Before a great while this unnamed person would be succeeding his ailing and childless brother. There were lamentations in prospect of his too early translation to the Upper House.
The older men had been speaking of his family, in which the tradition of public service, generations old, had been revived in the person of this younger son.
"I have never understood," Lord John was saying, "how a man with such opportunities hasn"t done more."
"A man as able, too," said Borrodaile, lazily. "Think of the tribute he wrung out of Gladstone at the very beginning of his career. Whatever we may think of the old fox, Gladstone had an eye for men."
"Be _quiet_, will you!" Lady Sophia administered a little whack to the Bedlington. "Sh! Joey! don"t you hear they"re talking about our cousin?"
"Who?" said Filey, bending over the lady with a peace-offering of cake.
"Why, Geoffrey Stonor," answered Sophia.
"_Is_ it Stonor they mean?"
"Well, of course."
"How do you know?" demanded Filey, in the pause.
"Oh, wherever there are two or three gathered together talking politics and "the coming man"--who has such a frightful lot in him that very little ever comes out--it"s sure to be Geoffrey Stonor they mean, isn"t it, Joey?"
"Perhaps," said her father, dryly, "you"ll just mention that to him at dinner to-night."
"_What!_" said Farnborough, with a keen look in his eyes. "You don"t mean he"s coming here!"
Sophia, too, had looked round at her host with frank interest.
"Comin" to play golf?"
"Well, he mayn"t get here in time for a round to-night, but we"re rather expecting him by this four-thirty."
"What fun!" Lady Sophia"s long face had brightened.
"May I stay over till the next train?" Farnborough was whispering to Lady John as he went round to her on the pretext of more cream. "Thank you--then I won"t go till the six forty-two."
"I didn"t know," Lady Sophia was observing in her somewhat crude way, "that you knew Geoffrey as well as all that."
"We don"t," said Lord John. "He"s been saying for years he wanted to come down and try our links, but it"s by a fluke that he"s coming, after all."
"He never comes to see _us_. He"s far too busy, ain"t he, Joey, even if we can"t see that he accomplishes much?"
"Give him time and you"ll see!" said Farnborough, with a wag of his head.
"Yes," said Lord John, "he"s still a young man. Barely forty."
"Barely forty! _They_ believe in prolonging their youth, don"t they?"
said Lady Sophia to no one in particular, and with her mouth rather more full of cake than custom prescribes. "Good thing it isn"t us, ain"t it, Joey?"
"For a politician forty _is_ young," said Farnborough.
"Oh, don"t I know it!" she retorted. "I was reading the life of Randolph Churchill the other day, and I came across a paragraph of filial admiration about the hold Lord Randolph had contrived to get so early in life over the House of Commons. It occurred to me to wonder just how much of a boy Lord Randolph was at the time. I was going to count up when I was saved the trouble by coming to a sentence that said he was then "an unproved stripling of thirty-two." You shouldn"t laugh. It wasn"t meant sarcastic."
"Unless you"re leader of the Opposition, I suppose it"s not very easy to do much while your party"s out of power," hazarded Lady John, "is it?"
"One of the most interesting things about our coming back will be to watch Stonor," said Farnborough.
"After all, they said he did very well with his Under Secretaryship under the last Government, didn"t they?" Again Lady John appealed to the two elder men.
"Oh, yes," said Borrodaile. "Oh, yes."
"And the way"--Farnborough made up for any lack of enthusiasm--"the way he handled that Balkan question!"
"All that was pure routine," Lord John waved it aside. "But if Stonor had ever looked upon politics as more than a game, he"d have been a power long before this."
"Ah," said Borrodaile, slowly, "you go as far as that? I doubt myself if he has enough of the demagogue in him."
"But that"s just why. The English people are not like the Americans or the French. The English have a natural distrust of the demagogue. I tell you if Stonor once believed in anything with might and main, he"d be a leader of men."
"Here he is now."
Farnborough was the first to distinguish the sound of carriage wheels behind the shrubberies. The others looked up and listened. Yes, the crunch of gravel. The wall of laurel was too thick to give any glimpse from this side of the drive that wound round to the main entrance. But some animating vision nevertheless seemed miraculously to have penetrated the dense green wall, to the obvious enlivenment of the company.
"It"s rather exciting seeing him at close quarters," Hermione said to Filey.
"Yes! He"s the only politician I can get up any real enthusiasm for.
He"s so many-sided. I saw him yesterday at a Bond Street show looking at caricatures of himself and all his dearest friends."
"Really. How did he take the sacrilege?"
"Oh, he was immensely amused at the fellow"s impudence. You see, Stonor could understand the art of the thing as well as the fun--the fierce economy of line----"
n.o.body listened. There were other attempts at conversation, mere decent pretence at not being absorbed in watching for the appearance of Geoffrey Stonor.
CHAPTER VI
There was the faint sound of a distant door"s opening, and there was a glimpse of the old butler. But before he could reach the French window with his announcement, his own colourless presence was masked, wiped out--not as the company had expected by the apparition of a man, but by a tall, lightly-moving young woman with golden-brown eyes, and wearing a golden-brown gown that had touches of wallflower red and gold on the short jacket. There were only wallflowers in the small leaf-green toque, and except for the sable boa in her hand (which so suddenly it was too warm to wear) no single thing about her could at all adequately account for the air of what, for lack of a better term, may be called accessory elegance that pervaded the golden-brown vision, taking the low sunlight on her face and smiling as she stepped through the window.
It was no small tribute to the lady had she but known it, that her coming was not received nor even felt as an anti-climax.
As she came forward, all about her rose a significant Babel: "Here"s Miss Levering!" "It"s Vida!" "Oh, how do you _do_!"--the frou-frou of swishing skirts, the sc.r.a.pe of chairs pushed back over stone flags, and the greeting of the host and hostess, cordial to the point of affection--the various handshakings, the discreet winding through the groups of a footman with a fresh teapot, the Bedlington"s first attack of barking merged in tail-wagging upon pleased recognition of a friend; and a final settling down again about the tea-table with the air full of sc.r.a.ps of talk and unfinished questions.
"You didn"t see anything of my brother and his wife?" asked Lord Borrodaile.
"Oh, yes," his host suddenly remembered. "I thought the Freddys were coming by that four-thirty as well as----"