up to the derision and contempt of his fellow students, as a scribbler of doggerel and a bear-leader, to be hated for repulsiveness of manners and shunned by every man who would not be deemed a profligate without wit and trifling without elegance.”

A cold dead look of mingled pain and savagery grew on his face as he read. Then he sprang up and went to the door. Behind him Dallas had seized the review and was reading it with indignation. The publisher was still pacing the floor: “What an unfortunate advertisement!” he was muttering.

Gordon stared out into the lamp-lighted street. The bitter malignancy which had spared not even the grave in its slander, numbed and maddened him. His breath came hard and a mist was before his eyes. Opposite the shop loomed the blackened front of the old church of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West; as he stood, the two wooden figures of wild men on the clock which projected over the street struck the hour with their clubs, and a late newsboy passed crying tiredly: “News and Chronicle! All about the Frame-Breakers shot in Nottingham!”

The volume the publisher had given him was still in Gordon’s hand. He turned into the room and flung it on the desk.

“No,” he said with harsh bluntness. “Not a line shall be altered! If every syllable were a rattlesnake and every letter a pestilence, they should not be expunged! Let those who cannot swallow, chew it. I will have none of your damned cutting and slashing, Murray. I will battle my way against them all, like a porcupine!”

Then he wheeled and plunged into the clack and babble of Fleet Street’s pedestrians.

London would be reading his effusion when his book appeared to-morrow—reading it and talking about it. “The curs!” he said to himself, as he walked fiercely down the Strand.

The cry of the newsboy ahead came back to him like a dulled refrain. He turned into Whitehall at Charing Cross, and looked up to find himself opposite Melbourne House. He remembered suddenly the clear-eyed girl to whom he had offered his Satire and whose coin was still in his waistcoat pocket; she had said “Melbourne House” that day to the coachman. He wondered with a curious levity whether she would read the Scourge.

Before the Houses of Parliament stood a double line of carriages.

“It’s the debate in the Lords on the Frame-Breakers bill,” he heard one passer-by inform another, as he stared frowning at the high Gothic entrance. That was the measure against which Shelley’s pamphlet had been written.

The pain was dulling and the old unyielding devil of challenge and fight was struggling uppermost. “‘The illegitimate descendant of a murderer!’”—Gordon muttered—“‘a scribbler of doggerel and a bear-leader!’”

Then suddenly he raised his head. His eyes struck fire like gray flint. “I am a peer,” he said through his teeth, and strode through the door which he had never entered in his life, but once.

An hour later there was a sensation in John Murray’s shop, where Dallas still sat. It was furnished by Sheridan, who came in taking snuff and shaking his gray head with delight.

“Heard the news?” he cried, chuckling. “George Gordon just made a great speech—best speech by a lord since the Lord knows when! I was in the gallery with Lady Melbourne and Lady Caroline Lamb. He opposed the Frame-Breakers bill. They say it means the death of the measure. You should have seen the big-wigs flock to offer congratulations! Why, even the Lord Chancellor came down from the woolsack to shake hands with him!” He paused out of breath, with a final “What d’ye think of that?”

“Well, well!” ejaculated the publisher, taking off his glasses and polishing them with vigor. He looked at Dallas.

“What an unfortunate advertisement!” quoth that gentleman, pulling his nose. “Eh?”

John Murray brought his fist down on the desk with a force that made the ink-well leap. “By the foot of Pharaoh!” he swore, “we’ll take advantage of it; it will discount that attack in the Scourge. The papers have their copies of the book already. I’ll send them word. We’ll not wait till to-morrow. We’ll issue TO-NIGHT!”

He rang the bell sharply and gave a clerk hurried orders which in a few moments made the office a scene of confusion.

When Lady Melbourne entered Melbourne House with her daughter-in-law that evening—about the time a swarm of messengers were departing from the Fleet Street shop carrying packages of books addressed to the greatest houses of London—she found her stately niece, Annabel Milbanke, reading in the drawing-room.

Lady Caroline’s eyes were very bright as she threw off her wraps. She went to the piano and played softly—long dissolving arpeggios that melted into a rich minor chord. Presently she began to sing the same Greek air that she had sung once before with a pathos that had surprised and stirred even the colder, calculate Annabel.

“Caro, what is that?” asked Lady Melbourne, unclasping her sables before the fireplace. The singer did not hear her.

“It’s a song Mr. Hobhouse sent her when he was traveling in the East,” Annabel volunteered.

Lady Melbourne’s thoughts were not wholly on the song. She had seen the book her niece had been reading—it was George Gordon’s long famous Satire. She picked it up, noting the name on the title-page with approval. She had been pondering since she left the ladies’ gallery of the House of Lords, and her thoughts had concerned themselves intimately with its author, the young peer whose maiden speech had challenged such surprise and admiration. His name went perpetually accompanied by stories of eccentricities and wild life at college, of tamed bears and hidden orgies at Newstead with Paphian dancing girls, of a secret establishment at Brighton, of adventures and liaisons the most reckless in cities of the Orient. Yet he had stanch supporters, too.

“Annabel,” she said presently, and with singular emphasis, “George Gordon is in town. He spoke in Parliament this evening. I am going to ask him to dinner here to-morrow—to meet you.”

The refrain Lady Caroline was singing broke queerly in the middle, and her fingers stumbled on the keys. The others did not see the expression that slipped swiftly across her face, the rising flush, the indrawn, bitten under lip, nor did they catch the undertone in her laugh as she ran up the stair.

In her own room she unlocked a metal frame that stood on her dressing-table. It held a pencil portrait, begged long before from Hobhouse. A vivid, conscious flush was in her cheeks as she looked at it.

“For a woman of fire and dreams!” she murmured. “Not for a thing of snow! Never—never!”

CHAPTER IX
GORDON WAKES AND FINDS HIMSELF FAMOUS

The sharp jostle of the pavement; the rattle of the crossings; the “this way, m’lord!” of dodging link-boys and the hoarse warning of the parochial watch to reckless drivers; street lamps flaring redly in the raw and heavy night; the steaming tap-rooms along the Thames; the cut-throat darkness and the dank smell of the slow turgid current under London bridge. Still Gordon walked while the hours dragged till the traffic ebbed to midnight’s lull—on and on, without purpose or direction. It was dawn before he entered his lodgings, fagged and unstrung, with blood pumping and quivering in his veins like quicksilver.

He let himself in with his own key. The door of the ante-chamber which his valet occupied was ajar. Fletcher had been waiting for his master; he was dressed and seated in a chair, but his good-humored, oleaginous face was smoothed in slumber.

Gordon went into his sitting-room, poured out a half goblet of cognac and drank it to the last drop, feeling gratefully its dull glow and grudging release from nervous tension.

His memory of his speech was a sort of rough-drawn composite impression whose salient points were color and movement: the wide groined roof, the peaked and gilded throne, the crimson woolsack, the long, red morocco sofas set thickly, the rustle in the packed galleries, and peers leaning in their seats to speak in low tones with their neighbors.

The majority there had not known him, but his paleness, his beauty, his curling hair, and most of all his lameness, told his name to the few. The few whispered it to the many, they in turn gazed and whispered too, and almost before he had uttered a word, the entire assemblage knew that the speaker was the notorious writer of the famous Satire whose winged Apollonian shafts had stung the whole poetic cult of England—the twenty-four-year-old lord whose name was coupled in the newspapers with unlovely tales of bacchanals in Madrid, duellos in Malta and Gibraltar, and harem intrigues in Constantinople; tales half-believed even by those who best knew what enemies his vitriolic pen had made and their opportunities for slander.

Gordon had acted in a mental world created by excitement. His pride had spurred him, in a moment of humiliation, to thrust himself into the place he of right should occupy. Mere accident had chosen the debate; the casual circumstance of a visit to the Fleet Prison had determined his position in it. Given these, his mind had responded clearly, spontaneously, with a grasp and brilliancy of which he himself had been scarcely conscious. He remembered, with a curious impersonal wonder as he walked, the sharp, straining, mental effort before that battery of glances coldly formal at first, then surprised into approval and at length warmed to enthusiastic applause; the momentary hush as he sat down; the buzz of undammed talk crisped by the tap of the gavel; the press of congratulations which followed him to the outer air.

Now, as he stood in his room in the gray light of the early morning, a feeling of distaste came over him. Why had he spoken? Had it been from any sympathy for the cause he championed? Was it not rather in a mere spirit of hurt pride and resentment—the same resentment that had made him refuse to eliminate the bitter stanzas from his book? A flush rose to his brow. How unworthy had been his motive beside that of the stripling who had written against that same bill!

A sense of shame rushed through him. In the late weeks at Newstead he had felt how small were such impulses. He had told himself that he would sing for his song’s own sake and keep it free from the petty and the retaliative; that he would live in the azure his own mind created and let the world’s praise and abuse alike go by. Had he kept this determination?

He poured out a second tumbler of the liquor and drank it.

Neither claret nor champagne ever affected him, but the double draft of brandy brought an immediate intoxication that grew almost instantly to a gray giddiness. He pushed a couch to the wall, shoved a screen between it and the dawn-lit windows, threw himself down without undressing and fell into a moveless sleep that lasted many hours. The reaction, his physical weariness and both topped by the cognac, made his slumber log-like, a dull, dead blank of nothingness, unbroken by any sound.

Fletcher came in yawning, looked into his master’s sleeping-room and went out shaking his head. Later he brought a pile of letters, and relaid the fire. Noon came—one, two o’clock—and meanwhile there were many knocks upon the door, from each of which the valet returned with larger eyes to add another personal card or note to the increasing pile on the table.

As the clock struck three, he opened the door upon two of the best-liked of his master’s old-time town associates. They were Tom Moore, with a young ruddy face of Irish humor, and Sheridan, clad to sprucery as if Apollo had sent him a birthday suit, and smiling like a rakish gray-haired cherub.

“Fletcher, where’s your master?”

“His lordship is out, Mr. Sheridan.”

“The devil he is! Hang it, we’ll wait then, Tom. Go and look for him, Fletcher.”

“I shouldn’t know where to look, sir. My lord didn’t come in at all last night.”

Sheridan whistled. “That’s queer. Well, we’ll wait a while,”—and they entered. As he saw the pile of newly arrived stationery, the older man threw his stick into the corner and smote Moore on the shoulder with a chuckle.

“I told them so!” he vociferated, wagging his head. “I told them so when his Satire first came out. Curse catch me, d’ye ever know of such a triumph? That speech was the spark to the powder. It was cute of Murray to issue last night. Every newspaper in town clapping its hands and bawling bigger adjectives. Genius and youth—ah, what a combination it is!”

He took a pinch of snuff and descended upon the heap of cards and billets, picking up each in turn between thumb and forefinger and looking at it with a squint. “‘Lord Carlisle,’” he read—“his guardian, eh? Wouldn’t introduce him in the Lords two years ago. ‘Colonel Greville’—wanted to fight George once for a line in his Satire about high-play in the Argyle Club! He’s cooing gently now! Blue-tinted note—smells of violets. Humph! More notes—seven of ’em! Fletcher, you old humbug, d’ye know your master at this moment is the greatest man in London?”

