The castaway

Bean Brummell, pattern of the dandies, stood in Almack’s Assembly Rooms, bowing right and left with the languid elegance of his station. The night before, in play at the Argyle, he had lost twenty thousand pounds at macao, but what mattered that to the czar of fashion, who had introduced starch into neck-cloths and had his top-boots polished with champagne, whose very fob-design was a thing of more moment in Brookes’ Club than the fall of Bonaparte, and whose loss even of the regent’s favor had not been able to affect his reign. He was a still fool that ran deep. He had been in debt ever since a prince’s whim had given him a cornetcy in the Tenth Hussars; the episode now meant to him only another ruined Jew, and a fresh flight for his Kashmerian butterfly career.

He took snuff with nonchalant grace from a buhl snuff-box,—he had one for each day in the year,—and touched his rouged lips with a lace handkerchief of royal rose-point. His prestige had never been higher, nor his insolence more accurately applied than on this evening of the last of the Dandy Balls.

The club tables, where ordinarily were grouped players at whist and hazard, had vanished; brackets holding glass candelabra were distributed along the walls, and the pink shaded glow of myriads of wax tapers was reflected from mirrors set crosswise in every angle and surrounded by masses of flowers. The great tapestried ball-room,—a hundred feet in length,—in which Madame Catalani had given her famous concerts and Kean his readings from Shakespeare, was decorated with gilt columns, pilasters, and classic medallions with candles in cut-glass lusters. A string orchestra played behind a screen of palms and a miniature stage had been built across the lower end of the room.

Here were gathered the oligarchs of fashion and the tyrants of ton. The dandies—Pierrepont, Alvanley, Petersham, the fop lieutenants and poodle-loving worshipers of Brummell—with gold buckles glittering in their starched stocks, and brave in tight German trousers and jewelled eye-glasses, preened and ogled among soberer wearers of greater names and ladies of title, whose glistening shoulders and bare arms flashed whitely through the shifting stir of bright colors.

On the broad stair, under the chandeliers of crystal and silver, in the ball-room,—wherever the groups and the gossip moved that evening, one name was on every tongue. The series of tableaux rehearsed under direction of Lady Heathcote, and the new quadrille introduced from Paris by Lady Jersey, the features of the evening, were less speculated upon than was George Gordon. The hissing at Drury Lane had several new versions, and there were more sensational stories afloat. It was said he had entered Brookes’ Club the day before, where no one had spoken to him; that the Horse Guards had had to be sent for to prevent his being mobbed in Palace Yard as he attempted to enter the House of Lords. It was even confidently asserted that a motion was to be introduced in Parliament to suspend him from his privileges as a peer.

Lady Jersey, stately in black velvet and creamy lace, met John Hobhouse on the stair.

“Have you seen him?” she asked anxiously.

“No, but I have called every day. It was courageous of you to send him the invitation for to-night. No other patroness would have dared.”

“I only wish he would come!” she flashed imperiously. “One would think we were a lot of New England witch-hunters! There is nothing more ridiculous than society in one of its seven-year fits of morality. Scandals are around us every day, but we pay no heed till the spasm of outraged virtue takes us. Then we pick out some one by mere caprice, hiss him, cut him—make him a whipping-boy to be lashed from our doors. When we are satisfied, we give our drastic virtue chloroform and put it to sleep for another seven years!”

Hobhouse smiled grimly at the gleam in her hazel eyes as she passed on to the lower room where the quadrille was to have its final rehearsal. Lady Jersey’s was a despotic rule. She was as famous for her diplomacy as for her Sunday parties. More than one debate had been postponed in Parliament to avoid a conflict with one of her dinners. Gordon, he reflected, could have no more powerful ally.

He ascended to the ball-room, where the tableaux were oozing patiently on with transient gushes of approbation: “Solomon and the Queen of Sheba,” with Lady Heathcote as the queen; “Tamerlane the Great,” posed by a giant officer of the foot-guards in a suit of chain-mail,—and subjects drawn from heathen mythology.

The last number, a monologue, was unnamed, but word had gone forth that the performer was to be Lady Caroline Lamb.

Slowly the curtain was drawn aside and a breath of applause stirred as Lady Caroline was revealed, in complete Greek costume, with short blue skirt and round jacket, its bodice cut square and low and its sleeves white from elbow to wrist. In that congress of beauties, decked in the stilted conventions of Mayfair modistes, the attire had a touch of the barbaric which suited its wearer’s type—a touch accentuated by the jade beads about her throat and the dagger thrust through her girdle.

The fiddles of the orchestra had begun to play, as prelude, the music of the Greek love-song Gordon had written, long ago made popular in London drawing-rooms, and “Maid-of-Athens!” was echoed here and there from the floor.

The figure on the stage swept a slow glance about her, her cheeks dark and red from some under-excitement. She waved her hand, and from the wings came a procession of tiny pages dressed as imps, all in red.

A murmur of wonder broke from the crowd. Lady Caroline’s vagaries were well-known and her wayward devisings were never without sensation.

“What foolery of Caro’s can this be?” queried Brummell to Petersham as the first page set up a tripod and the second placed upon it a huge metal salver.

The whole room was rustling, for it was clear, from the open surprise of the committee, that this was a feature not on the program. Those in the rear even stood on chairs while the scarlet-hued imps grouped about the tripod in a half-circle open toward the audience.

Lady Caroline clapped her hands and a last page entered dressed in red and black as Mephistopheles, carrying aloft on a wand what looked like a gigantic doll. The wand he fitted into a socket in the salver, and the dangling figure that swung from it, turning slowly, revealed a grotesque image of George Gordon.

