CHAPTER XI
AS George Mulross Demaine drifted down river in his cell that Tuesday afternoon the 2nd of June, Dolly sat blankly in Downing Street with the waters of despair at his lips.
Evil breeds evil.
As he considered the gloomy prospect, new aspects of it rose before him. Not only was he privately between these two fires, the sudden madness of the outgoing Warden, the disappearance of his successor, but the retirement of Charles Repton had been publicly announced and Dimmy’s nomination had appeared alongside with it in the morning papers. The double news was all over England.
Yet another torturing thought suggested itself. How and when should he fill the vacancy? What was he to do?
Repton was impossible. His disaster was not in the papers, thank God, and could not be, under the decent rules which govern our press. But it was already the chief tittle-tattle of every house that counted in London. There could be no interregnum with Repton still nominally filling the place. He might wait as long as he dared, give it to a third man, and then have Demaine turn up smiling and hungry: and if that happened the Prime Minister would earn what he dreaded most on earth, the enmity of those who had been his friends; perhaps a breach with Mary Smith herself.
He was not fit to do more than survey the misfortune of the moment: he was still in his perplexity, when he heard the bell ringing in the next room, and was told that he himself was personally and urgently wanted upon the telephone.
He put up his hand but the secretary would take no denial; it was something absolutely personal. Who was it from? It was from Lady Repton.
If it can be said of any wealthy and powerful man that he ever betrays in his features or gait a purely mental anxiety, then that might be said in some degree of the unfortunate Prime Minister at that moment. He suffered so acutely that his left lung, the sense of which never wholly left him, seemed to oppress him with actual physical pain.