Glorious Apollo E-Book

Elizabeth Louisa Moresby

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

E. Barrington is a pseudonym of Elizabeth Louisa Moresby, a British-born novelist who became the first prolific, female fantasy writer in Canada. She wrote very quickly, attributing her productivity to her sparse vegetarian diet and Buddhist habits of mental discipline; her best-selling fictional biography of Byron, „Glorious Apollo”, took only one month to complete. A bestseller in the 1920s, „Glorious Apollo” is a fictional biography of the 18th century Romantic poet, George Gordon, Lord Byron. Byron comes from a family noted for philandering and profligacy. He achieves notoriety in those areas before he achieves fame as a poet. Beginning as he prepares to takes his seat in the House of Lords in 1809, the novel takes us through Byron’s entire life and career right up to his death in Greece at the age of thirty-six.

Leseprobe

Contents

PART I

GLORIOUS APOLLO

CHAPTER I DAWN

CHAPTER II THE REBEL

CHAPTER III CHILDE HAROLD

CHAPTER IV WOMEN

CHAPTER V TRIUMPH

CHAPTER VI A GREAT LADY

PART II

CHAPTER VII THE RISEN SUN

CHAPTER VIII INTRIGUES

CHAPTER IX AN OFFER OF MARRIAGE

CHAPTER X ANGLING

CHAPTER XI SUCCESS

CHAPTER XII MARRIAGE

PART III

CHAPTER XIII STORM

CHAPTER XIV A WARNING

CHAPTER XV THE DISMISSAL

CHAPTER XVI THE THUNDERBOLT

CHAPTER XVII THE STRUGGLE

CHAPTER XVIII LOVE

PART IV

CHAPTER XIX SEPARATION

CHAPTER XX ECLIPSE

CHAPTER XXI EXILE

CHAPTER XXII RUIN

CHAPTER XIII A LOST BATTLE

CHAPTER XXIV SUNSET

CHAPTER XXV THE NIGHT

CHAPTER XXVI EPILOGUE

PART I

GLORIOUS APOLLO

CHAPTER I. DAWN

“And now the Lord of the unerring Bow,

The God of life and poesy and light.

The Sun in human limbs arrayed, and brow

All radiant from his triumph in the fight.„

–Byron.

The Nemesis of the Byron ill-luck had pursued him from birth, and yet on that day one would have thought it might have spared him. But everything had gone wrong.

In his lodgings in St. James’s Street Byron stood, white as death, shaken by a nerve storm, trembling in every limb, the ordeal before him of taking his seat in the House of Lords without the countenance, support or introduction of any of his peers, as lonely a young man as any in London. Not that formal introduction was necessary in the routine of business, but believing it to be so, he had written to his kinsman and guardian, the Earl of Carlisle, to remind him that he would take his seat at the opening of the session, expecting at least some show of family support. He had received a cold reply, referring him to the custom of the House, and feeling he had laid himself open to a calculated rebuff, his self-consciousness suffered accordingly.

And this was not all. He discovered to his horror that before taking his seat he must produce evidence of his grandfather’s marriage with Miss Trevanion of Cærhayes, and his solicitors reported that there was no family record as to where it had taken place, no legal record that it had ever been celebrated. Byron was almost mad with anxiety and dismay. Without that proof he could not take his seat, and himself and his peerage must be alike discredited. And God knows, he reflected bitterly, the Byrons had had discredit enough and to spare, and cursed bad luck as well. To him at times the peerage appeared designed only to draw attention to misfortunes and ill-doings much better forgotten. They haunted him, defacing his pride in it like a smear on the face of a portrait which must catch the eye of all beholders before they have time to appraise the likeness.

Indeed, the family history was far from pleasant reading. There was a highly picturesque “Sir John the Little with the Great Beard,” a Byron of Harry the Eighth’s time, who had received from that august hand a grant of the Priory of Newstead–no doubt an ancestor to plume oneself upon at the safe distance of three centuries, had it not been that Sir John’s morals were unfortunately as picturesque as his beard and his eldest son was, alas, filius naturalis. It could pass no otherwise, and for all time the bar sinister divided the successors from that Norman ancestry with which every well-found peerage should be decorated. That memory was loathsome to Byron.

The peerage itself came later, the reward of devotion to a family as unlucky as the Byrons themselves: the Stuarts. Charles the First granted it, and passed, and then set in an era of poverty and tedium, and no Byron distinguished himself until the fourth baron, and he did so in a way the family could have well dispensed with. He killed his cousin, Mr. Chaworth, in a duel so far outside the line of even the elastic code of the eighteenth century duel, that he was tried for wilful murder by his peers and found guilty of manslaughter. Apart from this, he was a village tyrant, who drove his wife from her home by ill-usage and, installing a tawdry “Lady Betty” in her place, disgraced himself and all his connections. And when this wicked old man died, as old in years as in wickedness, he was succeeded by “the little boy at Aberdeen,” the Byron whom the world will not forget.

So much for the peerage, but “the little boy at Aberdeen” was no happier in his parents. His grandmother, a lady of the great Berkeley blood, had married Admiral Byron, a cadet of the family and brother of “the wicked lord,” and became by that marriage mother of one of the worst scapegraces of the eighteenth century. Her son was that Mad Jack Byron whose wild escapades were the talk of the town, the Berkeley blood mingling with the Byron in most explosive fashion. And this was the poet’s father.

