The Testing of Diana Mallory - Mrs. Humphry Ward (novels to read for beginners txt) 📗

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As soon as she was gone Bobbie stopped whistling. If she was really going to make a quarrel of it, it would certainly be a great bore--a hideous bore. His conscience pricked him for the mean and unmanly dependence which had given the capricious and masterful little woman so much to say in his affairs. He must really find fresh work, pay his debts, those to Lady Niton first and foremost, and marry the girl who would make a decent fellow of him. But his heart smote him about his queer old Fairy Blackstick. No surrender!--but he would like to make peace.

* * * * *

It was past eight o'clock when the four-in-hand on which the new member had been touring the constituency drove up to the Tallyn door. Forbes hurried to the steps to greet the party.

"Hullo, Oliver! A thousand congratulations, old fellow! Never mind the figures. A win's a win! But I thought you would have been dining and junketing in Dunscombe to-night. How on earth did you get them to let you off?"

Oliver's tired countenance smiled perfunctorily as he swung himself down from the coach. He allowed his hand to be shaken; his lips moved, but only a husky whisper emerged.

"Lost his voice," Roland Lankester explained. "And so done that we begged him off from the Dunscombe dinner. He's only fit for bed."

And with a wave of the hand to the company, Marsham, weary and worn, mounted the steps, and, passing rapidly through the hall, went up-stairs. Alicia Drake and Lankester followed, pausing in the hall to talk with Bobbie.

Alicia too looked tired out. She was dressed in a marvellous gown of white chiffon, adorned with a large rosette of Marsham's colors--red-and-yellow--and wore a hat entirely composed of red and yellow roses. The colors were not becoming to her, and she had no air of happy triumph. Rather, both in her and in Marsham there were strong signs of suppressed chagrin and indignation.

"Well, that's over!" said Miss Drake, throwing down her gloves on the billiard-table with a fierce gesture; "and I'm sure neither Oliver nor I would go through it again for a million of money. How _revolting_ the lower classes are!"

Lankester looked at her curiously.

"You've worked awfully hard," he said. "I hope you're going to have a good rest."

"I wouldn't bother about rest if I could pay out some of the people here," said Alicia, passionately. "I should like to see a few score of them hanged in chains, _pour encourager les autres_."

So saying, she gathered up her gloves and parasol, and swept up-stairs declaring that she was too dog-tired to talk.

Bobbie Forbes and Lankester looked at each other.

"It's been really a beastly business!" said Lankester, under his breath. "Precious little politics in it, too, as far as I could see. The strong Ferrierites no doubt have held aloof on the score of Marsham's supposed disloyalty to the great man; though, as far as I can make out, he has been careful not to go beyond a certain line in his speeches. Anyway, they have done no work, and a good many of them have certainly abstained from voting. It is our vote that has gone down; the Tories have scarcely increased theirs at all. But the other side--and the Socialists--got hold of a lot of nasty little things about the estate and the collieries. The collieries are practically in rebellion, spoiling for a big strike next November, if not before. When Miss Drake and Marsham drove round there this morning they were very badly received. Her parasol was broken by a stone, and there was a good deal of mud-throwing."

Bobbie eyed his companion.

"Was any of the Opposition personal to _her_?"

Lankester nodded.

"There's an extraordinary feeling all over the place for--"

"Of course there is!" said Bobbie, hotly. "Marsham isn't such a fool as not to know that. Why did he let this aggressive young woman take such a prominent part?"

Lankester shrugged his shoulders, but did not pursue the subject. The two men went up-stairs, and Lankester parted from his companion with the remark:

"I must say I hope Marsham won't press for anything in the Government. I don't believe he'll ever get in for this place again."

Forbes shook his head.

"Marsham's got a lot of devil in him somewhere. I shouldn't wonder if this made him set his teeth."

* * * * *

Lankester opened the door of the ugly yet luxurious room which had been assigned him. He looked round it with fresh distaste, resenting its unnecessary size and its pretentious decoration, resenting also the very careful valeting which had evidently been bestowed on his shabby clothes and personal appointments, as though the magnificent young footman who looked after him had been doing his painful best with impossible materials.

"Why, the idiots have shut the windows!"

He strode vehemently across the floor, only to find the park outside, as he hung across the sill, even less to his liking than the room within.

Then, throwing himself into a chair, tired out with the canvassing, speaking, and multifarious business of the preceding days, he fell to wondering what on earth had made him--after the fatigues of his own election--come down to help Marsham with his. There were scores of men in the House he liked a great deal better, and requests for help had been showered upon him.

