A Lost Leader. E. Phillips OppenheimЧитать онлайн книгу.
to be learned from the languid smile with which she recognized their presence. Upon Mannering, however, the cloud seemed already to have fallen. His eyebrows were set in a frown. He had the appearance of a man in some manner perplexed. He carried two telegrams, which he handed over to Borrowdean.
"A boy on a bicycle," he remarked, "is waiting for answers. Two telegrams at once is a thing wholly unheard of here, Borrowdean. You really ought not to have disturbed our postal service to such an extent."
Borrowdean smiled as he tore them open.
"I think," he said, "that I can guess their contents. Yes, I thought so. Can you send me to the station, Mannering?"
"I can—if it is necessary," Mannering answered. "Must you really go?"
Borrowdean nodded.
"I must be in the House to-night," he said, a little wearily. "Rochester is going for them again."
"You didn't take a pair?" Mannering asked.
"It isn't altogether that," Borrowdean answered, "though Heaven knows we can't spare a single vote just now. Rochester wants me to speak. We are a used-up lot, and no mistake. We want new blood, Mannering!"
"I trust that the next election," Mannering said, "may supply you with it. Will you walk round to the stables with me? I must order a cart for you."
"I shall be glad to," Borrowdean answered.
They walked side by side through the chestnut grove. Borrowdean laid his hand upon his friend's arm.
"Mannering," he said, slowly, "am I to take it that you have spoken your last word? I am to write my mission down a failure?"
"A failure without doubt, so far as regards its immediate object," Mannering assented. "For the rest, it has been very pleasant to see you again, and I only wish that you could spare us a few more days."
Borrowdean shook his head.
"We are better apart just now, Mannering," he said, "for I tell you frankly that I do not understand your present attitude towards life—your entire absence of all sense of moral responsibility. Are you indeed willing to be written down in history as a philanderer in great things, to loiter in your flower gardens, whilst other men fight the battle of life for you and your fellows? Persist in your refusal to help us, if you will, Mannering, but before I go you shall at least hear the truth."
Mannering smiled.
"Be precise, my dear friend. I shall hear your view of the truth!"
"I do not accept the correction," Borrowdean answered, quickly. "There are times when a man can make no mistake, and this is one of them. You shall hear the truth from me this afternoon, and when your days here have been spun out to their limit—your days of sybaritic idleness—you shall hear it again, only it will be too late. You are fighting against Nature, Mannering. You were born to rule, to be master over men. You have that nameless gift of genius—power—the gift of swaying the minds and hearts of your fellow men. Once you accepted your destiny. Your feet were firmly planted upon the great ladder. You could have climbed—where you would."
A curious quietness seemed to have crept over Mannering. When he answered, his voice seemed to rise scarcely above a whisper.
"My friend," he said, "it was not worth while!"
Borrowdean was almost angry.
"Not worth while," he repeated, contemptuously. "Is it worth while, then, to play golf, to linger in your flower gardens, to become a dilettante student, to dream away your days in the idleness of a purely enervating culture? What is it that I heard you yourself say once—that life apart from one's fellows must always lack robustness. You have the instincts of the creator, Mannering. You cannot stifle them. Some day the cry of the world to its own children will find its echo in your heart, and it may be too late. For sooner or later, my friend, the place of all men on earth is filled."
For a moment that somewhat cynical restraint which seemed to divest of enthusiasm Borrowdean's most earnest words, and which militated somewhat against his reputation as a public speaker, seemed to have fallen from him. Mannering, recognizing it, answered him gravely enough, though with no less decision.
"If you are right, Borrowdean," he said, "the suffering will be mine. Come, your time is short now. Perhaps you had better make your adieux to my niece and Mrs. Handsell."
They all came out into the drive to see him start. A curious change had come over the bright spring day. A grey sea-fog had drifted inland, the sunlight was obscured, the larks were silent. Borrowdean shivered a little as he turned up his coat-collar.
"So Nature has her little caprices, even—in paradise!" he remarked.
"It will blow over in an hour," Mannering said. "A breath of wind, and the whole thing is gone."
Borrowdean's farewells were of the briefest. He made no further allusion to the object of his visit. He departed as one who had been paying an afternoon call more or less agreeable. Clara waved her hand until he was out of sight, then she turned somewhat abruptly round and entered the house. Mannering and Mrs. Handsell remained for a few moments in the avenue, looking along the road. The sound of the horse's feet could still be heard, but the trap itself was long since invisible.
"The passing of your friend," she remarked, quietly, "is almost allegorical. He has gone into the land of ghosts—or are we the ghosts, I wonder, who loiter here?"
Mannering answered her without a touch of levity. He, too, was unusually serious.
"We have the better part," he said. "Yet Borrowdean is one of those men who know very well how to play upon the heartstrings. A human being is like a musical instrument to him. He knows how to find out the harmonies or strike the discords."
She turned away.
"I am superstitious," she murmured, with a little shiver. "I suppose that it is this ghostly mist, and the silence which has come with it. Yet I wish that your friend had stayed away from Blakely!"
Upstairs from her window Clara also was gazing along the road where Borrowdean had disappeared. And Borrowdean himself was puzzling over a third telegram which Mannering had carelessly passed on to him with his own, and which, although it was clearly addressed to Mannering, he had, after a few minutes' hesitation, opened. It had been handed in at the Strand Post-office.
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