Nobody's Man Part 42

"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."

"Surely," her mother remarked acidly, "in view of your growing intimacy they are of some interest to you both?"

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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 friends.h.i.+p with him."

"Your aunt tells me that Colonel Fosbrook wants to marry you."

"He has mentioned the fact continually," Jane a.s.sented. "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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 s.e.x.

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 antic.i.p.ate 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. n.o.body 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 wors.h.i.+pping false G.o.ds."

"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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 r.e.t.a.r.ding 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 h.e.l.lesfield, 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."