To-night, however, her thoughts were poisoned with acute bitterness. The world, as Lady Denby had said, was upside down. Clamouring for justice, it offered high reward for iniquity, nepotism and refined knavery of every colour.
“Give us Honour and Idealism,” cried the voice of the People, “but give them to us garbed in the motley of hypocrisy and alluring vice. If you must be good, disguise yourself, so that you are still a knave and a rattling good fellow!”
Would the Public—that vague, vast body, of which none of us acknowledges himself a member—never come to the realisation that in Raymond Dilling the country had the man for whom it sought, a man of magnificent honesty, courage and fidelity to high purpose; a man whose talents were devoted to more lasting matters than the wearing of a morning coat, and the sequence of forks at a dinner-table? Would the Public never see that to him these things were non-essentials? Beau Brummel, she reminded herself with angry vehemence, spent several hours daily conferring with his tailor, and doubtless both found the association profitable. A pilot, on the other hand, has time—during the pursuit of his calling—for no such recreation. That he guide his ship through shoal and reef, fog and other dangers of the sea, is all that is required of him. Nor is he adjudged a less worthy pilot because he appears unshaven to steer his vessel into port.
Which did Canada need—a Beau Brummel to lend her picturesqueness in the Council of the Nations, or a pilot to guide the destiny of her Ship of State through the reefs of ready disaster?
Into her mind came the story of a young man who climbing in the Alps, lost his footing and was hurled to his death in the glacier hundreds of feet below. One of his companions, a scientist, computed that at the end of so many years, the body would reappear as the glacier moved towards a certain outlet. On the date specified, a group of the youth’s friends gathered at the spot signified, to see if the computation would prove correct.
It did. There, before the company of old men, battered and scarred in their struggles against life, lay the body of the boy—fair and unsullied as on the day he had left them.
Azalea wondered whether Raymond Dilling, having climbed so far along the treacherous crags of politics, must lose his foothold and plunge into a glacier of oblivion; and she wondered, passionately, if such had to be, would he emerge after a lapse of years, beautiful and fair, to reproach the country that had rejected him.
Azalea was, perhaps, the only person who saw Dilling’s reaction to Public Opinion. Universally, he was supposed to be indifferent, a man of stone, impervious alike to enmity and friendship. But she could recall half a dozen instances when the lack of sympathy—more difficult to endure than active opposition—from men whose warm approbation he richly deserved, filled him with corroding discouragement. She knew that he felt his isolation keenly, and was depressed by it.
Her thoughts turned to this new appointment, and her happiness for him was dulled by the manner in which Ottawa had received it. There had been noticeably lacking the warmth of genuine congratulation that made formal expression of it acceptable. The Press of the Dominion and many foreign countries commented enthusiastically upon the Government’s action, and paid a worthy tribute to the young Minister, but the people amongst whom the Dillings lived, were lukewarm and perfunctory. Azalea knew that to Raymond, the honour—the cloak—was cold, and that he shivered as he wore it.
She wondered what he thought about the attitude of Rufus Sullivan. There was something altogether extraordinary in the support of the Hon. Member for Morroway. Azalea did not agree with certain organs of the Press that credited him with sinking private considerations in the interest of public weal. She did not believe in the sincerity of Mr. Sullivan’s vaunted Imperialism. Unable to find any proof for her suspicions, yet she came very near the truth in listening to the warning of her instinct.