The castaway

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 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.