The Testing of Diana Mallory Part 59

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 a.s.signed 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 canva.s.sing, 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 s.p.a.ces 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 cla.s.s 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 G.o.d. 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 pa.s.sionately 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 Brooks.h.i.+re. 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 const.i.tuency.

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 out of the Government. Nevertheless, the scale of life had dropped--on the wrong side. Through Lankester's thought there shot a pang of sympathy. Defeat was always more winning to him than triumph.

Meanwhile the new member himself was in no melting mood.

Forbes was right. Marsham, in his room, looking over the letters which his servant had brought him, was only conscious of two feelings--disgust and loathing with regard to the contest just over, and a dogged determination with regard to the future. He had been deserted by the moderates--by the Ferrierites--in spite of all his endeavors to keep within courteous and judicial bounds; and he had been all but sacrificed to a forbearance which had not saved him apparently a single moderate vote, and had lost him scores on the advanced side.

With regard to Ferrier personally, he was extremely sore, A letter from him during the preceding week would certainly have influenced votes.

Marsham denied hotly that his speeches had been of a character to offend or injure his old friend and leader. A man must really be allowed some honest lat.i.tude of opinion, even under party government!--and in circ.u.mstances of personal obligation. He had had to steer a most difficult course. But why must he give up his principles--not to speak of his chances of political advancement--because John Ferrier had originally procured him his seat in Parliament, and had been his parents' intimate friend for many years? Let the Whig deserters answer that question, if they could!

His whole being was tingling with anger and resentment. The contest had steeped him in humiliations which stuck to him like mud-stains.

The week before, he had written to Ferrier, imploring him if possible to come and speak for him--or at least to write a letter; humbling his pride; and giving elaborate explanations of the line which he had taken.

There, on the table beside him, was Ferrier's reply:

"My Dear Oliver,--I don't think a letter would do you much good, and for a speech, I am too tired--and I am afraid at the present moment too thin-skinned. Pray excuse me. We shall meet when this hubbub is over. All success to you.

"Yours ever, J.F."

Was there ever a more ungracious, a more uncalled-for, letter? Well, at any rate, he was free henceforward to think and act for himself, and on public grounds only; though of course he would do nothing unworthy of an old friends.h.i.+p, or calculated to hurt his mother's feelings. Ferrier, by this letter, and by the strong negative influence he must have exerted in West Brooks.h.i.+re during the election, had himself loosened the old bond; and Marsham would henceforth stand on his own feet.

As to Ferrier's reasons for a course of action so wholly unlike any he had ever yet taken in the case of Lucy Marsham's son, Oliver's thoughts found themselves engaged in a sore and perpetual wrangle. Ferrier, he supposed, suspected him of a lack of "straightness"; and did not care to maintain an intimate relation, which had been already, and might be again, used against him. Marsham, on his side, recalled with discomfort various small incidents in the House of Commons which might have seemed--to an enemy--to ill.u.s.trate or confirm such an explanation of the state of things.

Absurd, of course! He _was_ an old friend of Ferrier's, whose relation to his mother necessarily involved close and frequent contact with her son. And at the same time--although in the past Ferrier had no doubt laid him under great personal and political obligations--he had by now, in the natural course of things, developed strong opinions of his own, especially as to the conduct of party affairs in the House of Commons; opinions which were not Ferrier's--which were, indeed, vehemently opposed to Ferrier's. In his, Oliver's, opinion, Ferrier's lead in the House--on certain questions--was a lead of weakness, making for disaster. Was he not even to hold, much less to express such a view, because of the quasi-parental relation in which Ferrier had once stood to him? The whole thing was an odious confusion--most unfair to him individually--between personal and Parliamentary duty.

Frankness?--loyalty? It would, no doubt, be said that Ferrier had always behaved with singular generosity both toward opponents and toward dissidents in his own party. Open and serious argument was at no time unwelcome to him.

All very well! But how was one to argue, beyond a certain point, with a man twenty-five years your senior, who had known you in jackets, and was also your political chief?

Moreover, he had argued--to the best of his ability. Ferrier had written him a striking series of letters, no doubt, and he had replied to them.

As to Ferrier's wish that he should communicate certain points in those letters to Barton and Lankester, he had done it, to some extent. But it was a most useless proceeding. The arguments employed had been considered and rejected a hundred times already by every member of the dissident group.

And with regard to the meeting, which had apparently roused so sharp a resentment in Ferrier, Marsham maintained simply that he was not responsible. It was a meeting of the advanced Radicals of the division.

Neither Marsham nor his agents had been present. Certain remarks and opinions of his own had been quoted indeed, even in public, as leading up to it, and justifying it. A great mistake. He had never meant to countenance any personal attack on Ferrier or his leaders.h.i.+p. Yet he uncomfortably admitted that the meeting had told badly on the election.

In the view of one side, he had not had pluck enough to go to it; in the view of the other, he had disgracefully connived at it.

The arrival of the evening post and papers did something to brush away these dismal self-communings. Wonderful news from the counties! The success of the latest batch of advanced candidates had been astonis.h.i.+ng.

Other men, it seemed, had been free to liberate their souls! Well, now the arbiter of the situation was Lord Philip, and there would certainly be a strong advanced infusion in the new Ministry. Marsham considered that he had as good claims as any of the younger men; and if it came to another election in Brooks.h.i.+re, hateful as the prospect was, he should be fighting in the open, and choosing his own weapons. No s.h.i.+rking! His whole being gathered itself into a pa.s.sionate determination to retaliate upon the persons who had injured, thwarted, and calumniated him during the contest just over. He would fight again--next week, if necessary--and he would win!

As to the particular and personal calumnies with which he had been a.s.sailed--why, of course, he absolved Diana. She could have had no hand in them.

Suddenly he pushed his papers from him with a hasty unconscious movement.

In driving home that evening past the gates and plantations of Beechcote it seemed to him that he had seen through the trees--in the distance--the fluttering of a white dress. Had the news of his inglorious success just reached her? How had she received it? Her face came before him--the frank eyes--the sweet troubled look.

He dropped his head upon his arms. A sick distaste for all that he had been doing and thinking rose upon him, wavelike, drowning for a moment the energies of mind and will. Had anything been worth while--for _him_--since the day when he had failed to keep the last tryst which Diana had offered him?

He did not, however, long allow himself a weakness which he knew well he had no right to indulge. He roused himself abruptly, took pen and paper, and wrote a little note to Alicia, sending it round to her through her maid.

Marsham pleaded fatigue, and dined in his room. In the course of the meal he inquired of his servant if Mr. Barrington had arrived.