CHAPTER VIIIA SAVAGE SPUR

John Murray,anaxof publishers, sat that evening in his shop in Fleet Street. He was in excellent humor, having dined both wisely and well. His hair was sparse above a smooth-shaven, oval face, in which lurked good-humor and the wit which brought to his drawing-room the most brilliant men of literary London, as his genius as a publisher had given him the patronage of the greatest peers of the kingdom, and even of the prince regent. His black coat was of the plainest broadcloth and his neck-cloth of the finest linen. Dallas sat opposite, his scholarly face keen and animated. The frayed waistcoat was no longer in evidence, and the worn hat had given place to a new broad brim.

“Yes,” said the man of books, “we shall formally publish to-morrow. I wrote his lordship, asking him to come up to town, to urge him to eliminate several of the stanzas in case we reprint soon. They will only make him more enemies. He has enough now,” he added ruefully.

“You still think as well of it?”

The publisher pushed back his glasses with enthusiasm. “It is splendid—unique.” He pulled out a desk-drawer and took therefrom a printed volume, poising it proudly, as a father dandles his first-born, and, turningits pages, with lifted forefinger and rolling voice read:

“Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth,And long accustomed bondage uncreate?Not such thy sons who whilom did await,The hopeless warriors of the willing doom,In bleak Thermopylæ’s sepulchral strait—Oh! who that gallant spirit shall resume,Leap from Eurotas’ banks, and call thee from the tomb?Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields;There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain air;Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds,Still in his beam Mendeli’s marbles glare;Art, glory, freedom fail, but Nature still is fair.Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye notWho would be free themselves must strike the blow?By their right arms the conquest must be wrought.Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No!True, they may lay your proud despoiler low,But not for you will freedom’s altars flame.Shades of the Helots! triumph o’er your foe!Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still the same;Thy glorious day is o’er, but not thine years of shame.”

“Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!

Immortal, though no more; though fallen, great!

Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth,

And long accustomed bondage uncreate?

Not such thy sons who whilom did await,

The hopeless warriors of the willing doom,

In bleak Thermopylæ’s sepulchral strait—

Oh! who that gallant spirit shall resume,

Leap from Eurotas’ banks, and call thee from the tomb?

Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields;There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain air;Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds,Still in his beam Mendeli’s marbles glare;Art, glory, freedom fail, but Nature still is fair.

Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;

Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields,

Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,

And still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields;

There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,

The freeborn wanderer of thy mountain air;

Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds,

Still in his beam Mendeli’s marbles glare;

Art, glory, freedom fail, but Nature still is fair.

Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye notWho would be free themselves must strike the blow?By their right arms the conquest must be wrought.Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No!True, they may lay your proud despoiler low,But not for you will freedom’s altars flame.Shades of the Helots! triumph o’er your foe!Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still the same;Thy glorious day is o’er, but not thine years of shame.”

Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not

Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?

By their right arms the conquest must be wrought.

Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye? No!

True, they may lay your proud despoiler low,

But not for you will freedom’s altars flame.

Shades of the Helots! triumph o’er your foe!

Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still the same;

Thy glorious day is o’er, but not thine years of shame.”

He broke off abruptly. “The pamphleteers have been busy since he landed,” he admitted, a trace of shrewdness edging his tone, “but the abuse seems to have dulled now. I have been waiting for that to issue.”

“His lordship, sir,” announced a clerk, and the proprietor sprang to his feet to greet his visitor.

Gordon’s eyes lighted with pleasure as they fell on Dallas, noting the change the few months of relief from the galling pressure of poverty had wrought in the features no less than the attire. “Are the types ready?” he asked the publisher.

“Yes, my lord. We distribute to-morrow. I have marked a few stanzas, however, that I hesitate to include in a further edition. Here they are. You will guess my reason.”

The other looked, his eyes reading, but his mind thinking further than the page.

“London! Right well thou know’st the hour of prayer;Then thy spruce citizen, washed artisanAnd smug apprentice gulp their weekly air.”

“London! Right well thou know’st the hour of prayer;

Then thy spruce citizen, washed artisan

And smug apprentice gulp their weekly air.”

The lines were bitter indeed! They had been written when he was still smarting under the lash of his earlier critics, in the first months of his journeyings, before the great wind of travel had swept his mind clear and sweet for the latter harmonies of his poesy. In them lay the hurt sneer of a personal resentment—the resentment that had been in his soul when he sailed from England; that had sprung alive again on his return, when he learned that his enemies had employed his absence to bespatter his name with lying tales.

Yet that was past. He had cast it behind him. And should he carry the old spirit into this better and nobler work, to deflect his message from its significance into cheaper channels of abuse? His thought recurred to the youth in the bare room of the Fleet. Even there, in a debtors’ prison, Shelley had forgot his own plight, and sunk individual resentment in desire for widerjustice! Should he be less big in tolerance than that youth? So he asked himself, as the publisher casually fluttered the leaves of an uncut review which the clerk had laid on his desk.

All at once John Murray’s eyes stopped, fixed on a page. He made an exclamation of irritation and chagrin, and pushed it out toward Gordon. It was a fresh copy of theScourge, and the leader Gordon read, while the publisher paced the floor with nervously angry strides, was the one in which had been steeped the anonymous venom of William Godwin the bookseller—a page whose caption was his own name:

“It may be asked whether to be a simple citizen is more disgraceful than to be the illegitimate descendant of a murderer; whether to labor in an honorable profession be less worthy than to waste the property of others in vulgar debauchery; whether to be the son of parents of no title be not as honorable as to be the son of a profligate father and a mother of demoniac temper, and, finally, whether a simple university career be less indicative of virtue than to be held up to the derision and contempt of his fellow students, as a scribbler of doggerel and a bear-leader, to be hated for repulsiveness of manners and shunned by every man who would not be deemed a profligate without wit and trifling without elegance.”

