CHAPTER XXII

Another delightful week elapsed, with yacht cruises and adventures by flood and field, and then Priscilla, never giving herself up with such complete abandonment to the intoxication of the first month of marriage as to be incapable of observing the changes of time and temper and temperature—the variations in the pulse of that little spiritual animal known by the pet name of Love, began to perceive that Jack was thinking about home; and that meant that she had been wholly successful in her treatment of that happiness of his which demanded the wisest nursing, with a mental chart of its variations from day to day. Women who are wise adopt the modern system of therapeutics, and devote all their thought to the nursing of that happiness which has been entrusted to their care when it is still in its cradle, and do not trouble about the Pharmacopoeia. It had been her aim to lead him to think about his home—their home—as that was where she meant him to spend most of his time; and the wife who can keep her husband’s attention most closely directed to home is the wisest as well as the happiest. The accountants who were going over the books of the estate, kept in a culpably slovenly way by Mr. Dunning, were, he was informed, approaching the end of their labours; and the new agent, who had been found with really only a reasonable amount of difficulty, was by the side of the accountants and the stewards and the bailiffs, mastering the details of the old system, which had been far from systematic, and, as Jack and Priscilla could see by his letters, instituting a new regime on a proper basis.

This was satisfactory; but Priscilla could see that the establishment of routine did not greatly interest her husband. He was imaginative, though no one but herself had suspected it, and she meant that he should have something to appeal to his imagination. Even before they had been married she had seen some splendid possibilities in connection with the trout stream that flowed through the glen, though at that time she had not so much as hinted at them; but now she felt that she could do so with good effect if the opportunity should arise; and when an imaginative young woman is on the look-out for an opportunity, the opportunity invariably presents itself. A letter from Mrs. Wingfield mentioned the services of a new footman who had succeeded in putting out a fire—the result of a lamp accident in the still-room and a housemaid’s carelessness. Owing to the exertions of the man and the training which he had received at his last place, the fire had done very little injury; but if it had not been dealt with in time the Manor House would certainly have been done for, said the letter.

“Confound those lamps! That’s the third fire within two years, and all through those antiquated abominations,” cried Jack.

“Sell them for scrap metal, and trust to electric light,” said Priscilla in a second.

“Who is to pay for a cable from Gallingham—nine miles?” he enquired.

“No one, my dear. There is no need to go so far or to spend so much money, when you have that lovely cascade going to waste in Primrose Dell.”

“What has the cascade to do with it, my girl? I wasn’t talking about a fire engine; though with these lamps——”

“With some elementary engineering and a simple dynamo you can make an electric installation for the house, and stables, and yard, and farm, and gardens, that will cost you little more than the wages of one man—say, twenty-five shillings a week.”

“Make it thirty.”

“Well, thirty. Mind you, you will be able to put stoves in all the bedrooms, and you will be able to run machinery for pumping water, for cleaning harness, for churning, for brushing your hair, if you wish for it.”

“I don’t wish for it for brushing my hair, but I do for everything else. Is this a dream of yours, my girl, or have you been reading a pictorial advertisement?”

“I went into the question two years ago, hoping that we might be able to introduce electric power on the farm; but unhappily we have no stream of water to work the dynamo and it would not pay to use coal; we might as well use the coal energy direct. I went so far into the matter as to visit a place where a private installation had been made, and my eyes were opened.”

He gazed at her admiringly in silence for some time. Then he cried:

“Great Gloriana! You are a bit of a wonder, Priscilla! You carry me off my feet; and the worst of it is that I feel I must do everything that you suggest. If I try to look the other way I see something that sends me back to you. I’m like the master mariner whose adventures worried us at school—in trying to avoid what’s its name, he fell on the other—you know.”

“Scylla and Charybdis?”

“That’s it—Scylla—in my case, Priscilla and Charybdis. Priscilla and Charybdis—that’s how I am. But by the living shrimp, you’re a wonder! Where can I get any books that will go into the business? I suppose the dynamo people are those to apply to in the first place. But I know nothing worth talking about of electricity.”

