"I regard this second appeal to West Brookshire as an insult!" said the Vicar of Beechcote, hotly. "If Mr. Marsham must needs accept an office that involved re-election he might have gone elsewhere. I see there is already a vacancy by death--and a Liberal seat, too--in Sussex.Wetold him pretty plainly what we thought of him last time."
"And now I suppose you will turn him out?" asked the doctor, lazily. In the beatitude induced by a completed article and an afternoon smoke, he was for the moment incapable of taking a tragic view either of Marsham's shortcomings or his prospects.
"Certainly, we shall turn him out."
"Ah!--a Labor candidate?" said the doctor, showing a little more energy.
Whereupon the Vicar, with as strong a relish for theprimeurof an important piece of news as any secular fighter, described a meeting held the night before in one of the mining villages, at which he had been a speaker. The meeting had decided to run a miners' candidate; expenses had been guaranteed; and the resolution passed meant, according to Lavery, that Marsham would be badly beaten, and that Colonel Simpson, his Conservative opponent, would be handsomely presented with a seat in Parliament, to which his own personal merits had no claim whatever.
"But that we put up with," said the Vicar, grimly. "The joy of turning out Marsham is compensation."
The doctor turned an observant eye on his companion's clerical coat.
"Shall we hear these sentiments next Sunday from the pulpit?" he asked, mildly.
The Vicar had the grace to blush slightly.
"I say, no doubt, more than I should say," he admitted. Then he rose, buttoning his long coat down his long body deliberately, as though by the action he tried to restrain the surge within; but it overflowed all the same. "I know now," he said, with a kindling eye, holding out a gaunt hand in farewell, "what our Lord meant by sending, not peace--but a sword!"
"So, no doubt, did Torquemada!" replied the doctor, surveying him.
The Vicar rose to the challenge.
"I will be no party to the usual ignorant abuse of the Inquisition," he said, firmly. "We live in days of license, and have no right to sit in judgment on our forefathers."
"Yourforefathers," corrected the doctor. "Mine burned."
The Vicar first laughed; then grew serious. "Well, I'll allow you two opinions on the Inquisition, but not--" he lifted a gesticulating hand--"nottwo opinions on mines which are death-traps for lack of a little money to make them safe--noton the kind of tyranny which says to a man: 'Strike if you like, and take a week's notice at the same time to give up your cottage, which belongs to the colliery'--or, 'Make a fuss about allotments if you dare, and see how long you keep your berth in my employment: we don't want any agitators here'--or maintains, against all remonstrance, a brutal manager in office, whose rule crushes out a man's self-respect, and embitters his soul!"
"You charge all these things against Marsham?"
"He--or, rather, his mother--has a large holding in collieries against which I charge them."
"H'm. Lady Lucy isn't standing for West Brookshire."
"No matter. The son's teeth are set on edge. Marsham has been appealed to, and has done nothing--attempted nothing. He makes eloquent Liberal speeches, and himself spends money got by grinding the poor!"
"You make him out a greater fool than I believe him," said the doctor. "He has probably attempted a great deal, and finds his power limited. Moreover, he has been eight years member here, and these charges are quite new."
"Because the spirit abroad is new!" cried the Vicar. "Men will no longer bear what their fathers bore. The old excuses, the old pleas, serve no longer. I tell you the poor are tired of their patience! The Kingdom of Heaven, in its earthly aspect, is not to be got that way--no! 'The violent take it by force!' And as to your remark about Marsham, half the champions of democracy in this country are in the same box: prating about liberty and equality abroad; grinding their servants and underpaying their laborers at home. I know scores of them; and how any of them keep a straight face at a public meeting I never could understand. There is a French proverb that exactly expresses them--"
"I know," murmured the doctor, "I know. 'Joie de rue, douleur de maison.' Well, and so, to upset Marsham, you are going to let the Tories in, eh?--with all the old tyrannies and briberies on their shoulders?--naked and unashamed. Hullo!"--he looked round him--"don't tell Patricia I said so--or Hugh."
"There is no room for a middle party," was the Vicar's fierce reply. "Socialists on the one side, Tories on the other!--that'll be the Armageddon of the future."
The doctor, declining to be drawn, nodded placidly through the clouds of smoke that enwrapped him. The Vicar hurried away, accompanied, however, furtively to the door, even to the gate of the drive, by Mrs. Roughsedge, who had questions to ask.
She came back presently with a thoughtful countenance.
"I asked him what he thought I ought to do about those tales I told you of."
"Why don't you settle for yourself?" cried the doctor, testily. "That is the way you women flatter the pride of these priests!"
"Not at all.Youmake him talk nonsense; I find him a fount of wisdom."
"I admit he knows some moral theology," said Roughsedge, thoughtfully. "He has thought a good deal about 'sins' and 'sin.' Well, what was his view about these particular 'sinners'?"
"He thinks Diana ought to know."
"She can't do any good, and it will keep her awake at nights. I object altogether."
However, Mrs. Roughsedge, having first dropped a pacifying kiss on her husband's gray hair, went up-stairs to put on her things, declaring that she was going there and then to Beechcote.
The doctor was left to ponder over the gossip in question, and what Diana could possibly do to meet it. Poor child!--was she never to be free from scandal and publicity?
As to the couple of people involved--Fred Birch and that odious young woman Miss Fanny Merton--he did not care in the least what happened to them. And he could not see, for the life of him, why Diana should care either. But of course she would. In her ridiculous way, she would think she had some kind of responsibility, just because the girl's mother and her mother happened to have been brought up in the same nursery.
"A plague on Socialist vicars, and a plague on dear good women!" thought the doctor, knocking out his pipe. "What with philanthropy and this delicate altruism that takes the life out of women, the world becomes a kind of impenetrable jungle, in which everybody's business is intertwined with everybody else's, and there is nobody left with primitive brutality enough to hew a way through! And those of us that might lead a decent life on this ill-arranged planet are all crippled and hamstrung by what we call unselfishness." The doctor vigorously replenished his pipe. "I vow I will go to Greece next spring, and leave Patricia behind!"
Meanwhile, Mrs. Roughsedge walked to Beechcote--in meditation. The facts she pondered were these, to put them as shortly as possible. Fred Birch was fast becoming themauvais sujetof the district. His practice was said to be gone, his money affairs were in a desperate condition, and his mother and sister had already taken refuge with relations. He had had recourse to the time-honored expedients of his type: betting on horses and on stocks with other people's money. It was said that he had kept on the safe side of the law; but one or two incidents in his career had emerged to light quite recently, which had led all the scrupulous in Dunscombe to close their doors upon him; and as he had no means of bribing the unscrupulous, he had now become a mere object-lesson for babes as to the advantages of honesty.
At the same time Miss Fanny Merton, first introduced to Brookshire by Brookshire's favorite, Diana Mallory, was constantly to be seen in the black sheep's company. They had been observed together, both in London and the country--at race-meetings and theatres; and a brawl in the Dunscombe refreshment-room, late at night, in which Birch had been involved, brought out the scandalous fact that Miss Merton was in his company. Birch was certainly not sober, and it was said by the police that Miss Merton also had had more port wine than was good for her.
All this Brookshire knew, and none of it did Diana know. Since her return she and Mrs. Colwood had lived so quietly within their own borders that the talk of the neighborhood rarely reached her, and those persons who came in contact with her were far too deeply touched by the signs of suffering in the girl's face and manner to breathe a word that might cause her fresh pain. Brookshire knew, through one or other of the mysterious channels by which such news travels, that the two cousins were uncongenial; that it was Fanny Merton who had revealed to Diana her mother's history, and in an abrupt, unfeeling way; and that the two girls were not now in communication. Fanny had been boarding with friends in Bloomsbury, and was supposed to be returning to her family in Barbadoes in the autumn.
The affair at the refreshment-room was to be heard of at Petty Sessions, and would, therefore, get into the local papers. Mrs. Roughsedge felt there was nothing for it; Diana must be told. But she hated her task.
On reaching Beechcote she noticed a fly at the door, and paused a moment to consider whether her visit might not be inopportune. It was a beautiful day, and Diana and Mrs. Colwood were probably to be found in some corner of the garden. Mrs. Roughsedge walked round the side of the house to reconnoitre.
As she reached the beautiful old terrace at the back of the house, on which the drawing-room opened, suddenly a figure came flying through the drawing-room window--the figure of a girl in a tumbled muslin dress, with a large hat, and a profusion of feathers and streamers fluttering about her. In her descent upon the terrace she dropped her gloves; stooping to pick them up, she dropped her boa; in her struggle to recapture that, she trod on and tore her dress.
"Damn!" said the young lady, furiously.
And at the voice, the word, the figure, Mrs. Roughsedge stood arrested and open-mouthed, her old woman's bonnet slipping back a little on her gray curls.
The young woman was Fanny Merton. She had evidently just arrived, and was in search of Diana. Mrs. Roughsedge thought a moment, and then turned and sadly walked home again. No good interfering now! Poor Diana would have to tackle the situation for herself.
Diana and Mrs. Colwood were on the lawn, surreptitiously at work on clothes for the child in the spinal jacket, who was soon going away to a convalescent home, and had to be rigged out. The grass was strewn with pieces of printed cotton and flannel, with books and work-baskets. But they were not sitting where Ferrier had looked his last upon the world three weeks before. There, under the tall limes, across the lawn, on that sad and sacred spot, Diana meant in the autumn to plant a group of cypresses (the tree of mourning) "for remembrance."
"Fanny!" cried Diana, in amazement, rising from her chair.
At her cousin's voice, Fanny halted, a few yards away.
"Well," she said, defiantly, "of course I know you didn't expect to see me!"
Diana had grown very pale. Muriel saw a shiver run through her--the shiver of the victim brought once more into the presence of the torturer.
"I thought you were in London," she stammered, moving forward and holding out her hand mechanically. "Please come and sit down." She cleared a chair of the miscellaneous needlework upon it.
"I want to speak to you very particularly," said Fanny. "And it's private!" She looked at Mrs. Colwood, with whom she had exchanged a frosty greeting. Diana made a little imploring sign, and Muriel--unwillingly--moved away toward the house.
"Well, I don't suppose you want to have anything to do with me," said Fanny, after a moment, in a sulky voice. "But, after all, you're mother's niece. I'm in a pretty tight fix, and it mightn't be very pleasant for you if things came to the worst."
She had thrown off her hat, and was patting and pulling the numerous puffs and bandeaux, in which her hair was arranged, with a nervous hand. Diana was aghast at her appearance. The dirty finery of her dress had sunk many degrees in the scale of decency and refinement since February. Her staring brunette color had grown patchy and unhealthy, her eyes had a furtive audacity, her lips a coarseness, which might have been always there; but in the winter, youth and high spirits had to some extent disguised them.
"Aren't you soon going home?" asked Diana, looking at her with a troubled brow.
"No, I'm--I'm engaged. I thought you might have known that!" The girl turned fiercely upon her.
"No--I hadn't heard--"
"Well, I don't know where you live all your time!" said Fanny, impatiently. "There's heaps of people at Dunscombe know that I've been engaged to Fred Birch for three months. I wasn't going to write to you, of course, because I--well!--I knew you thought I'd been rough on you--about that--you know."
"Fred Birch!" Diana's voice was faltering and amazed.
Fanny twisted her hat in her hands.
"He's all right," she said, angrily, "if his business hadn't been ruined by a lot of nasty crawling tale-tellers. If people'd only mind their own business! However, there it is--he's ruined--he hasn't got a penny piece--and, of course, he can't marry me, if--well, if somebody don't help us out."
Diana's face changed.
"Do you mean that I should help you out?"
"Well, there's no one else!" said Fanny, still, as it seemed, defying something or some one.
"I gave you--a thousand pounds."
"You gave itmother II got precious little of it. I've had to borrow, lately, from people in the boarding-house. And I can't get any more--there! I'm just broke--stony."
She was still looking straight before her, but her lip trembled.
Diana bent forward impetuously.
"Fanny!" she said, laying her hand on her cousin's, "dogo home!"
Fanny's lip continued to tremble.
"I tell you I'm engaged," she repeated, in a muffled voice.
"Don't marry him!" cried Diana, imploringly. "He's not--he's not a good man."
"What do you know about it? He's well enough, though I dare say he's not your sort. He'd be all right if somebody would just lend a hand--help him with the debts, and put him on his feet again. He suits me, anyway. I'm not so thin-skinned."
Diana stiffened. Fanny's manner--as of old--was almost incredible, considered as the manner of one in difficulties asking for help. The sneering insolence of it inevitably provoked the person addressed.
"Have you told Aunt Bertha?" she said, coldly--"asked her consent?"
"Mother? Oh, I've told her I'm engaged. She knows very well that I manage my own business."
Diana withdrew her chair a little.
"When are you going to be married? Are you still with those friends?"
Fanny laughed.
"Oh, Lord, no! I fell out with them long ago. They were a wretched lot! But I found a girl I knew, and we set up together. I've been in a blouse-shop earning thirty shillings a week--there! And if I hadn't, I'd have starved!"
Fanny raised her head. Their eyes met: Fanny's full of mingled bravado and misery; Diana's suddenly stricken with deep and remorseful distress.
"Fanny, I told you to write to me if there was anything wrong! Why didn't you?"
"You hated me!" said Fanny, sullenly.
"I didn't!" cried Diana, the tears rising to her eyes. "But--you hurt me so!" Then again she bent forward, laying her hand on her cousin's, speaking fast and low. "Fanny, I'm very sorry!--if I'd known you were in trouble I'd have come or written--I thought you were with friends, and I knew the money had been paid. But, Fanny, Iimploreyou!--give up Mr. Birch! Nobody speaks well of him! You'll be miserable!--you must be!"