A cold dead look of mingled pain and savagery grew on his face as he read. Then he sprang up and went to the door. Behind him Dallas had seized the review and was reading it with indignation. The publisher was still pacing the floor: “What an unfortunate advertisement!” he was muttering.

Gordon stared out into the lamp-lighted street. Thebitter malignancy which had spared not even the grave in its slander, numbed and maddened him. His breath came hard and a mist was before his eyes. Opposite the shop loomed the blackened front of the old church of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West; as he stood, the two wooden figures of wild men on the clock which projected over the street struck the hour with their clubs, and a late newsboy passed crying tiredly: “NewsandChronicle! All about the Frame-Breakers shot in Nottingham!”

The volume the publisher had given him was still in Gordon’s hand. He turned into the room and flung it on the desk.

“No,” he said with harsh bluntness. “Not a line shall be altered! If every syllable were a rattlesnake and every letter a pestilence, they should not be expunged! Let those who cannot swallow, chew it. I will have none of your damned cutting and slashing, Murray. I will battle my way against them all, like a porcupine!”

Then he wheeled and plunged into the clack and babble of Fleet Street’s pedestrians.

London would be reading his effusion when his book appeared to-morrow—reading it and talking about it. “The curs!” he said to himself, as he walked fiercely down the Strand.

The cry of the newsboy ahead came back to him like a dulled refrain. He turned into Whitehall at Charing Cross, and looked up to find himself opposite Melbourne House. He remembered suddenly the clear-eyed girl to whom he had offered his Satire and whose coin was still in his waistcoat pocket; she had said “Melbourne House”that day to the coachman. He wondered with a curious levity whether she would read theScourge.

Before the Houses of Parliament stood a double line of carriages.

“It’s the debate in the Lords on the Frame-Breakers bill,” he heard one passer-by inform another, as he stared frowning at the high Gothic entrance. That was the measure against which Shelley’s pamphlet had been written.

The pain was dulling and the old unyielding devil of challenge and fight was struggling uppermost. “‘The illegitimate descendant of a murderer!’”—Gordon muttered—“‘a scribbler of doggerel and a bear-leader!’”

Then suddenly he raised his head. His eyes struck fire like gray flint. “I am a peer,” he said through his teeth, and strode through the door which he had never entered in his life, but once.

An hour later there was a sensation in John Murray’s shop, where Dallas still sat. It was furnished by Sheridan, who came in taking snuff and shaking his gray head with delight.

“Heard the news?” he cried, chuckling. “George Gordon just made a great speech—best speech by a lord since the Lord knows when! I was in the gallery with Lady Melbourne and Lady Caroline Lamb. He opposed the Frame-Breakers bill. They say it means the death of the measure. You should have seen the big-wigs flock to offer congratulations! Why, even the Lord Chancellor came down from the woolsack to shake hands with him!” He paused out of breath, with a final “What d’ye think of that?”

“Well, well!” ejaculated the publisher, taking off his glasses and polishing them with vigor. He looked at Dallas.

“What an unfortunate advertisement!” quoth that gentleman, pulling his nose. “Eh?”

John Murray brought his fist down on the desk with a force that made the ink-well leap. “By the foot of Pharaoh!” he swore, “we’ll take advantage of it; it will discount that attack in theScourge. The papers have their copies of the book already. I’ll send them word. We’ll not wait till to-morrow. We’ll issueTO-NIGHT!”

He rang the bell sharply and gave a clerk hurried orders which in a few moments made the office a scene of confusion.

When Lady Melbourne entered Melbourne House with her daughter-in-law that evening—about the time a swarm of messengers were departing from the Fleet Street shop carrying packages of books addressed to the greatest houses of London—she found her stately niece, Annabel Milbanke, reading in the drawing-room.

Lady Caroline’s eyes were very bright as she threw off her wraps. She went to the piano and played softly—long dissolving arpeggios that melted into a rich minor chord. Presently she began to sing the same Greek air that she had sung once before with a pathos that had surprised and stirred even the colder, calculate Annabel.

“Caro, what is that?” asked Lady Melbourne, unclasping her sables before the fireplace. The singer did not hear her.

“It’s a song Mr. Hobhouse sent her when he was traveling in the East,” Annabel volunteered.

Lady Melbourne’s thoughts were not wholly on the song. She had seen the book her niece had been reading—it was George Gordon’s long famous Satire. She picked it up, noting the name on the title-page with approval. She had been pondering since she left the ladies’ gallery of the House of Lords, and her thoughts had concerned themselves intimately with its author, the young peer whose maiden speech had challenged such surprise and admiration. His name went perpetually accompanied by stories of eccentricities and wild life at college, of tamed bears and hidden orgies at Newstead with Paphian dancing girls, of a secret establishment at Brighton, of adventures andliaisonsthe most reckless in cities of the Orient. Yet he had stanch supporters, too.

“Annabel,” she said presently, and with singular emphasis, “George Gordon is in town. He spoke in Parliament this evening. I am going to ask him to dinner here to-morrow—to meet you.”

The refrain Lady Caroline was singing broke queerly in the middle, and her fingers stumbled on the keys. The others did not see the expression that slipped swiftly across her face, the rising flush, the indrawn, bitten under lip, nor did they catch the undertone in her laugh as she ran up the stair.

In her own room she unlocked a metal frame that stood on her dressing-table. It held a pencil portrait, begged long before from Hobhouse. A vivid, conscious flush was in her cheeks as she looked at it.

“For a woman of fire and dreams!” she murmured. “Not for a thing of snow! Never—never!”

Back to Index Next