“What is there to know about such a simple adaptation of it as is necessary for our purpose? I assure you that the sparking of your motor is a thousand times more complicated, and you know all about that. Long ago people thought that to be an electrical engineer enough to light up a house required years of training, and people’s sons were to become electrical engineers instead of being doctors or lawyers; but now they are only something between plumbers and gasfitters. Isn’t that so?”

“By the living shrimp! we’ll have the whole place in a blaze before the winter,” She lay back and laughed at his enthusiasm and the unfortunate way in which it led him to prophesy.

“I hope it will not be quite so bad as that,” she said. For the next three or four days he could talk of little else than the electrification of the Manor. She explained to him the way in which the course of the stream could be diverted at a trifling cost and at the sacrifice of none of the picturesqueness of the place of primroses.

“I would not have a primrose interfered with,” she cried. “The Primrose Dell is a sacred place.”

“I will take steps to have it incorporated on our coat of arms,” he said. “And I will see that it has a special motto to itself. Yes ‘Priscilla and Charybdis.’ Oh! we mustn’t spoil the primroses. If it hadn’t been for them where should I be to-day? What should I be to-day?” And then some of the books arrived, and with his usual aptitude for picking up new ideas, he mastered all the essentials to the schemes which Priscilla had initiated.

But before he had quite made up his mind as to the most suitable part of the stream to touch, something occurred which interfered materially with the development of his plans; for one morning he got a telegram signed “Franklin Forrester,” enquiring if he could be seen at 2.30 that day. “Very important.”

“What the mischief!” he exclaimed. “How does he know that I’m here? What can Franky Forrester want with me that’s very important?”

“Who is Franky Forrester?” asked Priscilla.

“Oh! Franky Forrester was one of the chaps who just escaped being sent down at Oxford when I enjoyed that distinction,” he replied. “Franky was a little too sharp for the powers. He had a genius for organizing; and that’s how he got through. He could organize a row with any man, but it was invariably part of his organization that he should be outside the row when it was going on. He has made his way in the world by the exercise of his genius. I saw him in London a few months ago. He is still organizing things—politics, I believe he said, What can he want with me?”

“Money,” suggested Priscilla. “I have heard that funds are the soul of politics, if principles are the body.”

“He’ll get no money out of me,” said Jack. “But somehow I don’t think that it’s money he wants. I suppose I had better see him. He is a nice chap and well connected. He never loses sight of a man that’s well off or that’s likely to be well off.”

“That’s the art of organization in a nutshell,” said she. “I suppose it is,” he said. “Anyhow, the phrase is a good one. There are a lot of good phrases knocking about; it’s a pity that so many of them are in nutshells—some of them are hard to crack. Franky was great at phrases. You always needed to carry a pair of nutcrackers in your pocket when he was in the offing. I wonder how he heard that I was here.”

“I suppose you will see him, Jack. He says ‘very important.’”

“Yes; but he doesn’t say whether it’s important to me or to himself. Oh, yes, I suppose I must see him.” Although Priscilla did not think that he had reached that period of honeymoon delight when a man is ready to welcome the arrival of a friend, or even an enemy, she was still pleased that a new element was entering into their communion. She had a strange longing to be presented to some of his friends, and to hear him say:

“I want to introduce you to my wife, old chap. She’s dying to know you.”

And she was gratified shortly after lunch that day; for those were the very words he employed when making her known to Mr. Franklin Forrester.

She saw by the expression of the visitor’s face when he looked at her that he was both surprised and pleased.

“He is appraising my value as a possible asset to a political party,” she said to herself; and that was precisely what Mr. Forrester was doing.

He was a well-made and rather good-looking man, with a Vandyck beard, inclined to fairness. He had a moderate supply of hair on the front of his head and he made praiseworthy, and on the whole successful, attempts to conceal the fact that it was becoming rather thin on the top. His eyes would possibly have been accounted good had he ever given anyone a chance to see them long enough to form an opinion upon them. As it was, most people saw them only long enough to see that they were restless. Still, Jack’s wife had managed to interpret the general expression of his face pretty accurately.

“And now maybe you’ll tell me how you got my address here,” said Jack, when they had said a few words about Sandycliffe and how it was being developed. Mr. Forrester knew who was most interested in its development, and how the hotel shares had been worked off.

