THE BOOMERANG
“George Gordon!”
There was an unaffected pleasure in the exclamation, and its echo in
the answer: “Sherry! And young as ever, I’ll be bound!”
“I heard last night at Lady Jersey’s you were in London,” said
Sheridan, after the first greetings. “So you’ve had enough of Greece,
eh? Three years! What have you done in all that time?”
“I have dined the mufti of Thebes, I have viewed the harem of Ali
Pasha, I have kicked an Athenian postmaster. I was blown ashore on the
island of Salamis. I caught a fever going to Olympia. And I have found
that I like to be back in England--the oddest thing of all!”
Gordon ended half-earnestly. Threading the familiar thoroughfares,
tasting the city’s rush, its interminableness, its counterplay and
torsion of living, he had felt a sense of new appreciation. His months
of freer breathing in the open spaces of the East had quickened his
pulses.
The pair strolled on together chatting, the old wit linking his arm in
the younger man’s. He had always liked Gordon and the appearance of his
famous _tour de force_ had lifted this liking into genuine admiration.
“Hobhouse says you’ve brought back another book,” said he, presently.
“I’ve a portmanteau crammed with stanzas in Spenser’s measure, but
they’re likely to be drivelling idiotism. I must leave that to the
critics. I have heard their chorus of deep damnations once,” Gordon
added ruefully. “But no doubt they’ve long ago forgotten my infantile
ferocities.”
Sheridan shot a keen glance under his bushy brows. Could the other, he
wondered, have so undervalued the vicious hatred his cutting Satire
had raised in the ranks of the prigs and pamphleteers it pilloried? In
his long foreign absence had he been ignorant of the flood of tales so
assiduously circulated in the London newspapers and magazines?
His thought snapped. Gordon had halted before a book-shop which bore
the sign of “The Juvenile Library,” his eye caught by printed words on
a pasteboard placard hung in its window.
“Sherry!” he cried, his color changing prismatically. “Look there!”
The sign read:
“_Queen Mab._”
_For writing the which Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley Stands lately
expelled from University College, Oxford._
2s, 6d.
_Also_
“_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_”
_A Poetical Satire
By a Noble Lord Travelling Abroad.
A few copies of this work
(Suppressed by the Author at great expense)
which can be bought nowhere else in London--1 guinea._
“Devil take the blackguard!” blurted Sheridan. He followed the other
into the musty shop where a stooped, agate-eyed old man laid aside a
black-letter volume of Livy’s Roman History and shuffled forward to
greet them.
Gordon’s face was pallid and his eyes were sparkling. He had written
the book the pasteboard advertised in a fit of rage that had soon
cooled to shame of its retaliative scorn. He had believed every copy
procurable destroyed before he left England. He had thought of this
fact often with self-congratulation, dreaming this monument of his
youthful petulance rooted out. To-day it was almost the first thing he
confronted. The sedulous greed that hawked his literary indiscretion
to the world roused now an old murderous fury that had sometimes
half-scared him in his childhood. He was battling with this as he
pointed out the second item of the sign.
“How many of these have you?” he asked the proprietor shortly.
“Twelve.”
“I will take them all.” Gordon put a bank-note on the counter.
The bookseller regarded him sagely as he set the books before him. It
was a good day’s bargain.
A doorway led from the shop into a binding-room, where stood a stove
with glue-pots heating upon it. With a word to Sheridan, Gordon seized
his purchase and led the way into this room. The dealer stared and
followed.
He saw the purchaser tear the books cover from cover, and thrust them
one by one into the fiery maw of the stove. And now, at the stranger’s
halting step and the beauty of his face, sudden intelligence came to
him. Five--ten--twenty guineas apiece he could have got, if he had
only found the wit to guess! The knowledge turned his parchment visage
saffron with suppressed cupidity, anger and regret.
The bell in the outer room announced a customer, and the bookseller
went into the shop, leaving the door ajar. Through it came a voice--a
lady’s inquiry. She was asking for a copy of the Satire whose pages
were shrivelling under Sheridan’s regretful eye.
Gordon’s hand held the last volume. He had turned to look through the
door--a fine, tall, spirit-looking girl, he thought. His observant eye
noted her face--a cool, chaste classic, and her dress, rich, but with a
kind of quiet and severity.
Yielding to some whimsical impulse, he went rapidly out to the
pavement. She was seating herself in her carriage beside her companion
as he approached.
“I had just secured the last copy,” he stated gravely, almost
apologetically. “I have another, however, and shall be glad if you will
take this.”
A glimmer of surprise had shadowed the immobile face, but it passed.
“You are very kind,” she said. “It seems difficult to procure. We saw
the sign quite by accident!” She was demurring--on prudential grounds.
She hesitated only a moment--just long enough for him to become aware
of another personality beside her, an impression of something wild,
Ariel-like, eccentric yet pleasing--then she searched her purse and
held out to him a golden guinea.
