He went hot as he pictured her with her melting eyes, hanging towards him a little as the ivy inclines to the oak. And then he turned cold. And cold, he considered what he was going to do!
Of course he was not going to marry her.
No doubt he had said to her more than he had the right to say. But his honour was not engaged. The girl was not the worse for him; even if that which he had read in her eyes were true, she would get over it as quickly as he would. But marry her, give way to a feeling doubtless evanescent, let himself be swayed by a fancy at which he would laugh a year later—no! No! He was not so weak. He had not only his career to think of, but the family honours which would be his one day. What would old Vermuyden say if he impaled a baton sinister with the family arms, added a Smith to the family alliances, married the nameless, penniless teacher in a girls’ school?
No, of course, he was not going to marry her. He had said what he had said to the Honourable Bob merely to shield her from a Don Juan. He had not meant it. He would go for a long fatiguing walk and put the notion and the girl out of his head, and come back cured of his folly, and make a merry night of it with the old set. And to-morrow—no, the morrow was Sunday—on Monday he would return to London and to all the chances which the changing political situation must open to an ambitious man. He regretted that he had not taken the Chancellor’s hint and sought for a seat in the House.
But the solitary ramble in the valley of the Avon, which was a hundredfold more beautiful in those days than in these, because less spoiled by the hand of man, a ramble by the Logwood Mills, with their clear-running weedy stream, by King’s Weston and Leigh Woods—such a ramble, tuneful with the songs of birds and laden with the scents of spring, may not be the surest cure for that passion, which
is not to be reasoned down or lost
In high ambition or a thirst for greatness!
At any rate he returned uncured, and for the first part of the Honourable Bob’s dinner was wildly merry. After that, and suddenly, he fell into a moody silence which his host was not the last to note.
Fortunately with the removal of the cloth and the first brisk journey of the decanters came news. A waiter brought it. Hart Davies, the Tory candidate for Bristol, and for twenty years its popular member, had withdrawn, seeing his chance hopeless. The retirement was unexpected, and it caused so much surprise that the party could think of nothing else. Nine-tenths of those present were Tories, and Flixton proposed that they should sally forth and vent their feelings by smashing the windows of the Bush, the Radical headquarters; a feat performed many a time before with no worse consequences than a broken head or two. But Colonel Brereton set his foot sharply on the proposal.
“I’ll put you under arrest if you do,” he said. “I’m senior officer of the district, and I’ll not have it, Flixton! Do you think that this is the time, you madmen,” he continued, looking round the table and speaking with indignation, “to provoke the rabble, and get the throats of half Bristol cut?”