“Yes, Mr. Sheridan.”

“Oh, you do? Knew it all along, I suppose. Doesn’t surprise you one bit, eh?”

“No, Mr. Sheridan.”

“Curse catch me!—”

“Yes, Mr. Sheridan.”

Moore laughed, and the older man, cackling at the valet’s matter-of-fact expression, continued his task: “Card from the Bishop of London—Lord deliver us! Another letter—where have I seen that silver crest? Why, the Melbourne arms, to be sure! By the handwriting, it’s from the countess herself. ‘Lord Heathcote’—‘Lord Holland.’ It’s electric! It’s a contagion! All London is mad to-day, mad over George Gordon!”

“I passed Murray’s shop an hour ago,” declared Moore. “There was a string of carriages at the door like the entrance of Palace Yard. Murray told me he will have booked orders for fourteen thousand copies before nightfall.”

As the other threw down the mass of stationery, he spied the bottle which Gordon had half emptied.

“Here’s some cognac,” he said. “Fletcher, some glasses. That’s right. It’s early in the day for brandy, but ‘better never than late,’ as Hobhouse would say. We’ll toast Gordon’s success.” He poured for both and the rims clicked.

“To ‘Childe Harold’!” cried Moore.

With the glasses at their lips, a voice broke forth behind them declaiming ex tempore:

“My boat is on the shore,

And my bark is on the sea;

But before I go, Tom Moore,

Here’s a double health to thee!”

Moore dragged away the screen. Gordon was standing by the couch; his tumbled hair and disordered dress showed he had just awakened. His face was flushed, his eyes sparkling.

“You villain!” expostulated Moore; “it’s you we’re toasting.”

“—And with water or with wine.

The libation I would pour

Should be peace with thine and mine.

And—a health to thee, Tom Moore!”

“Gordon, you eavesdropper, have you read the papers?” Sheridan shouted.

“Not a line!”

“Curse catch me, you’ve heard us talking then! George, George, you’ve waked to find yourself famous!”

Gordon hardly felt their hand-clasps or heard their congratulatory small-talk. He almost ran to the window and flung it open, drawing the cool air into his lungs with a great respiration. His sleep had been crumpled and scattered by the fall of a walking-stick, as the crackling of thin ice will spill and dissipate a crowd of skaters. He had caught snatches of conversation indistinctly as he shook off the leaden stupor of the intoxicant. “Every newspaper in town clapping its hands!” “All London mad over George Gordon!” His mind had conned the sentences dully at first, then with a gasping dart of meaning. His speech? No, it could not be that. Moore had spoken the name of his book, and he had known—realized in a flash, while he lay quivering. Then it was that he had leaped to his feet. Then he had voiced that impromptu toast, declaimed while he fought hard to repress his exultation, with every nerve thrilling a separate, savage triumph of its own.

He looked down. It was as fine a day as that on which Paradise was made, and the streets were alive. Several pedestrians stopped to stare up at him curiously. A carriage was passing, and he saw the gentleman it held speak to the lady by his side and point toward the building. Fame! To clamp shut the mouths of the scoundrels who maligned him and his! To feel the sting of the past covered with the soothing poultice of real reputation! To fling back the sneers of his enemies into their teeth. To be no longer singular, isolated, excommunicate—to have the world’s smiles and its praise!

Yesterday seemed a dream. It was fading into an indistinguishable background, with the face of the bright-eyed youth in the Fleet Prison—and the dull shame he had felt at dawn.

He turned. “Pardon me if I play the host poorly to-day,” he said; “I am ridiculously, fine-ladically nervous. I fear I must have retired drunk—a good old gentlemanly vice—and am now at the freezing point of returning soberness.”

Sheridan pushed him into his bedroom.

“Make your toilet, my boy,” he told him good-naturedly. “We will wait,”—and Gordon resigned himself to the ministrations of Fletcher and the comfort of hot water and fine linen.

When he came back to find his visitors smoking, he had thrust all outward agitation under the surface. He was dressed in elegance, and a carnation was in the buttonhole of his white great-coat. There was less of melancholy curve to the finely-wrought lips, more of slumbrous fire in the gray-blue eyes.

“There’s a soberer for you.” Moore indicated the pile of sealed missives and pasteboards. “You’ll certainly need a secretary.”

Gordon’s eye caught the Melbourne crest. He picked out the note from the rest hastily, with a vision flitting through his mind of a clear-eyed statuesque girl. While he was reading there was a double knock at the door which Fletcher answered.

A splendid figure stood on the threshold, arrayed as Solomon was not in all his glory, and the figure pushed his way in, with gorgeous disregard of the valet.

“Is his lordship in yet?” he simpered. “Eh? Stap my vitals, say it’s Captain Brummell—George Brummell—and be quick about it. Ah!” he continued, raising his glass to his eye, as he distinguished the group, “there he is now, and old Sherry, too. I am your lordship’s most obedient! I’ve been here twice this afternoon. You must come to Watier’s Club with me, sir—I’ll be sworn, I must be the one to introduce you! You will all favor us, gentlemen, of course, as my guests. My chariot is at the door!”

“I thank you, Captain,” Gordon answered, as he folded the note of invitation he had been reading and put it in his pocket, “but I cannot give myself the pleasure this afternoon. Mr. Sheridan and Mr. Moore will doubtless be charmed. I am promised within the hour to dinner—at Lady Melbourne’s.”

CHAPTER X
THE PRICE OF THE BAUBLE

Beau Brummell, from his seat in the bow-window, bowed with empressement as Gordon alighted from his carriage and ascended the steps of White’s Club from an early dinner at Holland House.

“’Fore gad,” admired the dandy, “what a coat! It becomes him as if he’d been hatched in it.”

Lord Petersham at his elbow gazed with seconding approval. The somber elegance of the black velvet dress-coat, which Gordon wore close-buttoned, and the white rolling collar left open so as to expose the throat, served to heighten the pallor of his skin and set in high relief the handsome, patrician face above it.

“Still on his pedestal,” observed Petersham. “Before long his vertex sublimis will displace enough stars to overthrow the Newtonian system! I hear Caro Lamb is not tired doing homage. His affair with Lady Oxford seems to be tapering.”

“Women!” ejaculated Brummell. “He’s a martyr to them. Stap my vitals, the beauties run after him because he won’t make up to them. Treat women like fools, and they’ll all worship you!”

To the pinnacle this implied, Gordon had risen at a leap. He was the idol of fashionable London, the chief topic of frivolous boudoir gossip and intellectual table-talk. His person, his travels spangled with romantic tales, his gloom, his pride, his beauty, and the dazzle of his prodigious success, combined to bring him an unheard-of homage. His newest book was on every drawing-room table in the kingdom. He was made much of by Lady Jersey. Hostesses quarrelled over entertaining him, and ladies of every title below the blood-royal asked to be placed next him at dinner. The regent himself had asked him to Carlton House.

Each of his publications since that February day when he woke to fame and when the chariot of the incomparable Captain Brummell had set him down at Melbourne House, had had a like history. Each had won the same rapt praise, the same wondering homage to talent. If they missed the burning fervor of those earlier impassioned lines on Grecian liberty, if they held, each more clearly, an under-note of agnosticism, it was overlooked in delight at their freedom, their metrical sweep and seethe of feeling, the melancholy sea-surge and fret of their moods. His ancient detractors, whom his success had left breathless, constrained to innuendo, had added to his personality the tang of the audacious, of bizarre license, of fantastic eccentricity, that beckoned even while it repelled.

One would have thought Gordon himself indifferent to praise as to censure. The still dissatisfaction that came to him in the night hours in his tumbled study, when he remembered the strength and purpose that had budded in his soul in those early weeks at Newstead, he alone knew. The convention that had carped at him before his fame he trod under foot. He frequented Manton’s shooting-gallery, practised the broad sword at Angelo’s, sparred with “Gentleman Jackson,” the champion pugilist, in his rooms in Bond Street, and clareted and champagned at the Cocoa-Tree with Sheridan and Moore till five in the matin. Other men might conceal their harshest peccadilloes; Gordon concealed nothing. What he did he did frankly, with disdain for appearances. Hypocrisy was to him the soul’s gangrene. He preferred to have the world think him worse than to think him better than he was.

His enemies in time had plucked up courage, revamped old stories and invented new; these seemed to give him little concern. He not only kept silence but declined to allow his friends, such as Sheridan and Hobhouse, to champion him. When the Chronicle barbed a sting with a reference to the enormous sums he was pocketing from his copyholds, he shrugged his shoulders. John Murray, his publisher, knew that the earnings of “The Giaour” had been given to a needy author; that “Zuleika” had relieved a family from the slavery of debt and sent them, hopeful colonists, to Australia.

Gordon passed into the club, bowing to the group in the bow-window with conventional courtesy, and entered the reading-room. It was September, but the night had turned cool, and he dropped into a chair before the hearth.

“Why does Lady Holland always have that damned screen between the whole room and the fire?” he grumbled half-humorously. “I who bear cold no better than an antelope, and never yet found a sun quite done to my taste, was absolutely petrified, and couldn’t even shiver. All the rest, too, looked as if they were just unpacked, like salmon from an ice-basket!”

A lackey in the club’s regalia brought a tray of letters and set it beside him. Gordon lit a cigar before he examined them. They were the usual collection: a sprinkling of effusions from romantic incognitas; a graver tribute from Walter Scott; a pressing request for that evening from Lady Jersey.

“To meet Madame de Staël!” he mused. “I once travelled three thousand miles to get among silent people; and this lady writes octavos and talks folios. I have read her essay against suicide; if I heard her recite it, I might swallow poison.”

The final note he lifted was written on blue-bordered paper, its corners embossed with tiny cockle-shells, and he opened it with a nettled frown.

“Poor Caro!” he muttered. “Why will you persist in imprudent things? Some day your epistle will fall into the lion’s jaws, and then I must hold out my iron. I am out of practice, but I won’t go to Manton’s now. Besides,” he added with a shrug, “I wouldn’t return his shot. I used to be a famous wafer-splitter, but since I began to feel I had a bad cause to support, I have left off the exercise.”

His face took on a deeper perplexity as he read the eccentric, curling hand:

“... Gordon, do you remember that first dinner at Melbourne House—the day after your speech in the Lords? You gave me a carnation from your buttonhole. You said, ‘I am told your ladyship likes all that is new and rare—for the moment!’ Ah, that meeting was not only for the moment with me, you know that! It has lasted ever since. I have never heard your name announced that it did not thrill every pulse of my body. I have never heard a venomous word against you that did not sting me, too.”

Gordon held the letter in a candle-flame, and dropped it on the salver. As it crackled to a mass of glowing tinder, a step fell behind him. He looked up to see Moore.