"Too late to think of that!" said Fanny, doggedly.
Diana looked up in sudden terror. Fanny tried to brazen it out. But all the patchy color left her cheeks, and, dropping her head on her hands, she began to sob. Yet even the sobs were angry.
"I can go and drown myself!" she said, passionately, "and I suppose I'd better. Nobody cares whether I do or not! He's made a fool of me--I don't suppose mother'll take me home again. And if he doesn't marry me, I'll kill myself somehow--it don't matter how--before--I've got to!"
Diana had dropped on her knees beside her visitor. Unconsciously--pitifully--she breathed her cousin's name. Fanny looked up. She wrenched herself violently away.
"Oh, it's all very well!--but we can't all be such saints as you. It'd be all right if he married me directly--directly," she repeated, hurriedly.
Diana knelt still immovable. In her face was that agonized shock and recoil with which the young and pure, the tenderly cherished and guarded, receive the first withdrawal of the veil which hides from them the more brutal facts of life. But, as she knelt there, gazing at Fanny, another expression stole upon and effaced the first. Taking shape and body, as it were, from the experience of the moment, there rose into sight the new soul developed in her by this tragic year. Not for her--not for Juliet Sparling's daughter--the plea of cloistered innocence! By a sharp transition her youth had passed from the Chamber of Maiden Thought into the darkened Chamber of Experience. She had steeped her heart in the waters of sin and suffering; she put from her in an instant the mere maiden panic which had drawn her to her knees.
"Fanny, I'll help you!" she said, in a low voice, putting her arms round her cousin. "Don't cry--I'll help you."
Fanny raised her head. In Diana's face there was something which, for the first time, roused in the other a nascent sense of shame. The color came rushing into her cheeks; her eyes wavered painfully.
"You must come and stay here," said Diana, almost in a whisper. "And where is Mr. Birch? I must see him."
She rose as she spoke; her voice had a decision, a sternness, that Fanny for once did not resent. But she shook her head despairingly.
"I can't get at him. He sends my letters back. He'll not marry me unless he's paid to."
"When did you see him last?"
Gradually the whole story emerged. The man had behaved as the coarse and natural man face to face with temptation and opportunity is likely to behave. The girl had been the victim first and foremost of her own incredible folly. And Diana could not escape the idea that on Birch's side there had not been wanting from the first an element of sinister calculation. If her relations objected to the situation, it could, of course, be made worth his while to change it. All his recent sayings and doings, as Fanny reported them, clearly bore this interpretation.
As Diana sat, dismally pondering, an idea flashed upon her. Sir James Chide was to dine at Beechcote that night. He was expected early, would take in Beechcote, indeed, on his way from the train to Lytchett. Who else should advise her if not he? In a hundred ways, practical and tender, he had made her understand that, for her mother's sake and her own, she was to him as a daughter.
She mentioned him to Fanny.
"Of course"--she hurried over the words--"we need only say that you have been engaged. We must consult him, I suppose, about--about breach of promise of marriage."
The odious, hearsay phrase came out with difficulty. But Fanny's eyes glistened at the name of the great lawyer.
Her feelings toward the man who had betrayed her were clearly a medley of passion and of hatred. She loved him as she was able to love; and she wished, at the same time, to coerce and be revenged on him. The momentary sense of shame had altogether passed. It was Diana who, with burning cheeks, stipulated that while Fanny must not return to town, but must stay at Beechcote till matters were arranged, she should not appear during Sir James's visit; and it was Fanny who said, with vindictive triumph, as Diana left her in her room; "Sir James'll know well enough what sort of damages I could get!"
After dinner Diana and Sir James walked up and down the lime-walk in the August moonlight. His affection, as soon as he saw her, had been conscious of yet another strain upon her, but till she began to talk to himtête-à-têtehe got no clew to it; and even then what he guessed had very little to do with what she said. She told her cousin's story so far as she meant to tell it with complete self-possession. Her cousin was in love with this wretched man, and had got herself terribly talked about. She could not be persuaded to give him up, while he could only be induced to marry her by the prospect of money. Could Sir James see him and find out how much would content him, and whether any decent employment could be found for him?
Sir James held his peace, except for the "Yeses" and "Noes" that Diana's conversation demanded. He would certainly interview the young man; he was very sorry for her anxieties; he would see what could be done.
Meanwhile, he never communicated to her that he had travelled down to Beechcote in the same carriage with Lady Felton, the county gossip, and that in addition to other matters--of which more anon--the refreshment-room story had been discussed between them, with additions and ramifications leading to very definite conclusions in any rational mind as to the nature of the bond between Diana's cousin and the young Dunscombe solicitor. Lady Felton had expressed her concern for Miss Mallory. "Poor thing!--do you think she knows? Why on earth did she ever ask him to Beechcote! Alicia Drake told me she saw him there."
These things Sir James did not disclose. He played Diana's game with perfect discretion. He guessed, even that Fanny was in the house, but he said not a word. No need at all to question the young woman. If in such a case he could not get round a rascally solicitor, what could he do?--and what was the good of being the leader of the criminal Bar?
Only when Diana, at the end of their walk, shyly remarked that money was not to stand in the way; that she had plenty; that Beechcote was no doubt too expensive for her, but that the tenancy was only a yearly one, and she had but to give notice at Michaelmas, which she thought of doing--only then did Sir James allow himself a laugh.
"You think I am going to let this business turn you out of Beechcote--eh?--you preposterous little angel!"
"Not this business," stammered Diana; "but I am really living at too great a rate."
Sir James grinned, patted her ironically on the shoulder, told her to be a good girl, and departed.
Fanny stayed for a week at Beechcote, and at the end of that time Diana and Mrs. Colwood accompanied her on a Saturday to town, and she was married, to a sheepish and sulky bridegroom, by special license, at a Marylebone church--Sir James Chide, in the background, looking on. They departed for a three days' holiday to Brighton, and on the fourth day they were due to sail by a West Indian steamer for Barbadoes, where Sir James had procured for Mr. Frederick Birch a post in the office of a large sugar estate, in which an old friend of Chide's had an interest. Fanny showed no rapture in the prospect of thus returning to the bosom of her family. But there was no help for it.
By what means the transformation scene had been effected it would be waste of time to inquire. Much to Diana's chagrin, Sir James entirely declined to allow her to aid in it financially, except so far as equipping her cousin with clothes went, and providing her with a small sum for her wedding journey. Personally, he considered that the week during which Fanny stayed at Beechcote was as much as Diana could be expected to contribute, and that she had indeed paid the lion's share.
