2
No less than the rest the Lady Eva was disturbed and made uneasy in her mind by the unexpected end of Henry Watkins’s reception. The short drive back to the Treasury, sitting beside her mother in the vast, lumbering carriage, was a torment to her. Involuntarily she asked questions, well aware that the Lady Burney neither knew, nor was interested in, the answers. She was obliged to speak to assuage her restlessness, and expected the reproof which she received.
“It’s not your business,” said the Lady Burney heavily. “You must not meddle in your father’s affairs. It shows a very forward and unbecoming spirit in you to have noticed that anything happened out of the ordinary. What people would say of you if they knew as much of your behavior as I do, I simply cannot think. They must see too much as it is. Remember that we ought to set an example to other people.”
The Lady Eva was silent, white with restraint and anxiety. But when they arrived at the Treasury and came into the atmosphere of expectancy which filled the entrance-hall, she again showed signs of excitement, and seemed to wish to stop and share in the general state of suspense. Her mother ordered her to her room in a thick intense whisper. She remembered herself and went on, sighing once sharply.
She found her room empty. It was a pleasant place, looking over the gardens, furnished in an awkward and mixed style which reflected her distaste for her mother’s notions of decoration, combined with her own inability to think of any better substitute. A riding-whip and gloves were thrown down on a table, beside a half-finished piece of needlework. Writing materials and a book lay on another. One of her eccentricities, not regarded so severely by the Lady Burney as the rest, was her wish to retain such slight knowledge of the arts of reading and writing as the scanty education of the women of that time had given her. But it was a hard business, starting from so insecure a foundation and proceeding with so little encouragement. The old books that she was able to obtain were very dull, very hard to understand, and told her little of what she wanted to know. Her companions of her own age laughed at her heartily for reading with so much devotion, after she had been released from the school-room, the works of the great poet, Lord Tennyson, from which they had all been taught their own language. She desired vaguely to be able to help her father, whose loneliness she obscurely but poignantly felt. But when in order to understand the old times she struggled through ragged and mildewed books, she despaired at the little assistance she was able to get from them.
She once expressed a timid wish that she might be allowed to learn history from Father Henry Dean, of whose knowledge she had heard confused but marvelous stories. But on this occasion her father had unexpectedly joined her mother to prevent her. He had said bluntly that the priest was an addled old man, while the Lady Burney had said that the suggestion was both improper and dangerous. Between the two opinions, her wish was effectually frustrated. Indeed, she got little encouragement from her father, whose loneliness often seemed to her to be in great part purely wilful. Now and then he would listen to her for a few minutes, and then rhapsodize cloudily for a long time on his hopes and fears. But when he did this, after the first few sentences he was up and away from her; and she soon realized that he talked to her only instead of talking to himself, and did not for the purpose much alter his method of address.
A minute or two after she came into her room, two of her attendants followed her, asking, without much hope, for news. She shook her head sharply, with compressed lips. She had no news, she knew nothing of the danger that threatened her father and had shaken his steady old hand so abruptly while he was reading that mysterious letter. The two girls broke at once into a babble of rumors and conjectures. The plague had reached England again, or the Chinese had begun to invade Europe, or the Pope had done something or other that was unexpected, it was not clear what.
These attendants were daughters of good families who came to be half maids, half companions to the Lady Burney and the Lady Eva for a year or two, as a way of graduating in the world, much as young men came to be clerks to the Speaker. But the cases were not quite parallel. All young men of family entered the Speaker’s service, or would do so if they could. There was a certain tradition of gentility in the work of government. But only the daughters of the poorer and smaller houses came to wait on the Speaker’s wife and daughter. The rich families, though they obeyed the Speaker, would not accord him royal prestige or his wife and daughter the privilege of noble ladies-in-waiting. They treated him and his household with respect, not with deference. Only the lesser among them thought that something might be gained by their daughters holding positions at what they would fain regard as a court, or that they might perhaps make good marriages, a hope which now and then miscarried into something less gratifying. They maintained that it was an honor to serve the ruling family, and were sneered at by their greater fellows.
The Lady Eva, though she was often indolent and was pleased to be waited on, would have preferred to be attended by servants. These girls claimed some sort of equality with her, and, though she had no objection to that, she wished that she could prevent them speaking to her, unless she called on them. She found them tedious. Now she listened to them patiently, and said at last with a faint ironic smile:
“Do you really know anything about it?” They began to protest and to double their rumors, but she stopped them with a lifted hand. “There is a council in my father’s room, is there not?” And when they had said that there was, she went on: “Can you tell me who has been called to it?”
“Jeremy Tuft was called to it just before we came to you,” answered Rose, simpering a little and placing her head on one side. Jeremy did not know that among the young girls in the Treasury he was the object of some longings and the subject of some confessions. He drew attention because of the air of mystery which surrounded his short and rather commonplace person. It was fashionable to affect a deliciously shuddering attraction towards the elements of eeriness and terror in what was known of his story. But this fashion was not allowed to interfere with any more practical project of love-making that happened to be going.
“I saw him go,” affirmed Mary with an even more pronounced simper.
“Is Thomas Wells there?” the Lady Eva shot at her quickly. Mary winced, looked guilty and said that she believed he was. Then she fell silent in a self-conscious attitude.
