The drive from Harsh to the Place, as it was called thereabouts, could
be achieved by swift horses in less than ten minutes; and if Mrs.
Dallow's ponies were capital trotters the general high pitch of the
occasion made it all congruous they should show their speed. The
occasion was the polling-day an hour after the battle. The ponies had
kept pace with other driven forces for the week before, passing and
repassing the neat windows of the flat little town--Mrs. Dallow had the
complacent belief that there was none in the kingdom in which the
flower-stands looked more respectable between the stiff muslin
curtains--with their mistress behind them on her all but silver wheels.
Very often she was accompanied by the Liberal candidate, but even when
she was not the equipage seemed scarce less to represent his easy,
friendly confidence. It moved in a radiance of ribbons and hand-bills
and hand-shakes and smiles; of quickened commerce and sudden intimacy;
of sympathy which assumed without presuming and gratitude which promised
without soliciting. But under Julia's guidance the ponies pattered now,
with no indication of a loss of freshness, along the firm, wide avenue
which wound and curved, to make up in large effect for not undulating,
from the gates opening straight on the town to the Palladian mansion,
high, square, grey, and clean, which stood among terraces and fountains
in the centre of the park. A generous steed had been sacrificed to bring
the good news from Ghent to Aix, but no such extravagance was after all
necessary for communicating with Lady Agnes.
She had remained at the house, not going to the Wheatsheaf, the Liberal
inn, with the others; preferring to await in privacy and indeed in
solitude the momentous result of the poll. She had come down to Harsh
with the two girls in the course of the proceedings. Julia hadn't
thought they would do much good, but she was expansive and indulgent now
and had generously asked them. Lady Agnes had not a nice canvassing
manner, effective as she might have been in the character of the high,
benignant, affable mother--looking sweet participation but not
interfering--of the young and handsome, the shining, convincing,
wonderfully clever and certainly irresistible aspirant. Grace Dormer had
zeal without art, and Lady Agnes, who during her husband's lifetime had
seen their affairs follow the satisfactory principle of a tendency to
defer to supreme merit, had never really learned the lesson that voting
goes by favour. However, she could pray God if, she couldn't make love
to the cheesemonger, and Nick felt she had stayed at home to pray for
him. I must add that Julia Dallow was too happy now, flicking her whip
in the bright summer air, to say anything so ungracious even to herself
as that her companion had been returned in spite of his nearest female
relatives. Besides, Biddy _had_ been a rosy help: she had looked
persuasively pretty, in white and blue, on platforms and in recurrent
carriages, out of which she had tossed, blushing and making people feel
they would remember her eyes, several words that were telling for their
very simplicity.
Mrs. Dallow was really too glad for any definite reflexion, even for
personal exultation, the vanity of recognising her own large share of
the work. Nick was in and was now beside her, tired, silent, vague,
beflowered and beribboned, and he had been splendid from beginning to
end, beautifully good-humoured and at the same time beautifully
clever--still cleverer than she had supposed he could be. The sense of
her having quickened his cleverness and been repaid by it or by his
gratitude--it came to the same thing--in a way she appreciated was not
assertive and jealous: it was lost for the present in the general happy
break of the long tension. So nothing passed between them in their
progress to the house; there was no sound in the park but the pleasant
rustle of summer--it seemed an applausive murmur--and the swift roll of
the vehicle.
Lady Agnes already knew, for as soon as the result was declared Nick had
despatched a mounted man to her, carrying the figures on a scrawled
card. He himself had been far from getting away at once, having to
respond to the hubbub of acclamation, to speak yet again, to thank his
electors individually and collectively, to chaff the Tories without
cheap elation, to be carried hither and yon, and above all to pretend
that the interest of the business was now greater for him than ever. If
he had said never a word after putting himself in Julia's hands to go
home it was partly perhaps because the consciousness had begun to
glimmer within him, on the contrary, of some sudden shrinkage of that
interest. He wanted to see his mother because he knew she wanted to fold
him close in her arms. They had been open there for this purpose the
last half-hour, and her expectancy, now no longer an ache of suspense,
was the reason of Julia's round pace. Yet this very impatience in her
somehow made Nick wince a little. Meeting his mother was like being
elected over again.
The others had not yet come back, and Lady Agnes was alone in the
large, bright drawing-room. When Nick went in with Julia he saw her at
the further end; she had evidently been walking up and down the whole
length of it, and her tall, upright, black figure seemed in possession
of the fair vastness after the manner of an exclamation-point at the
bottom of a blank page. The room, rich and simple, was a place of
perfection as well as of splendour in delicate tints, with precious
specimens of French furniture of the last century ranged against walls
of pale brocade, and here and there a small, almost priceless picture.
George Dallow had made it, caring for these things and liking to talk
about them--scarce ever about anything else; so that it appeared to
represent him still, what was best in his kindly, limited nature, his
friendly, competent, tiresome insistence on harmony--on identity of
"period." Nick could hear him yet, and could see him, too fat and with a
congenital thickness in his speech, lounging there in loose clothes with
his eternal cigarette. "Now my dear fellow, _that_'s what I call form: I
don't know what you call it"--that was the way he used to begin. All
round were flowers in rare vases, but it looked a place of which the
beauty would have smelt sweet even without them.
Lady Agnes had taken a white rose from one of the clusters and was
holding it to her face, which was turned to the door as Nick crossed the
threshold. The expression of her figure instantly told him--he saw the
creased card he had sent her lying on one of the beautiful bare
tables--how she had been sailing up and down in a majesty of
satisfaction. The inflation of her long plain dress and the brightened
dimness of her proud face were still in the air. In a moment he had
kissed her and was being kissed, not in quick repetition, but in tender
prolongation, with which the perfume of the white rose was mixed. But
there was something else too--her sweet smothered words in his ear: "Oh
my boy, my boy--oh your father, your father!" Neither the sense of
pleasure nor that of pain, with Lady Agnes--as indeed with most of the
persons with whom this history is concerned--was a liberation of
chatter; so that for a minute all she said again was, "I think of Sir
Nicholas and wish he were here"; addressing the words to Julia, who had
wandered forward without looking at the mother and son.
"Poor Sir Nicholas!" said Mrs. Dallow vaguely.
"Did you make another speech?" Lady Agnes asked.
"I don't know. Did I?" Nick appealed.
"I don't know!"--and Julia spoke with her back turned, doing something
to her hat before the glass.
"Oh of course the confusion, the bewilderment!" said Lady Agnes in a
tone rich in political reminiscence.
"It was really immense fun," Mrs. Dallow went so far as to drop.
"Dearest Julia!" Lady Agnes deeply breathed. Then she added: "It was you
who made it sure."
"There are a lot of people coming to dinner," said Julia.
"Perhaps you'll have to speak again," Lady Agnes smiled at her son.
"Thank you; I like the way you talk about it!" cried Nick. "I'm like
Iago: 'from this time forth I never will speak word!'"
"Don't say that, Nick," said his mother gravely.
"Don't be afraid--he'll jabber like a magpie!" And Julia went out of the
room.
Nick had flung himself on a sofa with an air of weariness, though not of
completely extinct cheer; and Lady Agnes stood fingering her rose and
looking down at him. His eyes kept away from her; they seemed fixed on
something she couldn't see. "I hope you've thanked Julia handsomely,"
she presently remarked.
"Why of course, mother."
"She has done as much as if you hadn't been sure."
"I wasn't in the least sure--and she has done everything."
"She has been too good--but _we_'ve done something. I hope you don't
leave out your father," Lady Agnes amplified as Nick's glance appeared
for a moment to question her "we."
"Never, never!" Nick uttered these words perhaps a little mechanically,
but the next minute he added as if suddenly moved to think what he could
say that would give his mother most pleasure: "Of course his name has
worked for me. Gone as he is he's still a living force." He felt a good
deal of a hypocrite, but one didn't win such a seat every day in the
year. Probably indeed he should never win another.
"He hears you, he watches you, he rejoices in you," Lady Agnes opined.
This idea was oppressive to Nick--that of the rejoicing almost as much
as of the watching. He had made his concession, but, with a certain
impulse to divert his mother from following up her advantage, he broke
out: "Julia's a tremendously effective woman."
"Of course she is!" said Lady Agnes knowingly.
"Her charming appearance is half the battle"--Nick explained a little
coldly what he meant. But he felt his coldness an inadequate protection
to him when he heard his companion observe with something of the same
sapience:
"A woman's always effective when she likes a person so much."
It discomposed him to be described as a person liked, and so much, and
by a woman; and he simply said abruptly: "When are you going away?"
"The first moment that's civil--to-morrow morning. _You_'ll stay on I
hope."
"Stay on? What shall I stay on for?"
"Why you might stay to express your appreciation."