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Nobody's Man, a novel by E. Phillips Oppenheim |
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Book Two - Chapter 17 |
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_ BOOK TWO CHAPTER XVII This is how a weekly paper of indifferent reputation but immense circulation brought Tallente's love affair to a crisis. In a column purporting to set out the editor's curiosity upon certain subjects, the following paragraphs appeared:
"Take that into the servants' hall and let it be destroyed, Parkins," she ordered. The Duchess held her peace until the man had left the room. Then she turned resolutely to Jane. "My dear," she said, "that's posing. Besides, it's indiscreet. Parkins will read it, of course, and it's what that sort of person reads, nowadays, that counts. We can't afford it. The aristocracy has had its fling. To-day we are on our good behaviour." "I should have thought," Jane declared, "that in these democratic days the best thing we could do would be to prove ourselves human like other people." "And people call you clever!" her mother scoffed. "Why, my dear child, any slight respect which we still receive from the lower orders is based upon their conviction that somehow or other we are, after all, made differently from them. Sometimes they hate us for it and sometimes they love us for it. The great thing, nowadays, however, is to cultivate and try and strengthen that belief of theirs." "How did you come to see this rag?" Jane enquired mildly. "Your Aunt Somerham brought it round this morning while I was in bed," her mother replied. "It was a great shock to me. Also to your father. He was anxious to come with me but is threatened with an attack of gout." "And what do you want to say to me about it? Just why did you bring me that rag and show me those paragraphs?" "My dear, I must know how much truth there is in them. Have you been going about with this man Tallente?" "To a certain extent, yes," Jane admitted, after a moment's hesitation. "Chaperoned?" "Pooh! You know I finished with all that sort of rubbish years ago, mother." "I am informed that Mr. Tallente is a married man." Jane flinched a little for the first time. "All the world knows that," she answered. "He married an American, one of William Hunter's daughters." "Who has now, I understand, left him?" Lady Jane shrugged her shoulders. "I do not discuss Mr. Tallente's matrimonial affairs with him."
Jane was silent for a moment. "Just what have you come to say, mother?" she asked, looking up at her, clear-eyed and composed. "Better let's get it over." The Duchess cleared her throat. "Jane," she said, "we have become reconciled, your father and I, against our wills, to your strange political views and the isolation in which you choose to live, but when your eccentricities lead you to a course of action which makes you the target for scandal, your family protests. I have come to beg that this intimacy of yours with Mr. Tallente should cease." "Mother," Jane replied, "for years after I left the schoolroom I subjected myself to your guidance in these matters. I went through three London seasons and made myself as agreeable as possible to whatever you brought along and called a man. At the end of that time I revolted. I am still in revolt. Mr. Tallente interests me more than any man I know and I shall not give up my friendship with him." "Your aunt tells me that Colonel Fosbrook wants to marry you." "He has mentioned the fact continually," Jane assented. "Colonel Fosbrook is a very pleasant person who does not appeal to me in the slightest as a husband." "The Fosbrooks are one of our oldest families," the Duchess said severely. "Arnold Fosbrook is very wealthy and the connection would be most desirable. You are twenty-nine years old, Jane, and you ought to marry. You ought to have children and bring them up to defend the order in which you were born." "Mother dear," Jane declared, smiling, "this conversation had better cease. Thanks to dear Aunt Jane, I have an independent fortune, Woolhanger, and my little house here. I have adopted an independent manner of life and I have not the least idea of changing it. You have three other daughters and they have all married to your complete satisfaction. I don't think that I shall ever be a very black sheep but you must look upon me as outside the fold.--I hope you will stay to lunch. Colonel Fosbrook is bringing his sister and the Princess is coming." The Duchess rose to her feet. The family dignity justified itself in her cold withdrawal. "Thank you, Jane," she said, "I am engaged. I am glad to know, however, that you still have one or two respectable friends." The setting was the same only the atmosphere seemed somehow changed when Jane received her second visitor that day. She was waiting for him in the small sitting room into which no other visitor save members of the family were ever invited. There was a comfortable fire burning, the roses which had come from him a few hours before were everywhere displayed, and Jane herself, in a soft brown velvet gown, rose to her feet, comely and graceful, to welcome him. "So we are immortalised!" she exclaimed, smiling. "That wretched rag!" he replied. "I was hoping you wouldn't see it." "Mother was here with a copy before eleven o'clock." Tallente made a grimace. "Have you sworn to abjure me and all my works?" "So much so," she told him, "that I have been here waiting for you for at least half an hour and I have put on the gown you said you liked best. Some one said in a book I was reading last week that affection was proved only by trifles. I have certainly never before in my life