He warned more than one omnibus as it passed, of an approaching combine between the various lines, and urged the shareholders to buy while yet there was time. At one awful moment he had begun excitedly to point out the figure of a Bishop upon the opposite pavement and to begin a full biography of that hierarch, when she thought it her duty to slam down the window and to bear the weight of his anger rather than permit the scene.
Small knots of people gathered outside the house, but the police had been warned and they were easily dispersed, with no necessity for violence beyond the loss of a tooth or two on the part of the crowd.
As though her task were not enough, the house was full of the noise of bells, message after message calling for news and for information, but she had already given orders to the secretary to write out whatever commonplace messages might occur to him, and he faithfully performed his duty.
In her confusion she could see no issue but to try yet another night’s sleep, and when he carried his hand to his head as he now and then did, when the touch of pain stung him, she comforted herself with this assurance, that a paroxysm of such violence could not long endure.
I say a paroxysm of such violence, though there was nothing violent in the man’s demeanour: the horror lay in the cold contrast between the pleasant easy tone in which the things were said and the things that were said in that pleasant easy tone, while the violence was no more than the violence of contrast between his absurd affirmations and the quiet current of the national life.
The printing of one-tenth of those simple, easily delivered words might have ruined the country. We owe it to Lady Repton—and I trust it will never be forgotten—that no syllable of them all was printed, and that the greater part of them were not even heard by any other ear than her own.
She had persuaded him to an early dinner; she had even put it at the amazing hour of half-past seven. She had ordered such food as she knew he best loved, and the wine that soothed him most—which happened to be a Norman champagne. She was particular to request a full service of attendance, for her experience told her that in such surroundings he was ever at his best.
Another attack of pain in the head seized him and passed. She sat doggedly, and endured. This admirable wife after her day-long watch was exhausted and heart-sick. She saw no issue anywhere. She sat by her husband’s side, starting nervously at the least sound from below, and listening to his impossible commentaries upon contemporary life, his hair-raising stories of his friends, his colleagues and even of her own religious pastors, and his bouts of self-revelations, or rather let us hope, of diseased imaginings, when there was put into her hand an express letter.
The superscription was peculiar; it ran:
To the Rt. Hon.
To the
The Lady C. Repton, M.V.O.