The Convert. Elizabeth Robins
laugh. It wasn't meant sarcastic.'
'Unless you're leader of the Opposition, I suppose it's not very easy to do much while your party's out of power,' hazarded Lady John, 'is it?'
'One of the most interesting things about our coming back will be to watch Stonor,' said Farnborough.
'After all, they said he did very well with his Under Secretaryship under the last Government, didn't they?' Again Lady John appealed to the two elder men.
'Oh, yes,' said Borrodaile. 'Oh, yes.'
'And the way'—Farnborough made up for any lack of enthusiasm—'the way he handled that Balkan question!'
'All that was pure routine,' Lord John waved it aside. 'But if Stonor had ever looked upon politics as more than a game, he'd have been a power long before this.'
'Ah,' said Borrodaile, slowly, 'you go as far as that? I doubt myself if he has enough of the demagogue in him.'
'But that's just why. The English people are not like the Americans or the French. The English have a natural distrust of the demagogue. I tell you if Stonor once believed in anything with might and main, he'd be a leader of men.'
'Here he is now.'
Farnborough was the first to distinguish the sound of carriage wheels behind the shrubberies. The others looked up and listened. Yes, the crunch of gravel. The wall of laurel was too thick to give any glimpse from this side of the drive that wound round to the main entrance. But some animating vision nevertheless seemed miraculously to have penetrated the dense green wall, to the obvious enlivenment of the company.
'It's rather exciting seeing him at close quarters,' Hermione said to Filey.
'Yes! He's the only politician I can get up any real enthusiasm for. He's so many-sided. I saw him yesterday at a Bond Street show looking at caricatures of himself and all his dearest friends.'
'Really. How did he take the sacrilege?'
'Oh, he was immensely amused at the fellow's impudence. You see, Stonor could understand the art of the thing as well as the fun—the fierce economy of line——'
Nobody listened. There were other attempts at conversation, mere decent pretence at not being absorbed in watching for the appearance of Geoffrey Stonor.
CHAPTER VI
There was the faint sound of a distant door's opening, and there was a glimpse of the old butler. But before he could reach the French window with his announcement, his own colourless presence was masked, wiped out—not as the company had expected by the apparition of a man, but by a tall, lightly-moving young woman with golden-brown eyes, and wearing a golden-brown gown that had touches of wallflower red and gold on the short jacket. There were only wallflowers in the small leaf-green toque, and except for the sable boa in her hand (which so suddenly it was too warm to wear) no single thing about her could at all adequately account for the air of what, for lack of a better term, may be called accessory elegance that pervaded the golden-brown vision, taking the low sunlight on her face and smiling as she stepped through the window.
It was no small tribute to the lady had she but known it, that her coming was not received nor even felt as an anti-climax.
As she came forward, all about her rose a significant Babel: 'Here's Miss Levering!' 'It's Vida!' 'Oh, how do you do!'—the frou-frou of swishing skirts, the scrape of chairs pushed back over stone flags, and the greeting of the host and hostess, cordial to the point of affection—the various handshakings, the discreet winding through the groups of a footman with a fresh teapot, the Bedlington's first attack of barking merged in tail-wagging upon pleased recognition of a friend; and a final settling down again about the tea-table with the air full of scraps of talk and unfinished questions.
'You didn't see anything of my brother and his wife?' asked Lord Borrodaile.
'Oh, yes,' his host suddenly remembered. 'I thought the Freddys were coming by that four-thirty as well as——'
'No—nobody but me.' She threw her many-tailed boa on the back of the chair that Paul Filey had drawn up for her between the hostess and the place where Borrodaile had been sitting.
'There are two more good trains before dinner——' began Lord John.
'Oh, didn't I tell you,' said his wife, as she gave the cup just filled for the new-comer into the nearest of the outstretched hands—'didn't I tell you I had a note from Mrs. Freddy by the afternoon post? They aren't coming.'
Out of a little chorus of regret, came Borrodaile's slightly mocking, 'Anything wrong with the precious children?'
'She didn't mention the children—nor much of anything else—just a hurried line.'
'The children were as merry as grigs yesterday,' said Vida, looking at their uncle across the table. 'I went on to the Freddys' after the Royal Academy. No!' she put her cup down suddenly. 'Nobody is to ask me how I like my own picture! The Tunbridge children——'
'That thing Hoyle has done of you,' said Lord Borrodaile, deliberately, 'is a very brilliant and a very misleading performance.'
'Thank you.'
Filey and Lord John, in spite of her interdiction, were pursuing the subject of the much-discussed portrait.
'It certainly is one aspect of you——'
'Don't you think his Velasquez-like use of black and white——'
'The tiny Tunbridges, as I was saying,' she went on imperturbably, 'were having a teafight when I got there. I say "fight" advisedly.'
'Then I'll warrant,' said their uncle, 'that Sara was the aggressor.'
'She was.'
'You saw Mrs. Freddy?' asked Lady John, with an interest half amused, half cynical, in her eyes.
'For a moment.'
'She doesn't confess it, I suppose,' the hostess went on, 'but I imagine she is rather perturbed;' and Lady John glanced at Borrodaile with her good-humoured, worldly-wise smile.
'Poor Mrs. Freddy!' said Vida. 'You see, she's taken it all quite seriously—this Suffrage nonsense.'
'Yes;' Mrs. Freddy's brother-in-law had met Lady John's look with the same significant smile as that lady's own—'Yes, she's naturally feeling rather crestfallen—perhaps she'll see now!'
'Mrs. Freddy crestfallen, what about?' said Farnborough. But he was much preoccupied at that moment in supplying Lady Sophia with bits of toast the exact size for balancing on the Bedlington's nose. For the benefit of his end of the table Paul Filey had begun to describe the new one-man show of caricatures of famous people just opened in Bond Street. The 'mordant genius,' as he called it, of this new man—an American Jew—offered an irresistible opportunity for phrase-making. And still on the other side of the tea urn the Ullands were discussing with Borrodaile and Miss Levering the absent lady whose 'case' was obviously a matter of concern to her friends.
'Well, let us hope,' Lord John was saying as sternly as his urbanity permitted—'let us hope this exhibition in the House will be a lesson to her.'
'She wasn't concerned in it!' Vida quickly defended her.
'Nevertheless we are all hoping,' said Lady John, 'that it has come just in time to prevent her from going over the edge.'
'Over the edge!' Farnborough pricked up his ears at last in good earnest, feeling that the conversation on the other side had grown too interesting for him to be out of it any longer. 'Over what edge?'
'The edge of the Woman Suffrage precipice,' said Lady John.
'You call it a precipice?' Vida Levering raised her