3
The reception was to be held at the house of one Henry Watkins, a big man with large estates near London and in Kent, whom Jeremy had met and had a little remarked. He seemed to be the most influential and the most consulted frequenter of the Treasury; and Jeremy observed that the Speaker commonly mentioned him with rather less than his usual contempt. His house was a large one, almost exactly on the site of Charing Cross, with gardens stretching down to the river; and here, when their carriage arrived, he came out and with easy respectfulness helped the Speaker to alight.
He was a tall man, with a long, narrow face and a slightly fretful expression. As he took the old man’s arm Jeremy fancied that he whispered something, and that the Speaker shook his head. Then he turned to Jeremy and said perfunctorily, “I have had the happiness of making your acquaintance,” wheeled back to the Speaker and went on: “We waited only for you, sir. The Lady Burney and the Lady Eva and Thomas Wells are already here.”
“Then lead us to them,” the Speaker replied. And as they were being conducted through a crowd of waiting guests, who made way for them with a quiet buzz of deferential salutations, he observed in a gracious tone, “I need not ask whether you have a good show for us, Henry Watkins.”
“I trust that it will please you, sir,” the host replied. “I have heard this troop very well spoken of.”
Jeremy was prepared by this conversation for something in the way of a performance; and he was therefore not surprised when they were ushered into a large room, which had been rudely fitted up as a theater. At the front, standing by themselves, were four gilt armchairs, and on these Jeremy thought he recognized the backs of the Speaker’s wife, of his daughter, and of Thomas Wells. They caught the Speaker’s notice, too, and he halted suddenly, craning his head forward and peering at them.
“There are only four chairs,” he said in a rasping voice. “I wish another chair to be brought for my friend, Jeremy Tuft.” In a moment, after some confusion, Jeremy found himself sitting next to the Lady Eva and hearing her demure reply to his greeting, which was almost drowned by the noise of the guests behind them entering the hall. When this had died down, he essayed a second remark, but received no answer beyond an inclination of the beautiful head, which he was devoutly studying with a strained sidelong glance. He therefore examined the stage instead and saw that it was already set with roughly-painted canvas flats. These appeared to be intended to represent a wood. There was no curtain; and the end of what looked remarkably like a piano was projecting from one of the wings. Tall canvas screens ran from the two ends of the stage to the walls of the room, covering on each side a space about five feet long; and Jeremy surmised, from a persistent whispering and from an occasional bulging of the canvas, that the players were hidden in these narrow quarters.
Presently three loud raps were heard and a hush fell on the audience. Jeremy started in his seat when an invisible performer at the piano began to play what sounded like a mangled waltz, very loud, very crude and very vulgar. The strings of the piano were in indifferent condition, the skill of the executant was no better, and Jeremy, who was proud of having some sympathy for music, suffered a little. When he looked about him, however, he saw neither amusement nor annoyance on any face. Luckily the performance lasted only a few minutes. As soon as it was done, an actress tripped affectedly on to the stage from the right side and began to declaim in a voice so high-pitched and theatrical and with so many gestures and movements of her head that Jeremy could hardly understand a word of what she was saying. He gathered that she had come to this wood to meet her lover; and his guess was confirmed when an actor strode on from the left, stamping his feet on the resounding boards as he came. Then both began to declaim at one another in voices of enormous power. Their stilted violence alarmed and repelled Jeremy. He ceased to look at the stage, wondering whether, under cover of the excitement which this scene must be causing, he dared steal a glance at the Lady Eva. He did so, and discovered that she was looking at him.
Both averted their eyes, and Jeremy sat staring at the floor, his heart beating and, he felt certain, his cheeks burning. Above his head the drama ranted along with a loud monotonous noise like the sea beating on rocks, and made a background to his thoughts. That single glance had precipitated his emotions, and he must now confess to himself, what had been before a mere toy for the brain, that he loved this girl. The admission carried his mind whirling wildly away, and he would have been content to brood on it with a secret rising delight until he was interrupted. But he could not help asking himself whether he had not discovered something else, whether there had not been at least a particular interest in the eyes of the Lady Eva. This second thought at first terrified him by its revelation of his own audacity in conceiving it. For a moment it stopped him still, and then suddenly there was silence on the stage.
The actor and the actress were departing, she to the right, he to the left, bowing as they went. The whole audience began clapping in a decorous and gentle manner. The Lady Eva leant slightly towards Jeremy as he sat stupefied and motionless, and whispered:
“You must clap. You will be thought impolite if you do not.”
He obeyed in a dazed way, watching her and seeing how she brought the palms of her hands together, regularly but so softly that it made hardly any sound. While the applause still continued, servants came forward from the sides of the hall, sprang up on the stage and began removing the scenery, which they replaced with other flats, representing a street. And after an interval, and another performance on the vile piano, the play resumed its course.
