Gracious!--if she were to ask why! The young man was about hastily to change the subject when Sir James and his companion came toward them.
"Can't we tempt you out, Miss Mallory?" said Ferrier. "There is a marvellous change!" He pointed to the plain over which the night was falling. "When we met you in the church it was still winter, or wintry spring. Now--in two hours--the summer's come!"
And on Diana's face, as she stepped out to join him, struck a buffet of warm air; a heavy scent of narcissus rose from the flower-boxes on the terrace; and from a garden far below came the sharp thin prelude of a nightingale.
For about half an hour the young girl and the veteran of politics walked up and down--sounding each other--heart reaching out to heart--dumbly--behind the veil of words. There was a secret link between them. The politician was bruised and weary--well aware that just as Fortune seemed to have brought one of her topmost prizes within his grasp, forces and events were gathering in silence to contest it with him. Ferrier had been twenty-seven years in the House of Commons; his chief life was there, had always been there; outside that maimed and customary pleasure he found, besides, a woman now white-haired. To rule--to lead that House had been the ambition of his life. He had earned it; had scorned delights for it; and his powers were at their ripest.
Yet the intrigue, as he knew, was already launched that might, at the last moment, sweep him from his goal. Most of the men concerned in it he either held for honest fanatics or despised as flatterers of the mob--ignobly pliant. He could and would fight them all with good courage and fair hope of victory.
But Lucy Marsham's son!--that defection, realized or threatened, was beginning now to hit him hard. Amid all their disagreements of the past year his pride had always refused to believe that Marsham could ultimately make common cause with the party dissenters. Ferrier had hardly been able to bring himself, indeed, to take the disagreements seriously. There was a secret impatience, perhaps even a secret arrogance, in his feeling. A young man whom he had watched from his babyhood, had put into Parliament, and led and trained there!--that he should take this hostile and harassing line, with threat of worse, was a matter too sore and intimate to be talked about. He did not mean to talk about it. To Lady Lucy he never spoke of Oliver's opinions, except in a half-jesting way; to other people he did not speak of them at all. Ferrier's affections were deep and silent. He had not found it possible to love the mother without loving the son--had played, indeed, a father's part to him since Henry Marsham's death. He knew the brilliant, flawed, unstable, attractive fellow through and through. But his knowledge left him still vulnerable. He thought little of Oliver's political capacity; and, for all his affection, had no great admiration for his character. Yet Oliver had power to cause him pain of a kind that no other of his Parliamentary associates possessed.
The letters of that morning had brought him news of an important meeting in Marsham's constituency, in which his leadership had been for the first time openly and vehemently attacked. Marsham had not been present at the meeting, and Lady Lucy had written, eagerly declaring that he could not have prevented it and had no responsibility. But could the thing have been done within his own borders without, at least, a tacit connivance on his part?
The incident had awakened a peculiarly strong feeling in the elder man, because during the early days of the recess he had written a series of letters to Marsham on the disputed matters that were dividing the party; letters intended not only to recall Marsham's own allegiance, but--through him--to reach two of the leading dissidents--Lankester and Barton--in particular, for whom he felt a strong personal respect and regard.
These letters were now a cause of anxiety to him. His procedure in writing them had been, of course, entirely correct. It is the business of a party leader to persuade. But he had warned Oliver from the beginning that only portions of them could or should be used in the informal negotiations they were meant to help. Ferrier had always been incorrigibly frank in his talk or correspondence with Marsham, ever since the days when as an Oxford undergraduate, bent on shining at the Union, Oliver had first shown an interest in politics, and had found in Ferrier, already in the front rank, the most stimulating of teachers. These remarkable letters accordingly contained a good deal of the caustic or humorous discussion of Parliamentary personalities, in which Ferrier--Ferrier at his ease--excelled; and many passages, besides, in connection with the measures desired by the Left Wing of the party, steeped in the political pessimism, whimsical or serious, in which Ferrier showed perhaps his most characteristic side at moments of leisure or intimacy; while the moods expressed in outbreaks of the kind had little or no effect on his pugnacity as a debater or his skill as a party strategist, in face of the enemy.