Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 3, 2025
As Japhet proceeded Sir Winterton's handsome face had grown ruddier and ruddier; when Japhet finished, he sat still through the hubbub, but his hand twitched and he clutched the elbow of his chair tightly. The platform collectively looked uncomfortable. The chairman he was Green, the linen-draper in High Street glanced uneasily at Sir Winterton and then whispered in his ear.
Making a friendly group with their rivals in the ante-room, they were able to forget the little fretful man who paced up and down, carefully avoiding Sir Winterton's eye, but asserting by the obstinate pose of his head and the fierce pucker on his brow that he had done no more than his duty in asking a plain answer to a plain question, and that on Sir Winterton's head, not on his, lay the consequences of evasion.
Sir Winterton's answer was not in the same words, but entirely to the same effect. "I've answered that question once, and I won't answer it again," he said. Then came the tumult, and after that a dull unenthusiastic ending, and the drive off through a grinning crowd, which enjoyed Sir Winterton's fury and added to it by a few hateful cries of "Where's Susy Sinnett?"
Sir Winterton's predominant desires, to do the handsome thing and to meet with pleasant looks, evidently had played a large part. At last his patience gave out and Tom was prosecuted; when arrested, Tom had tried blackmail; Sir Winterton was not to be bullied, and Tom's speech from the dock was no more than an outburst of defeated malice.
All Sir Winterton's relatives, friends, acquaintances, and dependents knew that well. Sir Winterton's honour and temper had never been so wounded as over that affair. By Japhet's hand it was dragged into light again; the odious thing became once more the gossip of Henstead, once more a disgusting topic which it was impossible wholly to ignore at Moors End.
May laughed at such scenes half-a-dozen times in the first week of her stay at Henstead. "Is he so very important to us?" she asked of Foster. He answered her in a whisper behind a fat hand, "His house is only a couple of miles from Sir Winterton's, and Lady Mildmay's been civil. He employs a matter of two hundred men up at the mills yonder." "The position's very critical, isn't it, then?"
Did gentlemen need to have the proper thing pointed out to them? Did they not see it for themselves and do it? Nay, one might look for more than the mere naked proper thing; from a gentleman the handsome thing was to be expected, and that of his own motion. There could, in Sir Winterton's view, be no doubt of what was in this case the handsome thing.
The Dean, resolved to risk Sir Winterton's anger in Sir Winterton's interest, did something; he wrote covertly to Jimmy Benyon at the Bull, begging him to be riding on the Henstead road at ten o'clock the next morning; the Dean would take a walk and the pair would meet, as it was to seem, accidentally; nothing had been said to Sir Winterton, nothing was to be said at present to Mr. Quisanté.
Sir Winterton's mind had need of categories, and was best not burdened with the complexities of an individual. But Jimmy was not so wise. "I don't think she cares a hang about politics, except so far as Quisanté's concerned in them," he said. Sir Winterton looked more puzzled still. "Nothing's any good unless he keeps his health," he murmured.
"And how got he the ear of the Earl," said my grandfather, "not having the sign?" "In for a penny in for a pound," was Winterton's motto, and ae lie with him was father to a race. "Luckily for him," replied he, "some of the serving-men kent him as being in Glencairn's service, so they took him to their master."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking