The Convert Part 51

'It's late. I won't ask you in.'

'You are over-tired. Go to bed.'

'I wish I could. I'm dining out.'

He looked at her out of kind eyes. 'It begins to be dreadfully stuffy in town. I'm glad, after all, we're going on that absurd yachting trip.'

'I'm not going,' she said.

'Oh, nonsense! Sophia and I would break our hearts.'

'I'm sure about Sophia.'

'It will do you good to come and have a look at the Land of the Midnight Sun,' he said.

'I'm going to have a look at the Land of Midnight where there's no sun.

And everybody but you and Sophia and my sister will think I'm in Norway.'

When she explained, he broke out:

'It's the very wildest nonsense that ever---- It would kill you.' The intensity of his opposition made him incoherent. 'You, of all women in the world! A creature who can't even stand people who say "serviette"

instead of "table-napkin"!'

'Fancy the little Blunt having been in prison!'

'Oh, let the little Blunt go to----' He checked himself. 'Be reasonable, child.' He turned and looked at her with an earnestness she had never seen in his eyes before. 'Why in heaven should _you_----'

'Why? You heard what that woman said.'

'I heard _nothing_ to account for----'

'That's partly,' she interrupted, 'why I must make this experiment. When a man like you--as good a man as you'--she repeated with slow wonder--'when you and all the other good men that the world is full of--when you all know everything that that woman knows--and more! and yet see nothing in it to account for what she feels, and what I--I too, am beginning to feel----!' she broke off. 'Good-bye! If I go far on this new road, it's you I shall have to thank.'

'I?'

He shrugged drearily at the absurd charge, making no motion to take the offered hand, but sat there in the corner of the hansom looking rather old and shrunken.

'You and one other,' she said.

That roused him. 'Ah, he has come, then.'

'Who?'

'The other. The man who is going to count.'

Her eyelids drooped. 'The man who was to count most for me came a long while ago. And a long while ago--he went.'

Borrodaile looked at her. 'But this---- Who is the gentleman who shares with me the doubtful, I may without undue modesty say the undeserved, honour of urging you to disappear into the slums? Who is it?'

'The man who wrote this.'

It was the book he had seen in her hands before the meeting. He read on the green cover, 'In the Days of the Comet.'

'Oh, that fellow! Well, he's not my novelist, but it's the keenest intelligence we have applied to fiction.'

'He _is_ my novelist. So I've a right to be sorry he knows nothing about women. See here! Even in his most rationalized vision of the New Time, he can't help betraying his old-fashioned prejudice in favour of the "dolly" view of women. His hero says, "I prayed that night, let me confess it, to an image I had set up in my heart, an image that still serves with me as a symbol for things inconceivable, to a Master Artificer, the unseen captain of all who go about the building of the world, the making of mankind----"' Vida's finger skipped, lifting to fall on the heroine's name. '"Nettie... She never came into the temple of that worshipping with me."' Swiftly she turned the pages back.

'Where's that other place? Here! The man says to the heroine--to his ideal woman he says, "Behind you and above you rises the coming City of the World, and I am in that building. Dear heart! you are only happiness!" That's the whole view of man in a nutsh.e.l.l. Even the highest type of woman such an imagination as this can conjure up----' She shook her head. '"You are only happiness, dear"--a minister of pleasure, negligible in all the n.o.bler moods, all the times of wider vision or exalted effort! Tell me'--she bent her head and looked into her companion's face with a new pa.s.sion dawning in her eyes--'in the building of that City of the Future, in the making of it beautiful, shall women really have no share?'

'My dear, I only know that I shall have no share myself.'

'Ah, we don't speak of ourselves.' She opened the hansom doors and her companion got out. 'But this Comet man,' she said as she followed, '_he_ might have a share if only he knew why all the great visions have never yet been more than dreams. That this man should think foundations can be well and truly laid when the best of one half the race are "only happiness, dear!"' She turned on the threshold. '_Whose_ happiness?'

CHAPTER XIV

The fall of the Liberal Ministry was said by the simple-minded to have come as a bolt from the blue. Certainly into the subsequent General Election were entering elements but little foreseen.

Nevertheless, the last two bye-elections before the crash had resulted in the defeat of the Liberal candidate not by the Tory antagonist, but in one case by the nominee of the Labour party, in the other by an independent Socialist. Both these men had publicly thanked the Suffragettes for their notable share in piling up those triumphant and highly significant majorities. Now the country was facing an election where, for the first time in the history of any great nation, women were playing a part that even their political enemies could hardly with easy minds call subordinate.

Only faint echoes of the din penetrated the s.p.a.cious quiet of Ulland House. Although the frequent week-end party was there, the great hall on this particular morning presented a deserted appearance as the tall clock by the staircase chimed the hour of noon. The insistence of the ancient timepiece seemed to have set up a rival in destruction of the Sunday peace, for no sooner had the twelfth stroke died than a bell began to ring. The little door in the wainscot beyond the clock was opened. An elderly butler put his head round the huge screen of Spanish leather that masked the very existence of the modest means of communication with the quarters of the Ulland domestics. So little was a ring at the front door expected at this hour that Sutton was still slowly getting into the left sleeve of his coat when his mistress appeared from the garden by way of the French window. The old butler withdrew a discreet instant behind the screen to put the last touches to his toilet, but Lady John had seen that he was there.

'Has Miss Levering gone for a walk?' she inquired of the servant.

'I don't know, m'lady.'

'She's not in the garden. Do you think she's not down yet?'

'I haven't seen her, m'lady,' said Sutton, emerging from his retirement and approaching the wide staircase on his way to answer the front-door bell.

'Never mind'--his mistress went briskly over to a wide-winged writing-table and seated herself before a litter of papers--'I won't have her disturbed if she's resting,' Lady John said, adding half to herself, 'she certainly needs it.'

'Yes, m'lady,' said Sutton, adjusting the maroon collar of his livery which had insisted upon riding up at the back.

'But I want her to know'--Lady John spoke while glancing through a letter before consigning it to the wastepaper basket--'the moment she comes down she must be told that the new plans arrived by the morning post.'

'Plans, m'la----'

'She'll understand. There they are.' The lady held up a packet about which she had just snapped an elastic band. 'I'll put them here. It's very important she should have them in time to look over before she goes.'

'Yes, m'lady.'

Sutton opened a door and disappeared. A footstep sounded on the marble floor of the lobby.

Over her shoulder Lady John called out, 'Is _that_ Miss Levering?'