When Mad Jack was twenty-two years of age, he seduced the beautiful Marchioness of Carmarthen from her husband and children, the wicked Byron charm proving irresistible, as it had done and was to do to many women. He married her after the divorce and had by her a daughter, Augusta; married again, on her death, Miss Gordon of Gight, a Scotch heiress in a small way, possessed of some ready money available for his debts. She was descended from the Scotch royal blood, but a passionate, uncontrolled, coarse creature with no ladyhood in her and nothing at all to attract her errant husband when the fortune, such as it was, was spent. Fortunately he died six years after their marriage. There is a glimpse of her in girlhood from no less a hand than Sir Walter Scott’s, who saw her screaming and shrieking hysterically at a theatre where the great Mrs. Siddons had stirred her overwrought sensibilities–a woman of innate vulgarity and violence. Her wretched marriage with Mad Jack Byron worked her up almost to madnesses of rage and grief, affecting not only herself, but her son through life.

He, the boy the world remembers, was born four years after his half-sister Augusta, who was rescued by her maternal grandmother, Lady Holderness, from the too evident wrath to come of the second wife and removed from the desperately undesirable Byron surroundings to a more tranquil sphere which promised well enough for her future. The boy was left to fate and his mother. But the child sheltered in the Holderness household was not to escape the taint of her blood.

These two unhappy children, half-brother and sister, represent the sorrows of their line to some purpose. They overshadowed them, black-winged, and when we understand better the problems of life and death, we shall know that when the Greeks spoke of the inexorable dooming of the Three Sisters, they meant in one word–Heredity.

So the Byrons, in spite of their peerage, stood alone in their last representative at the moment when the young man might hope to retrieve that evil past.

The men of law had discovered, with infinite pains and considerable cost, that Admiral Byron’s marriage with Miss Trevanion had taken place in a private chapel in Cornwall, and so far all was well. But the episode occasioned talk, it resurrected family ghosts better laid and it made Byron’s difficult position more difficult and his uneasy self-consciousness a torturing flame.

He stood now in the sitting room of his lodgings in St. James’s Street, seeking for resolution to face the House without a quiver: a peer, and yet without one man in the body he was about to join on whom he could count for a welcoming look or word.

He had had many bitter moments of poverty and slight in his young life, but this was the bitterest, and when he thought of his entry alone, uncertain, unwanted, he was trembling on the verge of a resolution to fling the whole thing overboard, take ship for the wilds of Europe and be seen and heard no more in England. Ferocious hatred of the country and every one in it shot out of him like fire. To make himself heard, felt, to be revenged on Lord Carlisle, on any one and everything which stood coldly aloof, careless of his pain–what other comfort could there be in all the world?

Should he go? Should he not go? Not a living soul would care which decision he made. Lord Carlisle might smile his thin, almost imperceptible smile. Augusta’s grand relations might say that nothing better could be expected from the son of that appalling Gordon woman, who had outraged the sensibilities of Lord Carlisle and every member of the family who, for his sins, had had to do with her–a woman who had only £150 a year after Mad Jack Byron had plundered her, who had brought up her boy almost as a vagrant until he had succeeded to the title! What could he be expected to turn out? The comments! Her son knew very well what they must be. Could he nerve himself to go through with it? His heart beat in his throat and choked him.

A quick step on the stair. A man’s voice at the door–

“Why, Byron, can I come in? Why–what the devil–you’re as white as death! What is it?”

Dallas, a kinsman, a friend. Are our friends and relations ever tactful in the moment and manner of their intrusion? Byron shuddered with annoyance, yet felt that inspection had its bracing qualities. And, after all, to go utterly alone down to Westminster seemed the uttermost of humiliation to his tense nerves. Dallas was better than nothing.

He loosed his grip of the chair and was smiling at once through fixed lips.

“The very pest of a nuisance! There never was a poor devil with luck like mine. I must take my seat to-day in that old Museum of Fogies, the House of Lords, and having unfortunately been seduced into making a night of it with some Paphian girls and their usual concomitants of drink and dishes, here I am almost in a fit of frenzy with nervous pains in the head. Do I look white? God knows I feel it! Take me as far as the House, Dallas, and bring some brandy to kick me through the tom-foolery.”

Dallas stood looking at him with a peculiar expression. He was as sure as that he stood there that this was mere “bam,” that Byron was suffering from stage fright. He could swear his dinner had consisted of hard biscuits and soda water, eaten alone, and that he had spent the night in counting the hours to this awful day, in alternating convulsions of pride and terror.

For Dallas, as a kinsman, was behind the scenes of Byron’s temperament and knew pretty well how to gauge this contempt for the Museum of Fogies, which in reality meant so much more to him than to most men. He sat down and looked at him through narrowed eyes, with a question behind them, half envious, half cynical. After all, one could not have much pity for a young man with birth, beauty and a peerage, who might repair his broken fortune by picking and choosing among the wealthiest women in England if he played his cards with reasonable dexterity. No doubt he had an atrocious mother, and there was his slight lameness from an injury to the tendons of one foot at birth, but, all said and done, the agreeables sent the scales of the disagreeables flying aloft, in Dallas’s opinion, and there were few young men in England who would not change places with Byron if they could.

“Damn bad luck you’re so mossy!” he said coolly. “But how came you to be so weak, my friend, on the eve of such a tremendous occasion?”

Byron laughed, from the teeth outward, as the French say.

“Tremendous? I suppose you might call it so, but my reverence for my country’s institutions don’t carry me so far, I regret to say. The thing’s a trifle, and a foolish one, but none the less I have no wish to make a pother by fainting at the Lord Chancellor’s feet. So come along and be my bottle-holder as far as Westminster.”

Dallas stared.

