Mr Barnett did not rise.
He held between his hands such “teeming destinies,” he controlled in
the pursuit of his high mission so many various men, that his life
necessarily suffered from the tension of artificial effort.
He was the more inclined to relax upon those occasions when he felt
himself in the presence of friends who were bound to him by ties of
gratitude. That evening in Norwood such a temptation was enhanced by
the influence of a cosy room, soda water, spirits, a deeply padded
chair, two magazines, Scotch whisky, and all the atmosphere of
refinement.
He relaxed, I say, and a more truly lovable, because a more real Mr
Barnett shone outwards through the surface of the man: a Mr Barnett
not anxious for his accent or any other thing; a Mr Barnett interior,
domestic, and at ease.
In such a mood he saw no need to rise; but his courtesy did not
forsake him, nor the inbred habit of a man of the world. He lifted
himself some inches from the chair by a pressure of his left hand
and stretched out his right towards the owner of the house.
The high cosmopolitan sphere in which Mr Barnett had been formed is
naturally indifferent, as our eager English gentry also are, to the
conventions of the suburbs; but my readers will already have learnt
that nothing could offend Mr Burden more than a breach of the usages
of Norwood.
Mr Barnett’s attitude was at first incredible to him: to this
incredulity succeeded a burst of anger.
The late hour, the recent quarrel with his oldest friend, and,
doubtless, the approach of illness, might have betrayed Mr Burden
into an irrevocable step. He might have left the room without
speaking. He might even, so thoroughly was he put out, have manœuvred
for his guest’s departure by that process of persistent, patient
pressure which is called “kicking a man out of one’s house.” He might
have sworn—had not Cosmo, with an excellent comprehension of his
father’s petty vagaries, saved the position.
For Cosmo stepped out to greet his father warmly; he congratulated
him heartily on having been able to return in time; he told the
flurried merchant how long and anxiously the financier had waited;
with the pardonable exaggeration of filial care, he ante-dated
Mr Barnett’s advent and his own by a little over three hours; he
insinuated in every tone that nothing but the overwhelming importance
of his father’s judgment could have led Mr Barnett to so great an
effort.
Mr Burden was but partially appeased; he sat down in a stiff chair,
not his own, and faced Mr Barnett sternly as one might a witness in
a court; the Leader of Men returned his gaze with a beam of comatose
good nature. His head leaned slightly to the right, his upper eyelids
(which were double, as are those of the great Andean bird) dropped
deeply down, but from the little slit of prominent eye beneath a
liquid humour still gleamed. That humour played upon Mr Burden
steadily for some forty seconds, and then the voice spoke.
“I am ver’ happy to zee you, Mr Burten.”
A doubt, a disgusting suspicion, ran through Mr Burden’s mind;
it leapt into a formed phrase; he felt the words coming—but it
never reached his lips. He controlled himself during the pause
that followed, and, during that pause, it was most evident that Mr
Barnett’s vast organising mind was plunging deeper and deeper into
the baths of silence and recuperation.
When he spoke next, it was with eyes quite shut, and head bending
forward irregularly at intervals.
“About that fellow Âppott?” he said.
Mr Burden did not answer.
“That fellow Âppott,” Mr Barnett’s big head wagged slowly in
disapproval, “he is obstinate—but he is O.K. Alright. Aha? Not so?”
Mr Barnett groped with his right hand as though to lay it upon Mr
Burden’s knee; but, finding in the way the arm of the deep chair on
which he sat, he patted that affectionately instead, and closed his
eyes again, and was silent.
The younger and more active, though lesser, mind of Cosmo, came to
the aid of Mr Barnett, whom fatigue, coupled with his remaining
difficulties in the English tongue, had led into some vagueness of
expression. Cosmo was the better fitted to speak, from the fact that
Mr Barnett, earlier in the evening, when his mood had been for some
reason more sprightly, had fully explained how and why Mr Abbott was
necessary to the M’Korio.
“Father,” said Cosmo, rapidly, “you know how very few men there are
in London who know one subject; Mr Abbott really does know the Delta.
That is the whole point. But I am not sure that Mr Barnett quite
understands....”
[Illustration: MR BARNETT THOROUGHLY AT HOME]
Mr Barnett smiled and grunted; he was following, but indistinctly.
“Of course you know the difficulty, and I suppose I know it too. It
all comes from what is finest in his nature; but the suspicion is
intolerable, father. And that is another reason why he ought to come
in.”
