"I can well imagine it," said Wilson.

"You see I'm not an aristocrat, after all," said Paul.

Wilson looked the young man in the face and saw the steel beneath the dark eyes, and the Proud setting of the lips. With a sudden impulse he wrung his hand. "I don't care a d.a.m.n!" said he. "You are."

Paul said, unsmiling: "I can face the music. That's all." He drew a note from his pocket. "Will you do me a final service? Go round to the Conservative Club at once, and tell the meeting what has happened, and give this to Colonel Winwood."

"With pleasure," said Wilson.

Then Paul shook hands with all his fellow-workers and thanked them in his courtly way, and, pleading for solitude, went through the door of the great chamber and, guided by an attendant, reached the exit in a side street where his car awaited him. A large concourse of people stood drawn up in line on each side of the street, marshalled by policemen. A familiar crooked figure limped from the shadow of the door, holding a hard felt hat, his white poll gleaming in the shaft of light. "G.o.d bless you, sonny," he said in a hoa.r.s.e whisper.

Paul took the old man by the arm and drew him across the pavement to the car. "Get in," said he.

Barney Bill hung back. "No, sonny; no."

"It's not the first time we've driven together. Get in. I want you."

So Barney Bill allowed himself to be thrust into the luxurious car, and Paul followed. And perhaps for the first time in the history of great elections the successful candidate drove away from the place where the poll was declared in dead silence, attended only by the humblest of his const.i.tuents. But every man in the throng bared his head.

CHAPTER XXI

"HE had the stroke in the night," said Barney Bill suddenly.

Paul turned sharply on him. "Why wasn't I told?"

"Could you have cured him?"

"Of course not."

"Could you have done him any good?"

"I ought to have been told."

"You had enough of worries before you for one day, sonny."

"That was my business," said Paul.

"Jane and I, being as it were responsible parties, took the liberty, so to speak, of thinking it our business too."

Paul drummed impatiently on his knees.

"Yer ain't angry, are you, sonny?" the old man asked plaintively.

"No--not angry--with you and Jane--certainly not. I know you acted for the best, out of love for me. But you shouldn't have deceived me. I thought it was a mere nervous breakdown--the strain and shock. You never said a word about it, and Jane, when I talked to her this morning, never gave me to dream there was anything serious amiss. So I say you two have deceived me."

"But I'm a telling of yer, sonny--"

"Yes, yes, I know. I don't reproach you. But don't you see? I'm sick of lies. Dead sick. I've been up to my neck in a bog of falsehood ever since I was a child and I'm making a h.e.l.l of a struggle to get on to solid ground. The Truth for me now. By G.o.d! nothing but the Truth!"

Barney Bill, sitting forward, hunched up, on the seat of the car, just as he used to sit on the footboard of his van, twisted his head round.

"I'm not an eddicated person," said he, "although if I hadn't done a bit of reading in my time I'd have gone dotty all by my lones in the old 'bus, but I've come to one or two conclusions in my, so to speak, variegated career, and one is that if you go on in that 'ere mad way for Truth in Parliament, you'll be a bull in a china shop, and they'll get sticks and dawgs to hustle you out. Sir Robert Peel, old Gladstone, Dizzy, the whole lot of the old Yuns was up against it. They had to compromise. It's compromise"--the old man dwelt lovingly, as usual, on the literary word--"it's compromise you must have in Parliament."

"I'll see Parliament d.a.m.ned first!" cried Paul, his nerves on edge.

"You'll have to wait a long time, sonny," said Barney Bill, wagging a sage head. "Parliament takes a lot of d.a.m.ning."

"Anyhow," said Paul, not eager to continue the argument, but unconsciously caught in the drift of Barney Bill's philosophy, "my private life isn't politics, and there's not going to be another lie in my private life as long as I live."

The old man broke a short silence with a dry chuckle. "How it takes one back!" he said reflectively. "Lor lumme! I can hear yer speaking now--just in the same tone--the night what yer run away with me. Yer hadn't a seat to yer breeches then, and now you've a seat in Parliament." He chuckled again at his joke. "But"--he gripped the young man's knee in his bony clasp--"you're just the same Paul, sonny, G.o.d bless yer--and you'll come out straight all right. Here we are."

The car drew up before Silas Finn's house. They entered. Jane, summoned, came down at once and met them in the dreadful dining-room, where a simple meal was spread.

"I haven't heard--" she said.

"I'm in."

"I'm glad."

"My father--?" he asked curtly.

She looked at him wide-eyed for a second or two as he stood, his fur-lined coat with astrachan collar thrown open, his hand holding a soft felt hat on his hip, his absurdly beautiful head thrown back, to casual glance the Fortunate Youth of a month or two ago. But to Jane's jealous eye he was not even the man she had seen that afternoon. He looked many years older. She confessed afterwards to surprise at not finding his hair grey at the temples, thus manifesting her ordered sense of the harmonious. She confessed, too, that she was frightened--Jane who, for any other reason than the mere saving of her own skin, would have stolidly faced Hyrcanean tigers--at the stern eyes beneath the contracted brows. He was a different Paul altogether. And here we have the divergence between the masculine and the feminine point of view. Jane saw a new avatar; Barney Bill the ragged urchin of the Bludston brick-fields. She shifted her glance to the old man. He, standing crookedly, c.o.c.ked his head and nodded.

"He knows all about it."

"Yes, yes," said Paul. "How is my father?"

Jane threw out her hands in the Englishwoman's insignificant gesture.

"He's unconscious--has been for hours--the nurse is up with him--the end may come any moment. I hid it from you till the last for your own sake. Would you care to go upstairs?"

She moved to the door. Paul threw off his overcoat and, followed by Barney Bill, accompanied her. On the landing they were met by the nurse.

"It is all over," she said.

"I will go in for a moment," said Paul. "I should like to be alone."

In a room hung like the rest of the house with gaudy pictures he stood for a short while looking at the marble face of the strange-souled, pa.s.sionate being that had been his father. The lids had closed for ever over the burning, sorrowful eyes; the mobile lips were for ever mute.

In his close sympathy with the man Paul knew what had struck him down.

It was not the blow of the nameless enemy, but the stunning realization that he was not, after all, the irresistible nominee of the Almighty.

His great faith had not suffered; for the rigid face was serene, as though he had accepted this final chastis.e.m.e.nt and purification before entrance into the Eternal Kingdom; but his high pride, the mainspring of his fanatical life, had been broken and the workings of the physical organism had been arrested. In those few moments of intense feeling, in the presence of death, it was given to Paul to tread across the threshold of the mystery of his birth. Here lay stiff and cold no base clay such as that of which Polly Kegworthy had been formed. It had been the tenement of a spirit beautiful and swift. No matter to what things he himself had been born--he had put that foolishness behind him--at all events his dream bad come partly true. His father had been one of the great ones, one of the conquerors, one of the high princes of men.

Mult.i.tudes of kings had not been so parented. Outwardly a successful business man and a fanatical Dissenter--there were thousands like Silas Finn. But Paul knew his inner greatness, the terrific struggle of his soul, the warrings between fierce blood and iron will, the fervent purpose, the lofty aspirations and the unwavering conduct of his life of charity and sorrow. He stretched out his hand and with his finger tips lightly touched the dead man's forehead. "I'm proud to be your son," he murmured.

Then the nurse came in and Paul went downstairs. Barney Bill waylaid him in the hall, and led him into the dining-room. "Have a little food and drink, sonny. You look as if yer need it--especially drink. 'Ere."

He seized a decanter of whisky--since Paul's first visit, Silas had always kept it in the house for his son's comforting--and would have filled the tumbler had not Paul restrained him. He squirted in the soda. "Drink it down and you'll feel better."

Paul swallowed a great gulp. "Yes," he agreed. "There are times when it does help a man."