altered my scheme of clothes to please any man." He raised her fingers to his lips. "You are exercising," he said, "the most wonderful gift of your sex. You are providing an oasis--more than that, a paradise--for a disheartened toiler. It seems that I have enemies whose very existence I never guessed at." "Well, does that matter very much?" she asked cheerfully. "It was one of your late party, wasn't it, who said that the making of enemies was the only reward of political success?" "A cheap enough saying," Tallente sighed, "yet with the germs of truth in it. I don't mind the allusion to a sinister rumour. The air will be thick with them before long. The other--well, it's beneath criticism but it hurts." She laughed whole-heartedly. "Andrew," she said, "for the first time in my life I am ashamed of you. Here am I, hidebound in conventions, and I could just summon indignation enough to send the paper down to the kitchen to be burnt. Since then I have not even thought of it. I was far more angry that any one should anticipate the troubles which you have to face. Come and sit down." She led him to the couch and held his fingers in hers as she leaned back in a corner. "I honestly believe," she went on gently, "that the world is not sufficiently grateful to those who toil for her. Criticism has become a habit of life. Nobody believes or wants to believe in the altruist any longer. I believe that if to-day a rich man stripped himself of all his possessions and obeyed the doctrines of the Bible by giving them to the poor, the Daily something or other would worry around until they found some interested motive, and the Daily something or other else would succeed in proving the man a hypocrite." He smiled and in the lightening of his face she appreciated for the first time a certain strained look about his eyes and the drawn look about the mouth. "You are worrying about all this!" she exclaimed. "Yes, in a way I am worrying," he confessed simply. "Not about the storm itself. I am ready to face that and I think I shall be a stronger and a saner man when the battle has started. In the meantime, I think that what has happened to me is this. I have arrived just at that time of life when a man takes stock of himself and his doings, criticises his own past and wonders whether the things he has proposed doing in the future are worth while." "You of all men in the world need never ask yourself that," she declared warmly. "Think of your lifelong devotion to your work. Think of the idlers by whom you are surrounded." "I work," he admitted, "but I sometimes ask myself whether I work with the same motives as I did when I was young. I started life as an altruist. I am not sure now whether I am not working in self-defence, from habit, because I am afraid of falling behind." "You mean that you have lost your ideals?" "I wonder," he speculated, "whether any man can carry them through to my age and not be afflicted with doubts as to whether, after all, he has been on the right path, whether he may not have been worshipping false gods." "Tell me exactly how you started life," she begged. "Like any other third or fourth son of a bankrupt baronet," he replied. "I went to Eaton and Oxford with the knowledge that I had to carve out my own career and my ambitions when I left the University were entirely personal. I chose diplomacy. I did moderately well, I believe. I remember my first really confidential mission," he went on, with a faint smile, "brought me to Paris, where we met.--Then came Parliament--afterwards the war and a revolution in all my ideas. I suddenly saw the strength and power of England and realised whence it came. I realised that it was our democracy which was the backbone of the country. I realised the injustice of those centuries of class government. I plunged into my old socialistic studies, which I had taken up at Oxford more out of caprice than anything, and I began to have a vision of what I have always since looked upon as the truth. I began to realise that there was some super-divine truth in the equality of all humans, notwithstanding the cheap arguments against it; that by steady and broad-minded government for a generation or so, human beings would be born into the world under more level conditions; and with the fading away of class would be born or rather generated the real and wonderful spirit of freedom. My parliamentary career progressed by leaps and bounds, but when in '15 the war began to go against us, I turned soldier." "You don't need to tell me anything about that part of your career," she interrupted, with a little smile almost of proprietory pride. "I never forget it." "When I came back," he continued, "I was almost a fanatic. I worked not from the ranks of the Labour Party itself, because I flatter myself that I was clear-sighted enough to see that the Labour Party as it existed after the war, split up by factions, devoted to the selfish interests of the great trades unions and with the taint of Miller retarding all progress, had nothing in it of the real spirit of freedom. It was every man for his own betterment and the world in which he lived might go hang. I stayed with the Coalitionists, though I was often a thorn in their side, but because I was also useful to them I bent them often towards the light. Then they began to fear me, or rather my principles. It was out of my principles, although I was not nominally one of them, that Dartrey admits freely to-day he built up the Democratic Party. He had been working on the same lines for years, a little too much from the idealistic point of view. He needed the formula. I gave it to him. Horlock came into office again and I