“You had better go up to the House, to-night,” called Long, as he passed
his wife’s door on his way to dress for dinner.
“What’s going on? I’m booked for bridge at the Blaine’s.”
“Dilling’s going to speak. I think you’ll be repaid for calling off your
game.”
“All right. I’ll telephone,” said Mrs. Long, carefully adjusting a hair
net. “Perhaps the others would like to go. Only two tables, I understand
. . .”
The House was crowded by the time Mrs. Blaine and her party arrived. The
“Ladies of the Cabinet” were shown, of course, into the front row of the
Speaker’s Gallery, and those of lesser rank were distributed wherever
space permitted.
Marjorie had been directed to a seat in the second row, immediately
behind Mrs. Carmichael and next to Mrs. Long, beyond whom sat Eva Leeds,
Pamela de Latour and Mrs. Chesley. Strictly speaking, none of them
deserved a place in the Member’s Gallery, but in deference to Mrs.
Blaine, whose guests they were, and also to their social status, they
were thus happily privileged. The vacancy next Marjorie was presently
filled by Mrs. Pratt, although Deputy Minister O’Neill’s wife sat
several rows behind.
“Well, upon my word,” whispered Mrs. Carmichael to Mme. Valleau, wife of
the Postmaster-General, “The Virginia Creeper will be clinging to us,
next. How does she do it?”
There was no mystery. Mrs. Pratt’s superb lack of what her husband
termed “gulp” was partially responsible; and, in addition, she knew how
to wring one hundred per cent returns out of a five dollar bill. The
doorkeeper, who was the object of her investment, was more affected by
the frigidity of her reception than she was, herself.
“Good evening, Lady Denby . . . How d’yuh do, Mrs. Blaine? Mrs.
Carmichael . . . Good evening, Madame Valleau . . .” She bowed right and
left, murmuring names—prominent names—and creating the impression
among those who didn’t know, that she was on pleasantly intimate terms
with every one worth while. “Oh, Mrs. Dilling . . . I didn’t notice
you!”
“Good evening,” returned Marjorie, with strained politeness.
She was determined to be just as stiff as Azalea could have wished. Not
that she was converted to the belief that this attitude on her part
would be in the least helpful to Raymond, but because she was, by
nature, docile and amenable to discipline. Always for Marjorie the word
“must” held an ineluctable obligation.
Therefore, when Azalea insisted that she must adopt a greater formality
of manner, the time came when Marjorie surrendered.
“Who is that woman in the other Gallery?” asked Mrs. Long, from behind a
jewelled lorgnette.
“Which one?” queried Pamela de Latour.
“There—in the front row. She seems to have forgotten her clothes, so
far as her torso is concerned.”
“Oh,” cut in Mrs. Pratt, “that’s Mrs. Barrington. They’ve recently come
to Ottawa. Her husband’s something or other on the Driveway Commission.
I can’t akkerately say just what, although Mr. Pratt was largely
instrumental in getting him appointed.”
“Barrington?” echoed Mrs. Chesley, “why, that’s the woman who’s rushing
Raymond Dilling, isn’t it?”
“Sh—sh—sh—” warned Pamela, nodding in Marjorie’s direction.
“Well, isn’t it?” insisted the other.
“Hush! She’ll hear you.”
“I suppose that means it is. Does she know?”
“I don’t think so,” whispered Pamela. “Doesn’t see much beyond the
kitchen cabinet and the drawing-room curtains, I fancy.”
“Lucky woman,” murmured Helena Chesley, thinking of her impressionable
husband.
“Who’s speaking?” Mrs. Long was moved to ask. Until that moment, no one
had given a glance at the House.
Mr. Sullivan, it seemed, had the floor. A few Members watched him
languidly. Nobody listened.
Pamela de Latour turned attentive eyes upon him for a moment or two.
Then,
“There’s really something intriguing about that man,” she murmured. “If
only he would apply a little veneer to cover the knots once in a while,
he would be accepted everywhere. No one minds what he does when you come
to analyse things; only they mind what he does so openly. Does anyone
happen to know the reigning favourite?”
“I hear she is a taffy-haired manicurist,” whispered Eva Leeds, wishing
they had stayed at home and played Bridge. Her losses had been shocking
of late, and she felt that the tide of bad luck would certainly have
turned this evening. That was always the way, she never really had a
chance! “But there’s no telling . . . That may be ancient history. I
haven’t heard much about him, lately.”