“But surely–you can never mean to say you’re going alone? My Lord Carlisle–”

“My dear man, is it possible you believe I would submit to be led like a good little boy to the Woolsack by that old dotard? I have a satire in my desk at this moment on his paralytic pulings as a poet, which will show you and the world what I think of my valuable guardian! No, no! The company of a friend like yourself to the door, and I shall know how to carry myself. But for this cursed pain in my temples, I wouldn’t even ask this office of friendship, if not agreeable to yourself.”

“More than agreeable!” Dallas assured him, and sat wondering what the dessous of the Carlisle business was, while Byron made his final arrangements. He would have given much to know. These family matters naturally interest even remoter branches. Already there was a thick atmosphere of talk about the Byron ménage at Newstead Abbey. The debts, duns, Mrs. Byron’s extravagant temper, her unbridled tongue, her weakness for the wines left in the scantily provided cellars, were the bases of scandal no doubt, but there was more. Byron himself was odd, unlike other young men of standing. He certainly provoked all manner of speculation.

They got into the carriage and drove down to Westminster from the lodgings in St. James’s Street. A short drive, and Byron was dumb all the way, near the end of his self-control and desperately holding on to the fragments. A word would have jarred them into nothing. Dallas knew that, and sat staring out into the smurr of rain and fog and pitifully bedrabbled streets, their mud splashing from the wheels of many hackney coaches on the garments of unfortunates who were walking along the slippery cobble-stones. A horrid day. Each of them took a dram from the case bottle.

In the same silence Byron got out when they reached the august portals, and, with a would-be air of acquaintanceship with the place and procedure, nodded to Dallas, tossing a “Wait for me–the operation won’t take long,” behind him, and went off, limping more than usual in a nervous hurry and excitement which he would not have had visible for the world. Dallas leaned back and pondered.

A queer fellow–a very queer fellow. There could be very few men of his standing in the same position. Newstead Abbey was a place that reflected credit on its owner (and, really, on the whole family) of the sort any man might envy, in spite of its poverty and disrepair. Yet what had it amounted to? The county gentry and their ladies fought shy of “the Dowager,” as Byron called her, and she and her son had been more or less isolated ever since he had succeeded his grand-uncle. That was partly owing to her oddities–a barrel of a woman, with the temper of a devil and the manners–the less said about them the better.

And what did Byron do with himself at the Abbey, while his meek mamma raged with inflamed face and temper at a distance?

He was particular that his friends should know he sat in company with a human skull, dug up from the monks’ graveyard and put to the sacrilegious use of a loving-cup when he wished to be desperately wicked. He had the girl down there sometimes who, dressed as a boy, had kept him company in lodgings at Brompton and at Brighton when he left Cambridge, a frizzle-headed fool with a cockney accent to tear your ears, who declared of the horse she rode–“It was gave me by my brother, his Lordship.” It was known that in the Dowager’s absence there had been a gathering at the Abbey where Byron, in the robes of an abbot, entertained four Cambridge friends as tonsured monks, the Paphian girls of this desperate party being in private life the cook and housemaid, with the cockney demoiselle, and this mummery had got abroad among the county gentry and emphasized their distrust of Newstead Abbey and all its ways.

Still, Dallas knew very well that such pranks would, in any other case, have been taken as the perfectly excusable and possibly lovable follies of a young man of quality, who must be expected to sow a plenteous crop of wild oats before he left husbandry of the sort and became a prop of Church and State. All that was nothing. What, then, was the mysterious something about Byron which set him apart, had already labelled him “Doubtful,” and would probably in the future label him “Dangerous,” even as his grandfather, the Wicked Lord, and Mad Jack, his father, had been labelled?

It was wearisome to watch the rain dripping in runnels down the panes of the window. Dallas betook himself to memory by way of diversion.

He had certainly thought Byron at the age of nineteen as unprepossessing a young man as could be. He was enormously corpulent for his height of five feet eight, his features all but obliterated in a tide of fleshy tissue, giving him an expression of moony good-nature entirely belying the æsthetic anguish and self-contempt which lay behind it. He remembered quizzing Byron on the subject and pointing out that his road to fame as the Fat Boy was assured–that, or some such cruelty–and he was not likely to forget the blinding fury that broke forth and left them both speechless and staring. It had frightened Byron himself when it was over. That was a point which Dallas never touched humorously again. Of course, it was disgusting, revolting, if one had ambitions, and obviously his unwieldy mother was a malignant prophecy of his future. He must just grin and bear it.

That was an outsider’s view of the case, not the sufferer’s.

Byron did neither. He went down to Newstead Abbey and took himself in hand with a kind of cruel zest and self-loathing. Rumors reached Dallas of austerities far exceeding any of those practised by the long-dead monks of the Priory. He heard of a daily diet of biscuits and soda water with a meal de luxe once a day of boiled rice soaked in vinegar, washed down with Epsom salts, digested with violent exercise and hot baths reminiscent of Trajan and the decadence of Rome. The aspirant to leanness lay in hot water, lived in it, except when he was tearing about the country on his horse, with the dog “Boatswain” racing behind him.

Well, what then? If Byron liked to kill himself, he could, but any sensible man knew it would make no difference to a family tendency like that. Absurd vanity–did any one ever hear the like! That is, if it were true. It might only be another Newstead story. One had a sort of contempt for the whole thing.

Of course Byron had another side. He was beginning to write–had quite a nice little taste for verses of the satiric order and for fugitive love lyrics, not quite so chaste as could be wished, chiefly addressed to young women of the third-rate society of a provincial town or to girls whom one might take even less seriously. Such was Dallas’s view.