After this lucid sequence of ideas, Cosmo, who was standing with
his hand on the table looking anxiously at his father across the
lamplight, said, with real earnestness, “We _must_ get him to come
in.”
Mr Barnett opened his eyes rather widely and suddenly, and said:
“Ah! Yes! He môst come in. That is so.”
He nodded wisely; then, had not breeding forbidden him, he would have
gone to sleep.
He fought against the temptation successfully, straightened himself
a little in his chair, and pursued the attack upon Mr Burden in
a manner the efficiency of which was only marred by his extreme
drowsiness. There was in his manner that which should connote so high
a respect for Mr Burden’s powers as to permit of confidence. He leant
forward heavily and pressed his thumb against the merchant’s ribs,
not as do lighter men and less consistent, with a jerk or dig, but
with a continuous pressure such as one uses against an electric bell.
When he had done this, Mr Barnett said, with increasing wakefulness,
and a kind of mock sadness in his voice:
“Sômetimes they do nôt come in.... No? ... Then we ...” And Mr
Barnett made with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand a
peculiar screwing motion, a gesture native to the conqueror; having
done so, he concluded: “we môst use pres-sure,” and, as he said these
words, he got up and stood steadily upon his feet.
It was a thing remarkable and arresting to the eye to see the fumes
of lethargy pass from that great mind as mist does from the face of a
mountain at morning; by an effort of the will it had thrown off sleep
and the blessing of repose. The power of concentration had returned
with every word during the last five minutes; the accent had grown
purer; the attention more decisive. Mr Barnett noted the hour, he
noted the cast of Mr Burden’s face in the shade of the light, and
interpreted it to mean a comprehension of his scheme. He exaggerated,
I believe, the intelligence of his host and colleague.
He took his hat from the table and put it firmly and ceremoniously
upon his head, as was his custom before he left a room; he took
up his cane, the top of which was of lead covered with gold; he
buttoned round him a great coat of fur, and, being so prepared,
went out through the drawing-room into the hall. There, with great
emphasis, he said good-night.
Cosmo not only opened the door for him, but leant his right hand
upon his shoulder, to afford support to a man older and perhaps
more infirm than himself. He so supporting him, they went down the
drive together, to where, at the gate, stood the electric brougham,
throwing great cones of light upon the thick air of the small hours:
it was the first in London to bear upon its panels a small coat of
arms.
As they went, Mr Barnett spoke twice. The first thing he said was:
“You should have a drive up herein. So a carriage can come. There is
no good if a carriage cannot come.” When he had said this, some rapid
process of thought led him to another topic, and he continued: “Your
father is a very fônny man.”
Cosmo although he had received so much wider a training than his
father, retained a trace, perhaps hereditary, of those conventions
which I have already condemned. He felt the colour come into his
face; but the darkness screened him, and his knowledge of the world
restored him his balance in a moment.
“He’ll be all right,” he said cheerfully. He opened the carriage
door (not without the thanks of his chief) and tenderly arranged a
warm rug around Mr Barnett’s knees. The young man in livery, hired
for such purposes, stood by in somnolent respect. Then they bade
each other good-night, and the last word Cosmo heard that evening as
he turned back towards the house was the great and comforting word
“Hôme,” rolled out by Mr Barnett to his servant in the accent of
command.
When Cosmo had re-entered the house and approached, with great
reluctance, the room whose atmosphere still seemed full of failure,
he found that his father had gone to bed, and he was glad; for, like
most men possessed of wisdom, he trusted half his fortunes to the
influence of other men’s sleep.
* * * * *
If the effect of a misunderstanding or a quarrel were immediate, with
what rapidity would not the tragedies of the world develop! With what
certitude could one not foresee, and perhaps provide against, the
climax of an evil fortune.
If things led on from logical step to step, what simple stories would
crowd the world. Then indeed the epic and the lyrical, which we
perpetually seek in fiction, would divert us in the common affairs of
our own lives.
But the real world around us, the world one corner of which it is
here my business to describe, is not arranged in that fashion. A
crime, a miscalculation, will produce consequences, not immediate
but ultimate. Suspicions confirmed, quarrels brought perhaps to the
point of violence, seem rather to sink into the mind and to make a
soil there, than to bear their full fruit at once; so that, when the
catastrophe falls, it is commonly at an insignificant and nearly
always at an unsuspected moment.
So it was with what I can only call the tragedy of my friend.
