A mixture of Imperial sentiment and personal pride urged him to put Van Diemens on their legs, and all April, all through the Easter Recess, he remained in London working. He worked right on into May; for the first week after Parliament met again he was seen but little; one thing only troubled him, that at long intervals—sometimes as long as ten days, an uneasy twinge behind the ears, the result of that little half-forgotten accident, incommoded him. These twinges came a trifle more frequently as May advanced. After the last of them he had felt a little dazed—no more. And still he worked and worked, holding twenty reins in his hands.
Before the end of May the fruit of all this labour began to appear. Camptons were reconstructed, arbitration had been forced upon the Docks combination in the North just in time to prevent a wholesale transference of shipping abroad, and more important than all, perhaps, there had begun to crop up in the papers, here, there, and everywhere, the mention—and the flattering mention—of Van Diemens, and the wealthy were already familiar with the conception of a certain railway in the land which was under the Van Diemens charter.
The wealthy, but as yet only the wealthy; it is as fatal to be too early as to be too late, and that brain which knew how to drive and compel, had also known so well how to restrain, that the shares still remained unsaleable with the meaningless quotation of sixteen shillings and a few fluctuating pence still attached to them in the market lists.
So Repton stood in the middle of May, 1915, when he became aware that an obscure member (obscure at least in the House of Commons—and Repton noticed little of, and cared nothing for, the merely luxurious world of London), an aristocrat of sorts, one of the Demaine,—George Demaine it seemed, was being talked about. He was being pushed somehow. Repton hardly heeded so commonplace a phenomenon, save perhaps to wonder what job was on:—he continued to push Van Diemens.
CHAPTER V
THE Petheringtons’ house, to which Mary Smith drove on the evening of 12th of April, under the two pretty little electric lights of her car, one for either side of her face, was one of a hundred similar London houses, a huge brown cube in the middle of Grosvenor Square.
It was no longer called Petherington House; it had once again regained its more familiar appellation of No. 89, under which it had been famous for the complete lack of entertainment of any sort which had distinguished the short session of 1912. Then old Hooker had died, the changes in the Cabinet had come, Hooker’s wife had married the Bishop and also died immediately, and finally the Petheringtons had taken the place, foolishly called it by their own title for a few months, and finding it unknown to cabmen and to their friends’ chauffeurs also under this appellation, they slowly reverted to the old name.
If hospitality is a fault when pushed to an extreme, the Petheringtons exhibited that fault. But so excellent were their arrangements—for business will out even in the smallest details of domestic life—that no one suffered in the crush, and that it was perfectly easy in the time a guest ordinarily allowed himself for the function, to go up the stairs and down again, though perhaps too much time was wasted at the necessarily narrow entrance where men must seek their hats and coats.