ALL through that hot noon and down the beginning of the sun’s decline, George Mulross slept heavily; he slept as in a death, in Parham. He slept in the house of Carolus Merry Armiger, under the shield and tutelage of William Bailey, eccentric, and with God’s benediction upon him. His troubles were at an end.
Meanwhile in London, the young and popular Prime Minister had received his secretary’s report. The Moon and the Capon were squared.
How squared he was not busy to inquire. Gold and silver he had none—for those purposes at least—that would not be in the best traditions of our public life: but they were squared: Edward assured him they were squared, and there was an end of it.
There was more even than Edward’s assurance, though that was as solid as marble; there were two early copies of the papers themselves which had been ordered and brought to him. The leader of the one dealt with those eternal Concessions in Burma,[239] and he smiled. There was not a word about Repton. The leader of the other was on Fiddlededee, and the Prime Minister experienced an immense relief.
But there was still Demaine,—or rather, there was still no Demaine. And there was still Repton, mad—mad—mad!
Between Dolly and the awful unstable equilibrium of the modern world, between him and a cosmic explosion, was nothing but the four walls round Repton, Lady Repton who bored him, and the sagacity of Edward. It was a quarter to three, a time when meaner men must wend them to the House of Commons. He also wended. He was the shepherd and he must look after his sheep.
That august assembly was astonished to perceive the Premier positively present upon the front bench during the process of that appeal to the Almighty which precedes the business of the day. But that did not get into the papers:—there is a limit!
As he knelt there he knew that a man whom he could not disobey was about to ask a question of which he had given private notice. He feared it much, he more feared those supplementary questions which are so useless to the scheme of our polity but which buzz like unnecessary midges round the cooking of the national food. And when prayers were over and questions begun, not an inquiry as to an Admiralty contract, not a simple demand for information from the Home Secretary as to the incarceration of a beggar or the torture of some[240] insignificant pauper, but put his heart into his mouth.
Mr. Maloney’s long cross-examination on the matter of the postmistress at Crosshaurigh gave him a little breathing space. They couldn’t bring Repton or Demaine in on that! But there was an ominous question about a wreck, and who should answer it? He had indeed arranged that the answer should proceed from the Treasury, but the clouds were lowering.
The question came as mild as milk: it was concerned with the wreck which still banged and battered about on the Sovereign Shoals; it had been put down days before, and the chief legal adviser of the Crown rose solemnly to reply.
“My right honourable friend has asked me to answer this question. He has no further information beyond that which he has already furnished to the honourable gentleman, but every inquiry is being made and papers will shortly be laid upon the table of the House.”
The fanatic rose, the inevitable fanatic, towering from the benches, and thundered his supplementary demand: What had been done with the gin? He was told to give notice of the question.
For three dreadful seconds the Prime Minister feared some consequence. His fears were well grounded. A gentleman rose and spoke from the darkness under the gallery and desired to know why the Warden of the Court of Dowry was not present[241] to deal with matters concerning his Department? He would have been reproved by the Chair had not the young and popular Prime Minister taken it upon himself to rise and reply.
“It is the first time,” he said, “and I hope it will be the last, that I have heard the illness of a colleague made the excuse for such an interruption.”
From the benches behind him those who knew the truth applauded and those who did not applauded more loudly still.
With what genius had he not saved the situation! And the questions meandered on, and all was well, save for that last dreadful query of which he had had private notice.
It was put at the end of question-time, not, oddly enough, by the member who most coveted the apparently vacant Wardenship, nor even by any relative of that member, nay, not even by a friend: a member surely innocent of all personal motives put that question. He desired to know, whether rumours appearing in the papers upon the Wardenship of the Court of Dowry were well founded, whether the Wardenship of the Court of Dowry were not for the moment vacant, and if so what steps were being taken to fill that vacancy.
The reply was curt and sufficient: “The honourable member must not believe everything he reads in the newspapers.”
It is not often that wit of a lightning kind falls zigzag and blasts the efforts of anarchy in the[242] National Council. Wit is very properly excluded from the exercise of legislative power; but when it appears—when there is good reason for its appearance—its success is overwhelming: and by the action of this one brilliant phrase, perhaps the most dangerous crisis through which the Constitution has passed since the flight of James II. was triumphantly passed.
Question-time was over. The young and popular Prime Minister, now wholly oblivious of his left lung, answered one or two minor questions, gave assurances as to the order of business, and left the House a happier man than he had entered it. He went straight to Downing Street. When he got to his room Edward was there awaiting him.
“They’ve got Demaine,” he said.
The luck had turned!
For half a minute Dolly couldn’t speak: then he gasped:
“Where?”
“I don’t know,” said Edward. “I don’t think anybody knows. There was a telephone message sent to the Press everywhere.”
A thousand horrid thoughts! Found dead? Found wandering and imbecile? Found——? He was faster bound than ever—and that just in the hour when he must act and decide. He said again:
“Where did it come from?”
“I couldn’t find out.”
“Edward,” said the Premier faintly, as he sat down[243] and fell to pieces, “you know how to do these things.... Puff!— ... Do go like ... a good fellow—find out ... quietly ... ch ... where it came from.”
