The Rustle of Silk Part 26

"Hood?-Why?"

"Listen to this:

"'Peace and rest at length have come, All the day's long toil is past, And each heart is whispering Home, Home at last.'"

"But what has that got to do with it?"

"That's my answer to you, George." And Fallaray waved his hand, as though the question was settled.

If Lytham had been older or younger, and if his admiration and esteem for Fallaray had not become so deep-rooted, he must have broken out into a torrent of incredulity and impatience. What he did, instead, persuading himself, easily enough, that his friend had not recovered from his recent disappointments, although he had obviously benefited in health, was to go over the whole ground again, more quietly and in greater detail, and to wind up with the a.s.sertion that Fallaray was essential to the cause.

To all of which Fallaray listened with a sort of respectful interest but without the slightest enthusiasm, and remained lolling in his chair. He might have been a Buckinghams.h.i.+re Squire who knew no language but his own, hearing a Frenchman holding forth for no apparent reason on Napoleon. He watched his friend's mouth, appraised his occasional gestures, ran his eyes with liking over his well-knit body and found his voice pleasant to the ear. Beyond that, nothing.

Lytham began to feel like a man who throws stones into a lake. All his points seemed to disappear into an unruffled and indifferent surface of water. It was incomprehensible. It was also indescribably baffling. What on earth had come over this man who, until a few days before, had been burning with a desire to reconstruct and working himself into a condition of nervous exhaustion in an endeavor to pull his country out of chaos?

"Well," he said, after an extraordinary pause, during which everything seemed to have fallen flat. "What are you going to do?"

"But I've told you, my dear George," said Fallaray, with a long sigh of happiness. "I have found a home, at last."

"You mean that you are going to let us down?"

"I mean that I am going to live my own life."

"That you're out of politics?"

"Yes. My resignation goes in to-morrow."

"My G.o.d! Why?"

Fallaray got up and went to the window. He stood for a moment looking out at a corner of the terrace where several steps led down to a fountain in which, out of an urn held in the hands of a weather-worn boy, water was flowing, colored like a rainbow by the evening sun.

And Lytham followed him, wondering whether he had gone off his head, become feeble-minded as the result of overstrain. And then he saw Lola sitting on the edge of the fountain, with her face tilted up, her hands clasped round one of her knees and her golden hair gleaming.

And there both men remained, gazing,-Fallaray with a smile of possession, of infinite pride and pleasure; Lytham with an expression of profound amazement and quick understanding.

"So it's a woman," he thought. And as he continued to look, another picture of that girl came back into his mind. He had seen her before. He had turned as she had pa.s.sed him somewhere and caught his breath. He remembered to have said to himself as she had walked away, "Eve, come to life! Some poor devil of an Adam will go to h.e.l.l for her."-The Carlton-Chalfont-the foyer with its little cases of glittering jewels, the long strip of carpet leading to the stairs of the dining room-the palms-the orchestra. It all came back.-Well, this might be a form of madness in a man of Fallaray's age and womanless life, but, thank G.o.d, it was one with which he could deal. It was physical, not mental, as he had feared. Fallaray might very well play Adam without going into h.e.l.l.

"Can't you combine the two," he said. "Politics and that girl? It's been done before. It's being done every day. The one is helped by the other."

But Fallaray shook his head. "I am not going to do it," he said. "I have had a surfeit of one and nothing of the other. Take it from me finally, George,-I am out of the political game. I think I should have been out of it in any case, because I came here acknowledging failure, fed up, nauseated. I am not the man to juggle with intrigues, to say one thing to placate the capitalists to-day and another to fool labor to-morrow.

It isn't my way and I shall not be missed. On the contrary, my resignation will be accepted with eagerness. I am going to begin all over again, free, perfectly firm in my belief that there are better men to do my job. I was a bull in a china shop, and it will remain a china shop, whether it's run by one party or another. It's the system. Nothing can alter it. I couldn't, you and your party won't be able to. It's gone too far. It's a cancer. It will kill the country. And so I'm out. I consider that I have earned the right to love and make a home. Row off from my Eden, my dear fellow, and leave me in peace. I am not going to be rescued."

"We'll see about that," thought Lytham. "This is not Fallaray who speaks. It's the man of forty suddenly hit by pa.s.sion. I'll fight that girl to the last gasp. We must have this man, we _must_."

He turned away, deeply disappointed at the queer tangent at which his chief had gone off, bitterly annoyed to find that here was a fight within a fight at a time when unity was vital. He was himself a perfectly normal creature who regarded the rustle of silk as one of the necessities, like golf and tobacco, but to sacrifice a career or let down a cause for the sake of a woman was to him an act of unimaginable weakness and folly. If only Fallaray had been younger or older, or, better still, had been contentedly married to Feo! Cursed bad luck that he had been caught at forty.-But, struck with an idea in which he could see immediate possibilities, he stopped on his way to the door and went back to Fallaray. To work it out in his usual energetic way he must use strategy and appear to accept his friend's decision as irreparable. "All right," he said. "You know best. I'll argue no more. But as there's no need now for me to dash back to town, mayn't I linger with you in Arcadia for a couple of hours?"

Fallaray was delighted. Lola was to dine at Lady Cheyne's, and he would be alone. It would be very jolly to have George to dinner, especially as he saw the futility of argument and recognized an ultimatum. "Stay and have some food," he said. "I've much to tell you. But will you let me leave you for ten minutes?"

That was precisely what young Lochinvar intended to do before he drove away,-speak to that woman.

He watched Fallaray join Lola at the fountain, give her his hand and wander off among the rose trees, wearing what he called the fatuous smile of the middle-aged man in love. And then, so that he might obtain a point or two for future use, he rang the bell for Elmer. The butler and he had known each other for years. He would answer a few nonchalant questions without reserve. "Good afternoon, Elmer," he said, when the old man came in.

"Good afternoon to you, Sir." He might have been an actor who in palmy days had played Hamlet at Bristol.

"I'm staying to an early dinner with Mr. Fallaray. A whiskey and soda would go down rather well in the meantime."

"Certainly, Sir."

"Oh, and Elmer."

"Sir?" His turn and the respectful familiar angle of his head were only possible to actors of the good old school.

"The name of the charming lady who has so kindly helped to brighten up Mr. Fallaray's week-end."

"Madame de Breze, Sir."

"Oh, yes, of course." He had never heard it before. Married then, or a widow. French. 'Um. "And she is staying with--"

"Lady Cheyne, Sir."

"Oh, yes,-that house--"

"A stone's throw from the gate in the wall, Sir. You can see the roof from this window."

"Thanks very much, Elmer. How's your son getting on now?"

"Very well indeed, Sir, thank you, owing to your kindness."

"A very good fellow,-a first-rate soldier. One of our best junior officers. Not too much soda, then."

"No, Sir." He left the room like an elderly sun-beam.

"Good!" said George Lytham. "Get off early, hang about by the gate, intercept this young woman on her way back to Fallaray and see what her game is. That's the idea."

And he sat down, lit a cigarette and picked up a copy of Hood that lay open on the table. His eyes fell on some marked lines.

"Peace and rest at length have come, All the day's long toil is past, And each heart is whispering Home, Home at last."

And he thought of Feo whom he had seen several nights running with Arrowsmith and before that, for a series of years, with d.i.c.k, Tom and Harry. Never with Fallaray.

"Poor devil," he thought. "He's been too long without it. It won't be easy to rescue him now."

VIII

And at the gate in the wall Fallaray held Lola close in his arms and kissed her, again and again.