The Testing of Diana Mallory Part 68

Marsham left Duns...o...b.. 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 Duns...o...b.. 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 the _Herald_ article, 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 a.s.sented.

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 pa.s.sions 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.

"You _are_ hurt!" 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 Duns...o...b.. 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 d.a.m.ning 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 the _West Brooks.h.i.+re 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.

CHAPTER XXI

"What time is the carriage ordered for Mr. Nixon?" asked Marsham of his servant.

"Her ladys.h.i.+p, sir, told me to tell the stables four-twenty at Duns...o...b..."

"Let me hear directly the carriage arrives. And, Richard, go and see if the Duns...o...b.. paper is come, and bring it up."

The footman disappeared. As soon as the door was shut Marsham sank back into his cus.h.i.+ons 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 ladys.h.i.+p at home?"

"I think not, sir. I saw her ladys.h.i.+p 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 Brooks.h.i.+re 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 const.i.tuents 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 Sat.u.r.day. 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 const.i.tuency 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 n.o.body will put themselves out.

He was, therefore, out of Parliament and out of office; estranged from mult.i.tudes 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 cus.h.i.+ons, trying to arrange them more comfortably. This _infernal_ pain! It was to be hoped Nixon would be able to do more for it than that a.s.s, the Duns...o...b.. doctor. Marsham thought, with resentment, of all his futile drugs and expedients.

According to the Duns...o...b.. man, the stone had done no vital injury, but had badly bruised one of the lower vertebrae, 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.sed his door on her way down-stairs.

_She_ was 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.