Jeremy must have followed it with some part of his mind of the existence of which he was ignorant: for when it was all over he had a reasonably clear notion of what it had been about. There had been two lovers and a villain and a buffoon who fell over his own feet. There had been one affecting moment when the heroine, deserted and hopeless, had been deluged with small pieces of paper, not too skilfully sprinkled on her, while she walked up and down, striving to comfort her child and lamenting the perfidy of man. And the play itself, as well as the acting, had been of an incredible theatricality and exaggeration. If Jeremy’s conscious mind had been active while the performance was going on he could not but have followed every point with amazement and indulged in some interesting reflections on the dramatic tastes of his new contemporaries. As it was, when it was over and he was able to look back on it, he could only wonder whether his unaccountable recollection of it was to be believed.
For after the end of the first scene, after the Lady Eva had spoken to him, he was plunged even more deeply into that delicious but alarming turmoil of feeling. His mind unbidden suggested to him sobering considerations only for the pleasure, as it appeared, of seeing them flung on one side. There was no certainty, no probability even, that the girl had loved him. In his story there was enough reason why she should look at him with interest, and he had learnt that her usual manner was frank and unstudied, not therefore to be too easily construed. Yet a mad certainty rose in his heart and overwhelmed this sensible thought. Jeremy closed his eyes resolutely to the buffoon on the stage, who was now imitating a drunken man and abandoned himself to visions of the girl at his side.
At that moment he would perhaps have been unwilling to be awakened to speak to her, even to embrace her. That would come, must come; but this exquisite dreaming, hitherto unknown to him, filled the circle of his forces, satisfied all his desires. He pictured her as he had seen her half-a-dozen times, walking across a room, lifting her eyes to his with some question in them, once riding, once with a piece of needlework in her hands, of which, without liking it, she was making a sound and creditable job. He thought of her clear, wide eyes, her free, athletic carriage, her pleasant voice. For a little while he was in neither the strange nor the familiar world of his twofold experience: his new hope had dissolved both recent and ancient memories alike. Then suddenly across the texture of his passionate meditation came a thought of himself. He shifted uneasily and felt cold. Who and what was he? He told himself—a sport of nature, a young man unnaturally old, an old man unnaturally young. Could he be certain yet what trick it was that Trehanoc’s ray had played on him? Might he not, one day, to-morrow or a year hence, perhaps in her very arms, suddenly expire, even crumble into dust? He shuddered in the chilling air of these suggestions and was filled with misery. But the next moment he could see himself confessing his misery to the Lady Eva and receiving her comfort.
He woke. Mixed with the light clapping, in which from time to time he had mechanically joined, there was a stir and shuffle as though the audience was preparing to depart; and, looking up, he saw the whole cast on the stage, bowing with a certain air of finality, the hero and the villain holding each a hand of the heroine. The Speaker was rising from his seat, and at that sign all the other persons in the room rose, too, and waited. Jeremy, brought down out of dreams, searched in his mind for something to say to the Lady Eva and dared not look at her until he had found it. But when he turned to her he saw that she was staring in another direction. A servant had just reached the Speaker and had apparently given him a letter. The whole assembly stood hushed and immobile while he read it, and Jeremy, his breath caught by an inexplicable sense of crisis, saw that, half-way through, the old man’s hand jerked suddenly and was steady again.
The interruption, the hushed seconds that followed, seemed to spread an impalpable sense of dismay through the hall. Henry Watkins, his fretful expression deepened to one of alarm, made his way to the Speaker’s side and whispered something in an anxious voice; but the old man waved his hand impatiently and went on reading.
“What is it?” Jeremy whispered sharply to the Lady Eva.
“I don’t know ... I don’t know ...” she uttered; and then, so low that he could hardly catch it, “I am afraid for him....”
Jeremy stared all around in the hope that somewhere he might find some enlightenment. But there was no trace of understanding on the faces of any of the guests. The Lady Burney stood lumpishly by her husband in an attitude of annoyance and boredom. Beyond her Thomas Wells half-leant on his chair in a barbaric but graceful pose, like that of a hunting animal at rest. Jeremy fancied for a moment that he could read some sort of comprehension, some sort of satisfaction even, in those vulpine features, in the small eyes, the swelling nostrils, the thin, backward straining mouth. And still the Speaker read on, motionless, without giving a sign, while Henry Watkins stood at his elbow as though waiting for an order; and still the Lady Eva gazed at them, crumpling restlessly with one hand a fold of her dress.
All at once the grouping broke up, and the Speaker’s voice came, steady and clear but not loud. “I must go back to the Treasury,” he said. “I am sorry I cannot stay to speak with your guests, Henry Watkins, but you must dismiss them. I wish you to come with me. And I need you, too, Jeremy Tuft; you must follow us at once. And——” he hesitated, “if you will give me the benefit of your counsel in this grave matter, Thomas Wells....” The Canadian bowed a little and grinned more thinly. Jeremy found himself in a state of confusion walking at the end of the Speaker’s party towards the door. In front of him the old man had gripped Henry Watkins firmly by the sleeve and was talking to him quietly and rapidly.
Jeremy’s passing by was the sign to the other guests that they might now leave; and as he went through the door he could feel them thronging behind him. He pressed on to keep the Speaker in sight, but slackened his pace when a hand fell lightly on his shoulder. It was Roger Vaile.
“Do you know what the matter is?” Roger asked.
Jeremy shook his head.
“Well, be careful of that Canadian. I saw him looking at you while the show was on, and he doesn’t like you.”