Maria went to the Floral Hall. And she was seen there to great
advantage. She wore a new hat chosen for her by Ethel at the most
fashionable shop in the city; she distributed the prizes to the
Orphans' Guild in a manner which extorted praise from even the
diminished Gertrude; she didn't actually "say a few words," but her
good heart--speaking figuratively of course--and her motherly presence
spoke for her; and as Miss Heber-Knollys said, in felicitously
proposing a vote of thanks to the Mayoress on whose behalf the Mayor
responded, she had brought a ray of sunshine into the lives of those
who saw the sun too seldom.
This achievement was a facer for the designing Gertrude, also for the
antiquated Doctor Tremlett. On the other hand, it was a triumph for
Ethel and for the modern school of medicine. Horace, Doctor Cockburn,
was reinstated. Maria would still have felt safer with some one who
really understood the heart and its ways, but, as Ethel pointed out to
her, she would earn the admiration of everybody if she could manage to
postpone her really serious illness until the following year.
Maria, at any rate, was open to reason. For the sake of the general
life of the community she would do her best. But it was very hard upon
her; far harder than people realized. As she had once pathetically told
Josiah, "she hadn't been brought up to that kind of thing," to which
the Mayor promptly rejoined, "that he hadn't either, but he was as good
as some who had."
Education was what the Mayor called a flam. In the main it wasn't
prattical. He allowed that it was useful in certain ways and in
carefully regulated doses, but of late years it had been ridiculously
overdone and was in a fair way to ruin the country. Education didn't
agree with everybody. He knew a case in point.
A classical instance of schooling misapplied would always remain in his
mind. There were times when he brooded over this particular matter in
secret, for he never spoke of it openly. His youngest girl, upon whose
upbringing a fabulous sum had been lavished, had cast such a blot on
the family escutcheon that it was almost impossible to forgive her. It
was all very well for Ethel to talk of Sally's doings in Serbia. That
seemed the best place for people like her. Yet, as a matter of strict
equity, and Josiah was a just man, although a harsh one, he supposed
that presently he would have to do something in the matter.
Under the surface he was a good deal troubled by Sally. She was out of
his will and he had fully made up his mind to have nothing more to
do with her; she had had carte blanche in the matter of learning, and
the only use she had made of it was to disgrace him in the eyes of the
world.
All that, however, was before the war. And there was no doubt that the
war had altered things. Before the war he lived for money and worldly
reputation; but now that he was in the thick of the fight some of his
ideas had changed. Money, for instance, seemed to matter far less
than formerly; and he had come to see that the only kind of worldly
reputation worth having didn't depend upon externals. His success as a
public man had taught him that. It wasn't his fine house on The Rise,
or the fact that he had become one of the richest men in the city, that
had caused him to be unanimously invited to carry on for another year.
Other qualities had commended him. He didn't pretend to be what he was
not, and the people of the soundest judgment seemed to like him all the
better on that account.
He was beginning to see now that the case of Sally would have to be
reconsidered. In spite of the damnable independence which had always
been hers from the time she was as high as the dining-room table, there
was no doubt that she was now fighting hard for a cause worth fighting
for. He had not reached the point of telling Mossop to put her back in
his will, but the conviction was growing upon him that he would have to
do so.
At the same time it was going to hurt. He could have wished now that he
hadn't been quite so hasty in the matter. It was not his way to indulge
in vain regrets or to pay much attention to unsolicited advice, but it
seemed a pity that he had not listened to Mossop in the first instance.
This business of Sally, in a manner of speaking, would be in the nature
of a public climb down. And there had been one already.
As far as Melia and her husband were concerned his conscience pricked
him more than a little. At first it had gone sorely against the grain
to revoke the ban upon his contemptuously defiant eldest daughter
and his former barman. But once having done so, it had come suddenly
upon him that he had gone wrong in that affair from the outset. The
provocation had been great, but he had let his feelings master him.
Melia and Hollis were not exonerated. She ought to have shown more
respect for his wishes, and a man in the position of Hollis ought to
prove himself before he ventures to ask for his employer's daughter;
but, if he had to deal with the episode again, he felt, in the light of
later experience, that he would have acted differently.