worked with him for a time. Gradually, however, my position became more and more difficult. In the end he offered me a post in the Cabinet, induced me to resign my own seat, which I admit was a doubtful one, and sent me to fight Hellesfield, which it was never intended that I should win. Then Miller dug his own grave. He opposed me there and I lost the seat. Horlock was politely regretful, scarcely saw what could be done for me at the moment, was disposed to join in a paltry little domestic plot to send me to the Lords. This was at the time I came down to Martinhoe, the time, except for those brief moments in Paris, when I first met you." "Pruning roses in a shockingly bad suit of clothes," she murmured. "And taken for my own gardener! Well, then came Dartrey's visit. He laid his programme before me, offered me a seat and I agreed to lead the Democrats in the House. There I think I have been useful. I knew the game, which Dartrey didn't. Whilst he has achieved almost the impossible, has, except so far as regards Miller's influence amongst the trades unions, brought the great army of the people into line, I accomplished the smaller task of giving them their due weight in the House." "Very well, then," Jane declared, looking at him with glowing eyes, "there is your stocktaking, taken from your own, the most modest point of view. With your own lips you confess to what you have achieved, to where you stand. What doubts should any sane man have? How can you say that the lamp of your life has burned dull?" "Insight," he answered promptly. "Don't think that I fear the big fight. I don't. With Dartrey on my side we shall wipe Miller into oblivion. It isn't true to-day to say that he represents the trades unions, for the very reason that the trades unions as solid bodies don't exist any longer. The men have learnt to think for themselves. Many of them are earnest members of the Democratic Party. They have learnt to look outside the interests of the little trade in which they earn their weekly wage. No, it isn't Miller that I am afraid of." "Then what is it?" she demanded. "How can I put it?" he went on thoughtfully. "Well, first of all, then, I feel that the Democrats, when they come into power, are going to develop as swiftly as may be all the fevers, the sore places, the jealousies and the pettiness of every other political party which has ever tried to rule the State. I see the symptoms already and that is what I think makes my heart grow faint. I have given the best years of my life to toiling for others. Who believes it? Who is grateful? Who would not say that because I lead a great party in the House of Commons, I have all that I have worked for, that my reward is at hand? And it isn't. If I am Prime Minister in three months' time, there will still be something left of the feeling of weariness I carry with me to-day." It was a new phase of the man who unconsciously had grown so dominant in her life. She felt the pull at her heartstrings. Her eyes were soft with unshed tears as her arm stole through his. "Please go on," she whispered. "There is the ego," he confessed, his voice shaking. "Why it has come to me just at this period of life--but there it is. I have neglected human society, human intercourse, sport, pleasures, the joys of a man who was born to be a man. I am philosopher enough not to ask myself whether it has been worth while, but I do ask myself--what of the next ten years?" "Who am I to give you counsel?" she asked, trembling. "The only person who can." "Then I advise you to go on. This is just a mood. There are muddy places through which one must pass, even in the paths that lead to the mountain tops, muddy and ugly and depressing places. As one climbs, one loses the memory of them." "But I climb always alone," he answered, with a sudden fierceness. "I walk alone in life. I have been strong enough to do it and I am strong enough no longer.--Jane," he went on, his voice a little unsteady, his hands almost clutching hers, "it is only since I have known you that I have realised from what source upon this earth a man may draw his inspiration, his courage, the strength to face the moving of mountains, day by day. My heart has been as dry as a seed plot. You have brought new things to me, the soft, humanising stimulus of a new hope, a new joy. If I am to fight on to the end, I must have you and your love." She was trembling and half afraid, but her hands yielded their pressure to his. Her lips and her eyes, the little quivering of her body, all spoke of yielding. "I have done foolish things in my life," he went on, drawing her nearer to him. "When I was young, I felt that I had the strength of a superman, and that all I needed in life was food for the brain. I placed woman in her wrong place. I sold myself and my chance of happiness that I might gain more power, a wider influence. It was a sin against life. It was a greater crime against myself. Now that the thunder is muttering and the time is coming for the last test, I see the truth as I have never seen it before. Nature has taken me by the hand--shows it me.--Tell me it isn't too late, Jane? Tell me you care? Help me. I have never pleaded for help before. I plead to you." Her eyes were wet and beautiful with the shine of tears. It seemed to him in that moment of intense emotion that he could read there everything he desired in life. Her lips met his almost eagerly, met his and gave of their own free will. "Andrew," she murmured, "you see, you are the only man except those of my family whom I have ever kissed, and I kiss you now--again--and again--because I love you." _ |
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