XIV
That night had also been one of triumph for Elton Gwynne. He had dined at the castle, and—his Julia having flitted to another country-house—spent the greater part of the evening in the smoking-room with half a score of the most eminent men in political England; and others whose recognition was not to be despised.
As there were many guests at the castle the dinner took place in the banquet-hall, but at six or eight round tables, and Gwynne had found himself distinguished above all the other young men present by being seated at that of the duchess. The prime-minister, the chancellor of the exchequer, two other members of the cabinet, and an ambassador were his companions. All the women were of exalted station, but for this fact Gwynne cared nothing, being entirely free of that snobbery which so often agitates even the best-born of the world; indeed, would have been resentful of the ripe age of the ladies—accumulated with their political values—had it not been for the tremendous compliment paid to his personal achievement.
He could not sit beside her grace in that nest of titles, but at the suggestion of the duke he had been placed as nearly opposite her as the round table permitted, and he soon forgot the broken circle of immemorial bosoms in the manifest disapproval of the Conservative premier towards himself, and in the attitude of the other men, which, whether hostile or friendly, evinced a recognition of the rising star and a tolerance of his ideas.
There is always a glamour about a very young man who has given cumulative evidence of genius and compelled the attention of the world, always distrustful of youth. His enemies had long since—and he was but thirty—admitted his gift for letters, fiercely as they might scoff at his conclusions; and his rewards for bravery in the field had aroused no adverse comment. But while his most persistent critics had never discovered him truthless and corruptible, his political sincerity had been called into question even by his colleagues, and almost unanimously by the opposition. His principles were by no means so rigidly outlined as those of the great Whig families, nor of the men who belonged to the Liberal party as a natural result of their more modest station and protesting spirit. He was strong on the fundamental principles of the party, and far more energetic in his advocacy of the rights and needs of the working-man than any Liberal of his own class, but he rarely, if ever, alluded to the question of Home Rule; a question somnolent but by no means dead; and the omission savored of Unionism, in spite of his avowed scorn of all compromises.
These facts, taken in connection with the pride and arrogance of the young scion of the house of Strathland and Zeal, generated the suspicion that he had allied himself with the Liberal party for two reasons only: its weakness in first-class men, and his passion for self-advertising. No one disputed his pre-eminence in this branch of industrial art, for although he never descended to commonplace methods, and the interviewer, far from being sought, rather dreaded him than otherwise, there was no man in England who was such a mine for "copy," nor of a perennially greener growth in the select front lawn of "news." When he attacked the government he was eminently quotable, and this endeared him to both reporters and editors. When he was interviewed, fearsome in manner as he was, he sent the worm away packed with ideas and phrases. But although he was almost continuously on the tongue, and the object of more acrimonious discussion than any young man in England, distrust of him had grown to such proportions that he had been dropped after one brief sojourn in the House; and to regain his seat had taken two years of the hardest and most brilliant fighting Great Britain had seen since the Conservative majority of 1874 permitted Disraeli to rest on his prickly laurels. But this memorable battle of one young man against a mighty phalanx of enemies and doubting friends had battered down the prejudices of his own party, and won a meed of applause from even those of stout old Tory principles. The humbler class, upon whom the election largely depended, were captivated by his eloquence, his insidious manipulation of the best in their natures, filling them with a judicious mixture of ideals and self-approval; while the phenomenon he invariably presented on the platform of the gradual awakening into life of a warm-blooded generous magnetic and earnest inner man, so effectually concealed at other times within a repellent exterior, never failed to induce in them the belief that something responsive in their own personalities awakened that rare spirit from its stifled sleep. That the glamour of his birth and condescension to their plane had aught to do with the dazzling quality of his charm, they might have admitted had their minds been driven by the enemy into the regions of self-analysis, but in any case he was the theme of two-thirds of the "pubs" and reading-rooms in England. He had achieved a sweeping victory that loomed portentously as a forerunner of greater triumphs in the future; for the personal popularity he had achieved, the gift for leadership he had demonstrated, the self-control he showed at all times, and the fatally adhesive quality of his biting wit, had strengthened the Liberal party and caused the Conservative to wish that he had never been born.
And flushed with self-love and the conquest of the woman of his desire, he had never talked better than on that night at Arcot; nor less offensively, for his arrogance and assertiveness were tempered by the warm high tide of his emotions. It was a magnificent room, the banquet-hall at Arcot, as large as that of many royal palaces, hung with old Gobelins and frescoed by a pupil of Giotto. It was a fit setting for the triumphant hour of the "most remarkable young man since the younger Pitt," a phrase which, if not notably suave, at least possessed an astonishing vigor, and was almost as familiar in American and continental newspapers as in his own proud nation; a nation always so keen to possess the first in all departments of excellence—creating them out of second-class material when the first is lacking—that the wonder was she had been so long accepting Elton Gwynne. Nothing, perhaps, but a noble desire for a really great man restrained her.
Opposite Gwynne, the duchess, sweet and tactful, if little more than an ornamental husk in which the juices of her race possibly recuperated to invigorate the future generations, was as fair and stately as her castle demanded; and if her gown was shabby her jewels were not. On either side of her table, which occupied the central position in the great room, were some of the most beautiful women in England, the smartest, the most politically important; all, without exception, of an inherited status that brought them once a year as a matter of course within the sternly guarded portals of Arcot. Gwynne did not know that Mrs. Kaye had knocked at these sacred portals in vain; for such gossip, if by chance he heard it, made no impression upon him whatever. But he was by no means insensible to the salient fact that he was one among the chosen of Earth to-night, and that it was good to be the hero of such an assembly.
For that he was the hero there was no manner of doubt, and when the dinner was over he spent but half an hour in the drawing-room, preferring the conversation of the heads of state, who so seldom gratified the vanity of a man of his years, but whom he had the power to interest whether they approved of him or not. He had many friends among women, some conquered by the magic of notoriety, others, like Flora Thangue, sensible of his finer side, or tolerant of him through life-long intimacy; and there were times when he was as alive to the pleasures of their society as any young sprig about town; but to-night their admiration was too illogical to administer to the self-love which in the last few days had palpitated with so exquisite a sense of fruition. Moreover, it gave him the keenest satisfaction to read in the manner of these older and long-tried men the grudging belief in his own sincerity.