Edward went into the next room and called up 009 Central. He was given 1009, kept his temper and repeated his call. A Being replied to him in an angry woman’s voice and begged him not to shout into the receiver.
He asked for the clerk in charge and waited ten minutes. Nothing happened.
The Prime Minister in his room was not at ease. His mood was if anything burdened by the delivery of an express message which ran: “They’ve found Dimmy. M. S.” The writing was the writing of Mary Smith. He asked the messenger with some indifference to find out who had sent the message and where it had come from.
Meanwhile, in the absence of Edward, he went into an outer room and begged them to call up Mrs. Smith’s house. When he returned there was a telegram from Charing Cross upon his table which ran:
“George found.”
There was no signature. He waited patiently for the return of Edward or the messenger or of something—hang it all, something!
The little buzzer on his table buzzed gently and the telephone whispered into his ear that “Mrs. Demaine wished him to know that Mr. Demaine was[244] found.” He had already asked “Where is he?” when he was cut off.
He had received so much information and no more when Edward returned with the information that the news had come in from Trunk Seven.
“What is Trunk Seven?” said the Prime Minister.
“I don’t know,” said Edward.
They sat together for a moment in silence. The Premier, as befitted his office, was a man of resource. Outside Westminster Bridge Underground Station men of insufficient capital but of economic ambition deal in the retail commerce of news. It occurred to the Prime Minister to reassure himself from their posters, and from a room that gave upon Westminster Bridge Road, his excellent eyesight—for it was among his points that his eyesight at fifty-four was still strong—perused the placards opposite.
They were clear enough.
“LOST MINISTER FOUND”
said the most decent.
“DEMAINE RESULT”
said the Capon, which appeared to have forgotten its good manners.
It ought not to be difficult to get the Capon without loss of dignity. He returned to his room and in about five minutes the Capon was brought to him.
Under the heading “Stop Press News,” he saw[245] “Demaine Result,” and then underneath, more courteously: “Mr. Demaine has been heard of.” It was printed in faint wobbly type in a big blank space—and there was nothing more.
Edward, entering at that moment, told him that the exact point from which the message had been sent could not be discovered until Brighton had cleared.
“Oh!” said the Prime Minister.
He was going to call up Mary Smith, but Edward assured him that nothing more than an inept half-wit maid would answer the demand—he had tried it.
Dolly sat on in patience and wondered where Demaine had been discovered. The matter was of some moment. Without the least doubt he would have to make up his mind as to the succession of the office that very afternoon, and it was already close on five.
Demaine might be discovered suffering from a loss of memory (though what he had to remember Dolly couldn’t conceive); he might have been discovered in the hands of the police. He might have been discovered attempting for some unknown reason to fly the country. Till the Premier knew more he could not act.
For a good half-hour he persuaded himself that it was better to wait. Then he went out and motored to Mary’s.
And Mary of course was not at home.
[246]He went on to Demaine House, and found there nothing but a man making a very careful inventory of all the pictures, all the furniture and all the glass. He came back to his room, and at last the mystery was solved.
All good things come to an end, as do all delays and all vexations, and life itself. By a method less expeditious than some of those which modern civilisation has put at our disposal, the full truth was revealed to him.
George Mulross Demaine was at that moment (it was six o’clock) upon that afternoon of Wednesday, the 3rd of June, ... drinking brandy and soda in great quantities and refusing tea, at the Liverpool Street Hotel. A courteous message from the Manager thereof was the source of the information, and Edward—Edward who never failed—had been the first to receive it.
The message had gone up and down London a good deal before it had got to the House of Commons; at Demaine House the Manager had been told to try Mary Smith’s number, and at Mary Smith’s the half-wit having almost had her head blown off by Edward’s repeated violence, very sensibly suggested that the Manager should telephone direct to the House of Commons and give a body peace.
An instant demand (said Edward) that Demaine should himself come to the instrument, had been followed by a very long pause, after which he was[247] told that the gentleman had gone off in a four-wheeler with a lame horse, and had left the bill unpaid.
There was nothing to do but to wait.
Half-past six struck, and the quarter. Their fears were renewed when, just upon seven, a figure strangely but neatly clothed was shown into the room, by a servant who displayed such an exact proportion between censure and respect as would have puzzled the most wearisome of modern dramatists to depict.[4]
It was Demaine!
His clothes were indeed extraordinary. You could not say they fitted, and you could not say they did not fit. The trousers and the coat and the waistcoat were made of one cloth, a quiet yellow. The lines of the shoulders, the arms, the legs, the very stomach, were right lines: they were lines proceeding from point to point; they were lines taking the shortest route from point to point. They were straight: they were plumb straight. The creases upon the trousers were not those adumbrations of creases which the most vulgar of the smart permit to hint at the newness of their raiment: they were solid ridges resembling the roofs of new barns or the keels of racing ships. The lapels of the coat did not sit well upon it; rather they were glued to it. The waistcoat did not fit, it stuck. And above this strange accoutrement shone, with more fitness than Edward[248] and Dolly could have imagined, the simple face of George Mulross Demaine.
His hair—oh horror!—was oiled; one might have sworn that his face was oiled as well.
The colour of his skin resembled cedarwood save on the nose, where it resembled old oak. If ever a man was fi............