Ferrier had been twenty-seven years in the House of Commons; his
chief life was there, had always been there; outside that maimed and
customary pleasure he found, besides, a woman now white-haired. To
rule--to lead that House had been the ambition of his life. He had
earned it; had scorned delights for it; and his powers were at
their ripest.
Yet the intrigue, as he knew, was already launched that might, at the
last moment, sweep him from his goal. Most of the men concerned in it he
either held for honest fanatics or despised as flatterers of the
mob--ignobly pliant. He could and would fight them all with good courage
and fair hope of victory.
But Lucy Marsham's son!--that defection, realized or threatened, was
beginning now to hit him hard. Amid all their disagreements of the past
year his pride had always refused to believe that Marsham could
ultimately make common cause with the party dissenters. Ferrier had
hardly been able to bring himself, indeed, to take the disagreements
seriously. There was a secret impatience, perhaps even a secret
arrogance, in his feeling. A young man whom he had watched from his
babyhood, had put into Parliament, and led and trained there!--that he
should take this hostile and harassing line, with threat of worse, was a
matter too sore and intimate to be talked about.
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