Yet that week--if he had known--was full of strange comfort to Diana. Often Muriel, watching her, would escape to her own room to hide her tears. Fanny's second visit was not as her first. The first had seen the outraging and repelling of the nobler nature by the ignoble. Diana had frankly not been able to endure her cousin. There was not a trace of that now. Her father's papers had told her abundantly how flimsy, how nearly fraudulent, was the financial claim which Fanny and her belongings had set up. The thousand pounds had been got practically on false pretences, and Diana knew it now, in every detail. Yet neither toward that, nor toward Fanny's other and worse lapses, did she show any bitterness, any spirit of mere disgust and reprobation. The last vestige of that just, instinctive pharisaism which clothes an unstained youth had dropped from her. As the heir of her mother's fate, she had gone down into the dark sea of human wrong and misery, and she had emerged transformed, more akin by far to the wretched and the unhappy than to the prosperous and the untempted, so that, through all repulsion and shock, she took Fanny now as she found her--bearing with her--accepting her--loving her, as far as she could. At the last even that stubborn nature was touched. When Diana kissed her after the wedding, with a few tremulous good wishes, Fanny's gulp was not all excitement. Yet it must still be recorded that on the wedding-day Fanny was in the highest spirits, only marred by some annoyance that she had let Diana persuade her out of a white satin wedding-dress.
"Sir James played Diana's game with perfect discretion"
Diana's preoccupation with this matter carried her through the first week of Marsham's second campaign, and deadened so far the painful effect of the contest now once more thundering through the division. For it was even a more odious battle than the first had been. In the first place, the moderate Liberals held a meeting very early in the struggle, with Sir William Felton in the chair, to protest against the lukewarm support which Marsham had given to the late leader of the Opposition, to express their lamentation for Ferrier, and their distrust of Lord Philip; and to decide upon a policy.
At the meeting a heated speech was made by a gray-haired squire, an old friend and Oxford contemporary of John Ferrier's, who declared that he had it on excellent authority that the communicated article in theHerald, which had appeared on the morning of Ferrier's sudden death, had been written by Oliver Marsham.
This statement was reported in the newspapers of the following morning, and was at once denied by Marsham himself, in a brief letter to theTimes.
It was this letter which Lady Felton discussed hotly with Sir James Chide on the day when Fanny Merton's misdemeanors also came up for judgment.
"He says he didn't write it. Sir William declares--a mere quibble! He has it from several people that Barrington was at Tallyn two days before the article appeared, and that he spoke to one or two friends next day of an 'important' conversation with Marsham, and of the first-hand information he had got from it. Nobody was so likely as Oliver to have that intimate knowledge of poor Mr. Ferrier's intentions and views. William believes that he gave Barrington all the information in the article, and wrote nothing himself, in order that he might be able to deny it."
Sir James met these remarks with an impenetrable face. He neither defended Marsham, nor did he join in Lady Felton's denunciations. But that good lady, who though voluble was shrewd, told her husband afterward that she was certain Sir James believed Marsham to be responsible for theHeraldarticle.
A week later the subject was renewed at a very heated and disorderly meeting at Dunscombe. A bookseller's assistant, well known as one of the leading Socialists of the division, got up and in a suave mincing voice accused Marsham of having--not written, but--"communicated" theHeraldarticle, and so dealt a treacherous blow at his old friend and Parliamentary leader--a blow which had no doubt contributed to the situation culminating in Mr. Ferrier's tragic death.
Marsham, very pale, sprang up at once, denied the charge, and fiercely attacked the man who had made it. But there was something so venomous in the manner of his denial, so undignified in the personalities with which it was accompanied, that the meeting suddenly took offence. The attack, instead of dying down, was renewed. Speaker after speaker got up and heckled the candidate. Was Mr. Marsham aware that the editor of theHeraldhad been staying at Tallyn two days before the article appeared? Was he also aware that his name had been freely mentioned, in theHeraldoffice, in connection with the article?
Marsham in vain endeavored to regain sang-froid and composure under these attacks. He haughtily repeated his denial, and refused to answer any more questions on the subject.
The local Tory paper rushed into the fray, and had presently collected a good deal of what it was pleased to call evidence on the matter, mainly gathered from London reporters. The matter began to look serious. Marsham appealed to Barrington to contradict the rumor publicly, as "absurd and untrue." But, unfortunately, Barrington, who was a man of quick and gusty temper, had been nettled by an incautious expression of Marsham's with regard to the famous article in his Dunscombe speech--"if I had had any intention whatever of dealing a dishonorable blow at my old friend and leader, I could have done it a good deal more effectively, I can assure you; I should not have put what I had to say in a form so confused and contradictory."
This--together with the general denial--happened to reach Barrington, and it rankled. When, therefore, Marsham appealed to him, he brusquely replied:
"DEAR MR. MARSHAM,--You know best what share you had in theHeraldarticle. You certainly did not write it. But to my mind it very faithfully reproduced the gist of our conversation on a memorable evening. And, moreover, I believe and still believe that you intended the reproduction. Believe me, Yours faithfully, ERNEST BARRINGTON."
To this Marsham returned a stiff answer, giving his own account of what had taken place, and regretting that even a keen journalist should have thought it consistent with his honor to make such injurious and unfair use of "my honest attempt to play the peacemaker" between the different factions of the party.
To this letter Barrington made no reply. Marsham, sore and weary, yet strung by now to an obstinacy and a fighting passion which gave a new and remarkable energy to his personality, threw himself fresh into a hopeless battle. For a time, indeed, the tide appeared to turn. He had been through two Parliaments a popular and successful member; less popular, no doubt, in the second than in the first, as the selfish and bitter strains in his character became more apparent. Still he had always commanded a strong personal following, especially among the younger men of the towns and villages, who admired his lithe and handsome presence, and appreciated his reputation as a sportsman and volunteer. Lady Lucy's subscriptions, too, were an element in the matter not to be despised.
A rally began in the Liberal host, which had felt itself already beaten. Marsham's meetings improved, theHeraldarticle was apparently forgotten.
The anxiety now lay chiefly in the mining villages, where nothing seemed to affect the hostile attitude of the inhabitants. A long series of causes had led up to it, to be summed up perhaps in one--the harsh and domineering temper of the man who had for years managed the three Tallyn collieries, and who held Lady Lucy and her co-shareholders in the hollow of his hand. Lady Lucy, whose curious obstinacy had been roused, would not dismiss him, and nothing less than his summary dismissal would have appeased the dull hatred of six hundred miners.
Marsham had indeed attempted to put through a number of minor reforms, but the effect on the temper of the district had been, in the end, little or nothing. The colliers, who had once fervently supported him, thought of him now, either as a fine gentleman profiting pecuniarily by the ill deeds of a tyrant, or as sheltering behind his mother's skirts; the Socialist Vicar of Beechcote thundered against him; and for some time every meeting of his in the colliery villages was broken up. But in the more hopeful days of the last week, when the canvassing returns, together with Marsham's astonishing energy and brilliant speaking, had revived the failing heart of the party, it was resolved to hold a final meeting, on the night before the poll, at Hartingfield-on-the-Wold, the largest of the mining villages.