“About whom?” demanded Madame Valleau, bending back her handsome head in
order to see the speaker. She was supposed to be the best informed lady
in the Cabinet—informed, that is to say, regarding the shadowy side of
the Members’ private lives.
They told her.
“Oh, Sullivan,” she cried, in her fascinating broken English. “A
delightful dog, hein? I wish there were more men like him in this dull
town!”
Mrs. Carmichael, having two young daughters to whom she enjoyed applying
the inappropriate word “innocent”, protested.
“Why, no woman is safe with him,” she said.
“A few,” argued Madame, allowing her eyes to travel slowly over the
immediate group. “Besides, who wants to feel safe with any man? Not I,
for one! If women had been safe with men, there would have been no need
for cavaliers, for gallantry. Sullivan is charming.”
“I think he’s a conscienceless old reprobate,” declared Mrs. Carmichael,
“and the National Council should make an example of him.”
Marjorie leaned forward. It required a good deal of courage on her part
to push into this argument, but she felt that loyalty to an absent
friend demanded it.
“You misjudge him, Mrs. Carmichael,” she defended. “I know him very well
and I am certain the things people say about him are not true. He’s too
kind to everybody, that’s his trouble! He is as kind to a—a—manicurist
as he is to . . . well, to me! He’s always so ready to help people and
to give them good advice!”
Mme. Valleau gave vent to a musical little scream that was heard by the
Sergeant-at-Arms, and impelled him to shake a playful warning for
silence at her.
“Don’t kill my enthusiasm for that man by telling me he is giving good
advice!” she said. “He won’t be doing that for a long while, I’ll be
bound.”
“Why not?” demanded Marjorie.
“Because it’s only when Sullivan is too old to give the bad example he
will begin to give the good advice,” returned the Frenchwoman. “_Mon
Dieu_, I hope that won’t be for many a long day.”
“I don’t think you are fair to him,” championed Marjorie.
“My child,” interrupted Lady Denby, “I should be greatly disturbed if I
thought you were trying, seriously, to defend that man! Mme. Valleau has
original ideas on every subject, including honour, but for you to
express yourself favourably on Sullivan’s behalf, or admit friendship
with him, would be little short of compromising. I know you too well to
misunderstand, but these others might get a sadly erroneous impression.”
“But . . .” began Marjorie.
“Stop chattering,” cautioned Mrs. Long, who had only just stopped,
herself. “Mr. Dilling is going to speak.”
The House filled rapidly. Members slipped into their seats and turned
towards the slender young man who stood, hand on hip, in the very last
row of back benches. In the Press Gallery there wasn’t a vacant chair.
Representatives of the leading dailies jostled and crowded one another
at the desk, and those men who could not obtain so convenient a
position, drew sheaves of copy paper from their pockets and recorded
Dilling’s speech on the surface offered by their neighbour’s backs.
Pages flung themselves on the steps of the Speaker’s dais, and relaxed
into an attitude that was almost inattentive. They had learned that
while the Member for Pinto Plains was speaking, the House rested from
its customary finger-snapping, and, like otiose diversions.
A cheer crashed through the silence. On the right of the Speaker, desks
were thumped and feet beat upon the floor. A babel arose from the
Opposition, and in the Galleries, visitors forgot that they were
“strangers in the House,” and that, like the children of a bye-gone
generation, they were supposed to be unheard.
“Or-r-der,” drawled the Speaker. And the clamour died.
“_Bon!_” chuckled Madame Valleau. “He has the courage to speak, that
Dilling—and behind his words, there is the mind to think!”
“Very good,” pronounced the ladies surrounding Marjorie. “Most
interesting! Quite excellent, indeed!”
“Thank you,” returned Marjorie, so stiffly that they looked at her in
amazement, wondering if success had suddenly turned her head.
They wondered still more when a messenger approached her, delivered a
note and said there would be an answer. Eyebrows were raised, and
incredulity was telegraphed from one to the other of the group.
“What’s this?” asked Lady Denby, in what she conceived to be a playful
tone. “Have we an admirer in the House?”
A furious blush and confused stammering was Marjorie’s reply. With one
of those rare flashes of insight for which she could never account, she
knew that in view of the recent discussion about Sullivan and her
defence of him, he was suspected of being the writer of that letter. She
didn’t blame the women in the least, for she suspected him, herself.
