Nobody's Man Part 24

"Aye, more than a dozen," Segerson muttered.

The man looked at them both and there was a dull hate gathering in his eyes.

"It's easy to talk about saving money and working hard, you that have got everything you want in life and no work to do," he protested "It's enough to make a man turn Socialist to listen to un."

"Mr. Crockford," Jane said, "I am a Socialist and if you take the trouble to understand even the rudiments of socialism, you will learn that the drones have as small a part in that scheme of life as in any other. You have a right to what you produce. It is one of the pleasures of my life to help the deserving to enjoy what they produce.

It is also one of the duties, when I find a non-productive person filling a position to which his daily life and character do not ent.i.tle him, to pull him up like a weed. That is my idea of socialism, Mr.

Crockford. You will leave on March 25th."

They rode homeward into a gathering storm. A ma.s.s of black clouds was rolling up from the north, and an unexpected wind came bellowing down the coombs, bending the stunted oaks and dark pines and filling the air with sonorous but ominous music. The hills around soon became invisible, blotted out by fragments of the gathering mists. The cold sleet stung their faces. Out on the moors was no sound but time tinkling of distant sheep bells.

"There's snow coming," Segerson muttered, as he turned up his coat collar.

"It won't do any harm," she answered. "The earth lies warm under it."

The lights of Parracombe, precipitous and unexpected, were like flecks in the sky, wiped out by a sudden driving storm of sleet. A little while later they cantered up the avenue to Woolhanger and Jane slipped from her horse with a little sigh of relief.

"You'd better stay and have some tea, Mr. Segerson," she invited.

"John will take your horse and give him a rubdown."

She changed her habit and, forgetting her guest, indulged in the luxury of a hot bath. She descended some time later to find him sitting in front of the tea tray in the hall. A more than usually gracious smile soon drove the frown from his forehead.

"I really am frightfully sorry," she apologised, as she handed him his tea. "I had no idea I was so wet. You'll have rather a bad ride home."

"Oh, I'm used to it," he answered. "I'm afraid they'll lose a good many sheep on the higher farms, though, if the storm turns out as bad as it threatens. Hear that!"

A tornado of wind seemed to shake the ground beneath their feet. Jane shivered.

"I suppose," she reflected, "that man Crockford thought I was very cruel to-day."

"I will tell you Crockford's point of view," Segerson replied. "He doesn't exactly understand what your aims are, and wherever he goes he hears nothing but praise of the way you have treated your tenants and the way you have tried to turn them into small landowners. He isn't intelligent enough to realise that there is a principle behind all this.

He has simply come to feel that he has a lenient landlord and that he has only to sit still and the plums will drop into his mouth, too.

Crockford is one of the weak spots in your system, Lady Jane. There is no place for him or his kind in a self-supporting world."

She sighed.

"Then I am afraid he must go down," she said. "He simply stands in the way of better men."

"One reads a good deal of Mr. Tallente, nowadays," Segerson remarked, changing the conversation a little abruptly.

Jane leaned over and stroked the head of a dog which had come to lie at her feet.

"He seems to be making a good deal of stir," she observed.

The young man frowned.

"You know I am not unsympathetic with your views, Lady Jane," he said, a little awkwardly, "but I don't mind admitting that if I had a big stake in the country I should be afraid of Tallente. No one seems to be able to pin him down to a definite programme and yet day by day his influence grows. The Labour Party is disintegrated. The best of all its factions are joining the Democrats. He is practically leader of the Opposition Party to-day and I don't see how they are going to stop his being Prime Minister whenever he chooses."

"Don't you think he'll make a good Prime Minister?" Jane asked.

"No, I don't," was the curt answer. "He is too dark a horse for my fancy."

"I expect Mr. Tallente will be ready with his programme when the time comes," she observed. "He is a people's man, of course, and his proposals will sound pretty terrible to a good many of the old school.

Still, something of the sort has to come."

The butler brought in the postbag while they talked. Segerson, as he rose to depart, glanced with curiosity at half a dozen orange-coloured wrappers which were among the rest of the letters.

"Fancy your subscribing to a press-cutting agency, Lady Jane!" he exclaimed. "You haven't been writing a novel under a pseudonym, have you?"

She laughed as she gathered up her correspondence in her hand.

"Don't pry into my secrets," she enjoined. "We may meet in Barnstaple to-morrow. If the weather clears, I want to go in and see those cattle for myself."

