The Ffolliots of Redmarley Part 2

"I've never seen anybody look like you before," he said gravely, "and I like watching you."

"Thank you," said the lady, and she patted his cheek.

She laughed.

Mr Gallup laughed, and came back to the affairs of the Golden Anchor, busying himself in tying up her parcel, while he explained that Eloquent was his only child.

Eloquent did not laugh, for she was going away.

Dada carried the parcel to the shop door and gave it to the footman.

He put it in the carriage, and held out a thin silken cloak for the lady, which she put on. He covered her knees with a linen dust rug, and smiling and bowing she drove away.

Eloquent turned back into the shop with his father.

It seemed to have got very dark and gloomy again.

"Dada," he asked, "who is that lady?"

"That," said Mr Gallup, loudly and with no little pride, "is Mrs Ffolliot of Redmarley, the bride."

The customers were all listening, the four a.s.sistants were all listening.

Mr Gallup held out his hand to Eloquent, and together they went through the shop and upstairs into the sitting-room, that looked out upon the market-place.

"Dada, is she one of the Cla.s.ses?" Eloquent inquired, nervously.

"I believe you, my boy," Mr Gallup responded jocosely, "very much so, she is; a regular out and outer."

His father went away chuckling, but Eloquent was much depressed.

He went and stood over against one of the portraits of John Bright and looked at him for help.

"Be just and fear not," said that statesman.

"All very well," thought Eloquent, "she didn't pat _your_ cheek."

He went and sought counsel of Mr Gladstone, a youngish Mr Gladstone in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester: "At last, my friends, I have come amongst you . . . unmuzzled," said the legend underneath his portrait.

But Eloquent felt that this was just what he was not. He felt very muzzled indeed. All sorts of vague thoughts went surging through his brain that could find no expression in words.

"I do believe," he said desperately, "if she was to give the whisperingest little call, I'd be obliged to go . . . and so would you," he continued, shaking his head at Mr Gladstone, "you'd do just the same."

He felt that, in some inexplicable, subtly mysterious fashion, there was a kind of affinity between Mr Gladstone and Mrs Ffolliot.

Mr Gladstone would understand, and not be too hard upon him.

In the years that followed, he saw Mrs Ffolliot from time to time from the window or in the street, but never again did he come so close to her as to touch her.

Never did he see her, however, without that strange thrill of enthusiastic admiration; that dumb, inarticulate sense of having seen something entirely satisfying and delightful; satisfying for the moment only: he paid dearly for his brief joy in after hours of curious depression and an aching sense of emptiness and loss. She was so far away.

Sometimes she was driving with her husband, and little Eloquent wondered after they had pa.s.sed what manner of man it could be who had the right to sit by her whenever he liked. He never had time to notice Mr Ffolliot, till one day he saw him in the carriage alone, and scrutinised him sternly. Long afterwards he read how some admirer of Lord Hartington had said that what he liked most about him was his "You-be-d.a.m.nedness." The phrase, Eloquent felt, exactly described Mr Ffolliot; aloof, detached, a fastidious, fine gentleman to his finger tips, entirely careless as to what the common people thought of him; not willingly conscious, unless rudely reminded of their existence, that there were any common people: such, Eloquent felt sure, was Mr Ffolliot's mental att.i.tude, and he hated him.

Mr Ffolliot wore a monocle, and just at that time a new figure loomed large on the little boy's political horizon--a figure held up before him not for admiration, but reprobation--as a turncoat, an apostate, a real and menacing danger to the Cause dada had most at heart; the well-known effigy of Mr Joseph Chamberlain. He always appeared with monocle and orchid. In his expression, judged by the ill.u.s.trated papers, there was something of that same "you-be-d.a.m.nedness" he disliked so much in Mr Ffolliot. Eloquent lumped them together in his mind, and hated Mr Ffolliot as ardently as he worshipped his wife; and to no one at all did he ever say a word about either of them.

He rose rapidly in the school, and when he was nine years old had reached a form with boys much older than himself, boys old enough to write essays; and Eloquent wrote essays too; essays which were cruder and quainter than those of his companions. One day the subject given--rather an abstruse theme for boys to tackle--was Beauty.