Marsham left Dunscombe for Hartingfield about six o'clock on an August evening, driving the coach, with its superb team of horses, which had become by now so familiar an object in the division. He was to return in time to make the final speech in the concluding Liberal meeting of the campaign, which was to be held that night, with the help of some half-dozen other members of Parliament, in the Dunscombe Corn Exchange.
A body of his supporters, gathered in the market-place, cheered him madly as the coach set off. Marsham stopped the horses for a minute outside the office of the local paper. The weekly issue came out that afternoon. It was handed up to him, and the coach rattled on.
McEwart, who was sitting beside him, opened it, and presently gave a low involuntary whistle of dismay. Marsham looked round.
"What's the matter?"
McEwart would have gladly flung the paper away. But looking round him he saw that several other persons on the top of the coach had copies, and that whispering consternation had begun.
He saw nothing for it but to hand the paper to Marsham. "This is playing it pretty low down!" he said, pointing to an item in large letters on the first page.
Marsham handed the reins to the groom beside him and took the paper. He saw, printed in full, Barrington's curt letter to himself on the subject of theHeraldarticle, and below it the jubilant and scathing comments of the Tory editor.
He read both carefully, and gave the paper back to McEwart. "That decides the election," he said, calmly. McEwart's face assented.
Marsham, however, never showed greater pluck than at the Hartingfield meeting. It was a rowdy and disgraceful business, in which from beginning to end he scarcely got a hearing for more than three sentences at a time. A shouting mob of angry men, animated by passions much more than political, held him at bay. But on this occasion he never once lost his temper; he caught the questions and insults hurled at him, and threw them back with unfailing skill; and every now and then, at some lull in the storm, he made himself heard, and to good purpose. His courage and coolness propitiated some and exasperated others.
A group of very rough fellows pursued him, shouting and yelling, as he left the school-room where the meeting was held.
"Take care!" said McEwart, hurrying him along. "They are beginning with stones, and I see no police about."
The little party of visitors made for the coach, protected by some of the villagers. But in the dusk the stones came flying fast and freely. Just as Marsham was climbing into his seat he was struck. McEwart saw him waver, and heard a muttered exclamation.
"You're hurt!" he said, supporting him. "Let the groom drive."
Marsham pushed him away.
"It's nothing." He gathered up the reins, the grooms who had been holding the horses' heads clambered into their places, a touch of the whip, and the coach was off, almost at a gallop, pursued by a shower of missiles.
After a mile at full speed Marsham pulled in the horses, and handed the reins to the groom. As he did so a low groan escaped him.
"Youarehurt!" exclaimed McEwart. "Where did they hit you?"
Marsham shook his head.
"Better not talk," he said, in a whisper, "Drive home."
An hour afterward, it was announced to the crowded gathering in the Dunscombe Corn Exchange that Mr. Marsham had been hurt by a stone at Hartingfield, and could not address the meeting. The message was received with derision rather than sympathy. It was universally believed that the injury was a mere excuse, and that the publication of that most damning letter, on the very eve of the poll, was the sole and only cause why the Junior Lord of the Treasury failed on this occasion to meet the serried rows of his excited countrymen, waiting for him in the packed and stifling hall.
It was the Vicar who took the news to Beechcote. As in the case of Diana herself, the misfortune of the enemy instantly transformed a roaring lion into a sucking dove. Some instinct told him that she must hear it gently. He therefore invented an errand, saw Muriel Colwood, and left the tale with her--both of the blow and the letter.
Muriel, trembling inwardly, broke it as lightly and casually as she could. An injury to the spine--so it was reported. No doubt rest and treatment would soon amend it. A London surgeon had been sent for. Meanwhile the election was said to be lost. Muriel reluctantly produced the letter in theWest Brookshire Gazette, knowing that in the natural course of things Diana must see it on the morrow.
Diana sat bowed over the letter and the news, and presently lifted up a white face, kissed Muriel, who was hovering round her, and begged to be left alone.
She went to her room. The windows were wide open to the woods, and the golden August moon shone above the down in its bare full majesty. Most of the night she sat crouched beside the window, her head resting on the ledge. Her whole nature hungered--and hungered--for Oliver. As she lifted her eyes, she saw the little dim path on the hill-side; she felt his arms round about her, his warm life against hers. Nothing that he had done, nothing that he could do, had torn him, or would ever tear him, from her heart. And now he was wounded--defeated--perhaps disgraced; and she could not help him, could not comfort him.
She supposed Alicia Drake was with him. For the first time a torment of fierce jealousy ran through her nature, like fire through a forest glade, burning up its sweetness.
"What time is the carriage ordered for Mr. Nixon?" asked Marsham of his servant.
"Her ladyship, sir, told me to tell the stables four-twenty at Dunscombe."
"Let me hear directly the carriage arrives. And, Richard, go and see if the Dunscombe paper is come, and bring it up."
The footman disappeared. As soon as the door was shut Marsham sank back into his cushions with a stifled groan. He was lying on a sofa in his own sitting-room. A fire burned in the grate, and Marsham's limbs were covered with a rug. Yet it was only the first week of September, and the afternoon was warm and sunny. The neuralgic pain, however, from which he had suffered day and night since the attack upon him made him susceptible to the slightest breath of chill.
The footman returned with the newspaper.
"Is her ladyship at home?"
"I think not, sir. I saw her ladyship go out a little while ago with Miss Drake. Is there anything else I can get for you?"
"Make up the fire, please. Put the cigarettes here, and don't come till I ring."
Marsham, left alone, lit a cigarette, and fell hungrily upon the paper, his forehead and lips still drawn with pain. The paper contained an account of the stone-throwing at Hartingfield, and of the injury to himself; a full record of the last five or six days of the election, and of the proceedings at the declaration of the poll; a report, moreover, of the "chivalrous and sympathetic references" made by the newly elected Conservative member to the "dastardly attack" upon his rival, which the "whole of West Brookshire condemns and deplores."
The leading article "condemned" and "deplored," at considerable length and in good set terms, through two paragraphs. In the third it "could not disguise--from itself or its readers"--that Mr. Marsham's defeat by so large a majority had been a strong probability from the first, and had been made a certainty by the appearance on the eve of the poll of "the Barrington letter." "No doubt, some day, Mr. Marsham will give his old friends and former constituents in this division the explanations in regard to this letter--taken in connection with his own repeated statements at meetings and in the press--which his personal honor and their long fidelity seem to demand. Meanwhile we can only express to our old member our best wishes both for his speedy recovery from the effects of a cowardly and disgraceful attack, and for the restoration of a political position which only a few months ago seemed so strong and so full of promise."
Marsham put down the paper. He could see the whipper-snapper of an editor writing the lines, with a wary eye both to the past and future of the Marsham influence in the division. The self-made, shrewd little man had been Oliver's political slave and henchman through two Parliaments; and he had no doubt reflected that neither the Tallyn estates, nor the Marsham wealth had been wiped out by the hostile majority of last Saturday. At the same time, the state of feeling in the division was too strong; the paper which depended entirely on local support could not risk its very existence by countering it.