But she was mistaken. The scrawling signature of Hebe Barrington met her
eye as she hastily turned the last page, and the body of the
communication was an invitation to supper.
“I have persuaded Mr. Dilling to join us,” the letter announced, “and he
asked me to say that we would meet in his room, at once. Please come!”
“Mrs. Barrington has invited me to supper,” Marjorie explained, with a
noticeable moderation of stiffness. “I think I will say good night and
hurry on.”
“What’s got into her?” asked the ladies. “Her naiveté was bad enough,
but her snobbishness is insufferable!”
Marjorie had never seen a home just like the Barrington’s. It reminded
her of the Ancient Chattellarium, and struck her as being a curious
place in which to live. There weren’t two chairs that matched in the
whole house, and the black rugs and hangings she found very depressing.
Moreover, the rooms bore names as strange as their furnishings, and she
had no idea what her hostess meant by the Cuddlery or the Tiffinaria.
Mrs. Barrington entertained easily. She did not stand in the centre of
the drawing-room, beneath the chandelier, and greet her guests with
flattering though repetitive phrases. In the first place, there wasn’t,
properly speaking, a drawing-room. In the second, there was no
chandelier. What light there was, came from half a dozen shaded sconces,
and a pair of Roman lamps. There were no pictures on the wall. At least,
Marjorie did not call them pictures. They were scratchy drawings
representing Chinamen engaged in such profitless occupations as
contemplating the tonsils of a large-mouthed dragon, or leaning
thoughtfully upon a naked blade—naked, that is, save for the head that
clothed the point of it. She had never seen their like, before, and
thoroughly disapproved of them.
Mrs. Barrington did not stand in the drawing-room at all, but wandered
about with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Scotch in the other,
and seemed intensely surprised to see the people she was entertaining.
“Well,” she greeted more than one guest, “fancy your trotting away out
here. Are you with anyone or did you come alone?”
With the exception of Mr. Sullivan and the Carmichael girls, they were
strangers to Marjorie, as, indeed, many of them were to their hostess.
“Who is the young blood so effectively burgling the cellarette?” she
would ask her husband. Or, “Toddles, tell me quickly, is that girl in
blue some one I ought to know?”
Supper was spread in the Tiffinaria and eaten all over the house.
Marjorie was inexpressibly shocked to hear a nice looking young man call
to his partner,
“You wait upstairs, old dear, and I’ll bring up the victuals. We can
mangle them on Hebe’s dressing table.”
“Peacherina!” answered the girl, throwing her slipper at him. “What’s on
the menu, this evening?”
A recital of the contents of the table and buffet resulted in guarded
approbation.
“Get a dab of everything,” called the girl, “and we’ll manage to find
something we can digest.”
A Sheffield tray was dismantled and heaped with food sufficient to have
served four persons. Added to this, the young man used as a centrepiece
his partner’s slipper, into which he had poured a mould of chicken
jelly.
The Hon. Member for Morroway was, as always, tenderly solicitous of
Marjorie. He made several attempts to find a place in which they could
sit to have their supper tete-a-tete, before he was successful.
“Somebody’s in the Cuddlery,” he announced, backing out of the door and
guiding her hastily away. “Oh, excuse me,” he cried, to an unseen couple
who were occupying a nook under the stairs. “Looks as though we’d have
to try the pantry or the kitchen. Let’s see if we can find a corner on
the floor above.”
“Oh, no!” protested Marjorie, “I shouldn’t care to do that. Why, can’t
we go there—into the front room? I don’t mind others being about.”
“Dear little woman,” Sullivan whispered, and drew her close against him
under the guise of protecting her from collision with a youth who
carried an empty glass, “of course we don’t mind, but the ridiculous
fact is that _they do_!” He sighed in his most elderly manner. “I do
wish that Hebe would infuse some dignity into her parties. Perfectly
innocent, you understand; not a hint of harm, but just naturally silly
and boisterous. Look at young Creel, there, daring Mona Carmichael to
stand on her head! By Jove,” he slapped his leg and burst into a laugh
that seemed to be a spontaneous expression of hilarious amusement, “he’s
got her by the ankles and she’s going to try!”
But, after being trundled about the room like a wheelbarrow, Mona
decided that she didn’t want to stand on her head. “I tell you what,”
she cried, “let’s dress up in Toddles’ clothes!”
With a whoop they raced for the stairs, half a dozen of them, leaving
Marjorie and Sullivan in possession of the room. Shrieks and confused
scamperings followed. Evidently, they were much at home, there.
