THE 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 night his 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 with a watching solicitude, and
there flashed into his mind the beginning of one of his poems:
“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.