“That is the price, I think,” she added, and with the word “Melbourne
House” to the coachman, the carriage merged in the stream of the
highway.
Annabel Milbanke’s complaisant brow was undisturbed. She was very
self-possessed, very unromantic, very correct. As the chestnut bays
whirled on toward Hyde Park Corner, she did no more than allow her
colorless imagination to ask itself: “Who is he, I wonder?”
Her fragile, overdressed companion might have answered that mental
question. As Gordon had come from the doorway, his step halting, yet
so slightly as to be unnoticed by one who saw the delicate symmetry of
his face, a quick tinge had come to Lady Caroline Lamb’s cheeks. The
brown curls piled on the pale oval of brow, the deep gray eyes, the
full chiselled lips and strongly modelled chin--all brought back to her
a pencil sketch she had once seen under a table-lamp. The tinge grew
swiftly to a flush, and she turned to look back as they sped on, but
she said nothing.
Gordon had seen neither the flush nor the backward look. His eyes, as
he surveyed the golden guinea in his hand, held only the picture of
the calm girl who had given it to him.
“Melbourne House,” he repeated aloud. “What a stately beauty she
has--the perfection of a glacier! I wonder now why I did that,” he
thought quizzically. “I never saw her before. A woman who wants to
read my Satire; and I always hated an _esprit_ in petticoats! It was
impulse--pure impulse, reasonless and irresponsible. God knows what
contradictions one contains!”
He tossed the coin in the air abstractedly, caught it and slipped it
into his waistcoat pocket as Sheridan rejoined him. The latter had not
seen the carriage and its occupants.
“A fine ash-heap we’ve made,” said the wit, “and a pity too! Curse
catch me, I wish _I’d_ written it! If it were mine, instead of
suppressing, I’d print a new edition and be damned to them. If they
won’t forget this, cram another down their throats and let them choke
on it! Come and drink a bottle of _vin de Graves_ with me at the
Cocoa-Tree,” he continued persuasively. “Tom Moore is in town. We’ll
get him and go to the Italian Opera afterward. What do you say?”
Gordon shook his head. “Not to-day. I have an appointment at my rooms.
Hobhouse pretends he wants to read my new manuscript.”
“To-morrow, then. I want to get the rights of the latest apocryphal
stories of you the clubs are relishing.”
“Stories? What stories?”
Sheridan cleared his throat uneasily. “Surely, letters--newspapers--must
have reached you in Greece?”
“Newspapers!” exclaimed Gordon. “I haven’t read one in a year. As for
letters--well, it has been little better. So the newspapers have been
talking of me, eh?”
“Not that any one in particular believes them,” interposed his
companion hastily, “or anything the _Scourge_ prints, for that matter!”
“The _Scourge_? That was the worst of the lot before I left. It’s
still mud-flinging, is it? I suppose I might have expected it. There’s
scarcely a witling-scribbler in London I didn’t grill with that
cursed Satire of mine, that they won’t let stay in its grave. But
the newspaper wiseacres--what under the canopy can _they_ know of my
wanderings? I haven’t set eyes on a journalist since I left.”
“Of course, they’re perfectly irresponsible!”
“What are they saying, Sherry?”
Sheridan hesitated.
“Come, come; out with it!”
“The _Morning Post_ reported last week that the pasha of the Morea had
made you a present of a Circassian girl--”
“It was a Circassian _mare_!”
“And that you had quarters in a Franciscan nunnery.”
“A monastery!” Gordon laughed--an unmirthful laugh. “With one Capuchin
friar, a bandy-legged Turkish cook, a couple of Albanian savages and a
dragoman! What tales are they telling at the clubs?”
“That’s about all that’s new--except Petersham. He has some tale of a
Turkish peri of yours that you saved from a sack in the Ægean.”
Gordon’s lips set tight together. The pleasure he had felt at his
return had been shot through with a new pain that spoke plainly in his
question:
“Sherry! Is there no story they tell of these two years that I need not
blush at?”
The other caught at the straw. “They say you swam the Hellespont, and
outdid Leander.”
“I’m obliged to them! I wonder they didn’t invent a Hero to wait for my
Leandering!” The voice held a bitter humor, the antithesis of the open
pleasantry of their meeting. “I presume that version will not be long
in arriving,” Gordon added, and held out his hand.
Sheridan grasped it warmly. “I shall see you to-morrow,” he said, and
they parted.
* * * * *
From the edge of his show-window, William Godwin, the bookseller, with
a malignant look in his agate eyes, watched Gordon go.
In the inner room he raked the fragments of charred leather from the
stove, thinking of the guineas he had let slip through his fingers.
Then he sat down at his desk and drawing some dusty sheets of folio
to him began to write, with many emendations. His quill pen scratched
maliciously for a long time. At last he leaned back and regarded what
he had written with huge satisfaction.
“The atheistical brat of a lord!” he muttered vindictively. “I’ll make
his ribs gridirons for his heart! I’ll send this as a leader for the
next issue of the _Scourge_!”