Lately, however, there had been a much more ambitious effort, nothing less than a full-fledged satire on celebrated English writers and their audacious Scotch reviewers, and this Dallas, with his literary experience, had liked well enough to offer to see through the press, a process quite outside Byron’s comprehension. It was verdantly youthful, mistook bitterness for wit, and would attract attention, Dallas thought, much after the same fashion as a cur yapping in the street at respected heels. Still–it was readable, its audacity was amazing, and since Byron, towering on his barony, declined to touch a farthing produced by his pen, it might be amusing to see how the world and the libelled would take such a skit, especially if one could turn an honest penny by it. It appeared to him that Byron, conscious of failure in all else, meant to pose as a misanthrope, a waspish deformity like Pope and with as venomous a tongue. It might after all be natural that he should feed his mind on the intellectual vinegar of Pope and Swift, for if fate condemned him to that kind of contemptible, absurd ugliness, he was just the man to take it out in devil-may-care-ishness and bitter attacks on men more fortunate than himself. Your satirists are mostly men who have failed in life, have had to stand aside and see others take the prizes, and if you are negligible otherwise, a caustic tongue may at least make you feared. Poor Byron! No, he would never quiz him again.

And then Byron had returned to London.

Dallas was alone in his rooms when the door handle turned and the lad walked in, and in sober truth he had not, for more than a moment, the slightest conception of who it was that stood before him.

Byron? Never!

For there confronted him the most beautiful young man he had ever seen in his life–and since the world, especially the world of women, endorsed this opinion, it may be accepted. He sat up in his chair and stared silently.

The blockish, moon-faced lout was gone. The marble was sculptured. He beheld the finished achievement. With laughter lurking in brilliant, deep-lashed eyes of hazel grey, there stood the young Apollo, pale with a moonlight pallor, exquisite as the dream of a love-sick nymph upon the slopes of Latmos, haughty, clear-featured, divine. Impossible rhetoric, but most true. The beauty of a beautiful young man, illumined by the summer lightning of genius, may be allowed to transcend that of any woman, for the type is higher; and no higher, prouder type than that of the Byronic beauty has ever been presented to the eye of man.

The comedy of the episode (for it was not devoid of comedy on either side) escaped Dallas at the moment, so thunderstruck was he with amazement. He sat and stared, confused, uncertain.

“Good God!” he said at last, clumsily enough. “What on earth have you been doing to yourself?”

“Undoing, rather!” said the Beautiful, reaching for a chair. “Don’t look so foolish, Dallas. If nature makes a man fat-headed and thick-witted, what can he do but thwart her ladyship? I’ve found the Pilgrim’s way. Like others, it must be walked with peas in your shoes, but you get used to that, and–me voilà!„

“Well, if you don’t thank God, you ought to! I never saw such a change!” said Dallas, still astare like an owl against the sun. He could hardly believe his senses even now.

“Thank God–the tribal Jehovah of Ikey Mo? No, indeed. What have I to thank him for? I have been my own sculptor, and with a care, a pains, a suffering, more than it costs to make a man out of one of Circe’s swine. And the devil of it is, I expect I shall have to live like a monk all my life! Well, I shall take it out in other ways.”

Dallas was reduced to a feeble–

“Well, in all the course of my life, I never did nor could have supposed–”

Byron laughed with a new cynicism almost as startling as the physical change. No doubt it had been always there, but it is difficult to be appropriately cynical with amiable puffed cheeks and eyes buried in creases of fat–indeed, it was a luxury he had been obliged to deny himself hitherto. It came to the surface now, however, when he detailed his methods to Dallas, and Dallas accused him of inordinate vanity. Later he grew more serious.

“Not vanity. At least–No, not vanity. My brain was as thick as my body. I couldn’t think, write. Sluggish, my dear man, sluggish from head to foot. Was I to submit to that? Now I can think, dream–”

“And make others dream!” Dallas said, a little grimly.

He was right. For the word “beauty” might have been coined for the man he saw before him, might have lain inert from the fall of Hellas until that extraordinary resurgence in England. It can scarcely be exaggerated. I call witnesses. Set down Sir Walter Scott’s “The beauty of Byron is something which makes one dream” (exactly what Dallas had set forth in grudging terms!), and Coleridge’s “So beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw–his eyes the open portals of the sun, things of light and for light,” and Stendhal’s “I never in my life saw anything more beautiful and impressive. Even now, when I think of the expression which a great painter should give to genius, I have always before me that magnificent head!” And of men many more. The women await us further on.

Perfection, Dallas thought. The close-curled auburn hair, the hazel-grey eyes, clear as water in the gloom of black lashes, the firm and beautiful curves of the sensuous mouth, the full under-lip pressed strongly against the bow of the upper, the clean and noble line of the jaw from ear to chin, chiselled as by the hand of a mighty sculptor and curving into the perfect cleft of the strong uplifted chin, Yes, perfection. And to crown all, the strangely beautiful pallor of the skin, as though lit from within by some suffused light, illuminating the face by the spirit, starry against a cloud.

The wand of the enchanter had touched him–or, rather, he himself had become the enchanter–and, heavens!–how it set forth his other gifts, little noticed hitherto: the deep, musical voice, the flying charm of phrase and word, the strong shoulders, the light grace of the slender figure, the air of disdain and pride. Human nature is human nature. It was a little comforting to Dallas to recollect that there were makeweights and drawbacks to all this starry splendour. It could not be wholly disagreeable to him, as he sat waiting behind the dribbling rain on the window, to reflect that Byron must be feeling somewhat small at the moment in that austerely silent and disapproving assembly, that Newstead Abbey was still half ruined and that a ponderous, ill-tempered mother with a developed taste for champagne still represented all Byron knew of home. After all, a man can’t have everything his own way–and all this ambition to write verses would probably slough away in a rich, uncomfortable marriage. He would subside into being like everybody else, and the literary honours of the family rest with a deserving kinsman. Such a man as Byron might easily spare them.