It was inevitable that when his even, narrow, and placid mind should
finally come face to face with the broad and rugged power of Mr
Barnett, sharp pain, and possibly misfortune, should follow from such
a meeting. The unhappy accident of the visit to Mr Abbott, and of a
couple of hours delay, had brought those two minds in the presence
one of the other; and a very grave hour had passed. But so are men
made, that this experience led to nothing at the time. A night’s
long sleep, the activities of the following day, sufficed to blur
the image. Is it not Seneca who tells us that our own judgment is
qualified by the expressed judgment of others? The public character
of Mr Barnett recovered its place in Mr Burden’s mind. Many days at
his business, a sudden change in the weather, a small but lucky
investment, a very active quarrel with his cook, who demanded and
received instant dismissal—these good and evil things soon put the
misfortune of Mr Barnett’s visit into its true perspective. It
produced no visible, certainly no deplorable, result; what it did do
was to leave Mr Burden all ready for further irritation, and for a
growing misconception of his surroundings, until at last the great
misfortune fell, after apparently the most trivial of accidents. The
heart of his confidence had been eaten out; it held by the outer
shell alone, and a touch was enough to make it crumble. But, for the
moment, his faith held firm.
Moreover, if Mr Burden had been inclined to let the incident
weigh upon him Cosmo’s efforts alone would have dispersed such an
inclination. He returned home quite regularly day after day; he
entertained his father with a thousand things. It was not till a
week had passed that he permitted so much as a letter concerning the
affairs of the Company to come under the old man’s eyes. When such
a letter did arrive, he had carefully provided that it should be a
short note of congratulation from a country gentleman, a distant
acquaintance, a man of great possessions, wholly ignorant of the
Delta and of most other things; one that hoped, if all went well,
to be a shareholder, and who very warmly said so in his letter to
Norwood.
At intervals of several days business details, of no great
importance, but such as gradually reawakened in Mr Burden the old
interest, began to come to his table; later he dined with Mr Harbury
and met a very charming American actress, the manager of the Banque
des Pyrénées, Lord John Mackintosh and his wife, and Lothingbury
Grail, a gentleman who had written verses. They talked of Art.
A week later Cosmo and he lunched with Lord Benthorpe at Cosmo’s
club, and the very next day, walking in the best of moods towards
the City, they met by accident Mr Barnett himself, fresh with the
morning, and in the most sympathetic of moods.
And all this while around Mr Burden, in the papers, in the
conversation of men, the M’Korio grew and grew. The season continued,
the debates in Parliament languished, the heat increased, and the
spirit of the great African River ran through the veins of London.
The prospectus was drafted: many little inconclusive conversations
were held; in a word, by all those small preliminaries which
are necessary to a great and worthy enterprise, Mr Burden was
re-introduced to the routine he knew. His active interest returned.
But deeper down the pall lay over his mind, and could not be lifted.
The struggle between these two things, his fatal lack of
comprehension, his eager and patriotic pride, has been hitherto the
matter of my record. Alas! the victory of the former must now lead on
to my conclusion!
* * * * *
Mr Burden permitted his colleagues to undertake the necessary
details, and he was even glad that they should look after such
wearisome business. The registration of the Company, the finding
of Brokers for it, and of Bankers, and of Solicitors, would have
interfered with what he honestly believed to be his own engrossing
labours in connection with his trade.
He was profoundly thankful that no further word was spoken of Mr
Abbott; but it was the thankfulness of respite, not of reprieve. He
saw before him an inevitable day, and he dreaded it. He consoled
himself with guesses; he tried to forget that his great friendship
had turned into an instrument—an instrument which could wound as well
as work for him.
Eddies of uncertainty swirled in his mind. The Bankers were as firm
as the Bank of England, the Brokers were of immense respectability,
the very name of the Solicitors seemed like a part of the
Constitution; but all these things did but increase his disease—they
seemed to him to be at the same time England, and not England. It
was as though a man should be given a picture framed in a solid
familiar frame—a frame suited to hold the portrait of his father—and
hung before his table; and as though, in such a setting, the picture
within constantly shifted and changed, now terrifying, now evil, now
grotesque, now merely irritant, but always a nightmare of discord. In
this mood a critical day found him—the day when his presence in the
new offices was demanded to hear the prospectus read, and to pass it
finally for printing.
