The Testing of Diana Mallory Part 47

"Was the debate interesting?"

"Ferrier made a very disappointing speech. All our fellows are getting restive."

Lady Lucy looked astonished.

"Surely they ought to trust his judgment! He has done so splendidly for the party."

Marsham shook his head.

"I wish you would use your influence," he said, slowly. "There is a regular revolt coming on. A large number of men on our side say they won't be led by him; that if we come in, he must go to the Lords."

Lady Lucy started.

"Oliver!" she said, indignantly, "you know it would break his heart!"

And before both minds there rose a vision of Ferrier's future, as he himself certainly conceived it. A triumphant election--the Liberals in office--himself, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and leader of the Commons--with the reversion of the Premiership whenever old Lord Broadstone should die or retire--this indeed had been Ferrier's working understanding with his party for years; years of strenuous labor, and on the whole of magnificent generalship. Deposition from the leadership of the Commons, with whatever compensations, could only mean to him, and to the world in general, the failure of his career.

"They would give him Foreign Affairs, of course," said Marsham, after a pause.

"Nothing that they could give him would make up!" said Lady Lucy, with energy. "You certainly, Oliver, could not lend yourself to any intrigue of the kind."

Marsham shrugged his shoulders.

"My position is not exactly agreeable! I don't agree with Ferrier, and I do agree with the malcontents. Moreover, when we come in, they will represent the strongest element in the party, with the future in their hands."

Lady Lucy looked at him with sparkling eyes.

"You can't desert him, Oliver!--not you!"

"Perhaps I'd better drop out of Parliament!" he said, impatiently. "The game sometimes doesn't seem worth the candle."

Lady Lucy--alarmed--laid a hand on his.

"Don't say those things, Oliver. You know you have never done so well as this year."

"Yes--up to two months ago."

His mother withdrew her hand. She perfectly understood. Oliver often allowed himself allusions of this kind, and the relations of mother and son were not thereby improved.

Silence reigned for a few minutes. With a hand that shook slightly, Lady Lucy drew toward her a small piece of knitting she had been occupied with when Marsham came in, and resumed it. Meanwhile there flashed through his mind one of those recollections that are only apparently incongruous. He was thinking of a dinner-party which his mother had given the night before; a vast dinner of twenty people; all well-fed, prosperous, moderately distinguished, and, in his opinion, less than moderately amused. The dinner had dragged; the guests had left early; and he had come back to the drawing-room after seeing off the last of them, stifled with yawns. Waste of food, waste of money, waste of time--waste of everything! He had suddenly been seized with a pa.s.sionate sense of the dulness of his home life; with a wonder how long he could go on submitting to it. And as he recalled these feelings--as of dust in the mouth--there struck across them an image from a dream-world.

Diana sat at the head of the long table; Diana in white, with her slender neck, and the blue eyes, with their dear short-sighted look, her smile, and the ma.s.ses of her dark hair. The dull faces on either side faded away; the lights, the flowers were for her--for her alone!

He roused himself with an effort. His mother was putting up her knitting, which, indeed, she had only pretended to work at.

"We must go and dress, Oliver. Oh! I forgot to tell you--Alicia arrived an hour ago."

"Ah!" He raised his eyebrows indifferently. "I hope she's well?"

"Brilliantly well--and as handsome as ever."

"Any love-affairs?"

"Several, apparently--but nothing suitable," said Lady Lucy, with a smile, as she rose and gathered together her possessions.

"It's time, I think, that Alicia made up her mind. She has been out a good while."

It gave him a curious pleasure--he could hardly tell why--to say this slighting thing of Alicia. After all, he had no evidence that she had done anything unfriendly or malicious at the time of the crisis.

Instinctively, he had ranged her then and since as an enemy--as a person who had worked against him. But, in truth, he knew nothing for certain.

Perhaps, after the foolish pa.s.sages between them a year ago, it was natural that she should dislike and be critical of Diana. As to her coming now, it was completely indifferent to him. It would be a good thing, no doubt, for his mother to have her companionship.

As he opened the door for Lady Lucy to leave the room, he noticed her gray and fragile look.

"I believe you have had enough of London, mother. You ought to be getting abroad."

"I am all right," said Lady Lucy, hastily. "Like you, I hate east winds.

Oliver, I have had a charming letter from Mr. Heath."

Mr. Heath had been for some months Marsham's local correspondent on the subject of the new Liberal hall in the county town. Lady Lucy had recently sent a check to the Committee, which had set all their building anxieties at rest.

Oliver looked down rather moodily upon her.

"It's pretty easy to write charming letters when people send you money.

It would have been more to the purpose, I think, if they had taken a little trouble to raise some themselves!"

Lady Lucy flushed.

"I don't suppose Duns...o...b.. is a place with many rich people in it," she said, in a voice of protest, as she pa.s.sed him. Her thoughts hurt her as she mounted the stairs. Oliver had not received her gift--for, after all, it was a gift to him--very graciously. And the same might have been said of various other things that she had tried to do for him during the preceding months.

As to Marsham, while he dressed, he too recalled other checks that had been recently paid for him, other anxious attempts that had been made to please him. Since Diana had vanished from the scene, no complaisance, no liberality had been too much for his mother's good-will. He had never been so conscious of an atmosphere of money--much money. And there were moments--what he himself would have described as morbid moments--when it seemed to him the price of blood; when he felt himself to be a mere, crude moral tale embodied and walking about. Yet how ridiculous! What reasonable man, knowing what money means, and the power of it, but must have flinched a little under such a test as had been offered to him? His flinching had been nothing final or d.a.m.nable. It was Diana, who, in her ignorance of the world, had expected him to take the sacrifice as though it were nothing and meant nothing--as no honest man of the world, in fact, could have taken it.

When Marsham descended he found Alicia already in possession of the drawing-room. Her gown of a brilliant shade of blue put the room out of joint, and beside the startling effect of her hair, all the washed-out decoration and conventional ornament which it contained made a worse effect than usual. There was nothing conventional or effaced about Alicia. She had become steadily more emphatic, more triumphant, more self-confident.

"Well, what have you been doing with yourself?--nothing but politics?"

The careless, provocative smile with which the words were accomplished roused a kind of instant antagonism in Marsham.

"Nothing--nothing, at least, worth anybody's remembering."

"You spoke at Duns...o...b.. last week."

"I did."

"And you went to help Mr. Collins at the Sheffield bye-election."

"I did. I am very much flattered that you know so much about my movements."

"I always know everything that you are doing," said Alicia, quietly--"you, and Cousin Lucy."