His Lordship at last came down the steps with an air of careful carelessness. A few distinguished and undistinguished-looking men filtered out behind him and got into waiting chariots and carriages. He carried his head magnificently high. His broad shoulders looked broader, his height greater than it really was, as he picked his way down the wet steps with studied pride and detachment. But no one noticed him. The men came out thicker and faster now, talking to one another in little groups. No one bowed, waved or shook hands with him. He was entirely alone. The footman threw the door open and he got in beside Dallas, very stiff and cool.

“What happened?” the latter asked eagerly.

“What should happen? The whole thing the dullest farce ever played. Something to sign, a certain amount of swearing–which one may do more cheaply at home–God knows what! The Lord Chancellor, Eldon, tried to shake hands with me and mumbled something–I believe it was some sort of a clumsy apology for the delay caused by the legal forms about my grandfather’s marriage.”

“Well, that at all events was civil, for he certainly couldn’t avoid it!” Dallas interrupted.

“Civil, was it? I scarcely thought so. He mumbled something about “These forms are a part of my duty!’ I got at him then. I said, “Your Lordship did your duty and you did no more.’ He saw what I meant.”

“After all, what could he have done? And then?”

“And then I bowed stiffly and brushed his fingers with mine. If he thought he could win me over for one of his party men, he was the more mistaken. I shall speak there once or twice to assert my rights, but I shall have nothing to do with any of their fanfaronnades. Besides, I’m going abroad.”

Dallas was silent, reflecting that Byron would probably have fanfaronnades enough of his own without troubling the two great political parties.

Thus they returned to St. James’s Street.

Taking leave, Dallas hung on his foot at the door.

“If I were you, Byron, I wouldn’t exactly signalize this occasion by insulting Lord Carlisle publicly. Think twice!”

Byron laughed inwardly and flourished his desk open.

“Well, what possesses the fool to attempt paddling in Helicon with his gouty feet? He deserves a lesson. Hear the lines, Cato the Censor. They’re a world too good to be lost on you and me. This is only part of it.”

He sat astride a chair, reading with the utmost relish, Dallas standing unwilling by the door.

“No more will cheer with renovating smile

The paralytic puling of Carlisle.

For who forgives the senior’s ceaseless verse,

Whose hairs grow hoary as his rhymes grow worse?

What heterogeneous honors deck the peer!

Lord, rhymester, petit-maître and pamphleteer!

So dull in youth, so drivelling in his age

His scenes alone had damned our sinking stage.

Yes, doff that covering where morocco shines,

And hang a calf-skin on those recreant lines.”

He paused for approval, in a kind of cruel transport of glee. Dallas, with tightened lips of disapprobation, held the door open for an exit.

“And you mean to publish that virulent stuff? You, that wrote only the other day:

“"On one alone Apollo deigns to smile,

And crowns a new Roscommon in Carlisle’?

You were ready enough to flatter him then! The lines are wicked, impossible!”

“Yes, but that was only in manuscript, and I little knew then what an old curmudgeon the man is.”

“That hardly affects his relation with Apollo and the Muses. Are you going to print it separately, or what? If I thought you meant to publish that stuff in “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,’ I can tell you, Byron, I for one, would have nothing to do with seeing it through the press, and I feel pretty sure that neither Cawthorn nor any other publisher who valued his skin would give it to the world. Well, I must leave you. If you wish to put fire under your own thatch, add those lines to the satire. It will have a hard struggle without them, God knows!–add them, and the game’s up.”

“Pooh! It was base jealousy made him take no notice of the verses I sent him a while ago–or such notice as was a blow in the face.”

“You’ll find he’ll notice these,” Dallas said, and closed the door, too angry to argue further. He believed he had impressed Byron at last.

CHAPTER II. THE REBEL

“The shaft hath just been shot, the arrow bright

With an Immortal’s vengeance; in his eye

And nostril, beautiful disdain and might

And majesty flash their full lightnings by.„

–Byron.

The poem was published, and “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” took its place in literature. But the latter fact was not obvious at the moment. All that was certain was that a new writer had appeared, brandishing the red flag of revolt against established authority–if not the Jolly Roger itself, the skull and cross bones of the pirate. There was the fiction of anonymity–Dallas had conditioned for that, but dire was his consternation on seeing, under a second allusion to Lord Carlisle, the following footnote:

“It may be asked why I have censured the Earl of Carlisle, my guardian and relative, to whom I dedicated a volume of puerile poems a few years ago? The guardianship was nominal, at least as far as I have been able to discover; the relationship I cannot help and am very sorry for it: but as his Lordship seemed to forget it on a very essential occasion to me, I shall not burden my memory with the recollection. I have heard that some persons conceive me to be under obligations to Lord Carlisle: if so, I shall be most particularly happy to learn what they are and when conferred, that they may be duly appreciated and publicly acknowledged.”

Reading this, Dallas almost tore his hair. He was furious with Byron, for whose vagaries he felt himself partly responsible. He had undertaken to see the poem through the publisher’s hands–yes. And it was risky enough from the first. But he had never expected vitriolic additions, slid through the printer’s hands at the last moment, too late for his interposition. He had left Byron, thinking him convinced, had not seen him since, and now–gone was anonymity, gone the last prospect of family peace. Madness! The young fool would ruin himself. It was the well-trodden Byron Road to Ruin to fly in the face of all decent people (and can an Earl be less than decent?) and to flout all authority. But for a young man with that scandalous Byron family history behind him, and in addition his grandfather and great-grandfather on his mother’s side both suspected of suicide, his mother, despite her royal descent, a vulgar, storming virago who had done her best to alienate all sympathy from her friendless child, this audacity must be fatal. What hope now of a Golden Dolly, as Byron persisted in styling the heiress of Dallas’s dreams? A title is and remains a title, but when charged with such an incumbrance as this young lunatic, what Golden Dolly but must feel her money could be laid out to better advantage? And, with this alarming addition, which must draw the peerage into the quarrel, to quiz such emperors of the flail and fan as the famous reviewers, to challenge almost every literary man of mark to mortal combat of pen and ink–perhaps worse–What could be done? He sat long in bleak bewilderment, then slowly betook himself to Lord Carlisle’s mansion and requested an interview.