The Lady Eva frowned a little. These girls, though she despised them for their shallowness, led fuller lives than she. They conformed more easily than she did with the prevailing ideal of womanly conduct; and yet in the Treasury they were free to do much what they pleased, to choose lovers if they were foolish enough ... as she guessed this girl had been. And the reflection had annoyed her, for she thought it likely that she would have to marry Thomas Wells. He and her father had been bargaining interminably about something, her father importunate but cozening, Thomas Wells smiling but obdurate. It might occur to her father at any moment to throw her person into the scale; and she would not like for a husband the lover of one of her attendants. Then, as she stood musing, it suddenly occurred to her with great force that she would not like to marry Thomas Wells in any circumstances. Strange! She had been long accustomed to the idea that she, her father’s only child, must marry some one who would be chosen to become his heir; and she had quite calmly contemplated the likelihood of Thomas Wells being chosen. Only to-day did she perceive that the idea was distasteful to her, and she wondered why. A vague answer presented itself....
“Go back, both of you,” she commanded, “and bring me the news when you hear any.” They left her at once, Rose anxious to return to the center of excitement, and Mary glad to escape any further uncomfortable questions.
The Lady Eva, left alone, walked up and down her room with short, impatient steps. It was very difficult to wait thus for news, more difficult still in view of the fact that she might not get any. She conceived cloudy romantic notions of intervening in the council, of persuading her father in the middle of it that she understood him and was with him against all the rest of the world. She walked towards the door in an exalted fit, certain that now at least in this moment of anxiety she could convince him. Then she remembered other appeals, made when she was alone with him and when his mood had seemed to promise sympathy. But he had smiled at her, patted her head or her hand, and answered vaguely in words that meant nothing and humiliated her. Once, gathering from one of the soliloquies, in which he so evidently forgot her presence, that he was concerned by the state of the railways, she had brooded on the problem through sleepless nights, at last hitting on a plan, which she laid eagerly before him. It had seemed as crude and childish to her as to him, after his first comment. A flash of realism showed her the injured and astonished big men at the council, if she appeared there, the grinning contempt of Thomas Wells, her father’s anger. She turned away again from the door.
Minutes passed. She went through stages of careless dullness, of unbearable suspense. At last, moved by an ungovernable longing, she left the room. She intended no longer to go to her father, but she would at least see the door behind which he was sitting with the others. She had an unreasonable certainty, which she could not examine, that waiting would be easier near the place where all was being decided.
She slipped along the corridor as softly as she could, ruefully aware that she did not usually move quietly and had often been reproved for it. But the intensity of her purpose helped her to avoid anything that could draw notice to her strange conduct. Soon the corridor was cut by another at right angles, which a few steps to the left led to the door of the Speaker’s room. At the corner the Lady Eva paused and looked cautiously around. In this part of the ill-constructed house reigned a perpetual dusk, and any passer-by would be heard by her long before he could see her.
Her certainty was justified. Waiting was easier here; and the time slipped by less oppressively. She did not know how long she had been standing pressed close against the wall, when her father’s door opened and two men came out and stamped up the corridor to the right. Even in that gloom she could see that they were strangers; and their odd looks and something odd in their manner, as though they were departing with a sinister purpose, increased her curiosity. She craned her neck to keep them in sight as long as she could, and drew back hastily when Henry Watkins came out. He was obviously distressed, and, as he went by her, following the strangers, he was rapidly clenching and unclenching his hands.
A minute passed. Then the door opened again and Thomas Wells sauntered into the corridor. He hesitated by the corner where she stood, and then thrust his hands into his pockets, and strolled after the others, whistling under his breath. She could still hear his steps when John Hammond emerged and also followed with bowed shoulders and dejected bearing. The Lady Eva’s sense of terror grew greater and she wondered whether the news, whatever it might be, would not be come at easier elsewhere. But her father and Jeremy Tuft were still conversing behind the closed door and she longed to know what they were saying. When she first met him she had had a fleeting idea that he might prove to be a bridge between her and her father.
A long interval elapsed and left her still in suspense. Once she went a few paces in the direction of her own room, but she was ineluctably drawn back again. She stared desperately behind her, to the right, at the ground, anywhere rather than at her father’s door, which had for her a fascination she felt she must resist. She was not looking at it when she heard the sound of the handle. When she looked, it was standing wide, and Jeremy and her father were framed in the opening, their faces lit from the windows in the room.
Her father’s face wore an expression of exultation which she had never seen there before, and, with a hand on his shoulder, was stooping over Jeremy, who looked worried, sullen, fatigued.
“Then all will be ready in a week,” the old man was saying.
“Yes, they’ll be ready ... so far as that goes,” Jeremy replied in a heavy toneless voice. “But there’s another thing we haven’t thought of. They haven’t been tested yet.”
“They can’t be tested now,” the Speaker said firmly. “It would take too long, and besides, we mustn’t have the slightest risk of the news leaking out before we first use them. And you say that you are satisfied with them, don’t you?”
“Yes, as far as I can see,” Jeremy muttered. “But there may be something wrong that I haven’t noticed.”
“No doubt there may,” the Speaker agreed. “But if there is, it would be too late to remedy it; and we should certainly be beaten without them. We may as well disregard that.”
“But if there is,” Jeremy said with an air of protest, raising his voice a little, “we may be....”
“Yes, yes,” the Speaker murmured, “you may all be blown up. But there....” He drew Jeremy by the shoulder into the corridor, and both their faces came into the shadow. The Lady Eva, seized by a sudden terror, picked up her skirts and ran, miraculously noiseless, back to her room.