“I sent a wire to Elliot—you know Compton Elliot—at Framsby to find out if you were at home. I believe that it was from Mrs. Wingfield, your mother, that he got your present location. Useful man, Compton Elliot,” said Mr. Forrester.

“Yes, infernally useful,” assented Jack.

“My dear Wingfield, you may be sure that I would not have thrust myself upon you at this—this—this interesting time if I could have avoided it,” cried the visitor. “At the same time, I must honestly confess that I’m rather glad to find you so circumstanced——”

“Gloriana! What a word—‘circumstanced’!” murmured Jack.

“Well, I mean that I’m pleased to be able to make an appeal to you in the presence of some one who will, I am sure, advise you to listen to me, and not condemn me without thinking the whole matter over.”

“Isn’t he artful?” said Jack. “He has just killed a political opponent and he is about to appeal to my better nature not to give him away. He knows that women are invariably on the side of the criminal. Go on, F. F.”

“Mrs. Wingfield, I ask you if this isn’t ungenerous on the part of your husband. Here I have come down from the intoxicating pleasure of the London season solely to ask this man to become a member of Parliament, and this is how he receives my proposition.”

Mr. Franklin Forrester had very rarely to be so straightforward as he was in this speech. As a matter of fact, his resources in this particular direction were so limited that he found it absolutely necessary to economise them; and the general opinion that prevailed among his political opponents was that he was very successful in his exercise of this form of thrift. But his excuse to himself for having resorted to an unaccustomed figure of speech was that this was an exceptional case that demanded exceptional treatment.

He had been straightforward almost to a point of abruptness, and he perceived that the end had justified the means: Jack Wingfield was voiceless and gasping, and Mrs. Wingfield was silent and flushing.

He saw what manner of woman she was—yes, up to a certain point. He saw that she was far more appreciative of a compliment paid to her husband than her husband was; and he also saw that she was more anxious for her husband’s advancement than her husband was.

He had rendered them speechless; and he knew that that was the prehistoric method of woman-capture; and that up to the present a more effective method has not been devised by the wit of man. Stun them, and there you are.

He felt that he had captured Mrs. Wingfield. She had flushed with surprise and delight. He had heard all about her from his useful friend, Compton Elliot, of Framsby. She was a farmer’s daughter, and having played her cards well, she had married a man with a fine property and not too rigid a backbone. She was sure to be ambitious to achieve a further step—one that should carry her away from the associations of the farm into the centre of London society—for the greater part of the year.

That was what Mr. Franklin Forrester’s analysis of the situation amounted to. It was not quite accurate; but there was something in it.

He had not expected the farmer’s daughter of Compton Elliot’s confidential report to have so pleasing a personality. He had rather visions of a stoutish young woman with an opulent bust and dark eyes, combined with a knowledge of how to use them. But the difference between his ideal and the real lady did not cause him to change the plan of attack which he had arranged for her capture.

“Now the murder’s out,” he said, looking not at Jack, but at Jack’s wife. “We want a good man who will make a good fight for Nuttingford, and we believe that we can hold the seat.”

“Then why the mischief didn’t you go to a good man?” enquired Jack.

Mr. Forrester smiled. He did not tell him that he had already approached two very good men; and that, being shrewd as well as good—politically good, which represents a condition that is possibly not quite the same as ethically good—they had shaken their heads and told him to go on to the next street.

No. Mr. Franklin Forrester regarded those communications as strictly confidential; he did not think it necessary to allude to them.

“I have come to the right man, if I know anything of the Nuttingford division,” was what he did say; “and I think I know something of the Nuttingford division,” he added.

“I don’t doubt it; but you don’t know quite so much about the man you’ve come to, or you wouldn’t have come,” suggested Jack. Then he glanced at his wife, and Mr. Forrester noted that glance with great interest.

“It’s because I know you, my friend, better than you know yourself—I won’t say better than Mrs. Wingfield knows you—that I have come to you,” said the politician. “You are the sort of man that we want—that the country wants.”

“Oh, I say, why drag in the poor old country by the hair of the head? It’s almost indecent,” remonstrated Jack, and once again he glanced at his wife. She smiled back at him, but spoke not a word. She was a wise woman. A wise woman is one who has a great deal to say and remains silent.