The new offices were in Broad Street. Their position I have described
in an earlier part of this book; with their magnificence perhaps most
of my readers are acquainted. I have but to recall the two plaster
lions that guard the staircase, symbolising, it is believed, the
majesty of our race; the splendid negro, in Vienna ware of life-size,
holding the lamp in the central gallery, and clothed as to his middle
with a belt of ostrich feathers—whose ring of white against the
shining darkness of his skin naturally led on to the row of smiling
teeth above and the very conspicuous eyes. This masterpiece, which
Mr Barnett had accepted long ago in lieu of payment of a debt, was
already familiar to London—little reproductions of it were to be
seen in the shops of the West End—the symbols of the M’Korio. The
interiors were worthy of such apparatus. The doors of the main rooms
were of oak; the doorplates and the locks were Marie Antoinette
bronze gilding, embossed, single and reversible. It was a matter of
pride to the Promoters that no two were exactly alike. A large male
black cat, bearing round its neck a silver collar, added the note of
domesticity, and was already familiar to Britain through the personal
paragraphs of the daily press. The whole was rendered complete by a
porter, than whom nothing more splendid could serve a sovereign in
arms, whether in London or Berlin.
[Illustration: THE PORTER OF THE M’KORIO’S DELTA DEVELOPMENT CO.
(FROM A GROUP)]
This man was a Swedish Protestant; in height he was fully six
feet seven, his hair was of the colour of tow, his eyes were of a
faded blue, his face was white and yellow; in intellect, while not
deficient, he was of a deliberation which admirably suited the nature
of his employment; nor could any length of hours passed in the public
gaze at the Main Entrance weary the Northern steadfastness of his
mind. Proud of his uniform, content with his wages, enormous in his
manner as in his dimensions, he was a further and a crowning proof
of Mr Barnett’s instinct for what those adjuncts are, which cheer on
to success the energies of an Imperial race.
I would I had the space or leisure to deal at further length with
this remarkable and simple figure; indeed, long before Mr Burden’s
death, it was my intention to devote to the portrayal of this
porter’s life and character that literary skill which has now been
turned into another, a far graver, and I fear a more monotonous
channel. I had intended to relate exactly his career. How, stranded
in the docks of London, this towering Scandinavian had obtained
employment as a Life-guard; how, deserting from his Corps on account
of the bullying to which he was subjected by his comrades, he found
his way into the Metropolitan Police. Dismissed from this force for
drunkenness, he became a chucker-out in a Music Hall, in which post
his grievous muscular weakness, universal in men of his type, soon
proved him unfit to deal with that athletic youth which frequents
such haunts in the hey-day of its vigour; how, finally, while
posing as a giant in a Fair, a position he occupied in return for
his bare food, he was tempted to break his contract at the prospect
of a higher wage. At the persuasion of Mr Barnett himself, he fled
by night, accepted the service and livery of the M’Korio, and so
reached the culmination of his career.
His interesting personality has detained my pen too long, I must
return to Mr Burden entering the Great Room, where he should find his
colleagues on the day when the Prospectus in its final form was to be
passed for Press.
* * * * *
Mr Burden had played a great part in the world. He had been Sheriff
in the early eighties; he had been Treasurer to the Bowmakers’
Company, and had drawn up in that capacity the scheme for endowing a
new Chair of Comparative Religion at Dublin, a city sadly in need of
broadening its outlook upon God; he had been called as an honoured
witness before many Royal Commissions, and had sat on the Committee
for the Adjustment of Port Dues; he had even enjoyed, now for some
years, the honourable title of Justice of the Peace; and on the
occasion of the Mansion House dinner, but eight months before, he had
sat between the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the moment and some
other member of the Cabinet whose name I cannot recall.
He was therefore not unfamiliar with the honourable pomp wherewith we
surround the conduct of Empire; he was accustomed to the scenes and
the personalities which accompany the furtherance of our Fate.
As he had entered daily deeper and deeper into the machinery by which
that fate is advanced, its complexity had overwhelmed his simple mind.
I have sufficiently described the vortex of conflicting moods into
which his soul had been drawn; yet must that whirlpool continually
appear in this short story of his end, for without some sympathy
with his grievous torment a view quite false to his nature might be
conveyed. He could not comprehend.
It must be so. The past and the name of such men are necessary
to the grist of expansion; but expansion and the newer kind of
responsibilities kill them. So doubtless Venice in the sixteenth,
Spain in the seventeenth, Holland in the eighteenth centuries were
compelled to use, and destroy in using, what had been their most
national type. It was the price they paid for the varied glory they
proceeded to achieve. My friend was a necessary sacrifice, I know;
but he was my friend. The victim moves me.
