“They were feeble, and not over-confident after the first hour. It was quite fun to watch them.”
“Weaklings! Fancy losing their nerve and half their majority. What are such sheep good for but to follow their leader through the hedge? I wish I had been there.”
A look of almost passionate regret crossed the man’s face as he spoke the last words.
“I wish you had, my dear Gastineau. We would have had more fun still, and they more funk.”
“Congreve?”
“Spoke for twenty minutes. An exhibition of the superior person in the throes of embarrassment. That point of yours about the repudiation of the Colonies hit them hard.”
“Ah, you made the most of that. Good! Congreve the Superior could not touch it?” He spoke eagerly.
“Touch it? He could not get near it. I wished afterwards, as I listened to his floundering, that I had elaborated it still more.”
Gastineau’s thoughts seemed to be far away; as though he were living in the scene his brain reconstructed. “I don’t doubt you did very well, my dear boy,” he murmured, still preoccupied. Suddenly he flashed out with a spiteful laugh, “The pattern Robert Congreve at a loss! His Baliol quibbles at a discount for once. Faugh! A brilliant party to depend for its allies upon the callow prigs of the Oxford Union! Ah, to be back again! to be back again!” His clenched hand rose and fell; he gave a great sigh of impotence.
“It is hard on you, old fellow,” Herriard said sympathetically; “cruelly hard. As it is, I only wish that, as your proxy, I could do you more justice.”