The young man took his reluctant departure. Jane crossed the hall, entered her own little sanctum, drew the lamp to the edge of the table and sank into her easy-chair with a little sigh of relief. All the rest of her correspondence she threw to one side. The orange-coloured wrappers she tore off, one by one. As she read, her face softened and her eyes grew very bright. The first cutting was a report of Tallente's last speech in the House, a clever and forceful attack upon the Government's policy of compromise in the matter of recent strikes. The next was a speech at the Holborn Town Hall, on workmen's dwellings, another a thoughtful appreciation of him from the pages of a great review. There was also a eulogy from an American journal and a gloomy attack upon him in the chief Whig organ. When she had finished the pile, she sat for some time gazing at the burning logs. The little epitome of his daily life--there were records there even of many of his social engagements-seemed to carry her into another atmosphere, an atmosphere far removed from this lonely spot upon the moors. She seemed to catch from those printed lines some faint, reflective thrill of the more vital world of strife in which he was living. For a moment the roar of London was in her ears. She saw the lighted thoroughfares, the crowded pavements, the faces of the men and women, all a little strained and eager, so different from the placid immobility of the world in which she lived. She rose to her feet and moved restlessly about the room.

Presently she lifted the curtain and looked out. There was a pause in the storm and a great ma.s.s of black clouds had just been driven past the face of the watery moon. Even the wind seemed to be holding its breath, but so far as she could see, moors and hillsides were wrapped in one unending mantle of snow. There was no visible sign of any human habitation, no sound from any of the birds or animals who were cowering in their shelters, not even a sheep h.e.l.l or the barking of a dog to break the profound silence. She dropped the curtain and turned back to her chair. Her feet were leaden and her heart was heavy. The struggle of the day was at an end. Memory was a.s.serting itself. She felt the flush in her cheek, the quickening heat of her heart, the thrill of her pulses as she lived again through those few wild minutes. There was no longer any escape from the wild, confusing truth. The thing which she had dreaded had come.

CHAPTER V

The most popular hostess in London was a little thrilled at the arrival of the moment for which she had planned so carefully. She laid her hand on Tallente's arm and led him towards a comparatively secluded corner of the winter garden which made her own house famous. "I must apologise, Mrs. Van Fosd.y.k.e," he said, "for my late appearance. I travelled up from Devonshire this afternoon and found snow all the way. We were nearly two hours late."

"It is all the more kind of you to have turned out at all, then," she told him warmly. "I don't mind telling you that I should have been terribly disappointed if you had failed me. It has been my one desire for months to have you three--the Prime Minister, Lethbridge and you--under my roof at the same time."

"You find politics interesting over here?" Tallente asked, a little curiously.

She flashed a quick glance at him.

"Why, I find them absolutely fascinating," she declared. "The whole thing is so incomprehensible. Just look at to-night. Half of Debrett is represented here, practically the whole of the diplomats, and yet, except yourself, not a single member of the political party who we are told will be ruling this country within a few months. The very anomaly of it is so fascinating."

"There is no necessary kinship between Society and politics," Tallente reminded her. "Your own country, for instance."

Mrs. Van Fosd.y.k.e, who was an American, shrugged her shoulders.

"My own country scarcely counts," she protested. "After all, we came into being as a republic, and our aristocracy is only a spurious conglomeration of people who are too rich to need to work. But many of these people whom you see here to-night still possess feudal rights, vast estates, great names, and yet over their heads there is coming this Government, in which they will be wholly unrepresented. What are you going to do with the aristocracy, Mr. Tallente?"

"Encourage them to work," he answered, smiling.

"But they don't know how."

"They must learn. No man has a right to his place upon the earth unless he is a productive human being. There is no room in the world which we are trying to create for the parasite pure and simple."

"You are a very inflexible person, Mr. Tallente."

"There is no place in politics for the wobbler."

"Do you know," she went on, glancing away for a moment, "that my rooms are filled with people who fear you. The Labour Party, as it was understood here five or six years ago, never inspired that feeling.

There was something of the tub-thumper about every one of them. I think it is your repression, Mr. Tallente, which terrifies them. You don't say what you are going to do. Your programme is still a secret and yet every day your majority grows. Only an hour ago the Prime Minister told me that he couldn't carry on if you threw down the gage in earnest."