The Ffolliots of Redmarley | Page 6

did not see his father's start, nor the momentary pained contraction of his cheerful features.
Eloquent's eyes were fixed on the lady's face, and sure enough he got what he wanted.
"I'm so sorry," she said simply, and she looked it; she had turned her kind eyes full upon him, eyes wide apart and grey and limpid.
He edged still nearer to her; so near that he stood upon her white dress with his dusty little boots, and still he stared unblinkingly.
The young lady looked puzzled. Why did the child regard her so fixedly? She suddenly awoke to the fact that everyone in the shop was looking at her. Even Mr Gallup, on the other side of the counter, seemed suddenly stricken by inertia, and instead of putting up the little suits in paper, was staring at the pair of them.
Then Eloquent was moved to explain.
"I've never seen anybody look like you before," he said gravely, "and I like watching you."
"Thank you," said the lady, and she patted his cheek.
She laughed.
Mr Gallup laughed, and came back to the affairs of the Golden Anchor, busying himself in tying up her parcel, while he explained that Eloquent was his only child.
Eloquent did not laugh, for she was going away.
Dada carried the parcel to the shop door and gave it to the footman. He put it in the carriage, and held out a thin silken cloak for the lady, which she put on. He covered her knees with a linen dust rug, and smiling and bowing she drove away.
Eloquent turned back into the shop with his father.
It seemed to have got very dark and gloomy again.
"Dada," he asked, "who is that lady?"
"That," said Mr Gallup, loudly and with no little pride, "is Mrs Ffolliot of Redmarley, the bride."
The customers were all listening, the four assistants were all listening.
Mr Gallup held out his hand to Eloquent, and together they went through the shop and upstairs into the sitting-room, that looked out upon the market-place.
"Dada, is she one of the Classes?" Eloquent inquired, nervously.
"I believe you, my boy," Mr Gallup responded jocosely, "very much so, she is; a regular out and outer."
His father went away chuckling, but Eloquent was much depressed.
He went and stood over against one of the portraits of John Bright and looked at him for help.
"Be just and fear not," said that statesman.
"All very well," thought Eloquent, "she didn't pat your cheek."
He went and sought counsel of Mr Gladstone, a youngish Mr Gladstone in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester: "At last, my friends, I have come amongst you . . . unmuzzled," said the legend underneath his portrait.
But Eloquent felt that this was just what he was not. He felt very muzzled indeed. All sorts of vague thoughts went surging through his brain that could find no expression in words.
"I do believe," he said desperately, "if she was to give the whisperingest little call, I'd be obliged to go . . . and so would you," he continued, shaking his head at Mr Gladstone, "you'd do just the same."
He felt that, in some inexplicable, subtly mysterious fashion, there was a kind of affinity between Mr Gladstone and Mrs Ffolliot.
Mr Gladstone would understand, and not be too hard upon him.
In the years that followed, he saw Mrs Ffolliot from time to time from the window or in the street, but never again did he come so close to her as to touch her.
Never did he see her, however, without that strange thrill of enthusiastic admiration; that dumb, inarticulate sense of having seen something entirely satisfying and delightful; satisfying for the moment only: he paid dearly for his brief joy in after hours of curious depression and an aching sense of emptiness and loss. She was so far away.
Sometimes she was driving with her husband, and little Eloquent wondered after they had passed what manner of man it could be who had the right to sit by her whenever he liked. He never had time to notice Mr Ffolliot, till one day he saw him in the carriage alone, and scrutinised him sternly. Long afterwards he read how some admirer of Lord Hartington had said that what he liked most about him was his "You-be-damnedness." The phrase, Eloquent felt, exactly described Mr Ffolliot; aloof, detached, a fastidious, fine gentleman to his finerer tips, entirely careless as to what the common people thought of him; not willingly conscious, unless rudely reminded of their existence, that there were any common people: such, Eloquent felt sure, was Mr Ffolliot's mental attitude, and he hated him.
Mr Ffolliot wore a monocle, and just at that time a new figure loomed large on the little boy's political horizon--a figure held up before him not for admiration, but reprobation--as a turncoat, an apostate, a real and menacing danger to the Cause dada had most