Part 7 (2/2)

No. He wouldn't be hard on her. But in that other case there wouldn't have been any rent at all.

As he left the house he could see Mrs. Rickards hurrying towards it across the square.

”She waddles like a duck,” he thought. The movement suggested a plebeian excitement and curiosity that displeased him. He recalled her face. Her extraordinary face. ”Quite enough,” he thought, ”to put all that into my head. Poor Elise”

He liked to think of her. It made him feel what he had felt last night over Barbara Madden--virtuous--as though he had struggled and got the better of an impetuous pa.s.sion. He was so touched by his own beautiful renunciation that when he found f.a.n.n.y working in the garden he felt a sudden tenderness for her as the cause of it. She looked up at him from her pansy bed and laughed. ”What are you looking so sentimental for, old thing?”

3

Mrs. Levitt's affair settled, he could now give his whole time to the serious business of the day.

He was exceedingly anxious to get it over. Nothing could be more disturbing than f.a.n.n.y's suggestion that the name of Sir John Corbett might carry more weight with his Committee than his own. The Waddingtons of Wyck had ancestry. Waddingtons had held Lower Wyck Manor for ten generations, whereas Sir John Corbett's father had bought Underwoods and rebuilt it somewhere in the 'seventies. On the other hand Sir John was the largest and richest landowner in the place. He could buy up Wyck--on--the--Hill to--morrow and thrive on the transaction. He therefore represented the larger vested interest And as the whole object of the League was the safeguarding of vested interests, in other words, of liberty, that British liberty which is bound up with law and order, with private property in general and landowners.h.i.+p in particular; as the principle of its very being was the preservation of precisely such an inst.i.tution as Sir John himself, the Committee of the Wyck Branch of the League could hardly avoid inviting him to be its president. There was no blinking the fact, and f.a.n.n.y hadn't blinked it, that Sir John was the proper person. Most of f.a.n.n.y's suggestions had a strong but unpleasant element of common sense.

But the more interest he took in the League, the more pa.s.sionately he flung himself into the business of its creation, the more abhorrent to Mr. Waddington was the thought that the chief place in it, the presidency, would pa.s.s over his head to Sir John.

His only hope was in Sir John's well-known indolence and irresponsibility. Sir John was the exhausted reaction from the efforts of a self-made grandfather and of a father spendthrift in energy; he had had everything done for him ever since he was a baby, and consequently was now unable or unwilling to do anything for himself or other people.

You couldn't see him taking an active part in the management of the League, and Mr. Waddington couldn't see himself doing all the work and handing over all the glory to Sir John. Still, between Mr. Waddington and the glory there was only this supine figure of Sir John, and Sir John once out of the running he could count without immodesty on the unanimous vote of any committee he formed in Wyck.

It was possible that even a Sir John Corbett would not really carry it over a Waddington of Wyck, but Mr. Waddington wasn't taking any risks.

What he had to do was to suggest the presidency to Sir John in such a way that he would be certain to refuse it.

He had the good luck to find Sir John alone in his library at tea-time, eating hot b.u.t.tered toast.

There was hope for Mr. Waddington in Sir John's att.i.tude, lying back and nursing his little round stomach, hope in the hot, b.u.t.tery gleam of his cheeks, in his wide mouth, lazy under the jutting grey moustache, and in the scrabbling of his little legs as he exerted himself to stand upright.

”Well, Waddington, glad to see you.”

He was in his chair again. With another prodigious effort he leaned forward and rang for more tea and more toast.

”Did you walk?” said Sir John. His little round eyes expressed horror at the possibility.

”No, I just ran over in my car.”

”Drove yourself?”

”No. Too much effort of attention. I find it interferes with my thinking.”

”Interferes with everything,” said Sir John. ”'Spect you drove enough during the war to last you for the rest of your life.”

”Ah, Government service. A very different thing. That reminds me; I've come to-day to consult you on a matter of public business.”

”Business?” (He noted Sir John's uneasy pout.) ”Better have some tea first.” Sir John took another piece of b.u.t.tered toast.

If only Sir John would go on eating. Nothing like b.u.t.tered toast for sustaining that mood of voluptuous inertia.

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