Marsham's keen brain spared him nothing. His analysis of his own situation, made at leisure during the week which had elapsed since the election, had been as pitiless and as acute as that of any opponent could have been. He knew exactly what he had lost, and why.
A majority of twelve hundred against him, in a constituency where, up to the dissolution, he had commanded a majority--for him--of fifteen hundred. And that at a general election, when his party was sweeping the country!
He had, of course, resigned his office, and had received a few civil and sympathetic words from the Premier--words which but for his physical injury, so the recipient of them suspected, might have been a good deal less civil and less sympathetic. No effort had been made to delay the decision. For a Cabinet Minister, defeated at a bye-election, a seat must be found. For a Junior Lord and a Second Whip nobody will put themselves out.
He was, therefore, out of Parliament and out of office; estranged from multitudes of old friends; his name besmirched by some of the most damaging accusations that can be brought against a man's heart and honor.
He moved irritably among his cushions, trying to arrange them more comfortably. Thisinfernalpain! It was to be hoped Nixon would be able to do more for it than that ass, the Dunscombe doctor. Marsham thought, with resentment, of all his futile drugs and expedients. According to the Dunscombe man, the stone had done no vital injury, but had badly bruised one of the lower vertebræ, and jarred the nerves of the spine generally. Local rest, various applications, and nerve--soothing drugs--all these had been freely used, and with no result. The pain had been steadily growing worse, and in the last twenty-four hours certain symptoms had appeared, which, when he first noticed them, had roused in Marsham a gust of secret terror; and Nixon, a famous specialist in nerve and spinal disease, had been summoned forthwith.
To distract his thoughts, Marsham took up the paper again.
What was wrong with the light? He looked at the clock, and read it with some difficulty. Close on four only, and the September sun was shining brightly outside. It was his eyes, he supposed, that were not quite normal Very likely. A nervous shock must, of course, show itself in a variety of ways. At any rate, he found reading difficult, and the paper slid away.
The pain, however, would not let him doze. He looked helplessly round the room, feeling depressed and wretched. Why were his mother and Alicia out so long? They neglected and forgot him. Yet he could not but remember that they had both devoted themselves to him in the morning, had read to him and written for him, and he had not been a very grateful patient. He recalled, with bitterness, the look of smiling relief with which Alicia had sprung up at the sound of the luncheon-bell, dropping the book from which she had been reading aloud, and the little song he had heard her humming in the corridor as she passed his door on her way down-stairs.
Shewas in no pain physical or mental, and she had probably no conception of what he had endured these six days and nights. But one would have thought that mere instinctive sympathy with the man to whom she was secretly engaged.
For they were secretly engaged. It was during one of their early drives, in the canvassing of the first election, that he had lost his head one June afternoon, as they found themselves alone, crossing a beech wood on one of the private roads of the Tallyn estate; the groom having been despatched on a message to a farm-house. Alicia was in her most daring and provocative mood, tormenting and flattering him by turns; the reflections from her rose-colored parasol dappling her pale skin with warm color; her beautiful ungloved hands and arms, bare to the elbow, teasing the senses of the man beside her. Suddenly he had thrown his arm round her, and crushed her to him, kissing the smooth cool face and the dazzling hair. And she had nestled up to him and laughed--not the least abashed or astonished; so that even then, through his excitement, there had struck a renewed and sharp speculation as to her twenty-four hours' engagement to the Curate, in the spring of the year; as to the privileges she must have allowed him; and no doubt to others before him.
At that time, it was tacitly understood between them that no engagement could be announced. Alicia was well aware that Brookshire was looking on; that Brookshire was on the side of Diana Mallory, the forsaken, and was not at all inclined to forgive either the deserting lover or the supplanting damsel; so that while she was not loath to sting and mystify Brookshire by whatever small signs of her power over Oliver Marsham she could devise; though she queened it beside him on his coach, and took charge with Lady Lucy of his army of women canvassers; though she faced the mob with him at Hartingfield, on the occasion of the first disturbance there in June, and had stood beside him, vindictively triumphant on the day of his first hard-won victory, she would wear no ring, and she baffled all inquiries, whether of her relations or her girl friends. Her friendship with her cousin Oliver was nobody's concern but her own, she declared, and all they both wanted was to be let alone.
Meanwhile she had been shaken and a little frightened by the hostile feeling shown toward her, no less than Oliver, in the first election. She had taken no part in the second, although she had been staying at Tallyn all through it, and was present when Oliver was brought in, half fainting and agonized with pain, after the Hartingfield riot.
Oliver, now lying with closed eyes on his sofa, lived again through the sensations and impressions of that first hour: the pain--the arrival of the doctor--the injection of morphia--the blessed relief stealing through his being--and then Alicia's face beside him. Delivered from the obsession of intolerable anguish, he had been free to notice with a kind of exultation the tears in the girl's eyes, her pale tremor and silence. Never yet had Alicia wept forhimor anything that concerned him. Never, indeed, had he seen her weep in his whole life before. He triumphed in her tears.
Since then, however, their whole relation had insensibly and radically changed; their positions toward each other were reversed. Till the day of his injury and his defeat, Marsham had been in truth the wooed and Alicia the wooer. Now it seemed to him as though, through his physical pain, he were all the time clinging to something that shrank away and resisted him--something that would ultimately elude and escape him.
He knew well that Alicia liked sickness and melancholy no more than he did; and he was constantly torn between a desire to keep her near him and a perception that to tie her to his sick-room was, in fact, the worst of policies.
Persistently, in the silence of the hot room, there rang through his brain the questions: "Do I really care whether she stays or goes?--do I love her?--shall I ever marry her?" Questions that were immediately answered, it seemed, by the rise of a wave of desolate and desperate feeling. He was maimed and ruined; life had broken under his feet. What if also he were done forever with love and marriage?
There were still some traces in his veins of the sedative drug which had given him a few hours' sleep during the night. Under its influence a feverish dreaminess overtook him, alive with fancies and images. Ferrier and Diana were among the phantoms that peopled the room. He saw Ferrier come in, stoop over the newspaper on the floor, raise it, and walk toward the fire with it. The figure stood with its back to him; then suddenly it turned, and Marsham saw the well-known face, intent, kindly, a little frowning, as though in thought, but showing no consciousness of his, Oliver's, presence or plight. He himself wished to speak, but was only aware of useless effort and some intangible hinderance. Then Ferrier moved on toward a writing-table with drawers that stood beyond the fireplace. He stooped, and touched a handle. "No!" cried Oliver, violently--"no!" He woke with shock and distress, his pulse racing. But the feverish state began again, and dreams with it--of the House of Commons, the election, the faces in the Hartingfield crowd. Diana was among the crowd--looking on--vaguely beautiful and remote. Yet as he perceived her a rush of cool air struck on his temples, he seemed to be walking down a garden, there was a scent of limes and roses.