“Tom,” he said, his brow clearing, “I am in one of my most vaporish moments.”

Moore seated himself on a chair-arm and poked the blackening twist of paper with his walking-stick. He smiled an indulgent smile of prime and experience.

“From which I conclude—” he answered sagely, “that you are bound to Drury Lane greenroom instead of to Lady Jersey’s this evening.”

Gordon’s lips caught the edge of the other’s smile.

“You are right. I’m going to let Jane Clermont brighten my mood. She is always interesting—more so off the stage than on. They are only hothouse roses that will bloom at Lady Jersey’s. Jane is a wild tiger-lily. She has all the natural wit of the de Staël—a pity it must be wasted on the pit loungers! Heaven only knows why I ever go to their ladyships’ infernal functions at all, for I hate bustle as I hate a bishop. Here I am, eternally stalking to parties where I shan’t talk, I can’t flatter, and I won’t listen—except to a pretty woman. If one wants to break a commandment and covet his neighbor’s wife, it’s all very well. But to go out amongst the mere herd, without a motive, a pleasure or a pursuit, of no more use than a sick butterfly—it begins to pall upon my soul!”

Moore’s stick was still meditatively poking the charred paper. The ashes fell apart, and a tiny unburnt blue corner showed—it bore the familiar device of a cockle-shell. His lips puckered in a thoughtful whistle. Aloud he said:

“Why not adopt the conventional remedy?”

“I’m too lazy to shoot myself!”

“There’s a more comfortable medicine than that.”

Gordon’s smile broke into a laugh. “Wedlock, eh? Reading the country newspapers and kissing one’s wife’s maid! To experience the superlative felicity of those foxes who have cut their tails and would persuade the rest to part with their brushes to keep them in countenance! All my coupled contemporaries—save you, Tom—are bald and discontented. Wordsworth and Southey have both lost their hair and good-humor. But after all,” he said, rising, “anything is better than these hypochondriac whimsies. In the name of St. Hubert, patron of antlers and hunters, let me be married out of hand. I don’t care to whom, so it amuses anybody else and doesn’t interfere with me in the daytime! By the way, can’t you come down to Newstead for the shooting-season? Sheridan and Hobhouse are to be there, and my cellar is full though my head is empty. What do you say? You can plague us with songs, Sherry can write a new comedy, and I mean to let my beard grow, and hate you all.”

His companion accepted with alacrity. “When shall we start?” he inquired, walking with the other to his carriage.

“At noon, to-morrow,” Gordon replied. “Till then, good night. I commend you to the care of the gods—Hindoo, Scandinavian and Hellenic.”

As the wheels clattered on, Gordon’s mind was running in channels of discontent.

“I am ennuyé,” he thought, “beyond my usual tense of that yawning verb I am always conjugating. At six-and-twenty one should be something—and what am I? Nothing but six-and-twenty, and the odd months. Six-and-twenty years, as they call them—why, I might have
been a pasha by this time!”

The coach turned a corner, and he saw, a little way off, the lighted front of Drury Lane Theater. In the shadow of its stage-door stood a couple his sight did not distinguish, but the keen black eyes of one of them—a vivid, creole-looking girl—had noted with a quick instinctive movement the approach of the well-known carriage, now tangled in the moving stream.

The gaze of the man beside her—defiant, furtive, theatric and mustachioed, with hair falling thickly and shortly like a Moor’s—followed her look.

“He was in the greenroom last night, too!” he said, with angry jealousy. “I saw him coming away.”

“Suppose you did?” flung the girl with irritation. “Who are you, that I must answer for whom I see or know—yes, and for anything else? He was here, and so was Mr. Sheridan and Captain Brununell. I should like to know what you have to say about it!”

The other’s cheek had flushed darkly.

“You used to have more time for me, Jane,” he answered sullenly, “before you took up with the theater—when you lived over the old book-shop and hadn’t a swarm of idling dandies about you.”

“I suppose his lordship there is an ‘idling dandy’!” she retorted with fine sarcasm. “A dandy, and the most famous man in England! An idler, who gets a guinea a line for all he writes. What do you spend, pray, that your father in Wales didn’t leave you? Tell me,” she said curiously, her tone changing; “you were in the East when you were in the navy. Are all the stories they tell of George Gordon in Greece true? They say he himself is Conrad, the hero of his ‘Corsair.’ Was he so dreadfully wicked?”

He turned away his head, gnawing his lip. “I don’t know,” he returned doggedly, “and I care less. I know he’s only amusing himself with you, Jane, and you know it, too—”

“And it’s no amusement to you?” she prompted, with innate coquetry, dropping back into her careless tone. “If it isn’t, don’t come then. I shall try to get along, never fear. Why shouldn’t I know fine people?” she went on, a degree less hardly. “I’m tired of this foggy, bread-and-butter life. It was bad enough at Godwin’s stuffy house with poverty and a stepfather. I don’t wonder Mary has run away to marry her Shelley! He’ll be a baronet some day, and she can see life. I don’t intend to be tied to London always, either—even with the playing! I want to know things and see something of the world. Why do you stay here? Why don’t you go to sea again? I’m sure I’d like to.”

“You know why I don’t,” he said, “well enough. I deserted the service once, besides. But I’d like to see the world—with you, Jane!”

He did not see the line that curved her lips, half-scornful, half-pitying, for his look had fastened on a figure in a ministerial cloak, who was passing on the pavement. The figure was Dr. James Cassidy, taking his evening walk with the under-curate of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West—an especially enjoyable hour with him.

Now, as Cassidy’s insect eyes lifted, they fell on the oriental face in the shadow of the doorway with a sudden interrogative start. He took a step toward it, hesitatingly, but the curate was in the midst of a quotation from Eusebius, and the pause was but momentary. The girl’s Moorish-looking companion had not moved, but his hands had clenched and his face had an ugly expression as Cassidy passed on.

“Only a resemblance,” remarked the latter, as he proceeded. “The man in the doorway there reminded me of an ensign who deserted the Pylades once when we were lying at Bombay.” His hand touched a broad white scar on his cheek. “I trust he may yet be apprehended—for the good of the service,” he added softly.

Gordon’s eyes, as the carriage picked its way, had been on the front of the theater, but they were preoccupied. He did not see the look of dislike from the mustachioed face in the shadow, nor the girl as she vanished through the stage-door. Yet, as it happened, the first glimpse of the theater had brought a thought of her.

“Fond, flippant, wild, elusive, alluring—the devil!” he mused. “That’s Jane Clermont—she would furnish out a new chapter for Solomon’s Song. The stage is her atmosphere: she came to it as naturally as a humming-bird to a garden of geraniums. Yet she will never make a Siddons; she lacks purpose and she is—méchante. She appeals to the elemental, raw sense of the untamed and picturesque men own in common with savages. Nature made such women to cure man’s ennui: they fit his mood. Jane Clermont was not born for fine ladies’ fripperies. What is it she lacks? Balance?—or is it the moral sense? After all, I’m not sure but that lack is what makes her so interesting. I have been attracted a million times by passion; have I ever been attracted by sheer purity? Yes—there is one. Annabel Milbanke!”

There rose before his mind’s eye a vision of the tall stateliness he had so often seen at Melbourne House. He seemed to feel again the touch of cool, ringless fingers. How infinitely different she was from others who had been more often in his fancy! She had attracted him from his first street glimpse of her—from the first day he looked into her calm virginal eyes across a dinner-table. It was her placidity—the very absence of chaos—that drew him. She represented the one type of which he was not tired. Besides, she was beautiful—not with the ripe, red, exotic beauty of Lady Caroline Lamb, or the wilder eccentric charm of Jane Clermont, but with the unalterable serenity of a rain-washed sky, a snow-bank, a perfect statue.

On his jaded mood the thought of her fell with a salving relief, like rain on a choked highway. A link-boy, throwing open the carriage door, broke his reverie.

He looked up. The bright, garish lanterns smote him with a new and alien sense of distaste. Beyond the stage-entrance and the long dim passage lay the candle-lighted greenroom, the select coterie that gossiped there, and—Jane Clermont. In Portman Square, in the city’s west end, Lady Jersey was standing by her bower of roses and somewhere in the throng about her moved a tall, spirit-looking girl with calm, lash-shaded eyes.

Gordon saw both pictures clearly as he paused, his foot on the carriage step. Then he spoke to the coachman.

“To Lady Jersey’s,” he said, and reëntered the carriage.

CHAPTER XI
THE BEATEN PATH

The late sun, rosying the lake beside the ruined cloister, had drawn its flame-wrought curtains across the moor that lay about Newstead, and the library was full of shadows as Gordon groped in the darkness for a candle.

Dinner was scarce through, for the party he had gathered—who for a noisy fortnight had made the gray old pile resound to the richest fooleries in the range of their invention—did not rise before noon, had scarce breakfasted by two, and voted the evening still in its prime at three o’clock in the morning. The Abbey had been theirs to turn upside down and they had given rein to every erratic audacity. That very day they had had the servants drag into the dining-room an old stone coffin from the rubbish of the tumble-down priory; had resurrected from some cobwebbed corner a set of monkish dresses with all the proper apparatus of crosses and beads with which they had opened a conventual chapter of “The Merry Monks of Newstead”; and had set Fletcher to polishing the old skull drinking-cup on whose silver mounting Gordon long ago had had engraved the stanzas he had written on the night his mother lay dead. The grotesquerie had been hailed with enthusiasm, and the company had sat that evening gowned and girdled about the dinner-table, where Sheridan’s gray poll had given him the seat of honor as abbot.

Gordon wore one of the black gabardines, as he lit the candle in the utterly confused library. It was a sullen, magnificent chamber. The oak wainscoting was black with age. Tapestries and book-shelves covered one side, and floor and tables were littered with reviews and books, carelessly flung from their place.

A shout, mingled with the prolonged howls of a wolf and the angered “woof” of a bear sounded from the driveway—the guests were amusing themselves with the beasts chained on either side of the entrance. These were relics of that old, resentful season when Gordon had hermited himself there to lash his critics with his defiant Satire. The wolf, he had then vowed, should be entered for the deanery of St. Paul’s, and the bear sit for a theological fellowship at Cambridge.

For a moment, candle in hand, he listened to the mingled noises, his head on one side, a posture almost of irksomeness. He started when Sheridan’s hand fell on his shoulder.

“By the Lord!” he ejaculated. “I took you for the Abbey ghost!”

Sheridan laughed, lit the cigar Gordon handed him, and sat down, tucking the ends of his rope-girdle between his great knees. The tonsure he had contrived was a world too small for his massive head, and the monk’s robe showed inconsistent glimpses of red waistcoat and fawn-colored trousers where its edges gaped.

“What are you mooning over?” he asked. “Got a new poem in mind?”

“No. To-day I have thrown two into the fire to my comfort, and smoked out of my head the plan of another.”

“Sentimental?”

“Not I. I was thinking of the East. I wish I might sail for Greece in the spring—provided I neither marry myself nor unmarry any one else in the interval.”