“Who are all these people?” Marjorie wanted to know.
The girls, it seemed, were a dashing and exclusive group whose number,
and conduct, had earned for them the sobriquet of “The Naughty Nine”.
They were the envy of all those who stood without the golden circle
drawn round them, and subsequently, by dint of heroic pressure that was
brought to bear, their number was increased by three and they became
“The Dirty Dozen”. The youths were the scions of Ottawa’s aristocracy.
“You don’t care for them?” asked Sullivan. “You wouldn’t like Althea to
behave in that way?”
The bare suggestion produced physical pain. “But, she wouldn’t,” cried
Marjorie. “She _couldn’t_, Mr. Sullivan! Not that they aren’t
very—er—bright,” she added, seeking to say the kindly thing.
When they returned to the room, the girls were dressed in Mr.
Barrington’s clothing—business suits, riding breeks, pyjamas and
underwear, while the boys had costumed themselves in their hostess’s
attire.
Marjorie kept telling herself that she was dreaming.
She longed to go home. She could neither enter into the revelry nor did
she wish to separate herself from the crowd and stay alone with
Sullivan. She had been very uncomfortable with him, lately. Sometimes,
almost afraid. She refused to acknowledge this fear, even to herself,
but she knew that it existed.
The conversation in the Gallery recurred to her with disturbing
vividness—not that slander ever influenced her judgment—ever! The
person who was swayed by unkind criticism was, in her opinion, no better
than the person who uttered it. At the same time, there was something
about the Hon. Member for Morroway from which she instinctively shrank,
without suspecting that she was making, by her attitude, a confession of
her secret impression of the man.
No amount of reasoning could correct this state of affairs. In vain did
she tell herself that he was old enough to be her father, and that his
frank affection for them all was merely the enthusiastic expression of a
lonely man’s dependence upon a kindly household. In vain did she try to
overcome a sensation of shame and personal impurity after she had been
alone with him.
“My own mind must be evil,” she scourged herself, time and again. “He
never has done or said a thing that Raymond couldn’t know. What _does_
make me feel so wicked when I’m alone with him?”
It may have been a sense of impotence that frightened her. She could
never see the wheels of Mr. Sullivan’s mind in operation, she could
never tell what he was going to do. He seemed to arrive at a goal
magically, without progressing step by step, and he had such an uncanny
way of divining what she was thinking.
She was not conscious of his footfall, nor of the opening of the doors
that admitted him to a closer intimacy, but suddenly, he would stand
before her, very near to the Inner Shrine of her Temple, catching her,
as it were, unclad, or in the act of prayer, and she couldn’t put him
out.
He was very quiet and respectful and walked as though aware that he was
in a Holy place, but that didn’t alter the fact that he had passed
through those obstructing doors without a sound of warning, and without
her permission.
And he took such shocking liberties. For example, Marjorie couldn’t
possibly have told how he had been allowed to contract the habit of
kissing her. To be sure, it had begun in fun, one evening, when they
were playing with the children. But she couldn’t explain why she found
it impossible to deny him the privilege thereafter. It was very curious
and disturbing.
Perhaps her difficulty lay in the artful naturalness with which he
performed his acts of pretty gallantry, taking so much for granted and
trading on her clean simplicity.
“I don’t want to behave so that he will think I have nasty notions,” she
said to herself, and Sullivan knew it.
“You’re tired, dear,” he said to her, not wholly inattentive to the
Vaudeville on the other side of the room. “Lean back against me. Raymond
won’t be long, now!”
She felt his arm slip round her and moved away in sudden panic.
“Oh, Mr. Sullivan, not here, please!” she cried.
It wasn’t in the least what she should have said; but there was no
opportunity for explanations or corrections then.
“You’re right, little woman,” he whispered, “this is _not_ the place. I
understand.”
It was only too obvious that he didn’t; that he misconstrued her gentle
repulse of all familiarity into a prudish discouragement of this
particular expression of it, and his manner suggested satisfaction that
she should prefer to receive his caresses when they were alone. It was a
case of another door being opened and one which resisted her efforts to
close it.
“I’d like to go home,” she said. “Do you think you could find Raymond?”
The Hon. Member for Morroway knew his hostess too well to commit himself
to a definite promise. But he murmured something hopeful and made his
way with a good deal of bluster to the top of the house.
The door of the Eyrie was closed.