CHAPTER XITHE BEATEN PATH
The late sun, rosying the lake beside the ruined cloister, had drawn its flame-wrought curtains across the moor that lay about Newstead, and the library was full of shadows as Gordon groped in the darkness for a candle.
Dinner was scarce through, for the party he had gathered—who for a noisy fortnight had made the gray old pile resound to the richest fooleries in the range of their invention—did not rise before noon, had scarce breakfasted by two, and voted the evening still in its prime at three o’clock in the morning. The Abbey had been theirs to turn upside down and they had given rein to every erratic audacity. That very day they had had the servants drag into the dining-room an old stone coffin from the rubbish of the tumble-down priory; had resurrected from some cobwebbed corner a set of monkish dresses with all the proper apparatus of crosses and beads with which they had opened a conventual chapter of “The Merry Monks of Newstead”; and had set Fletcher to polishing the old skull drinking-cup on whose silver mounting Gordon long ago had had engraved the stanzas he had written on the nighthis mother lay dead. The grotesquerie had been hailed with enthusiasm, and the company had sat that evening gowned and girdled about the dinner-table, where Sheridan’s gray poll had given him the seat of honor as abbot.
Gordon wore one of the black gabardines, as he lit the candle in the utterly confused library. It was a sullen, magnificent chamber. The oak wainscoting was black with age. Tapestries and book-shelves covered one side, and floor and tables were littered with reviews and books, carelessly flung from their place.
A shout, mingled with the prolonged howls of a wolf and the angered “woof” of a bear sounded from the driveway—the guests were amusing themselves with the beasts chained on either side of the entrance. These were relics of that old, resentful season when Gordon had hermited himself there to lash his critics with his defiant Satire. The wolf, he had then vowed, should be entered for the deanery of St. Paul’s, and the bear sit for a theological fellowship at Cambridge.
For a moment, candle in hand, he listened to the mingled noises, his head on one side, a posture almost of irksomeness. He started when Sheridan’s hand fell on his shoulder.
“By the Lord!” he ejaculated. “I took you for the Abbey ghost!”
Sheridan laughed, lit the cigar Gordon handed him, and sat down, tucking the ends of his rope-girdle between his great knees. The tonsure he had contrived was a world too small for his massive head, and the monk’s robe showed inconsistent glimpses of red waistcoat and fawn-colored trousers where its edges gaped.
“What are you mooning over?” he asked. “Got a new poem in mind?”
“No. To-day I have thrown two into the fire to my comfort, and smoked out of my head the plan of another.”
“Sentimental?”
“Not I. I was thinking of the East. I wish I might sail for Greece in the spring—provided I neither marry myself nor unmarry any one else in the interval.”
“Why not the first?” the other pursued. “I tried it younger than you.”
The speaker sighed presently, and locking his hands behind his head, leaned back against the cushions, his fine, rugged face under its shock of rough gray hair, turned tender. “My pretty maid of Bath!” he said softly. “Elizabeth, my girl-wife that I fought a duel for at Kingsdown and who ran away with me to France when I hadn’t a pound! It’s twelve years since she died. This is an anniversary to me, my boy. Forty years ago to-day she married me. I hadn’t written ‘The Rivals’ then, nor gone to Parliament—nor grown old!”
Gordon was silent. Sheridan’s face, in the candle-light, was older than he had ever seen it. Age was claiming him, though youth was still in the foppish dress, the brilliant sparkle of the eye, the sharp quickness on the tongue. But the wife he remembered at that moment had belonged to a past generation.
A muffled call came—“Sherry! Sherry!” and at the summons the gray head lifted and the gleam of incorrigible humor shot again across the thin cheeks. “The rogues are whooping for me!” he chuckled, and hurried out.
Gordon stared into the gloom of the open window opposite in a reverie. That echo of still-living memory struck across his whimsical mood with strange directness, like a voice speaking insistently of simple human needs.
“To love, to marry—” he reflected. “It is the recourse of the highest intellect as well as the lowest. There is Sheridan. He is brain at its summit. He puts more intellect into squeezing a new case of claret out of a creditor tradesman than the average man has in his whole brain-box. He has written the very best drama and delivered the very best single oration ever conceived or heard in England. And now, without his pretty wife, he is a prey to debt, to gaining and to the bailiffs! Peace and single possession, the Eden-right of man—the having and holding from all the world of one warm, human sympathy—that is the world’s way, the clear result of ages of combined experience.”
He looked up at a pounding of hoofs outside and a howl from the chained wolf. The sounds merged into a hilarious hubbub from the dining-room, betokening some neighborhood arrival.
His eyes, still gazing through the parted curtains, could discern dimly on the terrace a white image standing out in relief from the swathing darkness. It was a statue of Vesta, goddess of the domestic fireside. It seemed to gaze in at him with a peculiar quiet significance. To the Romans that image had stood for the hearthstone—for all the sweet, age-old conventionalities of life, such as enshrined his sister, in her placid country home, her children around her. He had a vision of a stately figure moving about the Abbey witha watching solicitude, and there flashed into his mind the beginning of one of his poems:
“She walks in beauty, like the nightOf cloudless climes and starry skies—”
“She walks in beauty, like the nightOf cloudless climes and starry skies—”
“She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies—”
It sang itself over in his brain. The woman he would choose would be like that—cool, cloudless, beautiful as the night outside the open window. He knew such a woman, as flawless and as lovely—one, and one only. His thought, unweighted by purpose, had followed her since that July afternoon when she had handed him the golden guinea in exchange for his book. She was not in London now. At that moment she was in Mansfield, a sharp gallop across the Newstead moor. If he had ever had a dream of feminine perfectness, she was its embodiment. Would marriage with such a one fetter him? In the great clanging world that teased and worried him, would it not be a refuge?
A sudden recollection came to him, out of the dust of a past year—a recollection of a youth with bright eyes and tangled hair, in the Fleet Prison. There had been an hour, before success had bitten him, when he had promised himself that fame’s fox-fire should not lure him, that he would cherish his song and rid his soul of the petty things that dragged it down. How had that promise been fulfilled? With poor adventure, and empty intrigue and flickering rushlight amours to which that restless something in him had driven him on, an anchorless craft in the cross-tides of passion!
“Home!” he mused. “To pursue no will-o’-the-wisp of fancy! To shut out all vagrant winds and prolong that spark of celestial fire!”
He drew a quick sibilant breath, sat down, at the writing-table and wrote hastily but unerringly, a letter, clean-etched and unembellished, a simple statement and a question.
He signed it, laughing aloud as a sense of wild incongruity gushed over him. Through the heavy oaken doors he could hear mingled laughter and uproar. A stentorian bass was rumbling a drinking-song.
What a challenging antithesis! Lava and snow—erratic comet and chaste moon—jungle passions and the calm of a northern landscape! A proposal of marriage written at such a time and place, with a drinking-stave shouted in the next room! And what would be her answer?
The daring grew brighter in his eye. He sealed the letter with a coin from his waistcoat pocket, sprang up and jerked the bell-rope. The footman entered.
“Rushton, have Selim saddled at once and take this note to Mansfield. Ride like the devil. Do you hear?”
“Yes, my lord.” The boy looked at the superscription, put the note in his pocket and was gone.
Gordon laughed again—a burst of gusty excitement—and seized the full ink-well into which he had dipped his pen. “It shall serve no lesser purpose!” he exclaimed, and hurled it straight through the open window.
Then he threw open the door and walked hastily toward the hilarity of the great dining-room.