“... the keys
Of such teeming destinies”
through them: through them!
It was a great speech.
He turned more carelessly to the already typewritten stuff which he must deliver upon the Thursday to the Wycliffite Conference. It would do—and it was of importance for the moment. It reminded him a little contemptuously of the High Meat Teas in the North of England and of his youth, and of that maundering war between Church and Chapel which was then of real moment to him, and which now he still had wearily to wage,—at least in public.
Whether this little bout of study had been too much for a man who had already spent a full month glued to his work, or whatever else was the cause, he felt as midnight approached a trifle brain-sick. He leant his head upon his hand, and it seemed to him—he hoped it was an illusion for the sensation was yet vague—but it did seem to him that the pain behind the ears, or at least an oppression there, was beginning. He muttered an exclamation so sharp as would have astonished those who had never seen him under a strain. Then he went quickly upstairs to the drawing-room and found his wife, sitting all alone with her book.
She looked up as he entered, and again she was startled by that strange innocence in his eyes. Odd, (but what living!) flashes of thirty, of forty years ago pierced her heart. Youth goes down every lane, and these two, just after their marriage, just before the first loan he had made, had been, for a month or so, young: the memory of it was a jewel to her.
He came in at that instant loosened: he was walking ill: he made towards her as though he were seeking a refuge, and still that persistent innocence shone from his eyes. He sat down beside her, breathing uncertainly, groped out and took her hand. He had made no such movement since—what year? Since before what first hardening had frightened her? How many years, how long a life ago?
The mood was of no long duration. She could have wished it had been longer. He slept with a sort of deep lethargy that was not his way, and twice in the night she rose to watch him; but with the morning all his powers and, alas! all that difference had returned.
She was to see nothing of him while he went through every detail of his affairs for the week and the month with his assistant; she was not even to be allowed to see something of him at his midday meal; she watched him as he went out of the house at the invariable hour to drive to the office of the Court of Dowry. And as she watched him with new feelings in her, and the breaking of dead crusts, she saw another man accost him, the cab turned away, and the two go together, walking, towards the Park. She knew the figure though she came so little into the life of London, and she recognised, in the sloppy clothes and the stooping walk, the Prime Minister.