"Oliver!" said his mother's voice beside him--"dear Oliver!"
He roused himself to find Lady Lucy bending over him. The pale dismay in her face excited and irritated him.
He turned away from her.
"Is Nixon come?"
"Dearest, he has just arrived. Will you see him at once?"
"Of course!" he said, angrily. "Why doesn't Richard do as he's told?"
He raised himself into a sitting posture, while Lady Lucy went to the door. The local doctor entered--a stranger behind him. Lady Lucy left her son and the great surgeon together.
Nearly an hour later, Mr. Nixon, waylaid by Lady Lucy, was doing his best to compromise, as doctors must, between consideration for the mother and truth as to the Son. There was, he hoped, no irreparable injury. But the case would be long, painful, trying to everybody concerned. Owing to the mysterious nerve-sympathies of the body, the sight was already affected and would be more so. Complete rest, certain mechanical applications, certain drugs--he ran through his recommendations.
"Avoid morphia, I implore you," he said, earnestly, "if you possibly can. Here a man's friends can be of great help to him. Cheer him and distract him in every way you can. I think we shall be able to keep the pain within bounds."
Lady Lucy looked piteously at the speaker.
"And how long?" she said, trembling.
Mr. Nixon hesitated. "I am afraid I can hardly answer that. The blow was a most unfortunate one. It might have done a worse injury. Your son might be now a paralyzed invalid for life. But the case is very serious, nor is it possible yet to say what all the consequences of the injury may be. But keep your own courage up--and his. The better his general state, the more chance he has."
A few minutes more, and the brougham had carried him away. Lady Lucy, looking after it from the window of her sitting-room, knew that for her at last what she had been accustomed to describe every Sunday as "the sorrows of this transitory life" had begun. Till now they had been as veiled shapes in a misty distance. She had accepted them with religious submission, as applying to others. Her mind, resentful and astonished, must now admit them--pale messengers of powers unseen and pitiless!--to its own daily experience; must look unprotected, unscreened, into their stern faces.
"John!--John!" cried the inner voice of agonized regret. And then: "My boy!--my boy!"
"What did he say?" asked Alicia's voice, beside her.
The sound--the arm thrown round her--were not very welcome to Lady Lucy. Her nature, imperious and jealously independent, under all her sweetness of manner, set itself against pity, especially from her juniors. She composed herself at once.
"He does not give a good account," she said, withdrawing herself gently but decidedly. "It may take a long time before Oliver is quite himself again."
Alicia persisted in a few questions, extracting all the information she could. Then Lady Lucy sat down at her writing-table and began to arrange some letters. Alicia's presence annoyed her. The truth was that she was not as fond of Alicia as she had once been. These misfortunes, huddling one on another, instead of drawing them together, had in various and subtle ways produced a secret estrangement. To neither the older nor the younger woman could the familiar metaphor have been applied which compares the effects of sorrow or sympathy on fine character to the bruising of fragrant herbs. Ferrier's death, sorely and bitterly lamented though it was, had not made Lady Lucy more lovable. Oliver's misfortune had not--toward Lady Lucy, at any rate--liberated in Alicia those hidden tendernesses that may sometimes transmute and glorify natures apparently careless or stubborn, brought eye to eye with pain. Lady Lucy also resented her too long exclusion from Alicia's confidence. Like all the rest of the world, she believed there was an understanding between Oliver and Alicia. Of course, there were reasons for not making anything of the sort public at present. But a mother, she thought, ought to have been told.
"Does Mr. Nixon recommend that Oliver should go abroad for the winter?" asked Alicia, after a pause. She was sitting on the arm of a chair, her slender feet hanging, and the combination of her blue linen dress with the fiery gold of her hair reminded Lady Lucy of the evening in the Eaton Square drawing-room, when she had first entertained the idea that Alicia and Oliver might marry. Oliver, standing erect in front of the fire looking down upon Alicia in her blue tulle--his young vigor and distinction--the carriage of his handsome head--was she never to see that sight again--never? Her heart fluttered and sank; the prison of life contracted round her.
She answered, rather shortly.
"He made no plan of the kind. Travelling, in fact, is absolutely forbidden for the present."
"Poor Oliver!" said Alicia, gently, her eyes on the ground. "Howhorridit is that I have to go away!"
"You! When?" Lady Lucy turned sharply to look at the speaker.
"Oh! not till Saturday," said Alicia, hastily; "and of course I shall come back again--if you want me." She looked up with a smile.
"Oliver will certainly want you; I don't know whom he could--possibly--want--so much." Lady Lucy spoke the words with slow emphasis.
"Dear old boy!--I know," murmured Alicia. "I needn't be long away."
"Why must you go at all? I am sure the Treshams--Lady Evelyn--would understand--"
"Oh, I promised so faithfully!" pleaded Alicia, joining her hands. "And then, you know, I should be able to bring all sorts of gossip back to Oliver to amuse him."
Lady Lucy pressed her hand to her eyes in a miserable bewilderment. "I suppose it will be an immense party. You told me, I think, that Lady Evelyn had asked Lord Philip Darcy. I should be glad if you would make her understand that neither I, nor Sir James Chide, nor any other old friend of Mr. Ferrier can ever meet that man on friendly terms again." She looked up, her wrinkled cheeks flushed with color, her aspect threatening and cold.
"Of course!" said Alicia, soothingly. "Hateful man! I too loathe the thought of meeting him. But you know how delicate Evelyn is, and how she has been depending on me to help her. Now, oughtn't we to go back to Oliver?" She rose from her chair.
"Mr. Nixon left some directions to which I must attend," said Lady Lucy, turning to her desk. "Will you go and read to him?"
Alicia moved away, but paused as she neared the door.
"What did Mr. Nixon say about Oliver's eyes? He has been suffering from them dreadfully to-day."
"Everything is connected. We can only wait."
"Are you--are you thinking of a nurse?"
"No," said Lady Lucy, decidedly. "His man Richard is an excellent nurse. I shall never leave him--and you say"--she turned pointedly to look at Alicia--"you say you will come back?"
"Of course!--of course I will come back!" cried Alicia. Then, stepping up briskly to Lady Lucy, she stooped and kissed her. "And there is you to look after, too!"
Lady Lucy allowed the kiss, but made no reply to the remark. Alicia departed.
She went slowly up the wide oak staircase. How stifling the house was on this delicious afternoon! Suddenly, in the distance, she heard the sound of guns--a shooting-party, no doubt, in the Melford woods. Her feet danced under her, and she gave a sigh of longing for the stubbles and the sunny fields, and the companionship of handsome men, of health and vigor as flawless and riotous as her own.
Oliver was lying still, with closed eyes, when she rejoined him. He made no sign as she opened the door, and she sank down on a stool beside him and laid her head against his shoulder.