The audience gazed at the effigy with its clever burlesque of each well-known detail,—the open rolling collar, the short brown curls pasted on the mask, the carnation in its buttonhole—startled at the effrontery of the idea. It was Brummell who gave the signal by an enthusiastic Brava!

Then the assemblage broke into applause and laughter that ran like a mounting wave across the flash and glitter of the ball-room, thundering down the refrain of the orchestra.

The applause stilled as Lady Caroline raised her hand, and recited, in a voice that penetrated to the furthermost corner:

She had spoken this doggerel with elaborate gestures toward the absurd manikin, her eyes gleaming at the applause that greeted each stanza. Unsheathing the dagger at her girdle, she waved it with a look of languishing that made new laughter.

John Hobhouse was staring indignantly, unable to control his anger. A note of triumph, more trenchant and remorseless than her raillery, grew into Lady Caroline’s tone:

At the word “burn,” the speaker seized a candle from a sconce and touched it to the figure, which blazed brightly up. The imp-pages grasped hands and began to run round and round the group. At the weird sight a tumult of applause went up from the whole multitude, which clapped and stamped and brava’d itself hoarse.

Suddenly a strange thing happened—unexpected, anomalous, uncanny. The applause hushed as though a wet blanket had been thrown over it. Faces forsook the stage. The pages ceased their circling. Women drew sharp tremulous breaths and men turned eagerly in their places to see a man advancing into the assembly with halting step and with a face pale yet brilliant, like an alabaster vase lighted from within.

Some subtle magnetism had always hung about George Gordon, that had made him the center of any crowd. Now, in the tension, this was enormously increased. His sharply chiselled, patrician features seemed to thrill and dilate, and his eyes sparkled till they could scarce be looked at. A hundred in that room he had called by name; scores he had dined and gamed with. His look, ruthless, yet even, seemed to single out and hold each one of these speechless and staring, deaf to Brummell’s sneer through the quiet.

Speech came from Gordon’s lips, controlled, yet vital with subterraneous passion—words that none of that shaken audience could afterward recall save in part—hot like lava, writhing, pitiless, falling among them like a flaying lash of whip-cords:

“Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! I have heard hyenas and jackals in the ruins of Asia, Albanian wolves and angry Mussulmans! Theirs is sweet music beside the purr of England’s scandal-mongers. I have hated your cant, despised your mediocrity and scoffed at your convention, and now, lacking the dagger and the bowl,—when deliberate desolation is piled upon me, when I stand alone on my hearth with my household gods shivered around me,—you gather your pomp and rabblement of society to bait me!”

There was a stir at the door. Lady Jersey had entered, and John Hobhouse sprang to her side. She saw the blazing puppet and divined instantly the cruel farce that had been enacted. Her indignation leaped, but he caught her arm.

“No, no,” he said, “it is too late.”

The stinging sentences went on:

“So have you dealt with others, those whose names will be rung in England when your forgotten clay has mixed with its earth! Let them be gently born and gently minded as they may—as gentle as Sheridan, whom a year ago you toasted. He grew old and you covered him with the ignominy of a profligate, abandoned him to friendless poverty and left him to die like a wretched beggar, while bailiffs squabbled over his corpse! What mattered to him the crocodile tears when you laid him yesterday in Westminster Abbey? What cared he for your four noble pall-bearers—a duke, a pair of earls and a Lord Bishop of London? Did it lighten his last misery that you followed him there—two royal highnesses, marquises, viscounts, a lord mayor and a regiment of right-honorables? Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

“So you dealt with Shelley—the youth whose songs you would not hear! You hounded him, expelled him from his university, robbed him of his father and his peace, and drove him like a moral leper from among you! You write no pamphlets in verse—nor read them if a canon frowns! You sit in your pews on Sunday and thank Fate that you are not as Percy Bysshe Shelley, the outcast! God! He sits so near that Heaven your priests prate of that he hears the seraphs sing!

“And do you think now to break me on your paltry wheel? You made me, without my search, a species of pagod. In the caprice of your pleasure, you throw down the idol from its pedestal. But it is not shattered; I have neither loved nor feared you! Henceforth I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you. Attribute to me every phase of your vileness! Charge me with profligacy and madness! Make of my career only a washed fragment in the hartshorn of your dislike! Drive your red-hot plowshares, but they shall not be for me! May my bones never rest in an English grave, nor my body feed its worms!”

The livid sentences fell quivering, heavy with virile emphasis, like the defiance of some scorned augur, invoking the Furies in the midnight of Rome.

Hardly a breath or movement had come from those who heard. They seemed struck with stupor at the spectacle of this fiery drama of feeling. Lady Caroline was still standing, the center of the group of imp-pages, and above her hovered a slate-colored cloud, the smoke from the effigy crumbling into shapeless ashes. Her gaze was on the speaker; her teeth clenched; the mockery of her face merged into something apprehensive and terror-smitten.

In the same strained silence, looking neither to right nor left, Gordon passed to the entrance. Hobhouse met him half-way and turned with him to Lady Jersey. Gordon bent and kissed her hand, and as he went slowly down the stair, Lady Jersey’s eyes filled with tears.

The spell was broken by a cry from the stage and Lady Heathcote’s scream. Lady Caroline had swayed and fallen. The blade of the dagger which she still held had slipped against her breast as she fell, and blood followed the slight cut. The crowd surged forward in excitement and relaxation, while waves of lively orchestral music rolled over the confusion, through which the crumpled figure was carried to a dressing-room.

Only those near-by saw the dagger cut, but almost before Gordon had emerged into the night a strange rumor was running through the assembly. It grew in volume through the after-quadrille and reached the street.

“Caroline Lamb has tried to stab herself,” the whisper said.