Marcella Part 60

"No; I have never seen her since the day of the poacher's trial."

"Oh! So she has gone into complete seclusion from all her friends?"

"That I can't answer for. I can only tell you my own experience."

Lady Selina bethought herself of a great many more questions to ask, but somehow did not ask them. The talk fell upon politics, which lasted till the hostess gave the signal, and Lady Selina, gathering up her fan and gloves, swept from the room next after the Countess at the head of the table, while a host of elderly ladies, wives of ministers and the like, stood meekly by to let her pa.s.s.

As he sat down again, Wharton made the entry of the dinner at Alresford House, to which he had just promised himself, a little plainer. It was the second time in three weeks that Lady Selina had asked him, and he was well aware that several other men at this dinner-table, of about the same standing and prospects as himself, would be very glad to be in his place. Lady Selina, though she was unmarried, and not particularly handsome or particularly charming, was a personage--and knew it. As the mistress of her father's various fine houses, and the kinswoman of half the great families of England, she had ample social opportunities, and made, on the whole, clever use of them. She was not exactly popular, but in her day she had been extremely useful to many, and her invitations were prized. Wharton had been introduced to her at the beginning of this, his second session, had adopted with her the easy, aggressive, "personal" manner--which, on the whole, was his natural manner towards women--and had found it immediately successful.

When he had replaced his pocket-book, he found himself approached by a man on his own side of the table, a member of Parliament like himself, with whom he was on moderately friendly terms.

"Your motion comes on next Friday, I think," said the new-comer.

Wharton nodded.

"It'll be a beastly queer division," said the other--"a precious lot of cross-voting."

"That'll be the way with that kind of question for a good while to come--don't you think"--said Wharton, smiling, "till we get a complete reorganisation of parties?"

As he leaned back in his chair, enjoying his cigarette, his half-shut eyes behind the curls of smoke made a good-humoured but contemptuous study of his companion.

Mr. Bateson was a young manufacturer, recently returned to Parliament, and newly married. He had an open, ruddy face, spoilt by an expression of chronic perplexity, which was almost fretfulness. Not that the countenance was without shrewdness; but it suggested that the man had ambitions far beyond his powers of performance, and already knew himself to be inadequate.

"Well, I shouldn't wonder if you get a considerable vote," he resumed, after a pause; "it's like women's suffrage. People will go on voting for this kind of thing, till there seems a chance of getting it. _Then_!"

"Ah, well!" said Wharton, easily, "I see we shan't get _you_."

"_I_!--vote for an eight-hours day, by local and trade option! In my opinion I might as well vote for striking the flag on the British Empire at once! It would be the death-knell of all our prosperity."

Wharton's artistic ear disliked the mixture of metaphor, and he frowned slightly.

Mr. Bateson hurried on. He was already excited, and had fallen upon Wharton as a prey.

"And you really desire to make it _penal_ for us manufacturers--for me in my industry--in spite of all the chances and changes of the market, to work my men more than eight hours a day--_even_ if they wish it!"

"We must get our decision, our majority of the adult workers in any given district in favour of an eight-hours day," said Wharton, blandly; "then when they have voted for it, the local authority will put the Act in motion."

"And my men--conceivably--may have voted in the minority, against any such tomfoolery; yet, when the vote is given, it will be a punishable offence for them, and me, to work overtime? You _actually_ mean that; how do you propose to punish us?"

"Well," said Wharton, relighting his cigarette, "that is a much debated point. Personally, I am in favour of imprisonment rather than fine."

The other bounded on his chair.

"You would imprison me for working overtime--with _willing men!_"

Wharton eyed him with smiling composure. Two or three other men--an old general, the smart private secretary of a cabinet minister, and a well-known permanent official at the head of one of the great spending departments--who were sitting grouped at the end of the table a few feet away, stopped their conversation to listen.

"Except in cases of emergency, which are provided for under the Act,"

said Wharton. "Yes, I should imprison you, with the greatest pleasure in life. Eight hours _plus_ overtime is what we are going to stop, _at all hazards!_"

A flash broke from his blue eyes. Then he tranquilly resumed his smoking.

The young manufacturer flushed with angry agitation.

"But you must know, it is inconceivable that you should not know, that the whole thing is stark staring lunacy. In our business, trade is declining, the export falling every year, the imports from France steadily advancing. And you are going to make us fight a country where men work eleven hours a day, for lower wages, with our hands tied behind our backs by legislation of this kind? Well, you know," he threw himself back in his chair with a contemptuous laugh, "there can be only one explanation. You and your friends, of course, have banished political economy to Saturn--and you suppose that by doing so you get rid of it for all the rest of the world. But I imagine it will beat you, all the same!"

He stopped in a heat. As usual what he found to say was not equal to what he wanted to say, and beneath his anger with Wharton was the familiar fuming at his own lack of impressiveness.