Consider him here in this great modern room—how much it was a
torture-place for him.
He and they were ending their work. That day the last stone would be
laid; yet was he further than ever from repose.
He and the three other men before him were now occupied in the actual
work of forging a new province. The dignity of such an occasion
should have touched him (he thought) more profoundly than it could
his colleagues, whose lives had been spent in no other atmosphere.
But, alas! unrest, most cogent, most bewildering, robbed that great
occasion of any note of the solemn. Reality and unreality mixed in
his mind continually. The world, so long a quite familiar thing, grew
unfamiliar to him, more and more with every hour. The constraint
which he felt in Mr Barnett’s presence; the certitude he had that
Mr Barnett was a genius and a maker of England; the natural awe
wherewith he regarded Lord Benthorpe’s experience; the astonishing
phenomenon whereby Lord Benthorpe nevertheless showed himself purely
passive; Harbury’s manifestly clear and decisive intelligence,
coupled with his complete subservience—all these contradictions put
his mind into a whirl.
Full of an aged complaint, not very distant from despair, he sat him
down wearily in the vacant chair set for him. It was of the kind
known to the trade as “Dutch Mediæval Easy”; fashioned of American
hickory so treated as to resemble old English oak, and handsomely
upholstered in a green imitation of Spanish leather.
He noticed Mr Harbury’s quiet, impressive face; Lord Benthorpe’s
somewhat nervous ease; above all, Mr Barnett’s powerful ill-dressed
figure, sitting at random, bent over the scattered papers before
him; and in his heart he groaned, remembering his fortune risked,
the friendship of his life in jeopardy, and his hopeless see-saw of
misunderstanding.
As usual, it was Mr Harbury who spoke first; as usual, he spoke
rapidly and clearly.
“I think, gentlemen,” he said, “there is very little for us to do
... Payleys will bank for us, as you know. Charles & Charles will
naturally do our legal work. The Directors I think we know.” He
smiled as he said this, a slight conventional smile which fluttered
on the face of Lord Benthorpe, and died on that of Mr Burden. “All
we have to do is to read over the prospectus for the last time.” He
sighed, and there was a pause. Then he turned to Mr Burden, saying:
“Perhaps Mr Burden can suggest something.”
Mr Burden frowned solemnly. How often at his breakfast-table, when he
opened his morning’s letters, had he not come upon such documents,
prospectuses—the bricks and stones of Dominion? How often had he not
held them before him, judging them steadily through his spectacles of
gold? How rarely had he been misled by the false; how rarely had he
despised the true? His investments had not been many. The expansion
of his business had absorbed the greater part of his savings. But
such ventures as he had made were safe enough. He could remember
but one that had failed, and that was through no fault of his own
judgment, or of that of his directorate. It was the Foreign Office
which, as usual, had failed to put its foot down, and had permitted
the ruffianly Alemami of Yollabù to repudiate his most solemn
engagements. On all these things Mr Burden pondered in a confused
silence; then he said, in that measured tone which marks the man of
affairs:
“I can remember nothing that needs alteration, Mr Harbury; nothing
material.”
Mr Harbury suggested that they should read the draft of the
prospectus immediately, and that if anything occurred to any of them
for the last time he should mention it.
Mr Harbury had not got very far into the body of the work when Lord
Benthorpe stopped him at the word “exploitation.” It seemed to him a
foreign word, and it had a flavour of something grasping and unjust
about it. He hoped that no atmosphere of that kind would mar the
effect of the prospectus.
Mr Harbury was evidently interested, and asked Mr Burden’s opinion.
Mr Burden, who had been lost in thought, gazing at the great map of
the M’Korio Delta that hung on the wall, patched with yellow for
gold and with grey for coal, looked round somewhat flurried, and said
that he had nothing to say.
Lord Benthorpe suggested the word “development,” but Mr Harbury
pointed out that the word already occurred at the head of the sheet
in the phrase “M’Korio Delta Development Company.”
Lord Benthorpe murmured:
“True, true.”
After about ten minutes of discussion, the word “exploitation” was
allowed to stand.
* * * * *
Such are the limits of a modern book, that it is impossible for me to
give at full length every remark that was made during this historic
meeting. I abandon the attempt with reluctance. So many subtle shades
of meaning were thrashed out between these four men; so powerfully
did their various characters come into play; so many aspects of the
forces that build up new colonies appeared in them, that the subject
possesses an irresistible fascination to the writer, and perhaps to
the reader of this chronicle. It is a fascination which they must
resist: each in his own sphere.