He had, no doubt, been anxious, as a keen member of the advanced group, that Marsham should finally commit himself to the programme of the Left Wing, with which he had been so long coquetting. Oliver had a considerable position in the House, and was, moreover, a rich man. Rich men had not, so far, been common in the advanced section of the party. Lankester, in whom the idealist and the wire-puller were shrewdly mixed, was well aware that the reforms he desired could only be got by extensive organization; and he knew precisely what the money cost of getting them would be. Rich men, therefore, were the indispensable tools of his ideas; and among his own group he who had never possessed a farthing of his own apart from the earnings of his brain and pen was generally set on to capture them.

Was that really why he had come down?--to make sure of this rich Laodicean? Lankester fell into a reverie.

He was a man of curious gifts and double personality. It was generally impossible to lure him, on any pretext, from the East End and the House of Commons. He lived in a block of model dwellings in a street opening out of the East India Dock Road, and his rooms, whenever he was at home, were overrun by children from the neighboring tenements. To them he was all gentleness and fun, while his command of invective in a public meeting was little short of terrible. Great ladies and the country-houses courted him because of a certain wit, a certain charm--above all, a certain spiritual power--which piqued the worldling. He flouted and refused the great ladies--with a smile, however, which gave no offence; and he knew, notwithstanding, everybody whom he wanted to know. Occasionally he made quiet spaces in his life, and disappeared from London for days or weeks. When he reappeared it was often with a battered and exhausted air, as of one from whom virtue had gone out. He was, in truth, a mystic of a secular kind: very difficult to class religiously, though he called himself a member of the Society of Friends. Lady Lucy, who was of Quaker extraction, recognized in his ways and phrases echoes from the meetings and influences of her youth. But, in reality, he was self-taught and self-formed, on the lines of an Evangelical tradition, which had owed something, a couple of generations back, among his Danish forebears, to the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg. This tradition had not only been conveyed to him by a beloved and saintly mother; it had been appropriated by the man's inmost forces. What he believed in, with all mystics, was _prayer_--an intimate and ineffable communion between the heart and God. Lying half asleep on the House of Commons benches, or strolling on the Terrace, he pursued often an inner existence, from which he could spring in a moment to full mundane life--arguing passionately for some Socialist proposal, scathing an opponent, or laughing and "ragging" with a group of friends, like a school-boy on an _exeat_. But whatever he did, an atmosphere went with him that made him beloved. He was extremely poor, and wrote for his living. His opinions won the scorn of moderate men; and every year his influence in Parliament--on both sides of the House and with the Labor party--increased. On his rare appearance in such houses as Tallyn Hall every servant in the house marked and befriended him. The tall footman, for instance, who had just been endeavoring to make the threadbare cuffs of Lankester's dress coat present a more decent appearance, had done it in no spirit of patronage, but simply in order that a gentleman who spoke to him as a man and a brother should not go at a disadvantage among "toffs" who did nothing of the kind.

But again--why had he come down?

During the last months of Parliament, Lankester had seen a good deal of Oliver. The story of Diana, and of Marsham's interrupted wooing was by that time public property, probably owing to the indignation of certain persons in Brookshire. As we have seen, it had injured the prestige of the man concerned in and out of Parliament. But Lankester, who looked at life intimately and intensely, with the eye of a confessor, had been roused by it to a curiosity about Oliver Marsham--whom at the time he was meeting habitually on political affairs--which he had never felt before. He, with his brooding second sight based on a spiritual estimate of the world--he and Lady Lucy--alone saw that Marsham was unhappy. His irritable moodiness might, of course, have nothing to do with his failure to play the man in the case of Miss Mallory. Lankester was inclined to think it had--Alicia Drake or no Alicia Drake. And the grace of repentance is so rare in mankind that the mystic--his own secret life wavering perpetually between repentance and ecstasy--is drawn to the merest shadow of it.

These hidden thoughts on Lankester's side had been met by a new and tacit friendliness on Marsham's. He had shown an increasing liking for Lankester's company, and had finally asked him to come down and help him in his constituency.

By George, if he married that girl, he would pay his penalty to the utmost!

Lankester leaned out of window again, his eyes sweeping the dreary park. In reality they had before them Marsham's aspect at the declaration of the poll--head and face thrown back defiantly, hollow eyes of bitterness and fatigue; and the scene outside--in front, a booing crowd--and beside the new member, Alicia's angry and insolent look.

The election represented a set-back in a man's career, in spite of the bare victory. And Lankester did not think it would be retrieved. With a prophetic insight which seldom failed him, he saw that Marsham's chapter of success was closed. He might get some small office