The Marriage of William Ashe

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

"Naturally," said Lady Tranmore. "Only that it is a pity to take him seriously."

"Oh, I don't know. He has his following; unfortunately, some of our own men are inclined to think that Parham should conciliate him. Ignore him, I say. Behave as though he didn't exist. Ah! by-the-way"—the speaker raised herself on tiptoe, and said, in an audacious undertone—"is it true that he may possibly marry your cousin, Miss Lyster?"

Lady Tranmore kept a smiling composure. "Is it true that Lord Parham may possibly give him an appointment?"

Lady Parham turned away in annoyance. "Is that one of the inventions going about?"

"There are so many," said Lady Tranmore.

At that moment, however, to her infinite relief, her companion abruptly deserted her. She was free to observe the two distant figures in conversation—Geoffrey Cliffe and Mr. Loraine, the latter a man now verging on old age, white-haired and wrinkled, but breathing still through every feature and every movement the scarcely diminished energy of his magnificent prime. He stood with bent head, listening attentively, but, as Lady Tranmore thought, coldly, to the arguments that Cliffe was pouring out upon him. Once he looked up in a sudden recoil, and there was a flash from an eye famous for its power of majestic or passionate rebuke. Cliffe, however, took no notice, and talked on, Loraine still listening.

"Look at them!" said Lady Parham, venomously, in the ear of one of her intimates. "We shall have all this out in the House to-morrow. The Opposition mean to play that man for all he's worth. Mr. Loraine, too—with his puritanical ways! I know what he thinks of Cliffe. He wouldn't touch him in private. But in public—you'll see—he'll swallow him whole—just to annoy Parham. There's your politician."

And stiff with the angry virtue of the "ins," denouncing the faction of the "outs," Lady Parham passed on.

Elizabeth Tranmore meanwhile turned to look for Mary Lyster. She found her close behind, engaged in a perfunctory conversation, which evidently left her quite free to follow things more exciting. She, too, was watching; and presently it seemed to Lady Tranmore that her eyes met with those of Cliffe. Cliffe paused; abruptly lost the thread of his conversation with Mr. Loraine, and began to make his way through the crowded room. Lady Tranmore watched his progress with some attention. It was the progress, clearly, of a man much in the eye and mouth of the public. Whether the atmosphere surrounding him in these rooms was more hostile or more favorable, Lady Tranmore could not be quite sure. Certainly the women smiled upon him; and his strange face, thinner, browner, more weather-beaten and life-beaten than ever, under its crest of grizzling hair, had the old arrogant and picturesque power, but, as it seemed to her, with something added—something subtler, was it, more romantic than of yore? which arrested the spectator. Had he really been in love with that French woman? Lady Tranmore had heard it rumored that she was dead.

It was not towards Mary Lyster, primarily, that he was moving, Elizabeth soon discovered; it was towards herself. She braced herself for the encounter.