"G.,--more than ever I understand your pa.s.sion for my secretary. I do not even find your fidelity ridiculous; she is one of the most fascinating creatures I have ever met. A masterpiece of balance and common sense, she will rise to the highest position one day--mark my words, boy!"

"I daresay--I cannot feel interested in that. I am still horribly in love. I thought Teheran had dulled the ache for her, but it has not."

Lady Garribardine sighed as she arranged a cushion.

"I live in terror that one day she will come and tell me quite honestly that she has learned all that my situation can teach her, and that she is going on to something new."

"She could not be so ungrateful."

"It would not be ingrat.i.tude--she works for money, not for love. It would be part of her plan of life. Sentimental emotion does not enter into it--that is what makes her so interesting, and so invaluable."

"But I know, Seraphim, that she has a deep affection for you--she has expressed it to me many times. You are her model for all fine conduct and point of view."

"Yes--the girl is devoted to me, I think. Well, we must hope that she is content here, for I do not know how I could quite get on without her. I have had her down for a little at each party during the winter, G. She literally devours bores for me, and gets all the cranks into good tempers. And all the women like her; that shows triumphant astuteness on her part."

"Triumphant! You did not after all marry her to Sir John while I was away. I almost hoped that you would do so when I left in October."

"Sir John was willing; he wanted but a hint from me to have shown all the ardour of a young lover. One even pictured verses--it is in this way that it takes aged politicians. One imagined a discreet wedding and almost by now the inevitable preparatory layette!--But Miss Bush would have none of it! When I approached her upon the subject she looked me straight in the face and said quite respectfully, but with a hauteur befitting a D'Estaire, that she had other views, and while sensible of my kindness she must decline the honour! I was immensely diverted."

"Danger is still ahead, then--She has told me just now that she means only to marry when she can gain her heart's desire--but what that is G.o.d--or the devil--alone knows."

Lady Garribardine looked at him shrewdly for a second; she did not speak, so Mr. Strobridge went on:

"By the way, she wants me to take her and Arabella to hear a debate in the House of Lords--may I?"

"Of course."

If he had not been so preoccupied with his own thoughts he would have remarked his aunt's tone, but he was absently staring out of the window and did not even see her face with its sagacious, querying expression.

"She is greatly interested in politics, I believe; she is well up in them already--she is well up in everything. I daresay she could open a bazaar, or give an address better than I could myself. I can spare her next Wednesday afternoon when the debate on the Land Bill will be in full swing. You can arrange it."

"I will.--Seraphim, isn't it pitiful about poor Lao!--Younger or older it would not have mattered quite so much--but at forty-two--Heavens! The only thing the poor darling had--her beauty--won't be worth looking at in a year or so. The mentality of women is beyond me, so utterly unaccountable their actions are."

"Not at all, my precious G. They are as plain as a pikestaff--only any man can be bamboozled by the silliest of them. They all answer to type and s.e.x. Lao has the brains of her type, the female guinea pig, raised under artificial conditions which have altered, but not stifled, the guinea pig's strongest instinct--prolific reproduction. It came out in Lao, not in the desire to have a numerous family, but in an intense desire to attract the male--_pas pour le bon motif, bien entendu!_--but for variety--Then she falls in love at a foolish age, and the emotion, being one of nature, the instinct rights itself for the moment, and swamps the effect of artificial conditions. Hence the pa.s.sion for the wedding ring--vows--the male in the cage, all unconscious preparation for a family--the last thing she would desire, in fact--and all sense of proportion lost sight of."

Mr. Strobridge laughed delightedly.

"You should write a 'Guide to the Knowledge of Women,' Seraphim, for the enlightenment of your men friends."

His aunt smiled, showing all her strong, well-preserved white teeth.

"I would like to, but not one of them would speak to me again, they would tear my new grey _toupee_ from my snowy locks, and denounce me as a liar, because I would tell the one thing they strongly dislike--the truth!"

"Yes, a thoroughly lovable feminine woman loathes the truth, doesn't she! I have always found my greatest success with her lay in a distortion of every fact to suit her personal view. Katherine Bush and yourself, sweet Aunt, are the only two of your s.e.x that I have ever met whom a man need not humour, and can speak his real mind out to."

And with this he kissed her fat hand and took his way from her presence down the gallery to his room to dress for dinner.

But all the while Stirling was coaxing the real silver and auxiliary iron grey waves into a superbly simple triumph of hairdressing, her ladyship wore a slight frown of concentrated thought.

What did it mean, this desire on the part of her secretary to see the House of Lords?

"Vermondsay--Hankhurst--Upper Harringway." She counted over a long list of the names of peers who frequented Blissington and Berkeley Square--but at the end she shook her head. "No--none of these--Who then--and what for?"

Katherine Bush was no guinea pig answering to type. What type was she, by the way? A complicated, conglomerated mixture, not easy to dissect at any time, was this new move a manifestation of s.e.x--or type?

Time alone would show--Until then the solution must remain in the lap of the G.o.ds. And in all cases, dinner should not wait, and it behooved a hostess to be punctual.

CHAPTER XXII

The outside of the Houses of Parliament had always affected Katherine.

They looked stately and English--and when they--herself and old Arabella d'Estaire and Gerard--walked through the corridors of the House of Lords, and came at last to the huge vaulted chamber itself, and so to the pen where they might stand to hear the debate, her heart began to beat with some strange excitement.

They went into the left side enclosure, and so could have a facing view of the Opposition benches.

Some member of the Government had just begun a speech as they entered, and Katherine had time to look about her. What types to study! And what an atmosphere of calm, after the scene in the House of Commons she had witnessed on her visit there! A din of angry voices and uncontrolled emotion. Here if people felt anything it did not appear on the surface.

Katherine leaned upon the second carved griffin which helps to adorn the part.i.tion which separates the pen from the sacred floor of the House itself. From there her eyes travelled from face to face opposite her.

She recognised several, indeed many whom she had seen either in London or at Blissington--but who were those others, some with features far from aristocratic?

She now examined the Ministerial benches, and made many reflections, while she only half listened to the rather lame string of sentences which were falling from a very refined-looking, carefully preserved gentleman, who seemed little interested in his subject, and almost ashamed to be speaking from that side of the House.

Then from the end by the throne two newcomers entered, and took their seats, one on the front Opposition bench.

For the moment, Katherine's eye had followed the younger of the two who went towards the back, so that she did not become conscious of the personality of the other until, at the conclusion of the Minister's speech, he rose and laid some papers down upon the table in front of him amidst a sudden thrill of interest which noticeably ran through the a.s.sembly.

He was a very tall and arrogant-looking person, rather thin and upright; and in everything about him there was a strange old-world suggestion, which characterised even the cutting and brushing of his hair and the shape of his coat. The brow was lofty and broad, and the thin iron-grey locks were combed straight back from it, and seemed to be perhaps rather longer than those of the young men. He had very large eyes deeply set, probably dark blue, Katherine thought, and his nose was prominently aquiline. He was clean-shaven, all but a small pair of close-cut whiskers, and this with some peculiarity about the shirt, and the frockcoat he wore, as well as a black satin stock, stamped him as someone of an altogether different generation--century, Katherine had almost said to herself!

Who could he be?

There was some picture she had seen which he reminded her of. She thought for a minute. Yes, it was a certain print which hung in a pa.s.sage at Blissington, of the Duke of Wellington in evening dress, a profile, with the ribbon of the Garter across his breast. This man had something of the same personality.

His whole appearance was so unusual, so almost startling, that had anyone else attempted to achieve the same result he would have looked either vulgarly dramatic or quite grotesque, but with this man even the old-fashioned clothes with their suspicion of a by-gone dandyism seemed to add to his immense distinction. Katherine thought that if she could have drawn a picture of a typical aristocrat of the Tory persuasion, of perhaps a hundred years ago, this man would have made a perfect model.

And now he began to speak!

And of all the voices she had ever heard or admired from beyond the half-high gla.s.s screen at Liv and Dev's, or listened to in her present situation, none had ever struck her as so ultra refined as the perfectly modulated tones now vibrating through the house.

His words were selected with judgment and grace, and showed the command of an uncommon vocabulary. She had thought Gerard Strobridge's sentences were well-chosen, and cultivated, but they would sound quite modern and almost colloquial, she felt, compared with the highly-polished flow of language which poured forth from this clear-cut mouth. The whole mien of the man expressed intense pride and dignity, and a perfect unself-consciousness. He gesticulated very little and kept one hand with the thumb resting above a b.u.t.ton of his fastened coat, so that she could see his hand plainly, and its shape, which was in keeping with the rest of his appearance, and on his little finger was a great graven emerald, or some green stone in a ring, which caught a ray of light and sparkled for a second.

How was it that so noticeable a personage had never been to Berkeley Square or Blissington?

He was of Her Ladyship's political convictions, too, and must be of importance to occupy so prominent a place. And presently she began to take in the words he was saying, and gathered from a sentence which remarked upon his "long absence from your Ladyship's House" that he must have been for some time out of England.

Then she grew fascinated with the speech itself, it was so witty and filled with an exquisite sarcasm. Such must have been the speeches of Chesterfield, she thought, in this same House of Lords more than a century and a half ago.

How old could he be? Fifty--forty-five--forty? It was impossible to say.