“Why not the first?” the other pursued. “I tried it younger than you.”

The speaker sighed presently, and locking his hands behind his head, leaned back against the cushions, his fine, rugged face under its shock of rough gray hair, turned tender. “My pretty maid of Bath!” he said softly. “Elizabeth, my girl-wife that I fought a duel for at Kingsdown and who ran away with me to France when I hadn’t a pound! It’s twelve years since she died. This is an anniversary to me, my boy. Forty years ago to-day she married me. I hadn’t written ‘The Rivals’ then, nor gone to Parliament—nor grown old!”

Gordon was silent. Sheridan’s face, in the candle-light, was older than he had ever seen it. Age was claiming him, though youth was still in the foppish dress, the brilliant sparkle of the eye, the sharp quickness on the tongue. But the wife he remembered at that moment had belonged to a past generation.

A muffled call came—“Sherry! Sherry!” and at the summons the gray head lifted and the gleam of incorrigible humor shot again across the thin cheeks. “The rogues are whooping for me!” he chuckled, and hurried out.

Gordon stared into the gloom of the open window opposite in a reverie. That echo of still-living memory struck across his whimsical mood with strange directness, like a voice speaking insistently of simple human needs.

“To love, to marry—” he reflected. “It is the recourse of the highest intellect as well as the lowest. There is Sheridan. He is brain at its summit. He puts more intellect into squeezing a new case of claret out of a creditor tradesman than the average man has in his whole brain-box. He has written the very best drama and delivered the very best single oration ever conceived or heard in England. And now, without his pretty wife, he is a prey to debt, to gaining and to the bailiffs! Peace and single possession, the Eden-right of man—the having and holding from all the world of one warm, human sympathy—that is the world’s way, the clear result of ages of combined experience.”

He looked up at a pounding of hoofs outside and a howl from the chained wolf. The sounds merged into a hilarious hubbub from the dining-room, betokening some neighborhood arrival.

His eyes, still gazing through the parted curtains, could discern dimly on the terrace a white image standing out in relief from the swathing darkness. It was a statue of Vesta, goddess of the domestic fireside. It seemed to gaze in at him with a peculiar quiet significance. To the Romans that image had stood for the hearthstone—for all the sweet, age-old conventionalities of life, such as enshrined his sister, in her placid country home, her children around her. He had a vision of a stately figure moving about the Abbey with a watching solicitude, and there flashed into his mind the beginning of one of his poems:

“She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies—”

It sang itself over in his brain. The woman he would choose would be like that—cool, cloudless, beautiful as the night outside the open window. He knew such a woman, as flawless and as lovely—one, and one only. His thought, unweighted by purpose, had followed her since that July afternoon when she had handed him the golden guinea in exchange for his book. She was not in London now. At that moment she was in Mansfield, a sharp gallop across the Newstead moor. If he had ever had a dream of feminine perfectness, she was its embodiment. Would marriage with such a one fetter him? In the great clanging world that teased and worried him, would it not be a refuge?

A sudden recollection came to him, out of the dust of a past year—a recollection of a youth with bright eyes and tangled hair, in the Fleet Prison. There had been an hour, before success had bitten him, when he had promised himself that fame’s fox-fire should not lure him, that he would cherish his song and rid his soul of the petty things that dragged it down. How had that promise been fulfilled? With poor adventure, and empty intrigue and flickering rushlight amours to which that restless something in him had driven him on, an anchorless craft in the cross-tides of passion!

“Home!” he mused. “To pursue no will-o’-the-wisp of fancy! To shut out all vagrant winds and prolong that spark of celestial fire!”

He drew a quick sibilant breath, sat down, at the writing-table and wrote hastily but unerringly, a letter, clean-etched and unembellished, a simple statement and a question.

He signed it, laughing aloud as a sense of wild incongruity gushed over him. Through the heavy oaken doors he could hear mingled laughter and uproar. A stentorian bass was rumbling a drinking-song.

What a challenging antithesis! Lava and snow—erratic comet and chaste moon—jungle passions and the calm of a northern landscape! A proposal of marriage written at such a time and place, with a drinking-stave shouted in the next room! And what would be her answer?

The daring grew brighter in his eye. He sealed the letter with a coin from his waistcoat pocket, sprang up and jerked the bell-rope. The footman entered.

“Rushton, have Selim saddled at once and take this note to Mansfield. Ride like the devil. Do you hear?”

“Yes, my lord.” The boy looked at the superscription, put the note in his pocket and was gone.

Gordon laughed again—a burst of gusty excitement—and seized the full ink-well into which he had dipped his pen. “It shall serve no lesser purpose!” he exclaimed, and hurled it straight through the open window.

Then he threw open the door and walked hastily toward the hilarity of the great dining-room.

CHAPTER XII
“MAN’S LOVE IS OF MAN’S LIFE A THING APART”

What he saw as he emerged from the hall was Saturnalia indeed.

Sheridan, his robe thrown open from his capacious frame, sat with knees wide apart, his chair tilted back, his face crumpling with amusement. Hobhouse sat cross-legged on the stone coffin. Others, robed and tonsured, were grouped about the board, and on it was perched a stooped and ungainly figure in a somber dress of semi-clerical severity.

“Sunburn me, it’s Dr. Cassidy,” muttered Gordon, with a grim smile. “And without his tracts! What’s he doing at Newstead? The rascals—they’ve got him fuddled!”

The hospitality offered in the host’s absence had in truth proved too much for the doctor. Now, as he balanced on his gaitered feet among the overturned wine-bottles, he looked a very unclerical figure indeed. His neck-cloth was awry, and his flattish eyes had a look of comical earnestness and unaccustomed good-fellowship. He held a wine-glass and waved it in uncertain gestures, his discourse punctured by frequent and unstinted applause:

“What was the Tree of Knowledge doing in the garden, you ask. Why not planted on the other side of the wall? Human reason, enlightened by inspiration, finds no answer in the divine Word. Theology is our only refuge. Adam was predestined to sin. All created things are contingent on omnipotent volition. Sin being predestined, the process leading to that sin must be predestined, too. See? Sin—Adam. Garden—snake. The law of the divine Will accomplished.”

Hobhouse wiped his eyes with his handkerchief. “Who could contemplate the picture,” he groaned, “without tears? Poor fallen man! I weep for him.”

The remark struck the lecturer with pathos. The look of stern satisfaction with which he had so eloquently justified the eternal tragedy melted into a compassionate expression which had a soft tinge of the romantic. He smiled—a smile of mingled burgundy and benevolence.

“Herein, gentlemen, appears our lesson of infinite pity. Man expelled from Eden, but still possessing Eve. Justice tempered with mercy. Love of woman compensating for the loss of earthly Paradise.”

“True, true,” murmured Hobhouse. “‘There’s heaven on earth in woman’s love,’ as Mr. Moore, here, sings. A prime subject for another toast, Doctor. We’ve drunk to the navy and to theology; now for a glass to her eternal ladyship!—Egad! Here’s Gordon!”

The final word brought a shout, and the glasses were refilled. “Gordon’s toast!” they insisted as they opened ranks. “A toast, or a new poem!”

Some disturbance out of doors had roused the animals kennelled at the hall entrance and a battery of growls mingled with the importunities.

Sheridan pounded with his great fist on the jingling board till the uproar stilled. “The lord of the manor speaks!” he proclaimed.

Gordon approached the table and picked up the skull-cup. In the blaze of candle-light, his face showed markedly its singular and magnetic beauty. He glanced about him an instant—at Sheridan’s waggish, rough-hewn countenance, at the circle of younger flushed and uproarious ones, and at the labored solemnity and surprise of the central figure on the table. The doctor’s answering stare was full of a fresh bewilderment; he was struggling to recall a message he had brought to some one—he had forgotten to whom—which in the last half-hour had slipped like oil from his mind.

In Gordon’s brain verses yet unwritten had been grouping themselves that afternoon—verses that not for long were to be set in type—and he spoke them now; not flippantly, but with a note of earnestness and of feeling, a light flush in his cheek tingeing the colorless white of his face, and his gray-blue eyes darkened to violet.

“Woman! though framed in weakness, ever yet

Her heart reigns mistress of man’s varied mind.

And she will follow where that heart is set

As roll the waves before the settled wind.

Her soul is feminine nor can forget—

To all except love’s image, fondly blind.

And she can e’en survive love’s fading dim,

And bear with life, to love and pray for him!”

It was an odd thing to see this compelling figure, standing in the midst of these monkish roisterers, all in celibate robes and beads, declaiming lines of such passionate beauty and in a voice flexible and appealing. An odd toast to drink from such a goblet!

“Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,

’Tis woman’s whole existence; man may range

The court, camp, church, the vessel and the mart,

Sword, gown, gain, glory offer in exchange.

Pride and ambition may o’errun his heart,

And few there are whom these cannot estrange.

Woman knows but one refuge, if love err—

To draw him from these baubles, back to her!”

There was an instant of dead silence when he paused, broken by the doctor’s hiccough and a voice behind them.

Sheridan saw Gordon set down the skull-cup as the spot of color faded from his cheek. He turned to the entrance.

“Curse catch me!” gasped the wit, springing to his feet. “Lady Melbourne and Miss Milbanke!”

CHAPTER XIII
THE SMIRCHED IMAGE

All turned astonished faces. Just inside the oaken door swung wide open to the night, stood her ladyship, her features expressing a sense of humor struggling with dignity, and just behind her, with a look of blent puzzle and surprise, her stately niece, Annabel Milbanke. Mrs. Muhl, Gordon’s withered fire-lighter, was hovering in the rear.

It was a tense moment. Gordon’s glance swept Annabel’s face—distinguished a letter still unopened in her hand—as he came forward to greet them. A dull red was climbing over Cassidy’s sobering face, and with something between a gulp and a groan he got down heavily from his commanding position.

It was Lady Melbourne who broke the pause:

“I fear we intrude. We were driving across to Annesley where there is a ball to-night, and felt tempted to take your lordship with us. We had not known of your guests. Dr. Cassidy rode ahead to apprise you of our call.”

The doctor was mopping his mottled brow. He was far too miserable to reply.

“I fear our hospitality outran our discretion,” ventured Gordon. “The doctor perhaps forgot to mention it.”

Lady Melbourne’s quick gaze overran the scene and lingered on the crosses and the monkish robes with a slow-dawning smile.

Sheridan made a dramatic gesture. “Lo, the first poet of his age in the depths of one of his abandoned debauches!” He pointed to Mrs. Muhl who stood in the background, her wrinkled countenance as brown as a dry toast—“Behold the troop of Paphian damsels, as pictured in the Morning Post! Evasion is no longer possible.”

“I see. And you, Doctor?”

“The doctor,” said Moore, maintaining his gravity, “had just read us his latest tract.”

“I regret we missed it.” She turned to Gordon. “We will not linger. Good night, gentlemen. No,”—as Gordon protested—“our carriage and escort are waiting.”