It was granted. Dallas was ushered into the library, solemn with brooding Roman busts, Etruscan vases and the true literary odour of calf-skin and elderly pages perused only by the bookworm on its travels through costly margins.

My Lord, clad in a flowing, rustling dressing-gown of richest silk which somehow suggested the magistrate, the Conscript Father, was seated by the fire, cowering from the bitter March gale outside, and his features, never of the urbanest, were rigid with indignation. A copy of the detestable volume lay on the table beside him. He inclined his head to the visitor.

“Excuse my not rising, Mr. Dallas. A touch of gout. Be seated.”

Dallas was seated and in expectation of a question. None followed. My Lord stared with as fixed an indignation at the fire as if it had been a party to Byron’s guilt. Dallas pulled himself together.

“I have called, my Lord, to express my sincere regret for this unpardonable insult to your Lordship, for such I feel it to be. And yet, to the generous mind, what is unpardonable? If you have waded through the poem, with its would-be cleverness and youthful arrogance, I am certain you will feel the author to be more deserving of pity than anger.”

“Certainly. Pity and contempt,” interjected his Lordship.

Dallas could not quite swallow the latter epithet, not being by any means certain that a regrettable brilliancy in the style might not carry the thing so high as to damn any man’s judgment who had assented to “contempt.”

“It is a deplorable performance,” he said mildly; “and my object in coming is to beseech your Lordship to overlook the personal insult, which I am sure the young man will be the first to regret later, and still to extend your protection for the sake of the family.”

“Family, Sir? What family?” cried my Lord, facing round so suddenly upon the suppliant that Dallas almost jumped out of his chair. “Because I had the misfortune to be allied by my father’s marriage with a Byron, am I to be forever saddled with a young man who not only is a disgrace in himself, but whose mother is one of the most atrocious of her sex? I am told that she permitted her child to be an errand boy to a low quack in Nottingham, fetching his daily tankards of beer, forsooth! A woman whose paroxysms of temper made it absolutely impossible to conduct any business with her, so that I was compelled virtually to retire from the guardianship years ago! I am told that she has pursued her son from room to room, brandishing the fire irons like an Alecto–”

Indignation and want of breath choked the noble Lord for a moment, giving Dallas time to speculate on Byron’s glee at the unclassical combination of Fury and fire irons, ere Lord Carlisle swept on.

“And these are the detestable persons I am asked to countenance! What, you assert that his mother is his misfortune? May I ask if his early licentiousness is his misfortune? Accredited stories of the most lamentable relations with women have reached me, and it is not because I now live retired that I am unaware of such productions as the poem “To Mary,’ of which I understand even he himself is now ashamed. And you ask me to condone these outrages on religion and virtue? No, Sir. His puny attack on my own productions as an author are beneath contempt, and are of a piece with his insulting behaviour to the Lord Chancellor when he recently took his seat. These might pass as the result of a vulgarity occasioned by early associations, but the other offences–”

The noble speaker threw speechless hands to heaven at this climax. Dallas made to rise; evidently there was no more to be said. Lord Carlisle, however, turned a glassy eye on him.

“If you are determined to continue your association with the young man, Mr. Dallas, I can only trust that the goodness of your intention will not obscure your judgment. I am much mistaken if his company will not be a disadvantage to those who court it. You will do well, in my opinion, to suggest his retiring abroad. His peculiar gifts will be more appreciated among foreigners than in a kingdom where religious and moral institutions are still revered.”

“My Lord, it is his intention to go abroad. He has been collecting funds for that purpose.”

“I hope it is also his intention to remain abroad. Sir, I have the honour to wish you a very good morning.”

An impassive footman responded to the bell, and Dallas was ushered through an unfeeling marble hall with repellent echoes up a Jacob’s ladder of a staircase, and so out into the equally unfeeling March wind.

He went straight to Byron.

He found him sitting over his breakfast, also in the dressing-gown stage of the chrysalis, a little pile of letters beside him, suspiciously feminine in spider-web handwriting, neglected for one as unmistakably masculine, on which his eyes were glued.

“Dallas–Dallas! God sent you!” he shouted. “What ho, my croaker, my raven! What think you of this? You know that Cawthorn insisted on printing an edition of a thousand, and that I said “Optimist! We shall never sell a thousand. Why print lumber?’ Well, here he writes that the thousand is melting away already and another edition in sight, the book-sellers are ranking up for their copies–and, by George, Sir (George of England, not he of Cappadocia!), he believes my name is made and–”

Dallas sat down. His face was sufficient interruption to any transports. Byron’s sails flapped in the dead calm. He tried the mocking tone, but was visibly alarmed.

“What is it? Newstead burned? Child’s Bank gone smash? The Regent, King? Speak up, man!”

“I think, Byron, you should realize that Lord Carlisle is deeply offended.”

An awful pause. Byron shouted with glee.

“Good God, and is that all? And if he hadn’t been, the world might well have written me down an ass that dipped his pen in asses’ milk instead of the gall I meant. You don’t mean to tell me he has written to complain? Show me the letter. It will be meat and drink to me.”

