A MAN OF BUSINESS
Behold us all engaged in laying the foundation stone of the Memorial
Hall, which was to be the most imposing feature, if not the most useful
part, of the great Driver Institute. At least--not quite all of us. Lady
Sarah had begun, by now, her habit of making long sojourns at Bath,
returning to Fillingford Manor from time to time on visits. These were
usually arranged to coincide with Jenny's absences--in London or on the
Riviera--but one had not been arranged to coincide with the laying of
Jenny's foundation stone. And Mrs. Jepps was not there--although she had
been invited to have the honor of meeting His Royal Highness. There
Jenny had to accept defeat. But all the rest gathered round her from
borough and from county--Fillingford stiff but friendly, the Aspenicks
as friendly as if they had never been stiff, Dormer forgetful of his
injuries, Alison to bless the undertaking, Lord and Lady Lacey, fresh
back from their honeymoon, Cartmell--and Sir John Bindlecombe! He was
not actually Sir John yet, but His Royal Highness--who did his part
excellently, but confided wistfully to Cartmell that it was a splendid
hunting morning--was the bearer of a certain gracious intimation which
made us give the Mayor and Chairman of the Reception Committee brevet
rank at once. Sir John, then, held the mortar, while Jenny herself
handed the silver-gilt trowel. His Royal Highness well and truly laid
the stone, making thereafter a very pleasant little speech, concerning
the interest which his Family took and had always taken in institutes,
and the achievements and sterling British qualities of the man we were
there to commemorate, the late Mr. Nicholas Driver of Breysgate Priory.
It had been my privilege to coach His Royal Highness in the latter
subject, and he did full justice to my tuition. That done, he added a
few graceful words of his own concerning the munificent lady who stood
by his side, and the men of Catsford cheered Jenny till they were
hoarse. Amyas Lacey and Bindlecombe jumped forward to lead the cheers,
and four or five eminent men of science, whom I had contrived to induce
to come down, to add to the glory of the occasion, joined in with a
will. After that--luncheon for us, dinner for half the population; and a
brass band and a procession to conduct His Royal Highness back to the
station. His way lay past Mrs. Jepps's window; so I hope that she saw
him after all--without a stain on her principles!
"That's done, anyhow!" said Jenny. "Now the real work can go ahead!"
The next morning after this eventful day she dismissed me--summarily and
without warning.
"You must go, Austin," she told me. "I've been very selfish, and I'm
very ignorant. Of course I realized that your books are very clever,
though I don't understand them, but till I heard what those great
pundits you brought down said about you, I didn't know what I was doing.
You mustn't waste your time writing notes and doing accounts for a
provincial spinster."
"And are you going to write the notes and do the accounts yourself?" I
asked. "Or is Chat?"
"I'm going to pension Chat; she's got a horrid cough, poor thing, and
will do much better in a snug little villa at the seaside. I've got my
eye on one for her. I shall get a smart young woman, who dresses nicely,
looks pretty, and knows something about frocks and millinery--which last
necessary accomplishment of a lady's private secretary you have never
even tried to acquire."
"Dear me, no more I have! It never occurred to me before. I left it to
Chat! Do you think I could learn it now?"
"I've the very greatest doubts about it," answered Jenny, deceitfully
grave. "Go away, and write more books." She shook her head at me
reproachfully. "To think you never told me what I was doing!"
"I suppose you're aware that you pay me four hundred pounds a year?"
"So did my father. I suppose he knew what the proper salary was."
"But you don't know perhaps how much I've made out of these marvelous
books in the last four years? It amounts to the sum of twenty-seven
pounds, four shillings, and twopence. Your new secretary will tell you
in a minute how much that works out at per annum."
"Goodness!" murmured Jenny. "Oh, but, of course, I should----"
"Of course you'd do nothing of the kind! Time has consecrated my claim
to be overpaid for inefficient services--but I won't be pensioned off
into a villa with Chat! Here I stay--or out I go--to a garret and
starvation!"
"And fame!"
"Oh, humbug! As for my work, you know I've more time here than I want."
"You really won't go? I shall have the clever girl, you know--for the
notes and the accounts!"
"Have the girl, and be--satisfied with that!"
"You really refuse to leave me, Austin?"
"This is my home," I said. "Here I stay till I'm turned out."
She came to me and put her arm through mine. "If this is your home,
nobody shall turn you out--neither before my death nor after it. As long
as you live, the Old Priory is there for you. Even you can't refuse
that?"
"No, I won't refuse that. Let me stop in the Old Priory and do the odd
jobs."