Briefly, then, to mention only the more important matters, the word
“but” in the fifth line was changed to “and”; the Anglo-Saxon word
“employee” was substituted for the printer’s “employé”; and (a very
striking example of Mr Barnett’s grasp of the public pulse), the word
“lagoon” (though it had become familiar to the Island race in the
last two months) was changed to “lake.”
The whole discussion did not absorb more than an hour and a half of
their time; and, at the close of it, Mr Barnett rang for a servant.
He was that man of magnificence whom we have seen: a giant amenable
and of service, he brought in wine and sandwiches upon a tray. The
four men ate and drank, relaxing for a moment their attention to
business, and touching upon lighter things. Three-quarters of an hour
was all that Mr Barnett allowed for this pleasant interval: he rang
again, and their discussion was resumed. They went carefully over all
the points which had previously been decided, deleted a comma after
the words “brightest gem,” and put a full stop after “in the British
crown.”
At last, as the afternoon was drawing on, one or the other would rise
at intervals, stroll to the window with his hands in his pockets and
gaze out, or saunter to the fireplace, and lean upon the mantel-piece
looking into the glass above it. Conversation of a more general kind
occasionally relieved the strain and tension of their great task.
Lord Benthorpe had quite an interesting argument with Mr Harbury
upon the value of the inter-colonial postal system, and Mr Burden
slept, for perhaps five or six minutes, towards the close of the
afternoon.
By four o’clock, however, there remained nothing to decide, and Mr
Barnett suggested that he himself should read over the prospectus for
the last time, that they might have a final opportunity of touching
upon any matters that had not hitherto occurred to them.
* * * * *
Outside in Broad Street, men passed and repassed, and most of them
glanced up at that great window. There were many of the shrewdest,
and many of the most solid, who envied the little group within; and
even the great run of people, the crowd which turns the curving lane
to a river through the middle hours of the day, felt the magic of
what was passing behind those walls.
There were some random enthusiasts—vague, belated democrats from an
earlier age—who were filled with sudden anger as they considered
invincible powers of evil forging, in that room above, the chains
which were to bind a new country. To these the names of Benthorpe and
Burden were the names of implacable fiends; oppressors of humanity,
but oppressors of such more than human genius, that humanity could do
nothing against their power.
On the top of a passing omnibus a father of the name of Bailey, said
to his son, who sat beside him:
“You see that window? Those are the M’Korio offices.”
He wagged his head wisely and said:
“It’s a big thing,” and the expression upon his face was at once
illuminate and reverent; that of a familiar but devoted worshipper
at the shrine of some god. The boy, careless as all boys are of all
religions, said, “Oh,” and the ’bus rolled on.
Even the policemen and other poor men, who might have no share in
these high things, felt the awe of what was toward. The hawkers and
the newspaper boys, members of a rank where finance is forgotten, yet
remembered England, and felt a pride of their own in the venture upon
which these four men had entered; nor is there to-day any great city
in the world, save London, where every citizen can forget envy and
the differences of wealth in the passion of patriotism.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Mr Barnett, within, was reading the prospectus for the
last, and, if I remember rightly, the fifth time.
He held the paper down on the table by the weight of his large left
hand, and read it through most carefully; the volume of his voice
was emphasised by the slight guttural accent and the broad vowels
which alone betrayed his foreign experience.
It was a peculiarity of his—common to most men of dominant
character—that he suffered no interruption: a chance remark from
Mr Harbury, an interjection from Lord Benthorpe passed by totally
unheeded. His voice, slowly proceeding from word to word, or jolting
at the stops, went steadily over the other men’s remarks, and crushed
them as a great stone roller crushes clods in its going. It had
also this in common with the roller, that its pace was even. He
emphasised no syllables; every letter—contrary to our modern English
usage—was pronounced; and this, in words such as “undesirability,”
“advantageous,” or “irrecognisable” produced an effect both rich and
strange.
When he had finished reading, he smoothed the papers out, gathered
them up, and sighed as over a thing completed. He rose, and the three
others with him; and you may say that one of the greatest days in the
recent history of our country had gloriously ended.
“Not once or twice,” as someone says somewhere, “in our rough island
story, the path of duty was the road to glory.”
* * * * *