"Dear Oliver, you must cheer up," she said, softly. "You'll be well soon--quite soon--if you are only patient."
He made no reply.
"Did you like Mr. Nixon?" she asked, in the same caressing voice, gently rubbing her cheek against his arm.
"One doesn't exactly like one's executioner," he said, hoarsely and suddenly, but without opening his eyes.
"Oliver!--dearest!" She dropped a protesting kiss on the sleeve of his coat.
Silence for a little, Alicia felt as if she could hardly breathe in the hot room. Then Oliver raised himself.
"I am going blind!"--he said, violently. "And nothing can be done. Did that man tell my mother that?"
"No, no!--Oliver!" She threw her arm round him, hastily repeating and softening Nixon's opinion.
He sank back on his cushions, gloomily listening--without assent. Presently he shook his head.
"The stuff that doctors talk when they can do no good, and want to get comfortably out of the house! Alicia!"
She bent forward startled.
"Alicia!--are you going to stick to me?"
His eyes held her.
"Oliver!--what a cruel question!"
"No, it is not cruel." He spoke with a decision which took no account of her caresses. "I ought to give you up--I know that perfectly well. But I tell you frankly I shall have no motive to get well if you leave me. I think that man told me the truth--I did my best to make him. Thereisa chance of my getting well--the thing isnothopeless. If you'll stand by me, I'll fight through. Will you?" He looked at her with a threatening and painful eagerness.
"Of course I will," she said, promptly.
"Then let us tell my mother to-night that we are engaged? Mind, I am not deceiving you. I would give you up at once if I were hopelessly ill. I am only asking you to bear a little waiting--and wretchedness--for my sake."
"I will bear anything. Only, dear Oliver--for your sake--for mine--wait a little longer! You know what horrible gossip there's been!" She clung to him, murmuring: "I couldn't bear that anybody should speak or think harshly of you now. It can make no difference to you and me, but two or three months hence everybody would take it so differently. You know we said in June--six months."
Her voice was coaxing and sweet. He partly withdrew himself from her, however.
"At least, you can tell my mother," he said, insisting. "Of course, she suspects it all."
"Oh, but, dear Oliver!"--she brought her face nearer to his, and he saw the tears in her eyes--"one's own mother ought to know first of all. Mamma would be so hurt--she would never forgive me. Let me pay this horrid visit--and then go home and tell my people--if you really, really wish it. Afterward of course, I shall come back to you--and Cousin Lucy shall know--and at Christmas--everybody."
"What visit? Youaregoing to Eastham?--to the Tresham's?" It was a cry of incredulous pain.
"HowcanI get out of it, dear Oliver? Evelyn has beensoill!--and she's been depending on me--and I owe her so much. You know how good she was to me in the Season."
He lifted himself again on his cushions, surveying her ironically--his eyes sunken and weak--his aspect ghastly.
"Well, how long do you mean to stay? Is Lord Philip going to be there?"
"What do I care whether he is or not!"
"You said you were longing to know him."
"That was before you were ill."
"I don't see any logic in that remark." He lay looking at her. Then suddenly he put out an arm, pulled her down to him feebly, and kissed her. But the movement hurt him. He turned away with some broken words--or, rather, moans--stifled against his pillows.
"Dear, do lie still. Shall I read to you?"
He shook his head.
"Don't stay with me. I shall be better after dinner."
She rose obediently, touched him caressingly with her hand, drew a light shawl over him, and stole away.
When she reached her own room she stood a moment, frowning and absorbed; beside the open window. Then some one knocked at her door. It was her maid, who came in carrying a large light box.
Alicia flew toward her.
"From Cosette! Heavens! Oh, Benson, quick! Put it down. I'll help you."
The maid obeyed, and ran to the dressing-table for scissors. Cords and tapes were soon cut in the hurry of unpacking, and from the crackling tissue-paper there emerged an evening gown of some fresh snowy stuff, delicately painted and embroidered, which drew from the maid little shrieks of admiration.
Alicia looked at it more critically.
"The lace is not good enough," she said, twisting her lip, "and I shall make her give me some more embroidery than that on the bodice--for the money--I can tell her! However, it is pretty--much prettier, isn't it, Benson, than that gown of Lady Evelyn's I took it from? She'll be jealous!" The girl laughed triumphantly. "Well, now, look here, Benson, we're going on Saturday, and I want to look through my gowns. Get them out, and I'll see if there's anything I can send home."
The maid's face fell.
"I packed some of them this morning, miss--in the large American trunk. I thought they'd keep better there than anywhere. It took a lot of time."
"Oh, never mind. You can easily pack them again. I really must go through them."
The maid unwillingly obeyed; and soon the room--bed, sofa, chairs--was covered with costly gowns, for all hours of the day and night: walking-dresses, in autumn stuffs and colors, ready for the moors and stubbles; afternoon frocks of an elaborate simplicity, expensively girlish; evening dresses in an amazing variety of hue and fabric; with every possible adjunct in the way of flowers, gloves, belt, that dressmakers and customer could desire.
Alicia looked at it all with glowing cheeks. She reflected that she had really spent the last check she had made her father give her to very great Advantage. There were very few people of her acquaintance, girls or married women, who knew how to get as much out of money as she did.
In her mind she ran over the list of guests invited to the Eastham party, as her new friend Lady Evelyn had confided it to her. Nothing could be smarter, but the competition among the women would be terribly keen. "Of course, I can't touch duchesses," she thought, laughing to herself, "or American millionaires. But I shall do!"
And her mind ran forward in a dream of luxury and delight. She saw herself sitting or strolling in vast rooms amid admiring groups; mirrors reflected her; she heard the rustle of her gowns on parquet or marble, the merry sound of her own laughter; other girls threw her the incense of their envy and imitation; and men, fresh and tanned from shooting, breathing the joy of physical life, devoted themselves to her pleasure, or encircled her with homage. Not always chivalrous, or delicate, or properly behaved--these men of her imagination! What matter? She loved adventures! And moving like a king among the rest, she saw the thin, travel-beaten, eccentric form of Lord Philip--the hated, adored, pursued; Society's idol and bugbear all in one; Lord Philip, who shunned and disliked women; on whom, nevertheless, the ambitions and desires of some of the loveliest women in England were, on that account alone, and at this moment of his political triumph, the more intently and the more greedily fixed.
A flash of excitement ran through her. In Lady Evelyn's letter of that morning there was a mention of Lord Philip. "I told him you were to be here. He made a note of it, and I do at last believe he won't throw us over, as he generally does."
She dressed, still in a reverie, speechless under her maid's hands. Then, as she emerged upon the gallery, looking down upon the ugly hall of Tallyn, she remembered that she had promised to go back after dinner and read to Oliver. Her nature rebelled in a moral and physical nausea, and it was all she could do to meet Lady Lucy at their solitary dinner with her usual good temper.