Part 42 (1/2)

”I can well imagine it,” said Wilson.

”You see I'm not an aristocrat, after all,” said Paul.

Wilson looked the young man in the face and saw the steel beneath the dark eyes, and the Proud setting of the lips. With a sudden impulse he wrung his hand. ”I don't care a d.a.m.n!” said he. ”You are.”

Paul said, unsmiling: ”I can face the music. That's all.” He drew a note from his pocket. ”Will you do me a final service? Go round to the Conservative Club at once, and tell the meeting what has happened, and give this to Colonel Winwood.”

”With pleasure,” said Wilson.

Then Paul shook hands with all his fellow-workers and thanked them in his courtly way, and, pleading for solitude, went through the door of the great chamber and, guided by an attendant, reached the exit in a side street where his car awaited him. A large concourse of people stood drawn up in line on each side of the street, marshalled by policemen. A familiar crooked figure limped from the shadow of the door, holding a hard felt hat, his white poll gleaming in the shaft of light. ”G.o.d bless you, sonny,” he said in a hoa.r.s.e whisper.

Paul took the old man by the arm and drew him across the pavement to the car. ”Get in,” said he.

Barney Bill hung back. ”No, sonny; no.”

”It's not the first time we've driven together. Get in. I want you.”

So Barney Bill allowed himself to be thrust into the luxurious car, and Paul followed. And perhaps for the first time in the history of great elections the successful candidate drove away from the place where the poll was declared in dead silence, attended only by the humblest of his const.i.tuents. But every man in the throng bared his head.

CHAPTER XXI

”HE had the stroke in the night,” said Barney Bill suddenly.

Paul turned sharply on him. ”Why wasn't I told?”

”Could you have cured him?”

”Of course not.”

”Could you have done him any good?”

”I ought to have been told.”

”You had enough of worries before you for one day, sonny.”

”That was my business,” said Paul.

”Jane and I, being as it were responsible parties, took the liberty, so to speak, of thinking it our business too.”

Paul drummed impatiently on his knees.

”Yer ain't angry, are you, sonny?” the old man asked plaintively.

”No--not angry--with you and Jane--certainly not. I know you acted for the best, out of love for me. But you shouldn't have deceived me. I thought it was a mere nervous breakdown--the strain and shock. You never said a word about it, and Jane, when I talked to her this morning, never gave me to dream there was anything serious amiss. So I say you two have deceived me.”

”But I'm a telling of yer, sonny--”

”Yes, yes, I know. I don't reproach you. But don't you see? I'm sick of lies. Dead sick. I've been up to my neck in a bog of falsehood ever since I was a child and I'm making a h.e.l.l of a struggle to get on to solid ground. The Truth for me now. By G.o.d! nothing but the Truth!”

Barney Bill, sitting forward, hunched up, on the seat of the car, just as he used to sit on the footboard of his van, twisted his head round.

”I'm not an eddicated person,” said he, ”although if I hadn't done a bit of reading in my time I'd have gone dotty all by my lones in the old 'bus, but I've come to one or two conclusions in my, so to speak, variegated career, and one is that if you go on in that 'ere mad way for Truth in Parliament, you'll be a bull in a china shop, and they'll get sticks and dawgs to hustle you out. Sir Robert Peel, old Gladstone, Dizzy, the whole lot of the old Yuns was up against it. They had to compromise. It's compromise”--the old man dwelt lovingly, as usual, on the literary word--”it's compromise you must have in Parliament.”