“My dear Lady Melbourne,” interposed Sheridan, “the entire chapter shall escort you. As abbot, I claim my right,”—and he offered her his arm. Gordon followed with her niece.

Annabel’s hand fluttered on his sleeve. “We heard your toast,” she said. “I did not dream it of you.”

On the threshold a tide of rich light met them. The moon had risen and was lifting above the moor beyond a belt of distant beechwood, bathing the golden flanks of the hills, flooding the long lake with soft yellow luster and turning the gray ruins of the priory to dull silver. Lady Melbourne led the way out on to the mole of the drained moat with a cry of delight: “What a perfect lilac night! It is like Venice. All it lacks is a gondola and music.”

Gordon and Annabel had lingered at the turn of the parapet. He put out his hand and touched the letter she held with his forefinger. “You have not opened it.”

“No. Your footman met us coming in the lodge gate.”

“Read it.”

She looked at him a moment hesitatingly. For a long time she had not been ignorant of her interest in George Gordon. She admired him also, as every woman admires talent and achievement, and the excess of worship which the world gave him fed her pride in the special measure of his regard. She saw something new in his look to-night—something more genuine, yet illusive.

“Read it,” he repeated.

She broke the seal and held the written page to the moonlight. As she read, a soft mellow note arose. It was Hobhouse’s violoncello, playing an aria of Rossini’s—a haunting melody that matched the night. The notes were still throbbing when her eyes lifted.

Gordon had taken a golden guinea from his pocket; he leaned forward and laid it on the letter’s waxen seal. It fitted the impression.

“It was a gift,” he said. “It is the one you gave me that day at the book-shop.”

She felt a sudden tremor of heart—or of nerves.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, thrilled for a brief moment; “and you kept it?”

At that instant a figure approached them across the terrace, doffing his cap awkwardly. It was the under-gardener, bringing a trinket he had found that afternoon among the lily-bulbs.

Gordon looked at the plain gold circlet he handed him. He turned to Annabel with a strange expression as the man disappeared.

“It is my mother’s wedding-ring,” he said in a low voice. “It was lost when I was a child.”

“How very odd,” she commented, “to find it—to-day!”

The music had ceased, and Lady Melbourne and her tonsured attendants were coming toward them.

Annabel’s hand rested on the stone railing and Gordon took it, looking full into her eyes.

“Shall I put it on?” he asked.

She looked from the ring to his face—her cool fingers trembling in his.

“Yes,” she answered, and he slipped it on her finger.

The noise of the departing carriage-wheels had scarce died away when Sheridan entered the library, whither Gordon had preceded him. He was tittering inordinately.

“I’ve been trying to find Cassidy,” he said, “but he’s gone. Went and got his horse while Hobhouse was fiddling. Poor doctor! If he’d only been a parson!”

“Look, look!” cried Gordon. He was pointing to the window.

Sheridan stared. The unwavering moonlight fell on the image of Vesta—no longer marble-white. The ink-well Gordon had hurled through the window had struck full on its brows, and the clear features and raiment were blackened and befouled with a sinister stain!

CHAPTER XIV
WHAT CAME OF THE TREACLE-MOON

“The treacle-moon is over. I am awake and find myself married.”

Gordon read the lines in the diary he held, by the fading daylight. He sat in the primrosed garden of his town house on Piccadilly Terrace, beside a wicker tea-table. The day was at its amber hour. The curtains of the open windows behind him waved lazily in the breeze and the fragrance of hawthorn clung like a caress across the twilight. What he read had been the last entry in the book.

He smiled grimly, remembering the night he had written it. It was at Seaham, the home of his wife’s girlhood, the final day of their stay—the end of that savorless month of sameness and stagnation, of eating fruit and sauntering, playing dull games at cards, yawning, reading old Annual Registers and the daily papers, listening to the monologue that his elderly father-in-law called conversation, and watching the growth of stunted gooseberry bushes—the month in which he had eaten of the bitter fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. To-day he recalled the trenchant features of that visit distinctly: the prim, austere figure of Lady Noël, his wife’s mother, presiding at the table; Sir Ralph opposite, mumbling for the third time, over a little huddle of decanters which could neither interrupt nor fall asleep, the speech he had made at a recent tax-meeting; his own wife with eyes that so seldom warmed to his, but grew keener each day to glance cold disapproval; and Mrs. Clermont, Lady Noël’s companion and confidante, black-gowned, bloodless, with noiseless gliding step and observant gaze—Jane Clermont’s aunt, as he had incidentally learned.

“The treacle-moon is over!” And that satiric comment had been penned almost a year ago!

Gordon moved his shoulders with a quick gesture, as though dismissing an unpleasant reflection, and took from his pocket a little black phial. He measured out a minute quantity of the dark liquid into a glass and poured it full of water. He drank the dull, cloudy mixture at a draft.

“How strange that mind should need this!” he said to himself. “My brain is full of images—rare, beautiful, dreamlike—but they are meaningless, incoherent, unattached. A few drops of this elixir and they coalesce, crystallize, transform themselves—and I have a poem. I have only to write it down. I wrote ‘Lara’ in three evenings, while I was undressing from the opera. It shan’t master me as it has De Quincey, either. Why, all my life I have denied myself even meat. My soul shall not be the slave of any appetite!”

He smiled whimsically as he set down the glass: “What nonsense it is to talk of soul,” he muttered, “when a cloud makes it melancholy, and wine makes it mad!”

He paused, listening intently. A low sound, an infant’s cry, had caught his ear. His eyes grew darker violet. His look changed.

“Ada! Ada!” he said in a whisper.

In his voice was a singular vibrant accent—intense, eager, yet the words had the quality of a sacrament and a consecration.

He rose, thrust the diary into his pocket and went into the house, ascending the stair to a small room at the end of the hall. The door was ajar and a dim light showed within. He listened, then pushed the door wider and entered. A white nursery bed stood in one corner, and Gordon noiselessly placed a chair beside it and sat down, his elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand, looking at the little face against the pillow, the tiny fist lying on the coverlid.

Gazing, his deeply carved lips moulded softly, a sense of the overwhelming miracle of life possessed him. This small fabric was woven of his own flesh. He saw his own curving mouth, his full chin, his brow! Some day those hands would cling to his, those lips would frame the word “father.” What of life’s pitfalls, of its tragedies, awaited this new being he had brought into the world?

He sighed, and as if in answer, the baby sighed too. The sound smote him strangely. Was there some occult sympathy between them? Her birthright was not only of flesh, but of spirit. Had she also share in his isolated heart, his wayward impulses, his passionate pride?

“ADA! MY ONE SWEET DAUGHTER!” p. [103].

At length he took out the diary and opening it on his knee, began to write—lines whose feeling swelled from some great wave of tenderness:

“Ada! my one sweet daughter! If a name

Dearer and purer were, it should be thine.

Whate’er of earth divide us I shall claim

Not tears, but tenderness to answer mine:

Go where I will, to me thou art the same—

A loved regret which I would not resign.

There are but two things in my destiny,—

A world to roam through, and a home with thee.

I can reduce all feelings but this one;

And that I would not;—for at length I see

Such scenes as those wherein my life begun.

The earliest—even the only paths for me—

Had I but sooner learned the crown to shun,

I had been better than I now can be;

The passions which have torn me would have died;

I had not suffered, and thou hadst not sighed.

I feel almost at times as I have felt

In happy childhood; trees, and flowers and brooks

Which do remember me of where I dwelt

Ere my young mind was sacrificed to books,

Come as of yore upon me, and can melt

My heart with recognition of their looks;

Till even at moments I have thought to see

Some living thing to love—but none like thee.

With false ambition what had I to do?

Little with love, and least of all with fame.

And yet they came unsought, and with me grew,

And made me all! which they can make—a name.

Yet this was not the end I did pursue;

Surely I once beheld a nobler aim.

Yet If thou help me find it—even so

Shall I be glad that I have purchased woe!”

The door of the room adjoining opened and a figure dressed in white appeared. He rose and passed through.

“You wished me, Annabel?”

“I do not wish Ada disturbed. As you know, I am starting with her to Seaham to-morrow, and she needs the rest.”

“I was very quiet,” he said almost apologetically, and a little wearily.

Her critical eye had wandered to the book and pencil in his hand. The look was cold—glacially so—and disapproving, as she asked with quiet point:

“My lord, when do you intend to give up your tiresome habit of versifying?”

He stared at her. In all her lack of understanding, she had at least spared him this. Yet this was really what she thought! At heart she despised him for the only thing that to him made life endurable. She took no pride in his poetry, wished him a man like others of her circle—a dull, church-going, speech-reading, tea-drinking, partridge-hunting clod! A flush blurred his vision.

“Surely,” a thin edge of contempt cutting in her words, “you do not intend always to do only this? You are a peer, you have a seat in the Lords. You might be anything you choose.”

“But if I am—what I choose?” he said difficultly.

A chill anger lay behind her constrained manner. Her lips were pressed tight together. During the whole time of their marriage he had never seen her display more feeling than in that brief moment on the terrace at Newstead when he had put his mother’s ring upon her finger. For a long time he had watched for some sign—each day feeling his heart, so savage of vitality, contract and harden under that colorless restraint—till he had come to realize that the untroubled gentleness was only passivity, the calm strength but complacency as cold as the golden guinea he had treasured, that the flower he had chosen for its white fragrance was a sculptured altar-lily. Now her mind seemed jolted from its conventional groove. The fact was that the constant flings of his enemies, which he noted with sovereign contempt, had pierced her deeply, wounding that love of the world’s opinion so big in her. And a venomous review which her mother had brought her that day had mingled its abuse with a strain of pity for her, and pity she could not bear.

“Why do you not choose to live like other men?” she broke out. “There is something so selfish, so unnatural in your engrossed silences, your changeable moods, your disregard of ordinary customs. You believe nothing that other men believe.”

His face had grown weirdly white. The sudden outburst had startled him. He was struggling with resentment.

“Cassidy’s doctrinal tracts, for instance?” The query had a tinge of sarcasm.

She bit her lips. “You have no idea of reverence for anything. I might have guessed it that night at Newstead and how you treated him! You speak your views on religion—views that I hate—openly, anywhere. You write and print them, too, in your verse!”

“You are frank,” he said; “let me be the same. What my brain conceives my hand shall write. If I valued fame, I should flatter received opinions. That I have never done! I cannot and will not give the lie to my doubts, come what may.”

“What right have you to have those doubts?” Her anger was rising full-fledged, and bitter-winged with malice. “Why do you set yourself against all that is best? What do you believe in that is good, I should like to know?”

“I abhor books of religion,” he responded steadily, “and the blasphemous notions of sectaries. I have no belief in their absurd heresies and Thirty-nine Articles. I feel joy in all beautiful and sublime things. But I hate convention and cant and lay-figure virtue, and shall go on hating them to the end of the chapter.”

