“The banquet is in half-an-hour from now,” the Speaker said, turning towards the door. “If you are well enough to attend it, you must go and dress at once.”
CHAPTER XII
NEW CLOUDS
1
IT was in a state of tranquil elation that Jeremy left his room to take his place at the banquet in the great hall. All day one emotion had been chasing another through his mind, like clouds hurrying across a storm-swept sky. Now it seemed that the last cloud had gone and had left a radiant evening serenity. He had been crushed by congratulations that morning. In the afternoon his love for the Lady Eva had exceeded his endurance. But to-night he felt himself able to bear the last degree of joy from either. He dressed with care, and, a minute or so before the hour, walked with a light and confident step through the corridors of the Treasury. He approached the hall by way of the private passages and turned into an ante-room, where, on ceremonial occasions, the Speaker and his family and his guests were accustomed to wait until the proper moment for taking their seats.
Here he found himself alone. After lighting an Irish cigar, he strolled jauntily up and down the room with his hands in his pockets, occasionally humming a bar or two of one of the songs of the nineteen-twenties—the last expressions of a frivolous and hilarious phase of society—or lightly kicking the furniture in the sheer height of his spirits. Not once since the moment of his waking in the Whitechapel Meadows had he been in such a mood. Something had happened to him of which he had no experience before; and its paradoxical result was to make him thoroughly at home in the new world for the first time. He felt like a man who in choppy water has been bumping up and down against the side of a quay and has at last succeeded in making himself fast. And, even in this gay and careless spirit, he was deeply conscious of what it was that had made him gay and careless. He continued, even through his light-hearted and somewhat ludicrous maneuvers up and down the room, through his tuneless but jaunty renderings of vulgar songs, to praise Heaven for having made the Lady Eva and for having given her to him. He knew that it was because of her that he was fit, as he told himself, reverting to earlier habits of phrase, to push a house over.
He did not, as he had hoped, get a moment alone with her before the banquet began. The Speaker beckoned him out without entering the room, and he could only catch a glimpse of her, by the side of the Lady Burney, as they entered the hall together. Immediately on their entrance the guests, who were already assembled, rose to their feet and began to cheer deafeningly. The sound had on Jeremy’s spirits an effect contrary to that which it had had in the morning. It elated him; and when the Speaker, with a hand on his shoulder, drew him into a more prominent place on the dais, he bowed without self-consciousness. At last the Speaker raised his hand authoritatively and obtained silence. There was a shuffling of chairs; and it seemed to be supposed that the banquet would begin. But the Speaker cried in a thundering voice:
“My friends!” A profound and instant hush fell on the assembly. “My friends,” he continued less loudly. “It is not our custom to make speeches before dinner or my custom to make long speeches at any time. I do not intend to say now what is in all our minds. But I believe that good news is the better for being soon told; and I have news to give you which I would like you to enjoy during dinner as well as after it. Jeremy Tuft, to whom under Heaven we owe our lives and our freedom to-night, has asked for the hand of my daughter, and she has consented to marry him.” The hush continued, while he said briskly in a low but audible tone, “Your right hand, girl—your right hand, Jeremy.” Then he went on again more loudly, “I put their hands together. I am the first to wish them happiness.” In the uproar that followed, Jeremy had a confused notion that he and the Lady Eva bowed to the guests in the hall with equal composure. He was vividly aware that the Lady Burney had kissed him, this time on both cheeks. A lull followed, in which his condition of exaltation enabled him to express his gratitude and joy in a few words without faltering. And then suddenly it was all over. He was sitting next to the Lady Eva, saying something to her, he knew not what, in an undertone; and the banquet had begun.
When he was calm enough to look around him, he saw that the table on the dais at which he was sitting was occupied by all the most influential of the “big men” that were in the habit of attending the Treasury. The Speaker sat at the middle of one side. The Lady Burney sat on his right, and beyond her the Canadian, on whose face for once the ordinary expression of grinning malice had given way to one of sinister displeasure. On his left was the Lady Eva, next to whom came Jeremy. Jeremy’s neighbor was the wife of a “big man” whom he knew but slightly, and who, to his relief, was at once engaged in conversation by the apparently still careworn and desponding dignitary, Henry Watkins. From this survey Jeremy turned with pleasure to the Lady Eva. Her mood chimed with his, and he was in high spirits. Her eyes were gleaming, her color was bright, and she talked lightly and without restraint. He noticed, too, with some pleasure that she showed a healthy appetite and took a sensible interest in good food. He was very hungry; and they talked for some time about the dishes. She did not drink, however. Nothing was served, indeed, no drinks were usual in England of that day, save whisky and beer, both of which were produced in good quality and consumed in large quantities. Jeremy, fearful of the effect either might have on him in his already stimulated condition, drank whisky sparingly, having weakened it with a great deal of water. So the banquet went through its innumerable courses to the last of them. At the end the servants cleared the table, and, with the costly Irish cigars, great decanters were brought in. These contained a kind of degenerate port which, for ceremonial reasons, was usually produced on the greatest occasions. But it was very nasty; and most persons confined themselves to a single glass of it, which they took because, for some inscrutable reason, it had been the custom of their ancestors.
The speeches, which began at this point, were excessively long and tedious. Jeremy gathered that a succession of hour-long speeches on every public occasion was one of the habits of the time, though it seemed to him as incomprehensible as seemed in the twentieth century the even longer sermons of an earlier period. Notable after notable arose and made the same remarks about the victory and the marriage, sometimes not even perceptibly varying the language. It was only in Henry Watkins’s oration that he found any gleam of interest.
It began dully enough. The man looked gloomy, and his utterance was halting. Jeremy was at first soothed into sleepiness by the monotonous voice. He decided that this great and wealthy man was almost certainly a descendant of the charwoman from whom he had had the earliest intimation that “trouble” was really in the air. There was something unmistakably reminiscent both in his despondency and in his stupidity. But all at once a new resemblance struck his ears and stimulated his attention. Mrs. Watkins, in that fast fading antiquity, had brought him bodements of ill; and this latest scion of her line seemed to be playing the same part.