"Well, I dare say," said Wharton, serenely. "However, let's take your 'political economy' a moment, and see if I can understand what you mean by it. There never were two words that meant all things to all men so disreputably!"

And thereupon to the constant accompaniment of his cigarette, and with the utmost composure and good temper, he began to "heckle" his companion, putting questions, suggesting perfidious ill.u.s.trations, extracting innocent admissions, with a practised shrewdness and malice, which presently left the unfortunate Bateson floundering in a sea of his own contradictions, and totally unable for the moment to attach any rational idea whatever to those great words of his favourite science, wherewith he was generally accustomed to make such triumphant play, both on the platform and in the bosom of the family.

The permanent official round the corner watched the unequal fight with attentive amus.e.m.e.nt. Once when it was a question of Mill's doctrine of cost of production as compared with that of a leading modern collectivist, he leant forward and supplied a correction of something Wharton had said. Wharton instantly put down his cigarette and addressed him in another tone. A rapid dialogue pa.s.sed between them, the dialogue of experts, sharp, allusive, elliptical, in the midst of which the host gave the signal for joining the ladies.

"Well, all I know is," said Bateson, as he got up, "that these kinds of questions, if you and your friends have your way, will _wreck_ the Liberal party before long--far more effectually than anything Irish has ever done. On these things some of us will fight, if it must come to that."

Wharton laughed.

"It would be a national misfortune if you didn't give us a stiff job,"

he said, with an airy good-humour which at once made the other's bl.u.s.tering look ridiculous.

"I wonder what that fellow is going to do in the House," said the permanent official to his companion as they went slowly upstairs, Wharton being some distance ahead. "People are all beginning to talk of him as a coming man, though n.o.body quite knows why, as yet. They tell me he frames well in speaking, and will probably make a mark with his speech next Friday. But his future seems to me very doubtful. He can only become a power as the head of a new Labour party. But where is the party? They all want to be kings. The best point in his favour is that they are likely enough to take a gentleman if they must have a leader.

But there still remains the question whether he can make anything out of the material."

"I hope to G.o.d he can't!" said the old general, grimly; "it is these town-chatterers of yours that will bring the Empire about our heads before we've done. They've begun it already, wherever they saw a chance."

In the drawing-room Wharton devoted himself for a few minutes to his hostess, a little pushing woman, who confided to his apparently attentive ear a series of grievances as to the bad manners of the great ladies of their common party, and the general evil plight of Liberalism in London from the social point of view.

"Either they give themselves airs--_rediculous_ airs!--or they admit everybody!" she said, with a lavish use of white shoulders and scarlet fan by way of emphasis. "My husband feels it just as much as I do. It is a real misfortune for the party that its social affairs should be so villainously managed. Oh! I dare say _you_ don't mind, Mr. Wharton, because you are a Socialist. But, I a.s.sure you, those of us who still believe in the influence of the best people don't like it."

A point whence Wharton easily led her through a series of spiteful anecdotes bearing on her own social mishaps and rebuffs, which were none the less illuminating because of the teller's anxious effort to give them a dignified and disinterested air. Then, when neither she nor her plight were any longer amusing, he took his leave, exchanging another skirmishing word or two on the staircase with Lady Selina, who it appeared was "going on" as he was, and to the same house.

In a few minutes his hansom landed him at the door of a great mansion in Berkeley Square, where a huge evening party was proceeding, given by one of those Liberal ladies whom his late hostess had been so freely denouncing. The lady and the house belonged to a man who had held high office in the late Administration.

As he made his way slowly to the top of the crowded stairs, the stately woman in white satin and diamonds who was "receiving" on the landing marked him, and when his name was announced she came forward a step or two. Nothing could have been more flattering than the smile with which she gave him her gloved hand to touch.

"Have you been out of town all these Sundays?" she said to him, with the slightest air of soft reproach. "I am always at home, you know--I told you so!"

She spoke with the ease of one who could afford to make whatever social advances she pleased. Wharton excused himself, and they chatted a little in the intervals of her perpetual greetings to the mounting crowd. She and he had met at a famous country house in the Easter recess, and her aristocrat's instinct for all that gives savour and sharpness to the dish of life had marked him at once.

"Sir Hugh wants you to come down and see us in Suss.e.x," she said, stretching her white neck a little to speak after him, as he was at last carried through the drawing-room door by the pressure behind him. "Will you?"

He threw back an answer which she rather took for granted than heard, for she nodded and smiled through it--stiffening her delicate-face the moment afterwards to meet the timid remarks of one of her husband's const.i.tuents--asked by Sir Hugh in the streets that afternoon--who happened to present her with the next hand to shake.

Inside, Wharton soon found himself brought up against the ex-Secretary of State himself, who greeted him cordially, and then bantered him a little on his coming motion.

"Oh, I shall be interested to see what you make of it. But, you know, it has no _actuality_--never can have--till you can agree among yourselves.