“To the end of the chapter!” she echoed. “You mean to do nothing more—to think of nothing but scribbling pretty lines on paper and making a mystery of yourself! What is our life to be together? What did you marry me for?”

“Bella!” The word was almost a cry. “I married you for faith, not for creeds! I am as I have always been—I have concealed nothing. I married you for sympathy and understanding! I know I am not like other men—but I tried to make you love and understand me!—I tried! Why did you marry me?”

For an instant the real pain in the appeal seemed to cleave through her icy demeanor and she made an involuntary movement. But as she hesitated, Fletcher knocked at the door:

“Mr. Sheridan, my lord, come to take you to Drury Lane.”

The words congealed the softer feeling. As the valet withdrew, she turned upon her husband.

“Sheridan! and Drury Lane! That is the kind of company you prefer to keep! A doddering old man who falls asleep over his negus in White’s bow-window, coming and going here at all hours, and littering the library with his palsied snuff-taking.”

A doddering old man! It was true. The soul of White’s and Brookes’, the first table wit and vivant of the kingdom, the companion of a royal prince—he, “Sherry,” who all his life had never known ache or pain, not even the gout, who had out-dandied and out-bumpered the youngest of them—had lived beyond his time. The welcome of the gay world had dwindled to a grudging patronage. Gordon had more than once of late come between him and a low sponging-house or the debtors’ prison. Yet at his wife’s tone, a gleam of anger shot into his eyes—anger that made them steely-blue as sword blades.

“Sheridan was my friend,” he said. “My friend from the first, when others snarled. He is old now—old and failing—but he is still my friend. Is a man to pay no regard to loyalty or friendship?”

“He should have regard first to his own reputation. Do you? Even Brummell and Petersham and your choice fops of the Cocoa-Tree tavern and the Drury Lane committee have some thought for the world’s opinion. But you have none. You care nothing for what it thinks of you or of your morality.”

“Morality!” he repeated slowly. “I never heard the word before from anybody who was not a rascal that used it for a purpose!”

“Why will you sit silent,” she continued, “and hear yourself defamed everywhere without a word? Why will you not defend yourself?”

He shrugged his shoulders, the flash of indignation past She had touched the point of least response. The shrug angered her even more than his satiric reply:

“What man can bear refutation?”

“You seem to think it beneath your dignity to deny slander,” she went on. “You always did. I thought it would be different after we were married. But it has grown worse. The papers print more and more horrible things of you, and you do not care—either for yourself or for me!”

He gazed at her with a curious intentness.

“Surely you pay no heed to such irresponsible tales?”

“If they were all! Do you suppose I do not hear what people say besides? They do not spare my ears! Do you think I do not know the stories—what they used to say of your bachelor affairs—with Lady Oxford, and Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster—and Caro Lamb?”

“Is there none more recent?” A bitter smile had appeared, called by the veiled insinuation in her tone.

Another name flew to her tongue, for malicious rumor had credited him with a footlight amour. “Yes—Jane Clermont!”

A frown of incredulity and annoy hung blackly on his brow an instant. Had this baseless gratuitous fling gone beyond the circle of Drury Lane gossipers? Had it even reached his wife’s ears? Aloud he said:

“Really, I can scarcely hold myself responsible for silly chatterers who are determined to Rochefoucauld my motives. I seem to be fast becoming the moral Æsop of the community. I am judged by what I presume Dr. Cassidy would call a dramatic Calvinism—predestined damnation without a sinner’s own fault.”

Her control was gone. She could not trust herself to speak further and turned away. He waited a moment in the doorway, but she did not move, and with an even “good night” he left her.

At the foot of the stair, during Gordon’s painful interview, a black-gowned woman had noiselessly bent over the hall table. A letter, arrived by the post, had been laid there by Fletcher for his master. She lifted it and examined it closely. The address was written in a peculiar, twirly handwriting, on blue-tinted paper that bore in each corner the device of a cockle-shell. She listened, then passed with it into the library.

The room was unlighted, but a spring fire flickered on the hearth. She caught up a paper-knife and crouching by the hearth held its thin blade in the flame. When the metal was warmed, she softened the edges of the seal and with deftness that betrayed long practice, split it off without its breaking, opened the note and read it. Her basilisk eyes lighted with satisfaction—the triumph of a long quest rewarded. Then she warmed the wax again, replaced it, and as it hardened, broke it across as if the letter had been opened in the ordinary manner.

As Mrs. Clermont rose to her feet, a thin, severe figure stood on the threshold. She saw with relief that it was Lady Noël, and handed her the letter with a feline smile.

“Perhaps your ladyship will know if this should be preserved,” she said. “I found it just now on the floor.”

Lady Noël’s eyes glittered at sight of the cockle-shells. She read it hastily by the firelight. Her look was coldly yet triumphantly malignant as she leaned forward.

“Put an outer wrapper on this,” she ordered in an undertone, “seal it, and take it at once to Melbourne House. Give it into William Lamb’s hands—to no one else. Do you understand?”

“Yes, my lady,” the other replied, and left her noiselessly, as Gordon came slowly down the stair.

“I have left your lordship this evening’s Courier,” said Lady Noël, forbiddingly.

“Thank you,” he answered and looked at it carelessly. On its exposed page a pencil had marked an article of considerable length whose title was: “The Poetical Works of a Peer of the Realm, viewed in connection with Christianity and the Obligations of Social Life.”

Its final paragraph was underscored with meaning heaviness:

“We have less remorse in quoting the noble lord,”—he read—“for, by this time, we believe the whole world is inclined to admit that he can pay no compliment so valuable as his censure, nor offer any insult so intolerable as his praise. Crede Gordon is the noble lord’s armorial motto: ‘Trust Gordon’ is the translation in the Red-Book. We cannot but admire the ingenuity with which his lordship has converted the good faith of his ancestors into a sarcasm on his own duplicity.”

A simmer of rage rose in Gordon’s throat. He tore the paper twice across, flung it down, and passed on to the drawing-room. Seeing no one, he rang for the valet.

“Where is Mr. Sheridan?” he demanded.

Fletcher was carrying a wine-glass and seemed surprised at the query.

“He was here five minutes ago, your lordship. Mr. Sheridan looked very bad when I let him in, sir. I was just getting him this brandy.”

“I suppose he tired of waiting,” thought Gordon. “The Clermont has a new part to-night, and Sherry’s bound for Fops’ Alley.”

As he buttoned his great-coat, he heard a cry from the valet, and ran into the drawing-room to find Fletcher bending over the form of the old wit, prostrate on the floor, moveless, speechless, his face swept by a bluish pallor.

“Good God!” cried Gordon. “Help me lift him and fetch a doctor at once!”

With Fletcher’s aid the old man was placed upon a sofa, and Gordon loosed the stiff neckerchief, put a cushion under the recumbent head and chafed the sick man’s hands.

The physician looked grave when he came.

“A paralytic stroke,” he said. “He must be taken home.”

CHAPTER XV
THE PITFALL

It was later evening. Gordon sat in the library, the diary in which he had written those lines to Ada open before him.

Since the scene with Annabel whose dark aftermath had been the illness of his old friend, a deeper sense of pain had oppressed him. His marriage had sprung from an inarticulate divining of the infinite need of his nature for such a spiritual influence as he had imagined she possessed. It had ended in failure. A mood of hopelessness was upon him now as he wrote:

“Man is a battle-ground between angel and devil. Tenderness and roughness—sentiment, sensuality—soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity—all mixed in one compound of inspired clay. Marriage is the hostage he gives to his better nature. What if this hostage conspire with his evil side to betray the citadel?

“Nature made me passionate of temper but with an innate tendency to the love of good in my mainspring of mind. I am an atom jarring between these great discords. Sympathy is the divine lifter—the supreme harmonizer. And shall that evade me forever? Where shall I find it? In the cheap intrigue that absorbs half the life of those around me? Shall I turn to the fairest of those blandishments, and, like the drunkard, forget my penury in the hiccough and happiness of intoxication?”

The thought of the delicate coquetry of Jane Clermont and of the ripe beauty of Lady Caroline Lamb flashed across the page, an insistent vision. He saw the latter’s eyes, eager and inviting, as he had so often seen them at Melbourne House, when he had turned from them to a paler beauty. He thought of a past season when the whirlwind of her infatuation had wound their two names in gossip that had never tired. Love with her would have counted all sacrifice cheap, all obstacles gossamer. Could such a passion yield him what he craved? Was he bound to live pent within the palisade a priest’s ceremony had reared about him? Of what virtue were honor and faith to a bond where love was not?

But this picture faded as he wrote across it the answer to its question:

“No! I will not. I will keep the bond. Yet I and the mother of my child are far apart as the two poles! I am a toy of inborn unbeliefs, linked to unemotional goodness, merciless virtue and ice-girdled piety. I am asked to bow down to arcana which to me are bagatelles. As well believe in Roberts the Prophet, or Breslau the Conjurer if he had lived in the reign of Tiberius! The everlasting why which stares me in the face is an unforgivable thing. Yet to yield—to go the broad, easy way of conventional belief and smug morality—to shackle the doubts I feel! To anchor myself to the frozen molehills and write, like other men, glozed comfortable lines on which friend and foe can batten alike, and with which reviewer and reviewee, rhinoceros and elephant, mammoth and megalonyx can lie quietly together!”

He threw down his pen, and leaned his forehead in his hands.

“Would to God I had nothing better in this soul of mine!” he exclaimed. “The rest of the world can game and kiss and besot themselves in peace. Only I—I—must writhe and struggle unsatisfied!”

“There is a carboy outside, your lordship, who wishes to see you.”

“A carboy!” Gordon raised his head. “What does he want?”

“He says he has a message for your lordship’s own hands. He’s a likely-looking lad.”

“Very well, show him in. Hasn’t Rushton returned from Mr. Sheridan’s yet?” he added.

“Yes, my lord. But Lady Noël sent him out again with a letter for Sir Ralph to his club.”

Gordon heaved a sigh of relief. “Sherry must be better,” he thought. He waited on the threshold till Fletcher ushered in a slim figure in the round coat and buttons of a carman. His chin was muffled in a coarse neckerchief, and a rumpled mass of brown hair showed beneath the edges of the cloth cap whose visor was pulled over his eyes.

“Well, my lad?”

The boy stood still, twisting his fingers in his jacket till the valet had retired. Then suddenly as the door closed, the cap was snatched off, a mass of brown hair dropped curling about the boyish shoulders—the silver-buttoned jacket fell open, revealing a softly rounded throat and delicate slope of breast. Gordon uttered an astonished and bewildered exclamation:

“Caro! What mad masquerade is this?”

She drew back under the pale intensity, the controlled agitation of his face. “Forgive me! forgive me!” Tumult was looking from her eyes, and her shoulders were heaving. “I could not help it! I have tried to forget you during all this past year. I cannot bear to see you only at Melbourne House and at parties and on the street. How pale you always are!” she went on. “Like a statue of marble, and your dark hair such a contrast. I never see you without wanting to cry. If any painter could paint me your face as it is, I would give anything I possess!”