“He has more sense of his own dignity. No. I felt it my duty to see him and request that he would consider this escapade as the ebullition of youth and high spirits only.”

Thunder and lightning in a moment on brow and eyes, the glittering sunshine hidden in sinister gloom.

“You dared? You call yourself my friend, and dared–”

“I shall dare more than that before I’ve done,” Dallas said composedly. “Are you aware–but you must have been–that when you wrote that infamous line about “paralytic puling,’ you insulted a personal ailment? His Lordship has suffered from a slight stroke of paralysis. I can only think you are bent on alienating every humane mind. Criticism may be legitimate, but upon my soul–”

He halted. Byron was staring at him all aghast, with the terrified eyes of a boy.

“My God!” he said under his breath at last. “I never knew it–never a word. And I–I to taunt any man with a personal disgrace! I am scarcely the man for that.”

Something caught in his throat. He looked down at his lame foot, and there was a painful silence. Presently:

“He must have thought me a devil. Sometimes I think I am one. But, oh, Dallas, my ill-luck, my cursed, damned, blasted ill-luck! Here was a bit of triumph fresh from the hands of the gods. Cawthorn writes that Gifford–Gifford–saw “English Bards’ in manuscript and liked it. My Magnus Apollo, Gifford! My spiritual father in the holy bonds of satire! And you’ll see that London will be talking of me in a few days–and here’s the bitter drop I never miss. I thought I was to escape it this time, but, no, never! Every living soul will think I did it on purpose.”

He hung his head: with one of his quick transitions, the world was a desert with a shrill wind blowing desolation through it. Dallas unbent a little.

“Vitriol has an unpleasant way of recoiling in the face of the thrower,” he said sententiously. “And perhaps you will now do justice to my motive in waiting on Lord Carlisle.”

Byron interrupted.

“If you tell me that he expressed any forgiveness, any pity for a man who had so grossly committed himself, I’ll go out and drown myself. I will, by God!”

“You could scarcely expect–” Dallas began.

“No. I could scarcely expect–I never did. That composes me. Well, I can listen more quietly now. Go on. What happened?”

“His Lordship expressed the deepest resentment, naturally. He also lamented–and here, Byron, I have long felt I must be plain with you myself. Women–”

“Women!”

All contempt, all mockery in the tone. It needed no comment.

“Well then, surely if you feel in this way about the sex, it is the easier to end the disreputable ties you have formed. I am no censor of the average young man’s morals, but why brandish these things in the world’s face? Why insult every prejudice? Why take up with wenches that other men of quality would not touch with a bargee’s pole? Why–”

“The world’s a damned hypocrite. It deserves to have the truth thrust upon it even if it dislikes the smell of its own corruption! My Lord Carlisle was a rake in his young days–would be now, if years and paralysis permitted. Why is the truth to be smothered to please these Mawworms?”

Dallas persevered.

“You must be aware that all your hopes hang on a brilliant marriage. What young woman of refined tastes will accept the leavings of the stews?”

He stopped before the grimace which bitterly distorted the beautiful lips.

“They do, my friend. They do–and will. Do you suppose Miss Prue doesn’t know her lover’s antecedents? What is it Sheridan calls it–”The leaves of the evergreen Tree of Knowledge of the circulating library’ teach her that,–and more, much more the deep-sunk instinct in the female breast that teaches her to long for conquest, not only over the man but over all the other women who have desired him. No, no. The Golden Dolly will come to my whistle for all that. They love a rake. They love also to think they can reform him. Why deprive any pretty lady of her mission? The worse the man, the greater her glory.”

He looked the very incarnation of mocking malice as he spoke. Dallas sat perplexed.

“No, my good man, I have not much cause to respect the sex so far. They started their injuries early. My nurse terrified me, my amiable mamma–I assure you upon my honour, I have never been so scurrilously and violently abused by any person as by that woman who gave me birth. The blackest malevolence! Such is my mother. No, the sex shall pay dear for the belief in them I might have had and now never shall. But allow me to correct one mistake. My loves have by no means been all of the servants’ hall. The bright-plumaged birds of the aviary come as meekly to my call as the sparrows of the streets. I could a tale unfold!”

He laughed significantly.

Dallas said nothing. Very little indeed could be said profitably on the subject of Mrs. Byron, except that it might be hoped she meant better than appeared, which he had said often enough already. After a minute Byron spoke abruptly.

“If you see any way of my making the amende to Lord Carlisle without lowering myself too far–”

“I see no way. The thing is published, and in his present frame of mind I believe any approach might give rise to fresh angers. Otherwise, I must congratulate you, I suppose, on a literary success.”

“You shall congratulate me to some purpose in a few days. And then I’m off, out of this foggy, groggy, hypocritical atmosphere to lands where the sun shines, the skies are blue and women love without fear or compulsion. I’m half minded to pitch my tent there for good.”

“That was his Lordship’s suggestion–a good riddance of bad rubbish!” Dallas said seriously.

Byron flamed, furious.

“Said he so, the old Iniquity! Then tell him I shall be back to plague him before he can digest his present dose! Now, off with you, Dallas, and sound Cawthorn. Whatever money it makes is yours, not mine, for I’m damned if I touch a sou for my writing. It’s too dirty a trade for a peer of the realm, though well enough as an amusement.”

Dallas remonstrated, but went. Byron was beyond him. His swift mind went forward in grasshopper leaps, while Dallas, like panting Time, toiled after him in vain. He wrung his mental hands, but prepared to count the shekels, which indeed were very welcome–his own work was not exactly a gold mine and if the money was going begging, a kinsman who had given literary aid had the best right to it. It might be worth having. It was.

