The castaway

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:

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.”

“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.”