“You are the man that’s wanted at this time,” resumed Forrester. “By the way, what are your politics?”

“What politics do you want?” asked Jack. “I fancy that if I were to stand I could accommodate you; but I shan’t.”

“You’re the man for us. Most of us inherit our politics with the family Bible and our grandfather’s clock, and we rarely change them, unless, like our young Zimri—the unsuccessful Zimri—we are at the tail end of a Parliament, and are certain that there will be a change of government in the next—a change of government has usually meant a change of politics with the family of our aspiring Zimri. His father was the successful Zimri, but he didn’t have peace; and the founder of the family elevated Zimriism to a fine art—he didn’t have peace either—on the contrary, he had a wife. All things are possible with such men; but I don’t care what your politics are; we’ll put you in for Nuttingford, if you’ll agree to stand.”

“This is rot, Forrester, and you know it. What good shall I be in your House of Commons? What good shall I be to your blessed Party anyway?”

Mr. Forrester could quite easily have answered this question, had it been prudent to do so. He could have told him that he was wanted by the Party because there was a difficulty with two men, each of whom believed that he had a right to the reversion of the seat, and would certainly contest it in view of the other coming forward. In such a case the seat would undoubtedly be seized by the solitary representative of the Other Party. But Mr. Forrester perceived that such an explanation would occupy a good deal of valuable time; and he wished to spare his friend and his friend’s charming wife an acquaintance with details which possibly a man, and certainly a woman, looking into the arena of politics from a private box, might regard as sordid. So he merely laid his hand on his friend’s knee, and said:

“Leave that to us, my dear Wingfield. You may be sure that we would not take you up unless we saw that you could do something for us that would pay us for our trouble. Now, don’t you decide against us in a hurry. Talk the matter over with Mrs. Wingfield. I wouldn’t give much for a man who didn’t take his wife into his confidence on such important things.”

“And how much would you give for a man who did, and then decided by her advice against you?” asked Jack.

“The constituency is a peculiar one,” said Forrester, ignoring the question. “They hate politics. If we were to send them a well-known politician he would have no chance with them. What they want is a man like yourself—a simple ordinary, everyday, good-wearing English gentleman—plain commonsense—that’s what they want; nothing very definite in the way of a programme; they don’t want a windbag or a gasometer; they’re not going in for air ships at Nuttingford. You know what Cotton is?”

“Cotton? Who the mischief is Cotton that I should know of him?”

“That’s the best proof of the accuracy of what I’ve been telling you. Cotton is the man who has sat for the constituency for the past fifteen years, and yet nobody has heard of him.”

“And why shouldn’t he continue in the obscurity of the House of Commons for another fifteen years? Nobody wants him outside, I suppose.”

“He has been ordered off by his doctor, and he is applying for the Chiltern Hundreds at once. He will mention your name in his valedictory address, and we’ll do the rest—that is, of course—you know what I mean?”

“Blest if I do, quite!”

“Oh, I mean that having provided them with the right man for them—the man they want—we’ll see that they are loyal to you.”

‘“Wingfield and the Old Cause’—that’ll be the war cry, I suppose. You’ll have to coach me on the old cause—only there’ll be no need, for I haven’t the remotest idea of standing. I’m going in for a big electric scheme, Forrester, and I’ll have no time for politics.”

“I refuse to take your answer now. I should be doing you a grave injustice. I didn’t except you to jump at my offer before it was well out of my lips. Heavens, man! a seat in the House of Commons——”

“Mother of Parliaments, and the rest.”

“You needn’t sneer. I tell you it’s a position that carries weight with it. I don’t wonder that it’s so coveted. Men spend thousands of pounds trying to reach it—thousands of pounds and years of their life.”

“I’m not one of them, Forrester. Don’t look angrily at me because other men make such fools of themselves.”

“I won’t, Wingfield, because I know that you won’t make a fool of yourself by refusing this offer. But I have said my last word of encouragement. After all, you know best what will suit you. It would be an impertinence on my part to suggest that you are not competent to decide for yourself. Don’t be in a hurry. Now, what about this electrical scheme?”