The delight of seeing not only one’s acquaintance, but the renowned, the mighty, soundly castigated, is one of the most widely spread of human graces, and in a few days London, both literary and fashionable, was humming with a delicious titillation of excitement. The onslaught on established reputations was so fast, so furious, conducted with such a diabolical brilliancy, that there could be no question of disparaging the author’s achievement. His morals, his taste, one might deplore, with a reservation of pleasure in such devilish skill in wounding, but every man and woman with a gust for literature knew very well either that Pope had reincarnated, or that his scintillations were in a fair way to being out-sparkled. The Romantics were furious, little guessing that Romance herself had at last found her Avatar, and there was not a pedestal in England but trembled in this earthquake shock, while the majestic figures thus enthroned, themselves showed a tendency to duck before the flying missiles of mockery. And Gifford and Jeffery applauded, outdone. What more of delight could earth or heaven offer?

There could, of course, be no real concealment of the author’s identity, and Byron went down, exultant, to Newstead Abbey to prepare for the first and most innocent of his pilgrimages. There were certain things to settle before he could depart. Mrs. Byron must be left in charge there, and before her arrival there must be revels of a sort to deck the newly discovered author with the robes of mystery and dread–

And raising a ravenous red eye

And blinking a mutinous lid,

He said unto matron and maid, “I

Will shock you!” And did.

But not irreparably. Rumours of the beauty and eccentricity and brilliant attainments of the new author gilded his coronet with more than the gold balls of heraldry. They did him no harm. Since Lords Roscommon, Sheffield, Carlisle and many more had deigned to handle the grey goose quill, since the Earl of Orford had published his “Royal and Noble Authors,” the Grub Street taint was fading from Literature, and she was felt to be worthy of noble coquetries. Scarcely more,–a mistress, not a wife; an amusement, not a profession; that must be understood. But it is well to meet the plebeians on their own ground and show ourselves masters there also by right divine! Exactly Byron’s view. It winged him down to Newstead in a glitter of joy and vanity.

The monkery, the understudy Paphian girls and all the other properties of romantic dissipation were got out. A few love lyrics were transacted. A sentimental epitaph for his dog “Boatswain” was written while the noble animal was bounding about the park in rejoicing health (for who could tell what might happen in his absence, and a Romantic’s faithful hound must certainly not pass without comment). And so the time ran swiftly on.

It is an odd tribute to his thrifty foresight that Boatswain died before he left, and the epitaph was suitably engraved. The world knows it, with its inevitable fleer at humanity. Swift and water. But most people know little of Swift, and it would pass for pure Byronism.

“Near this spot

Are deposited the remains of one

Who possessed beauty without vanity,

Strength without insolence,

Courage without ferocity

And all the virtues of Man without his vices.

This praise, which would be unmeaning flattery

If inscribed over human ashes,

Is but a just tribute to the memory of Boatswain, a Dog.”

Yet, though this posing was certainly the lad Byron’s, Byronic also was the true devotion which tended the dog to the last and recorded his passing thus. Pity had its turn also, if it were brief at best.

“Boatswain is dead. He expired in a state of madness after suffering much, yet retaining all the gentleness of his nature to the last, never attempting to do the least injury to anything near him. I have now lost all, except old Murray.”

“Everything by turns and nothing long,” was Dallas’s comment, as so often before and later, but more passionately “everything” than any other man in the world.

He spent a few weeks in London before he started, savouring the delights of nascent fame, jarred, galled by the holding aloof of men of his own rank. They distrusted him none the less for “English Bards.” It bore the complexion of crime in England to attack the long-established, the respectable. Indeed, it was a kind of atheism and apt to be allied with the real thing. A man who could jeer at Lord Carlisle and Walter Scott was very unlikely to be reverent in his approaches to Jehovah. Friendship with such a rebel might easily imperil one’s own standing in society.

Therefore even the boys he had known at Harrow–boys he had lorded it over on the historic Hill, shunned or seemed to shun him now. Lord Delawarr, for instance. He asked him to come and spend an hour before he left England, perhaps for ever, for who could tell the chances of travel in wild countries like Spain and Greece and Albania? And Delawarr–Delawarr, who had craved his notice at Harrow, replied with the cold excuse that he was engaged with his mother and some ladies to go shopping!

Vile, false friend! Out it all burst to Dallas, who naturally could not miss the opportunity of pointing out the rankling fears left by the venom of “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.”

“Your tongue, my dear Byron,–” etc. “You will do well to consider–”

So he broke away, with no farewell to his mother and few to friends–never to see her in life again. Even Augusta, the half-sister who had received his confidences about that unhappy mother, had no personal farewell to boast. But she had no grievance there, for he had not seen her since early youth, and she, as a wife and mother, had half forgotten him. He was not in the vein for memories. The wide world called him with siren voices, dreamed figures lifted the veil of the dark and laughed with wooing eyes from bowers of vine, hung with purple clusters and paved with violets and asphodel. And on England he believed he had already left his mark indelible. His erratic steps would be watched, commented on. People cared now what he did and where he went. They should care still more!

“I am like Adam, the first convict sentenced to transportation; but I have no Eve and have eaten no apple but what was sour as a crab. And thus ends my first chapter.”

So he sailed to the unknown and to his first romance of the great world–for Eve waited a-tiptoe across the sea–an Eve more subtle and alluring than any he had yet touched lips with. He had begun the quest of the Married Woman, while “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” was left behind him to perplex and dazzle the British public.

Dallas experienced a feeling of comparative calm and security when that boat pulled out to sea. No wonder! Byron had certainly left a trail of brimstone in his wake.