Part 32 (1/2)

”Home to London. I've just come from Cashel. I went to try to effect some sort of reconciliation with Mount Rorke; but--and you, where are you going?”

”I'm going to Cashel. I'm going to contest the town in the Parnellite interest.”

Each pair of eyes was riveted on the other. For both men thought of the evening when Mike had received the letter notifying that Lady Seeley had left him five thousand a year, and Frank had read in the evening paper that Lady Mount Rorke had given birth to a son.

Frank was, as usual, voluble and communicative. He dilated on the painfulness of the salutations of the people he had met on the way going from the station to Mount Rorke; and, instead of walking straight in, as in old times, he had to ask the servant to take his name.

”Burton, the old servant who had known me since I was a boy, seemed terribly cut up, and he was evidently very reluctant to speak the message. 'I'm very sorry, Mr. Frank,' he said, 'but his lords.h.i.+p says he is too unwell to see any one to-day, sir; he is very sorry, but if you would write' ... If I would write! think of it, I who was once his heir, and used the place as if it were mine! Poor old Burton was quite overcome. He tried to ask me to come into the dining-room and have some lunch. If I go there again I shall be asked into the servants' hall. And at that moment the nurse came, wheeling the baby in the perambulator through the hall, going out for an airing. I tried not to look, but couldn't restrain my eyes, and the nurse stopped and said, 'Now then, dear, give your hand to the gentleman, and tell him your name.' The little thing looked up, its blue eyes staring out of its sallow face, and it held out the little putty-like hand. Poor old Burton turned aside, he couldn't stand it any longer, and walked into the dining-room.”

”And how did you get away?” asked Mike, who saw his friend's misfortune in the light of an exquisite chapter in a novel. ”How sad the old place must have seemed to you!”

”You are thinking how you could put it in a book--how brutal you are!”

”I a.s.sure you you are wrong. I can't help trying to realize your sensations, but that doesn't prevent me from being very sorry for you, and I'm sure I shall be very pleased to help you. Do you want any money? Don't be shy about saying yes. I haven't forgotten how you helped me.”

”I really don't like to ask you, you've been very good as it is.

However, if you could spare me a tenner?”

”Of course I can. Let's send these jarvies away, and come into my hotel, and I'll write you a cheque.”

The sum Frank asked for revealed to Mike exactly the depth to which he had sunk since they had last met. Small as it was, however, it seemed to have had considerable effect in reviving Frank's spirits, and he proceeded quite cheerfully into the tale of his misfortune.

Now it seemed to strike him too in quite a literary light, and he made philosophic comments on its various aspects, as he might on the hero of a book which he was engaged on or contemplated writing.

”No,” he said, ”you were quite wrong in supposing that I waited to look back on the old places. I got out of the park through a wood so as to avoid the gate-keeper. In moments of great despair we don't lapse into pensive contemplation.” ... He stopped to pull at the cigar Mike had given him, and when he had got it well alight, he said, ”It was really most dramatic, it would make a splendid scene in a play; you might make him murder the baby.”

Half an hour after Mike bade his friend good-bye, glad to be rid of him.

”He's going back to that beastly wife who lives in some dirty lodging. How lucky I was, after all, not to marry.”

Then, remembering the newspaper, and the use it might be to him when in Parliament, he rushed after Frank. When the _Pilgrim_ was mentioned Frank's face changed expression, and he seemed stirred with deeper grief than when he related the story of his disinheritance. He had no further connection with the paper. Thigh had worked him out of it.

”I never really despaired,” he said, ”until I lost my paper. Thigh has asked me to send him paragraphs, but of course I'm not going to do that.”

”Why not?”

”Well, hang it, after being the editor of a paper, you aren't going to send in paragraphs on approval. It isn't good enough. When I go back to London I shall try to get a sub-editors.h.i.+p.”

Mike pressed another tenner upon him, and returning to the smoking-room, and throwing himself into an arm-chair, he lapsed into dreams of the bands and the banners that awaited him. When animal spirits were ebullient in him, he regarded his election in the light of a vulgar practical joke; when the philosophic mood was upon him he turned from all thought of it as from the smell of a dirty kitchen coming through a grating.

CHAPTER XI

During the first session Mike was hampered and inconvenienced by the forms of the House; in the second, he began to weary of its routine.

His wit and paradox attracted some attention; he made one almost successful speech, many that stirred and stimulated the minds of celebrated listeners; but for all that he failed. His failure to redeem the expectations of his friends, produced in him much stress and pain of mind, the more acute because he was fully alive to the cause. He ascribed it rightly to certain inherent flaws in his character. ”The world believes in those who believe in it. Such belief may prove a lack of intelligence on the part of the believer, but it secures him success, and success is after all the only thing that compensates for the evil of life.”

Always impressed by new ideas, rarely holding to any impression long, finding all hollow and common very soon, he had been taken with the importance of the national a.s.sembly, but it had hardly pa.s.sed into its third session when all illusion had vanished, and Mike ridiculed parliamentary ambitions in the various chambers of the barristers he frequented.

It was May-time, and never did the Temple wear a more gracious aspect. The river was full of hay-boats, the gardens were green with summer hours. Through the dim sky, above the conical roof of the dear church, the pigeons fled in rapid quest, and in Garden Court, beneath the plane-trees, old folk dozed, listening to the rippling tune of the fountain and the shrilling of the sparrows. In King's Bench Walk the waving branches were full of their little brown bodies. Sparrows everywhere, flying from the trees to the eaves, hopping on the golden gravel, beautifully carpeted with the rich shadows of the trees--unabashed little birds, scarcely deigning to move out of the path of the young men as they pa.s.sed to and fro from their offices to the library. ”That sweet, grave place where we weave our ropes of sand,” so Mike used to speak of it.