Part 48 (2/2)

”Hasn't he come in yet?” Edwin replied negligently, as he mounted the stairs with his desire.

In his room he settled himself once more under the gas, and opened the flimsy newspaper with joy. Yes, there it was--columns, columns, in small type! An hour or two previously Gladstone had been speaking in Parliament, and by magic the whole of his speech, with all the little convolutions of his intricate sentences, had got into Edwin's bedroom.

Edwin began to read, as it were voluptuously. Not that he had a peculiar interest in Irish politics! What he had was a pa.s.sion for great news, for news long expected. He could thrill responsively to a fine event. I say that his pleasure had the voluptuousness of an artistic sensation.

Moreover, the attraction of politics in general was increasing for him.

Politics occupied his mind, often obsessing it. And this was so in spite of the fact that he had done almost nothing in the last election, and that the pillars of the Liberal Club were beginning to suspect him of being a weakling who might follow his father into the wilderness between two frontiers.

As he read the speech, slowly disengaging its significance from the thicket of words, it seemed incredible. A parliament in Dublin! The Irish taxing themselves according to their own caprices! The Irish controlling the Royal Irish Constabulary! The Irish members withdrawn from Westminster! A separate nation! Surely Gladstone could not mean it! The project had the same air of unreality as that of his marriage with Hilda. It did not convince. It was too good to be true. It could not materialise itself. And yet, as his glance, flitting from left to right and right to left, eagerly, reached the bottom of one column and jumped with a crinkling of paper to the top of the next, and then to the next after that, the sense of unreality did depart. He agreed with the principles of the Bill, and with all its details. Whatever Gladstone had proposed would have received his sympathy. He was persuaded in advance; he concurred in advance. All he lacked was faith. And those sentences, helped by his image of the aged legislator dominating the House, and by the wondrous legend of the orator's divine power--those long stretching, majestic, misty sentences gave him faith. Henceforward he was an ardent Home Ruler. Reason might or might not have entered into the affair had the circ.u.mstances of it been other; but in fact reason did not. Faith alone sufficed. For ever afterwards argument about Home Rule was merely tedious to him, and he had difficulty in crediting that opponents of it were neither stupid nor insincere. Home Rule was part of his religion, beyond and above argument.

He wondered what they were saying at the Liberal Club, and smiled disdainfully at the thought of the unseemly language that would animate the luxurious heaviness of the Conservative Club, where prominent publicans gathered after eleven o'clock to uphold the State and arrange a few bets with sporting clients. He admitted, as the supreme importance of the night leaped out at him from the printed page, that, if only for form's sake, he ought to have been at the Liberal Club that evening. He had been requested to go, but had refused, because on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sat.u.r.days, he always spent the evening in study or in the semblance of study. He would not break that rule even in honour of the culmination of the dazzling career of his political idol.

Perhaps another proof of the justice of Maggie's a.s.sertion that he was a regular old maid!

He knew what his father would say. His father would be furious. His father in his uncontrolled fury would destroy Gladstone. And such was his father's empire over him that he was almost ready on Gladstone's behalf to adopt an apologetic and slightly shamed att.i.tude to his father concerning this madness of Home Rule--to admit by his self-conscious blushes that it was madness. He well knew that at breakfast the next morning, in spite of any effort to the contrary, he would have a guilty air when his father began to storm. The conception of a separate parliament in Dublin, and of separate taxation, could not stand before his father's anger...

Beneath his window, in the garden, he suddenly heard a faint sound as of somebody in distress.

”What the deuce--!” he exclaimed. ”If that isn't the old man I'm--”

Startled, he looked at his watch. It was after midnight.

FOUR.

As he opened the garden door, he saw, in the porch where had pa.s.sed his first secret interview with Hilda, the figure of his father as it were awkwardly rising from the step. The gas had not been turned out in the hall, and it gave a feeble but sufficient illumination to the porch and the nearest parts of the garden. Darius stood silent and apparently irresolute, with a mournful and even despairing face. He wore his best black suit, and a new silk hat and new black gloves, and in one hand he carried a copy of ”The Signal” that was very crumpled. He ignored Edwin.

”h.e.l.lo, father!” said Edwin persuasively. ”Anything wrong?”

The heavy figure moved itself into the house without a word, and Edwin shut and bolted the door.

”Funeral go off all right?” Edwin inquired with as much nonchalance as he could. (The thought crossed his mind: ”I suppose he hasn't been having a drop too much, for once in a way? Why did he come round into the garden?”)

Darius loosed a really terrible sigh. ”Yes,” he answered, expressing with a single word the most profound melancholy.

Four days previously Edwin and Maggie had seen their father considerably agitated by an item of gossip, casually received, to which it seemed to them he attached an excessive importance. Namely, that old Shus.h.i.+ons, having been found straying and dest.i.tute by the authorities appointed to deal with such matters, had been taken to the workhouse and was dying there. Darius had heard the news as though it had been a message brought on horseback in a melodrama. ”The Bastille!” he exclaimed, in a whisper, and had left the house on the instant. Edwin, while the name of Shus.h.i.+ons reminded him of moments when he had most intensely lived, was disposed to regard the case of Mr Shus.h.i.+ons philosophically. Of course it was a pity that Mr Shus.h.i.+ons should be in the workhouse; but after all, from what Edwin remembered and could surmise, the workhouse would be very much the same as any other house to that senile mentality.

Thus Edwin had sagely argued, and Maggie had agreed with him. But to them the workhouse was absolutely nothing but a name. They were no more afraid of the workhouse than of the Russian secret police; and of their father's early history they knew naught.

Mr Shus.h.i.+ons had died in the workhouse, and Darius had taken his body out of the workhouse, and had organised for it a funeral which was to be rendered impressive by a procession of Turnhill Sunday school teachers.

Edwin's activity in connexion with the funeral had been limited to the funeral cards, in the preparation of which his father had shown an irritability more than usually offensive. And now the funeral was over.

Darius had devoted to it the whole of Home Rule Tuesday, and had returned to his house at a singular hour and in a singular condition.

And Edwin, loathing sentimentality and full of the wisdom of nearly thirty years, sedately pitied his father for looking ridiculous and grotesque. He knew for a fact that his father did not see Mr Shus.h.i.+ons from one year's end to the next: hence they could not have been intimate friends, or even friends: hence his father's emotion was throughout exaggerated and sentimental. His acquaintance with history and with biography told him that tyrants often carried sentimentality to the absurd, and he was rather pleased with himself for being able thus to correlate the general past and the particular present. What he did not suspect was the existence of circ.u.mstances which made the death of Mr Shus.h.i.+ons in the workhouse the most distressing tragedy that could by any possibility have happened to Darius Clayhanger.

”Shall I put the gas out, or will you?” he asked, with kindly secret superiority, unaware, with all his omniscience, that the being in front of him was not a successful steam-printer and tyrannical father, but a tiny ragged boy who could still taste the Bastille skilly and still see his mother weeping round the knees of a powerful G.o.d named Shus.h.i.+ons.

”I--I don't know,” said Darius, with another sigh.

The next instant he sat down heavily on the stairs and began openly to blubber. His hat fell off and rolled about undecidedly.

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