Part 24 (1/2)

'I'm to have one,' said she. 'I'm going down to stay with my uncle at Bentbridge in a week's time.'

'At Bentbridge?' asked Fielding sharply. 'For the election.'

She saw his lips tighten. 'My husband goes with me,' she replied quickly and stopped, flus.h.i.+ng as she realised that she had meant and conveyed an apology.

'I should have thought that the Continent would have been more advisable as a change.'

'The Continent! I don't want to travel far. I am so tired.' She spoke in a tone of weariness which touched Fielding in spite of himself. He looked at her more closely. 'Yes,' he said gently, 'you look very tired. You have been doing too much.'

'No, it isn't that,' she replied. 'One thinks of things, that's all.' She bent her head and was silent for a little, tracing a pattern on the table-cloth with a finger absently. Then she added in a low voice, 'I suppose few women ever think at all until after they are married.'

The voice was low, and Fielding was conscious of something new in the tone of it, a deeper vibration, a sincerity different in kind from that surface frankness which he had always known in her. He wondered whether she had struck down from her pinchbeck sentimentality into something that rang solid in the depths of her nature. He looked at her again, her eyes were turned to his. With the shadows about them, they looked bigger, darker, more piteously appealing. She was no less a child to him, the child looked out of her eyes, sounded in the commonplace sentiment she had spoken, and the air of originality with which she had spoken it. But the child seemed beginning to learn the lesson of womanhood, and from the one mistress which could teach it her.

'But why think then?' he asked lightly. 'It ruins a complexion no less than before. Or does a complexion cease to count? Look!' He leaned forward. A pink carnation was in a gla.s.s in front of him, already withering from the heat. He touched the faded tips of the petals. 'That is the colour which conies from thinking.'

Clarice lifted her shoulders with more of sadness than impatience in the gesture. 'You believe,' she said, 'no woman at all has a right to dare to think.'

'I notice,' he answered with the same levity, 'that the woman who thinks generally thinks of what she ought not to.'

Later, in the drawing-room, he looked for her again, and looked unsuccessfully. The window, however, was open, and he advanced to it. Clarice was on the balcony alone, her elbows on the rail, a hand on either side of her cheek. Something in her att.i.tude made him almost pity her.

'Mrs. Mallinson,' he said, 'you will probably think me intrusive, but do you think your visit really wise?' Clarice turned towards him quickly with something of defiance in her manner. 'You are tired,' he went on, 'you want rest. Well, an election isn't a very restful time, even for the onlooker.'

Clarice did not reply for a moment, and when she did she replied with an impulsive frankness, to which his friendly tone had prompted her. 'To tell you the truth, I am not anxious to go. I don't want to, but Sidney wants to.'

'Your husband?'

'You don't believe me.'

'Of course I do.' He left her on the balcony, and went in search of Mallinson. 'So you go to Bentbridge for the election,' he said.

'Yes,' replied the other, lighting up. 'I am looking forward to it like a schoolboy to a football match. The prospect of activity exhilarates me--bodily activity, don't you know--a town humming with excitement.'

Fielding cut him short. 'My dear fellow, you're a d.a.m.ned fool,' he said.

CHAPTER XIII

Stephen Drake had decided to stay during the period of the election at a hotel in the centre of the town, rather than to accept an invitation from Captain Le Mesurier, who lived some miles beyond the outskirts. He travelled down to Bentbridge on the day that the dissolution was announced, and during the journey Mr. Burl gave him much sage advice.

'Keep the arguments for buildings; they're in place there. Ma.s.s-meetings in the open air want something different. Many a good man has lost his seat from not observing that rule. In the open air pitch out a fact or two--not too many--or a couple of round sums of figures first of all, just to give them confidence in you, and then go straight for your opponent. No rapier play--it's lost then--but crack him on the top-knot with a bludgeon. They'll want to hear his skull ring before they'll believe that you have touched him. Phrases! Those are the things to get you in, not arguments. Pin a label on his coat-tails. You'll see them laugh as he squirms round to pull it off. And, mind you, there'll be no walking over, you'll want all you know. The man's a Radical and a Lord!

The combination satisfies their democratic judgments and their sn.o.bbish instincts at the same time. People forget to count the sn.o.b in the democrat, but he's there all the same, as in most Englishmen. A veneer of sn.o.bbishness over solid independence. That's our characteristic. Lord Cranston! Can't you hear their tongues licking it? Luckily, there are things against him. He's a carpet-bagger like yourself, and he's been more than once separated from his wife. His fault, too--once it was an opera dancer. I've got up the facts. He only joined his wife again a few months ago--probably for the purpose of this election.'

Mr. Burl pulled out a pocket-book, and began to turn over the leaves in search of the d.a.m.ning details, when Drake interrupted him. 'You don't expect me to discuss the man's private life?'

'My dear Drake, do be practical. It's no use being finicking. The essential thing is to win the seat.'

'Whatever the price?'

'Look here; I am not asking you to do anything so crude as to make platform speeches about the man's disgraceful conduct to his wife.' Mr.

Burl a.s.sumed the look of a Rhadamanthus. 'But'--and again he relaxed into the tactician--'you might take a strong social line on morals generally, and the domestic hearth, and that sort of thing.' He looked critically at Drake. 'You're one of the few chaps I know who look as if they could do that and make people believe they really mean it.'

He finally discredited his advice by adding impressibly, 'You needn't go into the instance at all, you know. They'll understand what you're alluding to, never fear'; and Drake flatly refused to dance into Parliament to that tune, however persuasively Mr. Burl played upon the pipes.