The castaway

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:

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!”