They were there, perhaps asleep, perhaps wearily wakeful, with only their souls left to fight for them against some vague, sinister enemy. Perhaps she was watching over him as he slept; preparing his draughts; stirring the fire with a little shiver. Perhaps she, too, had been approached by spectres. Perhaps she was ill, despairing, afraid. Tears came into his eyes.
He could feel the disk pressing against his fingers, and the tiny hard rills through which the needle had traced its uncanny message.
“What do you know of the sick man!” Above the mysterious silence of the night a phantom voice, thin, clear, dainty, was singing the answer into his understanding: “I attempt from love’s sickness to fly, in vain; for I am myself my own fever and pain.” It could so airily sing, as though it were a toy song and a toy sentiment, words which were as irrelevantly indicative as flowers nodding over a grave.
Many years ago he and Walter had played a game called “scaling”. You chose round, flat pieces of slate and sent them whirling through the air.
He scaled, and waited for the splashing sound far out on the water.
Poor little record, it had meant well enough.
CHAPTER IV
KEBLE had received a petition signed by Conservatives throughout the county inviting him to present himself as candidate for the provincial elections. He had foreseen this, but hesitated to accept the nomination. In the first place he was barely thirty; in the second place success at the polls would mean protracted absences from the ranch; in the third place he was not sure that Louise would approve. He remembered her saying, apropos of her Uncle Alfred Mornay-Mareuil, “If he had only been able to control his ambition! Politics is as demoralizing as gambling.” And Keble quite often took Louise’s remarks at their literal value.
When it came time to select a candidate for the elections, the scattered Conservatives of the district, knowing that the only hope of making a showing against their entrenched opponents was to induce Keble Eveley, with his important holdings and the prestige of his name, to stand for them, had encountered opposition from the supporters of the mayor of Witney, who in several consecutive elections had suffered defeat at the hands of the Liberal candidate, but who had learned to look forward to his periodical worsting as an agreeable break in the monotony of his days. The repeated success of the Liberal representative had resulted in over-confidence on the part of that gentleman. He had been weaned from his county, had invested his savings in the capital, and returned home only to collect rents or sell at a substantial profit stock which he had acquired at bargain prices. A feeling was abroad, among Liberals and Progressives, as well as Conservatives, that the electors were being “used for a good thing.”