She had touched his hand, but he drew it away sharply, feeling a black sense of entanglement in the touch.

“Lady Caroline! This is unthinkable! To come here in that dress—here, to this house, is sheer madness! I did not imagine you capable of such folly.”

“You think I am weak and selfish,” she pleaded. “You have always thought I did not struggle to withstand my feelings. But indeed, indeed, it is more than human nature can bear! I loved you before you married Bella—loved you better than name, than religion, than any prospects on earth! You must have loved me more if you had never seen her! She has never cared for you as I do.”

He darted a glance at the door. His wife! A rebellious anger rose in him at being thrust into such a predicament.

“You have taken a strange way to show that love.”

“Oh, I could show it other ways!” She was looking at him with tremulous daring. “They used to say that once in the East, to prove to a Greek girl that you loved her, you wounded yourself in the breast. Would such a thing make you believe how I love you?”

At that moment both heard a voice in the hallway.

“Bella!” he said in a whisper.

“Oh, I thought she had gone to Seaham,” she breathed. “You must believe I did not know she was here!” She buttoned the coat over her breast with nervous fingers and put on the cloth cap. The sound had thrown her into a paroxysm of dread.

“Quick, quick!” she urged.

“Not that way. Here, to the garden entrance!” He caught her hand, drew her sharply toward the rear door and opened it.

The retreat was closed. Lady Noël, with sparkling eyes and spare figure leaning on her cane, faced them at the threshold, her gaze leaping with flickering triumph. At the same instant Annabel entered by the other door.

The trap had sprung, the joints were working with precision. Gordon’s first glance at his wife’s face told him there had been betrayal, for the look he saw was not of surprise or wonder, though its indignant lines set themselves deeper in presence of the visible fact. The jaws of this trap had not been set by accident. How had Lady Noël and Annabel guessed? The latter’s eyes were on the carboy’s costume, as if she would convince herself doubly by every evidence of her senses. The grim figure on the threshold pointed one thin forefinger at the shrinking form in the boy’s dress.

“Take off that cap!”

Annabel took a quick step forward, as Lady Caroline snatched off the covering to show a face flaming with defiance. “Caro!” she exclaimed—“Caro!”

As she looked from one to the other, contempt rose in a frigid wave over her features and she drew herself up to her full height and stood stonily erect.

Lady Noël laughed with an echoing amusement, as Lady Caroline burst out in a torrent:

“You can hate and despise me if you want to, Bella. It can make no difference to me. Why did you come between us in the first place? You never loved him, at least. You had nothing to give him but that horrible virtuous indifference of yours—nothing! nothing! You have nothing to give him now. You have made his life wretched with your perfectness and your conventions! Everybody knows that!”

Annabel’s look swept her with its sharp edge of scorn; then flashed on Gordon, who stood composed, motionless, in a grip of repression.

“Is it not enough for you to have made me the butt of your daily caprice, your shameless atheism?”—she drove the words at her husband—“for all London to gossip of your social ‘conquests’ and your dissolute affairs? Is this not enough—that you offer me the final dishonor of such planned meetings, under this roof?”

“It was not his fault!” cried Lady Caroline. “Bella! I will tell you the truth!”

Gordon put out his hand with a gesture of protest as Lady Noël laughed again, musically, maliciously.

A knock at the door silenced all voices. It heralded Fletcher, whose eyes, habitually discreet, seemed to see no further than his master.

“Mr. Somers is outside, sir, with the Melbourne coach, to wait for Lady Caroline Lamb.”

Lady Caroline’s blank, terror-struck eyes turned to Gordon, and she began to tremble. She ran and pulled aside the portière from the window. She shrank back with a gasping cry, for she recognized the coach drawn up at the curb, whose lighted lanterns, reflected from fawn-covered panels emblazoned with the Melbourne arms, lit plainly the figure of William Lamb’s confidential factotum waiting by its step. Her husband had known she was coming there! He had sent Somers instead of the coachman—he even knew of the carboy’s dress!

A slow change passed over her face. Fear and dread had shown there an instant pallidly—dread of the malignant fury she knew lay couched beneath the cold exterior of her husband; now these were swallowed up in a look more burning, more intense, more terrible—a look of sudden, savage certainty. She turned this new countenance upon Gordon.

“So!” she said in a stifled voice. “You sent my letter to my husband! You did not count on a scene with Bella—but for me who have bored you, you took this cruel way to end it all! Well, you have succeeded. Now I know Madame de Staël was right when she called you ‘demon.’ You are without a heart. How I have loved you—and now I hate you. I hate you!”

He made no reply. Her letter? As she spoke he had had a vision of Mrs. Clermont’s noiseless movements and thin secret mouth, and suspicion clogged his tongue.

Lady Caroline looked at him an instant with a shudder as she passed out. “I shall always hate you,” she said with vengeful emphasis. They heard the outer door close heavily behind her and the dulled sound of wheels.

As Gordon turned again to meet his wife’s flinty gaze, the footman appeared.

“Sir Ralph wished me to say he would answer at once, your ladyship,” he said to Lady Noël.

“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.

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.

“Matter is eternal,” he reflected, “always changing, but reproduced and eternal. May not mind be also? Is its inner spark celestial? Or, like the cells that produce it, is it a creature of the mold, doomed to extinction with the brain, sinking as the candle-flame perishes when the wick falls? I remember when I viewed the planets through Herschel’s telescope and saw all at once that they were worlds. What has eternity to do with the congregated cosmic dust we call mankind? What are our little passions and resentments before the least of those stars?”

His gaze and his thought fell from the sky.

Had he any right to the stubborn pride which would not bemean itself by self-defense? Would his own silence not abet the calculating hatred of Lady Noël’s and add to that monstrous estrangement that was steadily carrying his soul further and further from the soul of Annabel? The question of whether his wife believed or disbelieved aside, was he justified in such a course now? A softer feeling took possession of him. Appearances had been against him. To speak could make the matter no worse for Lady Caroline. He would go to Annabel and assure her of the truth. Perhaps even out of such a catastrophe as to-night’s might arise a truer and a nearer confidence.

He threw off his great-coat in the empty hall and ascended the stair. The door of the chamber where sat the little white bed was open. He went in. The lamp still shed its radiance on the pillow, but the tiny fragrant mould where a baby head had lain, now held only a note, bearing Gordon’s name.

With a puzzled look he tore it open.

A white anguish spread over his features. A cry broke from his lips. He flung wide the door of his wife’s room—it was empty. He ran down the stair, where the footman met him, turning a wondering face to his question.

“My lady went out with Lady Noël, my lord,” Rushton answered, “and took the baby with her. Sir Ralph came for them a half-hour ago. Here is a letter he left for your lordship.”

Gordon took it mechanically and read the few curt lines that burned into his sight like points of pain. It was the end, then! Annabel had gone, not to return—gone with only a hastily pencilled note for farewell, laid with refinement of cruelty on his baby’s pillow! That, and these blunt, peremptory lines of her father’s menace!

He found himself at length in the library, feeling his way blindly to his chair. What to do? Could there be reconciliation? Could she, with her cold prudent resolve, her fixed principles squared mathematically, her starched life which counted even forgiveness a Christ-like sin, retract a step of such moment? He told himself it was not to be hoped for; her pride would make her decision irrevocable.

What then? To pursue? Invoke the law to restore his child? Plunge into publicity to set right his own name? When had he cared for reputation in the world’s eyes! Dare her father’s threat? Drag his wife’s name and his own in the dust and infamy of the courts, and bare the festering sore of his heart to the world? Dare it, and shut the gate of society on another woman, too, whose punishment already would be more than she could bear? Most of all, cloud his daughter’s young years with a lasting stain?

He rose and paced the floor, his step halting, fighting out the struggle. Once he sat down and wrote, scarce seeing the lines his pen traced—and rose and paced the floor again. He took the black phial from its drawer, but put it back. There was something in him which in this fierce crisis disdained to blunt the pain.

After a while he left the library and went slowly up the stair to the little carved white bed. He sank into a chair and hid his face in his folded arms. The agony of childlessness came down on him. Home! A year ago how fondly he had desired it! Yet it had become the winding-sheet of his heart!

Mrs. Clermont saw him sitting there as she passed the door. By Lady Noël’s command, she had waited to pack some smaller articles, and was now ready for departure.

On the lower floor she entered the library for a last survey. Some loose sheets of paper were scattered on the desk, the ink scarce yet dry on them. Laying them together she slowly deciphered the tense, uneven handwriting. The lines had been dragged from the deeps of Gordon’s despairing, from his pent grief that found its natural vent in verse. Was it what it seemed—his heart’s final word to Annabel? Or rather was it a last yearning call to the woman he had dreamed her to be—an adieu to his lost ideal of her?

Mrs. Clermont’s eyes gloated. Two spots of dull vermilion grew in her sallow cheeks. Her hands shook with the delight of an inspiration. Bending over the table she muttered the written lines:

“Fare thee well! and if forever,

Still forever, fare thee well—”

How carefully she had gathered them all along—these garish strands of scandal which had come to her hands! How deftly her fingers had cast them here and there in the woof of dislike the great loom of London had been weaving! This was a thread of bright red for her to use. What if the poem were printed—now, now, with the first rumor of the separation? She could fancy what would be the world’s verdict on such an address, penned in the first hour of his bereavement, and offered to the public ostensibly by his own hand. Publicity would be just the note to make the whole strain ring false. It would recoil upon him in open disapproval and contempt! It would rouse new voices in the clarion-tongued clamor of abuse that her jubilant ear had heard swelling through the past year—forge a new link in the chain that would bind him to disgrace, the disgrace she believed he had had share in heaping upon her niece!

The mainspring of the woman’s hatred leaped. The world had coupled their names long ago, when the girl had first stolen away from the dreary Godwin house to the glamour and allurements of Drury Lane! And the world no doubt told the truth. If she could help to ruin him, line for line, name and fame—as he had ruined Jane Clermont!

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.

Could the great world credit these monstrous calumnies? Might the reiterate malice of the public prints infect his nearer acquaintances—those at whose tables he had sat almost weekly, the cliques of the clubs, the gay set at Almack’s, the circle of Melbourne House?

He drew a sharp breath, for he thought of William Lamb, heir to the Melbourne title, from whom he had daily expected a cartel. He would leave no path of revenge untrod; nor would Lady Caroline. Could their disassociate hatred envenom even the few for whose opinion he cared?

The Courier had reserved its bitterest attack. On the second day it published the stanzas entitled “Fare Thee Well,” signed by Gordon’s name. He saw them with a strange sensation, his mind grasping for the cords he felt enmeshing him, his eyes fully opened now to the devilish ingenuity of his persecution.

But he himself stood appalled at the deadly effect of this attack. Innuendo was thrown aside; invective took its place. Paragraph, pamphlet and caricature held the lines up to odium. The hypocrisy of a profligate! A cheap insincere appeal to mawkish sympathy! A tasteless vulgar parade of a poseur strumming his heartstrings on the highway!