However, by the end of November, Josiah had made up his mind to restore
Melia and Sally to his will. It was only a question of when he should
do so. But this was a matter in which his usual power of volition
seemed to desert him. In other affairs of life to decide on a thing was
at once to do it; but now he hesitated, putting off from day to day.
It was a dose of particularly disagreeable medicine that there seemed
no immediate need to swallow.
A day soon came, however, when he was rather bitterly to rue his
vacillation. One morning Josiah arrived at the City Hall at a quarter
to ten. A meeting of the Ways and Means Committee was called for a
quarter past and he had to take the chair in the Mayor's parlor. When
he entered the room he found the Town Clerk standing in front of a fire
of the Best Blackhampton Bright, a twinkle in his eye and a formidable
sheaf of documents in his hand.
"Good morning, Mr. Mayor." Perhaps a faintly quizzical greeting,
respectful though it was. But this shrewd dog Aylett, with a pair of
humorous eyes looking through gold-rimmed glasses which hung by a cord
from his neck, had a slightly quizzical manner with everybody. He knew
his value to the city of Blackhampton; he was the ablest Town Clerk it
had ever had.
"Mornin', Aylett," said his worship in that official voice which seemed
to get deeper and deeper at every meeting over which he presided.
"I suppose you've read your _Tribune_ this morning?" Aylett had an easy
chatty way with everybody from the Mayor down. He was so well used to
high affairs that he could be slightly jocular without impairing the
dignity of a grandee and without loss of his own.
"As a matter of fact I haven't," said the Mayor. "The girl forgot to
deliver it this morning at Strathfieldsaye. Don't know, Aylett, what
things are coming to in this city, I don't really. We'll have to have
an alteration if we are not going to lose the war altogether."
The Town Clerk smiled at this, and then he took the municipal copy of
the _Tribune_ from among other works of reference on a side table,
folded back the page and handed the paper to the Mayor. "That youngest
girl of yours has been going it."
It was an unfortunate piece of phrasing on the part of one so
accomplished as Aylett. Josiah started a little and then with an air of
rather grim anxiety proceeded to read the _Tribune_.
There was three quarters of a column devoted to the doings of Miss
Sarah Ann Munt; a sight which, with certain sinister recollections in
his mind, went some way to assure Josiah that his worst fears were
realized. But he had but to read a line or so to be convinced that
there was no ground for pessimism. Miss Sarah Ann Munt, it seemed, had
rendered such signal service to the Allied Cause that she had brought
great honor upon herself, upon a name highly and justly esteemed in the
city of Blackhampton, and even upon the country of her origin.
The _Tribune_ told the thrilling story of her deeds with pardonable
gusto. On the outbreak of war she had volunteered for service with the
Serbian Army. Owing to her great skill as a motor driver, for which
in pre-war days she had been noted, she had been attached in that
capacity to the Headquarters Staff. She had endured the perils and the
hardships of the long retreat; and her coolness, her daring and her
mother wit had enabled her to bring her car, containing the Serbian
Commander and his Chief of Staff, in safety through the enemy lines at
a moment when they had actually been cut off. "It is not too much to
say," declared the _Tribune_ whose language was official, "that the
story of Miss Munt's deeds in Serbia is one of the epics of the war.
By her own personal initiative she did much to avert a disaster of the
first magnitude. No single individual since the war began has rendered
a more outstanding service to the Allied Cause. She has already been
the recipient of more than one high decoration, and on page five will
be found an official photograph of her receiving yet another last week
in Paris from the hands of the Chief of the Republic."
Josiah felt a little dizzy as with carefully assumed coolness he turned
to page five. There, sure enough, was Sally, looking rather fine drawn
in her close-fitting khaki, but with that half-wicked down-looking
smile upon her that he knew so well. With her leggings, and her square
chin and her "bobbed" hair which hung upon her cheeks in side pieces
and gave her a resemblance to Joan of Arc she was like an exceedingly
handsome, but as they say in Blackhampton, a rather "gallus" boy.
The hussy! He couldn't help laughing at the picture of her, it was
so exactly how he best remembered her. The amused slightly defiant
You-Be-Damned air was so extraordinarily like her.
"Blame my cats!" said the Mayor.
For several minutes it was his only remark.