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.”