I thought over Crawleigh’s belated tribute as I took Barbara to our places. This imminent election might purge the House of those to whom the war—as Saltash told me frankly—had come as a god-send; but, if the adventurers into public life were not sent back to their counting-houses and newspaper-offices and bucket-shops, I feared that, with Bertrand, there would die an unparalleled tradition of integrity and devotion. My uncle had prepared himself for politics by half a lifetime of study, as Gladstone and Salisbury, Morley and Rosebery prepared themselves; of the men under thirty who entered the House with me in 1906, hardly one had not tried to equip himself by travel, by settlement-work, by experience in business or by the management of an estate. There seemed to be fewer servants of the public in 1918.
“If he had scoffed less,” said Lady Dainton, “he would have done more.”
I agreed privately, though I think his cynicism covered a disappointment of soul: he had come to England, as a brilliant, ambitious and sanguine boy, to reform the world; and the sluggish-witted, slow-speaking English had worn him down. To begin as an O’Connell and to end as “a great public servant” would have roused him to savage merriment.
“How he would have despised all this!,” I whispered to Barbara, as the people whom he would not admit to his house hurried importantly into the more prominent seats.
Ministers of the present and past, divines and pressmen, authors and diplomats poured in till every place seemed to be taken. A crowd began to collect at the doors; there was rather more noise than I thought seemly; and I was glad when the organ began to play.
Sixty years of public life. I was trying to remember whether Bertrand had known Westminster before the new Houses of Parliament were built, when Spence-Atkins, who was acting as an usher, touched my arm and asked if we had room in our pew for two more. I made way for Sonia, who crushed past me with scarlet cheeks, and for O’Rane, who allowed himself to be guided by a verger. His face, I thought, was white and set, with a suppressed anger which I had seen more often at school than in later years. I asked if anything was amiss; but he would only reply “Afterwards.” Then I relapsed into the past and forgot my surroundings until the last notes of the Dead March throbbed into silence.
Outside I was surrounded by sympathetic friends; but, in the complete detachment of my anæsthesia, I was thinking only that I had time to see my solicitors before luncheon, when I found Sonia the centre of an agitated little group which O’Rane was trying alternately to soothe and to disperse.
“No, I insist on telling George,” she proclaimed. “Did you hear what happened when we arrived? I don’t like being called a murderer!”
The word—and, still more, the tone in which it was uttered—disturbed my dream of past days.
“Who . . .?” I began.