Eloquent wrote as follows:

"Beauty is tall and has a pleasant sounding voice, and you want to come as near as you can. You want to look at her all the time because you don't see it often. Beauty is most pretty to look at and you don't seem to see anyone else when it's there. She smells nice, a wafty smell like tobacco plants not pipes in the evening. When beauty looks at you you feel glad and funny and she smiles at you and looks with her eyes. She is different to aunts and people's wives. Taller and quite a different shape. Beauty is different.--E. A. Gallup, cla.s.s IIIb."

He was twelve years old when they left Marlehouse. His father had bought a larger business in a busy commercial town, where there was a grammar school famous throughout the Midlands.

There Eloquent was educated until he was seventeen, when he, too, went into the outfitting business. He attended lectures and the science school in his free time, and belonged to two or three debating clubs.

He was in great request at the smaller political gatherings as a speaker, and with constant practice bade fair to justify his name.

He occasionally went to Marlehouse, generally on political business, but never to Redmarley. Nevertheless, stray items of Redmarley news reached him through his aunt, who still kept up her friendship with some of the village folk there.

From her he learned that there were a lot of young Ffolliots; that they were wild and "mishtiful," unmanageable and generally troublesome; that Mrs Ffolliot was still immensely popular and her husband hardly known after all these years; that, owing, it was supposed, to their increasing family, they did not entertain much, and that the "Manshun"

itself looked much as it had always looked.

Eloquent made no comment on these revelations, but he treasured them in his heart. Some day he intended to go back to Redmarley. He never forgot Mrs Ffolliot, or the impression she had made upon him the first time he saw her.

When Eloquent was four-and-twenty Abel Gallup died. He then learned that his father was a much wealthier man than anyone had supposed.

Miss Gallup was left an annuity of a hundred a year. The rest of the very considerable property (some seventy thousand pounds) was left to Eloquent, but with the proviso that until he was elected a member of Parliament he could not touch more than three hundred a year, though he was to be allowed two thousand pounds for his election expenses whenever, and as often as he chose to stand, until he was elected; as long as the money lasted. Once he was in Parliament the property was his absolutely, to dispose of as he thought fit.

It was proof of Abel Gallup's entire trust in his son, that there was not one word in the will that in any way whatsoever expressed even a hope as to the legatee's political convictions.

Miss Gallup went back to Redmarley. Eloquent sold the outfitting business, and went to London to study parliamentary business from the stranger's gallery.

CHAPTER III

ANOTHER OF THEM

A young man was walking through Redmarley woods towards Redmarley village, and from time to time he gazed sorrowfully at his boots. There had been a lot of rain that winter, and now on this, the third Sunday in December, the pathway was covered with mud, which, when it was not sticky, was extremely slippery.

The young man walked rather slowly, twirling a smart cane as he went, and presently he burst into speech--more accurately--a speech.

"What, gentlemen," he demanded, loudly and rhetorically, "but no--I will not call you gentlemen; here to-night, I note it with pride and gladness, there are but few who can claim that courtesy t.i.tle. I who speak, and most of you who do me the honour to listen, can lay claim to no prouder appellation than that of MEN. What then, fellow-men, I ask you, what _is_ the House of Lords? What purpose does it serve except to delay all beneficent legislation, to waste the country's time and to nullify the best efforts. . . . Confound . . ."

He slipped, he staggered, his hat went one way, his stick another, and he sat down violently and with a splash in a particularly large puddle. And at that instant he was suddenly beset by a dog--a curiously long-legged fox-terrier--who came bouncing round him with short rushes and sharp barks. He had reached a part of the woods where the paths cross. Fir trees were very thick just there, and footsteps made hardly any sound in the soft mud.

A tall girl came quickly round the corner, calling "Parker!" and pulled up short as she beheld the stranger seated ingloriously in the puddle.

But it was only for a moment; she hastened towards him, rebuking the dog as she came: "Be quiet, Parker, how rude of you, come off now, come to heel"--then, as he of the puddle, apparently paralysed by his undignified position, made no effort to arise, on reaching him she held out her hands, saying; "I wouldn't _sit_ there if I were you, it's so awfully wet. Shall I pull you up? Dig your heels in, that's it. I say, you are in a mess!"

He was.