It came to Gordon with a start that during the past forty-eight hours he had forgotten his mail. He rang the bell and asked for his letters.

“There are none, my lord.”

No letters? And daily for a year his table had been deluged with tinted and perfumed billets crested and sealed with signets of great houses. No letters!

“Who has called to-day?”

Fletcher’s honest eyes could scarcely meet his master’s. “Mr. Hobhouse called this morning, and Mr. Dallas this afternoon.”

“That is all?”

“Yes, your lordship.”

Gordon went to the fireplace and stared down dazedly into the embers. He had been a santon; now he was an Ishmaelite, a mark for the thrust of every scurrillous poetaster who wielded a pen—a chartered Blue-Beard—another Mirabeau whom the feudalists discovered to be a monster! The world had learned with pleasure that he was a wretch. Tom Moore was in Ireland, Sheridan dead. Of all he knew, only two rallied to his support: Hobhouse, the sturdy, undemonstrative, likable companion of his early travels, and—Dallas!

Gordon laughed bitterly. He had been London’s favorite. Now, without justice or reason, it covered him with obloquy and went by on the other side.

There had followed days and nights of mental agony, of inner crying-out for reprisal—hours of fierce longing for his child, when he had sought relief in walking unfrequented streets from dark to dawn, in desultory composition, more often in the black bottle that lay in the library drawer. Meager news had reached his sister, and a brave, true message from her was the only cooling dew that fell into his fiery Sahara of suffering. A packet left by a messenger roused him to a white fury. It was from Sir Samuel Romilly, the solicitor under his retainer. Sir Samuel had reversed his allegiance. His curt note inclosed a draft of separation proposed by Sir Ralph Milbanke, and though couched in judicial phrases, voiced a threat unmistakable.

Almost a round of the clock Gordon sat with this paper before him, his meals untasted. His wife at that moment was with Ada—his child and hers!—at her father’s house in Seaham. She had read the attacks—knew their falseness—knew and would not deny. Now he knew why. What she wanted was written in that document: freedom and her daughter. She would engulf him in calumny only so the world would justify her in her self-righteous desertion. And lest he put it to the test, lest he refuse to be condemned unheard and demand the arbitrament of an open though prejudiced tribunal, she threatened him with what further veiled accusations he could not imagine. Good God! Was there anything more to accuse him of? Better any appeal to publicity now than this step which shut him from Ada!

Suppose he made this appeal. There was no justice in public opinion. In his case, it was already poisoned. Already it dubbed him a Nero, a Caligula, a Richard Third! Add to the present outcry new and more terrible charges—the formless insinuations of Sir Ralph—and what might not its verdict be? It would justify his wife, applaud the act which robbed him of his child! And these dark indictments, though false, would be no less an evil legacy for that daughter whom he loved with every fiber of his being.

To consent to lose Ada forever—or to risk both her loss and her blight. To battle, and jeopardize her life’s happiness perhaps—or to yield and give tacit admission to the worst the world said of him, her father!

Night fell. At last he stirred and his square shoulders set. “To wait,” he said—“to wait and be patient. That is all that is left. Whatever I must do, the world shall not see me cringe. The celebrity I have wrung from it has been in the teeth of all opinions and prejudices. I will show no white feather now!”

He laid the document aside, rose and looked in the glass. His face was haggard, worn; there were listless lines under his eyes. He summoned Fletcher and dressed with all his old scrupulousness—such a costume as he had worn the afternoon he had waked to fame. With a thought, perhaps, of that day, he drew a carnation through his buttonhole. Then he left the house and turned his steps toward Drury Lane.

The fog was gone, the air lay warm and pleasant, and a waxing moon shamed the street lamps. He passed down St. James Street, and came opposite White’s Club. He had no thought of entering. Lord Petersham descended the steps as he approached, his dress exquisite, his walking-stick held daintily between thumb and forefinger like a pinch of snuff. The fop’s eyes met Gordon’s in a blank stare.

A group of faces showed in the bow-window and for an instant Gordon hesitated, the old perverse spirit tempting him to enter, but he resisted it.

The first act was on when he reached Drury Lane Theater, and the lobby was empty save for the usual loungers and lackeys. The doors of the pit were open and he stood behind the rustling colors of Fops’ Alley. He scanned the house curiously, himself unobserved, noting many a familiar face in the boxes.

Night after night the pit had roused to the veteran actor Kean. Night after night, Fops’ Alley had furnished its quota of applause for a far smaller part, played with grace and sprightliness—by Jane Clermont, the favorite of the greenroom. Her first entrance formed a finish to the act now drawing to a close. To Gordon’s overwrought senses to-night there seemed some strange tenseness in the air. Here and there heads drew together whispering. The boxes were too quiet.

As the final tableau arranged itself, and Jane advanced slowly from the wings, there was none of the usual signs of approval. Instead a disturbed shuffle made itself heard. She began her lines smiling. An ugly murmur overran the pit, and she faltered.

Instantly a man’s form leaned over the edge of a box and hissed. The watcher, staring from the shadow of the lobby, recognized him with a quick stab of significance—it was William Lamb. The action seemed a concerted signal. Some one laughed. An undulate hiss swept over the house like a nest of serpents. Even some of the boxes swelled its volume.

Jane shrank, looking frightenedly about her, bewildered, her hands clutching her gown; for the pit was on its legs now, and epithets were hurled at the stage. “Crede Gordon!” came the derisive shout—a cry taken up with groans and catcalls—and a walking-stick clattered across the footlights. The manager rushed upon the stage and the heavy curtain began to descend.

“The baggage!” said a voice near Gordon with a coarse laugh. “It’s the one they say he had in his house when his wife left him. Serves her right!”

Gordon’s breath caught in his throat. So this had been William Lamb’s way! Not an appeal to the court of ten paces—an assassin in the dark with a bloodless weapon to slay him in the world’s esteem!

He heard the din rising from the whole house, as he crossed the lobby and strode down the passageway leading to the greenroom.

CHAPTER XVIII
GORDON STANDS AT BAY

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.

Jane’s glance had followed his and she saw the figure at the door for the first time, as Gordon spoke:

“Cowards!” he said. “Cowards!”—a shrivelling rage was making his speech thick. “A thousand against one! It is I they hate, and they vent their hatred of me upon a woman! Such is the chivalry of this puddle of water-worms they call London!”

A sudden admiration swept the girl. “You dare them, too! You are not afraid!” She turned on the manager passionately. “I wouldn’t play for them again for all London! I despise you all, in front of the curtain and behind it. Liars—all liars! Come, Bysshe, I will go with you!”

Shelley held out his hand to Gordon with an open, friendly, “Good-by, my lord.”

“AYE, GO!” HE FOAMED. “THE QUICKER THE BETTER!” p. [136].

Gordon had been looking at him steadily—looking, but with a strange irrelevance, seeing really himself, standing in his own room at a long-ago dawn, a goblet of brandy in his hand, and in his heart a determination rising anew—a wish to be like the youth whose clasp now met his own, with a like serenity and purpose, a soul to which fame meant least, truth and right all! In that year of dazzle before his marriage he had quenched that determination. He had worshiped the Great Beast. He had lived the world’s life and played its games and accepted its awards. Now he suffered its punishments!

Malicious faces were peering in at the street entrance. The pit had overflowed into the lobby, the lobby into the street, and the numbers swelled from the hordes of the pave whose jargon banter flew back and forth. The jeering voices came plainly down the brick passageway.

“I will see you to your carriage,” said Gordon, and went out with them.

They passed to the vehicle—from which Mary Shelley’s frightened face looked out—through a vociferous human lane, that groaned and whistled in gusto.

“There’s the jade; an’ ’er lordship with ’er, too!”

“Which is ’im?”

“W’y, ’im with the leg.”

At the gibe which followed Gordon smiled mirthlessly. This blind rabble, egged on by hatred that utilized for its ends the crass dislike of the scum for the refined—what was it to him? He knew its masters!

As Jane took her seat the jeers redoubled. Across the heads between him and the surging entrance of the theater he saw the sneering, heavy-lidded face of William Lamb. The sight roused the truculent demon of stubbornness in him. With a flare of unrecking impertinence, and a racing recollection of a first dinner at Melbourne House, when he had given Lady Caroline Lamb such a blossom from his coat, Gordon drew the carnation from his buttonhole and handed it to Jane Clermont.

The crowd had looked to see him enter with the others; now as the vehicle rolled away, leaving him standing alone, the clamor, sharpened by his nonchalant act and by the smile which they could not translate, rose more derisive, more boldly mixed with insult. They were overcoming that dull inborn fear of the clod for the noble. There was menace in what they said, a foreshadowing of peril that might have fallen but for a diversion.

A coach, adroitly handled, whirled up to the kerbstone, and a man leaped to the pavement. Gordon felt a hand touch his arm.

“The carriage, my lord,” said Fletcher.

The valet, guessing better than his master, had followed him. A sense of the dog-like fidelity of the old servitor smote Gordon and softened the bitter smile on his lips. Only an instant he hesitated before he entered the carriage, and in that instant a hand grasped at the horses’ heads, but the coachman’s whip fell and the plunging animals made an aisle through which the vehicle, hissed and hooted, rolled in safety.

As it drew away, a young man, dark and oriental looking, came through the crowd, staring wonderingly at the excitement. He was one who more than once on that spot had watched Gordon’s approaching carriage with black envy and jealousy—the same who had stood with Jane Clermont on the night Dr. Cassidy’s suspicious gaze had made him draw closer into the shadow of the doorway. At the names the crowd coupled, he started, paled and hurried into the stage-entrance.

In an instant he emerged, breathing hard, heard the jeers of the crowd directed at the moving carriage, and, his fingers clenching, rushed into the street and gazed after it. It turned into Long Acre, going toward Piccadilly. He plunged into the network of side streets opposite and hastened rapidly in the direction it had taken.

It was not far to the house on Piccadilly Terrace, and he outstripped the coach. From the shadow he saw it stop, saw the man it carried dismount—alone.

“Where is she?” he muttered. “He took her from the theater—damn him! Where has he left her?”

The same bitter smile with which he had faced the clamor outside the theater was on Gordon’s white face as he entered the house. In the hall he opened a single note of invitation, read it and laughed.

Rushton met him. “Mr. Dallas is in the library, your lordship.”

Gordon strode into the room. Dallas saw that though he was smiling oddly, his face was deeply lined, and his eyes were glittering like those of a man with a fever.

“George,” cried Dallas, “I was bound to see you! Why,—you are ill!”

“Not I, Dallas. I have been to Drury Lane to-night. All society was there, divorced and divorceable, intrigants and Babylonians of quality. Lady Holland, like a hippopotamus in the face, and William Lamb with the very manner of the ursine sloth!”

There was genuine anxiety in Dallas’ tone. “Come with me to Stratford for a few days,” he besought. “Come now—to-night!”