CHAPTER XVITHE DESPOILING
As his hackney-coach sped through the night, Gordon’s anger at the inhumanity that had kept from him the sick man’s message, faded gradually into a duller resentment that held most of grief.
The words of his wife recurred to his mind: “A doddering old man!” She had seen only the uncertain walk, the trembling hand, the dying down of the brilliance and fire into crumbling ashes. Not the past, the career in Parliament, the masterly craft of the playwright, the years of loyalty to his friends. Social morality had been a lifelong jest to Sheridan—a veritable “School for Scandal” from which he drew his choicestbon-mots, yet his whole character had been sweetened with the milk of human kindness. Annabel walked a moral princess of parallelograms, viciously virtuous, mercilessly inflexible. “And the greatest of these is charity”—whose was it? Annabel’s or Sheridan’s?
On the steps of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West stood Dr. Cassidy with his friend, the under-curate, and he caught a glimpse of the coach that whirled by.
“Yonder,” said Cassidy, “rides London’s poet-apostate,known by his limp and his profligacy. The devotees are tiring. How long can the idol stand?”
The other turned to gaze. “Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you!” he quoted, “for so did their fathers, to the false prophets!” He also was a sanctimonious young man.
The house that sheltered the old wit was dark as Gordon ascended the steps, and the hollow echoes from the knocker, reverberating through the hall, chilled him with dread. “He died an hour ago, your lordship,” the servant said.
An hour! And but for the delay, he would have been in time! As Gordon entered, a prey to this reflection, a thick-set man dressed shabbily, ascended the steps. He had once been the dead man’s groom, he explained, and begged awkwardly to be allowed to look upon his face. The servant hesitated, but at the grief in the stranger’s voice, he let him in, and the new-comer pushed quickly past Gordon and entered the darkened bedroom before him.
There his profound emotion vanished. He drew a bailiff’s wand from beneath his coat and touching the rigid figure that lay there, proclaimed with gruff triumph: “I arrest this body in the king’s name, for five hundred pounds.”
The exultant bailiff started at the touch of fingers gripping his wrist. Something in Gordon’s face, though now distorted with feeling, was familiar.
“Why,” he said, “I’m a turnkey, if you ain’t the gent that took the young ladies into the Fleet!”
“Come with me,” rasped Gordon between his teeth, and the bailiff followed. In the next room he drew fromhis pocket a draft from John Murray, his publisher, for four hundred and eighty guineas. Without a word he indorsed this and handed it to the bailiff, who scrutinized it and counted out the four pounds change.
“Now go!” said Gordon.
The clock of St. Paul’s was pealing the hour of eleven as the hackney-coach drove back to the house on Piccadilly Terrace. A light low-lying mist softened the outlines of the alley-ways and purified the filth of the street. Overhead, it frayed into a night of wonderful starshine, where, beyond the soiled sordidness of the clamorous city, the sky spread a web of diamonds and sifted gold dust.
While the wheels rattled onward, Gordon’s white whimsical face, lifted to those presences above the smoky roofs, gradually lost its bitter glaze and expressed a curious wistfulness—a vague, appealing weariness and speculation.
“Matter is eternal,” he reflected, “always changing, but reproduced and eternal. May not mind be also? Is its inner spark celestial? Or, like the cells that produce it, is it a creature of the mold, doomed to extinction with the brain, sinking as the candle-flame perishes when the wick falls? I remember when I viewed the planets through Herschel’s telescope and saw all at once that they were worlds. What has eternity to do with the congregated cosmic dust we call mankind? What are our little passions and resentments before the least of those stars?”
His gaze and his thought fell from the sky.
Had he any right to the stubborn pride which wouldnot bemean itself by self-defense? Would his own silence not abet the calculating hatred of Lady Noël’s and add to that monstrous estrangement that was steadily carrying his soul further and further from the soul of Annabel? The question of whether his wife believed or disbelieved aside, was he justified in such a course now? A softer feeling took possession of him. Appearances had been against him. To speak could make the matter no worse for Lady Caroline. He would go to Annabel and assure her of the truth. Perhaps even out of such a catastrophe as to-night’s might arise a truer and a nearer confidence.
He threw off his great-coat in the empty hall and ascended the stair. The door of the chamber where sat the little white bed was open. He went in. The lamp still shed its radiance on the pillow, but the tiny fragrant mould where a baby head had lain, now held only a note, bearing Gordon’s name.
With a puzzled look he tore it open.
A white anguish spread over his features. A cry broke from his lips. He flung wide the door of his wife’s room—it was empty. He ran down the stair, where the footman met him, turning a wondering face to his question.
