The silent and little known young member whose disappearance from the benches under the gallery would never have been noticed, was half a hero already in the popular mind, and had become particularly dear to his colleagues during the anxious moments when he was believed to be lost, and when the press of London had worked that mystery for all it was worth.
The House of Commons knows a Man.
There was, therefore, loud and hearty cheering, which, according to the beautiful tradition of our public life, was confined to no one part of the assembly, when, that happy Friday, George Mulross entered rapidly from behind the Speaker’s chair, stumbled over the outstretched foot of the Admiralty, his second uncle by marriage, and took his seat for the first time among his new colleagues upon the Treasury Bench.
The Prime Minister accompanied him. Congratulations suitable to the occasion were to be seen in the gestures of those in his immediate neighbourhood, and he himself wore the blest but sickly smile of a man who is about to be hanged but who is possessed of a fixed faith in a happy eternity.
Only one question was set down to him; he had read it and re-read it; he had read and re-read the typewritten answer which Mr. Sorrel had furnished him and which he had now got by heart beyond, he hoped, the possibility of error. The questioner had chivalrously offered to withdraw his query in deference to the fatigues and anxieties through which the new Warden of the Court of Dowry had so recently passed, but the Prime Minister, though appreciative of that offer, rather determined that his dear young relative should win his spurs; and trivial as the subject was, Question No. 31 was by far the most important upon the paper for most of those present.
It concerned (of course) the wreck which still banged about, the sport of wind and wave, upon the Royal Sovereign Shoals. This aching tooth of Empire had cropped up again in yet another aspect. The Member for Harrowell, a landowner upon that coast, wanted to know whether it was not a fact that large planks studded, he was ashamed to say, with long rusty nails, had not drifted shorewards from the wreck and grievously scratched such persons as were indulging in mixed bathing just off the popular and rapidly rising seaside resort which lay a little east by north of the wretched derelict.
Question No. 29 was answered, Question 30 was answered. Demaine’s ordeal had come.
He heard a low mumbling noise some distance down the benches which he would never have taken to be the single word “Thirty-one” had not his mother’s half-sister’s husband the Chancellor of the Exchequer given him a sharp dig in the ribs with his elbow and jolted him onto his feet. His hands shook like a motor car at rest as he began his reply.
“I have nothing to tell my right honourable gentleman—I mean my honourable gentleman....” Here there was a pause, painful to all present with the exception of one ribald fellow who cackled twice and then was silent.... “I have nothing to add,” George Mulross began again with a lump in his throat, “in reply to my honourable friend—to what my predecessor said in reply to a similar” (another pause) ... “Oh,—question—upon the tenth of this month.”
He had read all of it out now, anyhow, and he sat down, a trifle unsteadily, feeling for the seat.