The castaway

“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?

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:

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:

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.”