“My lady went out with Lady Noël, my lord,” Rushton answered, “and took the baby with her. Sir Ralph came for them a half-hour ago. Here is a letter he left for your lordship.”
Gordon took it mechanically and read the few curt lines that burned into his sight like points of pain. It was the end, then! Annabel had gone, not to return—gone with only a hastily pencilled note for farewell,laid with refinement of cruelty on his baby’s pillow! That, and these blunt, peremptory lines of her father’s menace!
He found himself at length in the library, feeling his way blindly to his chair. What to do? Could there be reconciliation? Could she, with her cold prudent resolve, her fixed principles squared mathematically, her starched life which counted even forgiveness a Christ-like sin, retract a step of such moment? He told himself it was not to be hoped for; her pride would make her decision irrevocable.
What then? To pursue? Invoke the law to restore his child? Plunge into publicity to set right his own name? When had he cared for reputation in the world’s eyes! Dare her father’s threat? Drag his wife’s name and his own in the dust and infamy of the courts, and bare the festering sore of his heart to the world? Dare it, and shut the gate of society on another woman, too, whose punishment already would be more than she could bear? Most of all, cloud his daughter’s young years with a lasting stain?
He rose and paced the floor, his step halting, fighting out the struggle. Once he sat down and wrote, scarce seeing the lines his pen traced—and rose and paced the floor again. He took the black phial from its drawer, but put it back. There was something in him which in this fierce crisis disdained to blunt the pain.
After a while he left the library and went slowly up the stair to the little carved white bed. He sank into a chair and hid his face in his folded arms. The agony of childlessness came down on him. Home!A year ago how fondly he had desired it! Yet it had become the winding-sheet of his heart!
Mrs. Clermont saw him sitting there as she passed the door. By Lady Noël’s command, she had waited to pack some smaller articles, and was now ready for departure.
On the lower floor she entered the library for a last survey. Some loose sheets of paper were scattered on the desk, the ink scarce yet dry on them. Laying them together she slowly deciphered the tense, uneven handwriting. The lines had been dragged from the deeps of Gordon’s despairing, from his pent grief that found its natural vent in verse. Was it what it seemed—his heart’s final word to Annabel? Or rather was it a last yearning call to the woman he had dreamed her to be—an adieu to his lost ideal of her?
Mrs. Clermont’s eyes gloated. Two spots of dull vermilion grew in her sallow cheeks. Her hands shook with the delight of an inspiration. Bending over the table she muttered the written lines:
“Fare thee well! and if forever,Still forever, fare thee well—”
“Fare thee well! and if forever,Still forever, fare thee well—”
“Fare thee well! and if forever,
Still forever, fare thee well—”
How carefully she had gathered them all along—these garish strands of scandal which had come to her hands! How deftly her fingers had cast them here and there in the woof of dislike the great loom of London had been weaving! This was a thread of bright red for her to use. What if the poem wereprinted—now, now, with the first rumor of the separation? She could fancy what would be the world’s verdict on such an address,penned in the first hour of his bereavement, and offered to the public ostensibly by his own hand. Publicity would be just the note to make the whole strain ring false. It would recoil upon him in open disapproval and contempt! It would rouse new voices in the clarion-tongued clamor of abuse that her jubilant ear had heard swelling through the past year—forge a new link in the chain that would bind him to disgrace, the disgrace she believed he had had share in heaping upon her niece!
The mainspring of the woman’s hatred leaped. The world had coupled their names long ago, when the girl had first stolen away from the dreary Godwin house to the glamour and allurements of Drury Lane! And the world no doubt told the truth. If she could help to ruin him, line for line, name and fame—as he had ruined Jane Clermont!
In her vision rose the stooped figure of William Godwin, Jane’s foster-father. He hated Gordon, she knew—and he had a connection with theCourier, the bitterest of them all.
Fletcher was in the lower hall as Mrs. Clermont passed out the street door. He knew the catastrophe that had befallen. Now his honest old eyes were full of grief and perplexity.
It was long past midnight when he ascended to his master’s room. Gordon had thrown off his clothing and was stretched on the bed. He was asleep.
As the grizzled valet’s eyes rested on the recumbent figure, he could see that one foot—the lame one—was uncovered. Through all the years of his service, he had never seen the member which Gordon’s sensitivenessconcealed. He had often wondered curiously what was the nature of the deformity. How did it look?
Fletcher turned away, took a counterpane from a chair and with face averted, drew it over the uncovered foot. Then he shaded the candle and went out, and as he went, a tear splashed down his seamed and weather-beaten cheek.