She pressed my arm gently. "It would have been very curious to have
nobody to talk to about things--especially about the old things." Her
voice shook a little. "Very curious--and very desolate, Austin!"
It is now a good many years since we had that conversation--and we have
never had another like it. I must plead guilty to one or two books, but
I manage to save a little of Jenny's work from the clutches of the
clever girl, and old Cartmell is on the shelf--so I get some of his; and
still I dwell in the little Old Priory under the shadow of big Breysgate
on the hill above. Changes have come elsewhere. There are children at
Oxley Lodge; the succession is prosperously--and indeed amply--secured.
Mrs. Jepps has departed this life--stubborn to the last in her protest;
a donor, who was, and insisted on remaining, anonymous, has founded a
Jepps Scholarship at the Institute "as a mark of respect for her
honorable life and consistent high principle"; I am inclined to hope
that Mrs. Jepps is not permitted to know who that donor was. Lady Sarah
is gone, too, and Alison has been promoted to a suffragan bishopric. But
over us at Breysgate no change passes, save the gentle change of the
revolving years--unless it be that with every year Jenny's sway
increases. Down in Catsford they have nicknamed her "The Empress." The
seat of empire is at Breysgate; by her proconsuls she governs the
borough, Oxley, even Fillingford Manor; for though its rigid master has
never become her friend, has no more passed than he has fallen short of
the limits of punctilious courtesy which he accepted, yet in all
business matters he leans more and more on her. So her power spreads,
and will increase yet more when, in due course, Lacey and Margaret take
possession of the Manor. The despotism is veiled; she is only First
Citizen, like Augustus himself. She will grow no richer--"There is more
than enough for them after I am gone"--and pours back into the town and
the countryside all that she receives from them--_panem et
circenses_--and better things than that. The Institute is even such a
model to all institutes as Bindlecombe would have it; his dream of its
broadening into a university is an openly avowed project now. No wonder
that by public subscription they have placed a portrait of her in the
Memorial Hall, facing the picture of Nicholas Driver which she herself
presented. From where she hangs, she can see the old roof of Hatcham
Ford, surrounded and dwarfed by the great buildings that she has
erected. The painter of Jenny's portrait never saw the Eleanor Lacey at
Fillingford Manor--indeed it has gone from its old place, and is to be
found somewhere in a cupboard, as I suspect--but the likeness is
indubitably there, all undesigned. You see it in the firm lips and jaw,
in the straight brows on the pale face, above all in the hazel eyes, so
bright and yet profound. Eleanor Lacey had little luck after her
luckless flirtation. Fortune has been kinder to Jenny. She has a full
life, a good life, a very useful one. The story has grown old; the name
of Octon is merged; time has obliterated well-nigh all the tracks she
made in her evening flight from Hatcham Ford.
Yet not in her heart; there is no obliteration there, but rather an
indelible stamp; it may be covered up--it cannot be sponged or scratched
out. For her, Leonard is not forgotten; he triumphs. He lives again in
the son of Margaret his daughter; in the person of that son--his
grandson--he is to reign where he was spurned. That is the triumph of
the scheme she made--and to her it is Leonard's triumph. In her eyes her
own triumphs are little beside that.
"My day is done," she said to me once. "Bad it was, I suppose, and God
knows that it was short! But it was my day, and it is over." But she did
not speak in sorrow. "I am content--and at peace." She broke into a
smile. "Don't think of me as a woman any more. Think of me as just a man
of business!"
A man of business she is--and a very fine one; tactful and conciliatory,
daring and subtle. But not a woman? Never was there more a woman since
the world began--never one who leaned more on her woman's power, nor
turned the arts of woman more to practical account. She has had many
wooers; Dormer returned to the charge three or four times, till at last
he fell back--in a mood little above resignation--on Eunice Aspenick; we
have had an ambitious young merchant from Catsford, a curate or two, and
one splendid aspirant, a former brother-officer of Lacey's, a man of
great name and station. All went away with the same answer--but all were
sent away friends, praisers of Jenny, convinced, I think, that they had
only just failed and that no other man could have come so near success.
There lies her instinct, and she cannot help using it--sometimes for her
purposes, sometimes for her instinctive pleasure, which is still to lose
no adherent, and to make friends even in refusing to be more. She will
not marry, but she is marriageable--eminently marriageable--and that is
as much an asset now as when she threatened to use it against Lord
Fillingford if he would not take her bribe. Not a woman? How little we
know of ourselves, Jenny! Is not her great triumph--Leonard's triumph,
for which she planned and wrought and risked--is it not a woman's
triumph all over, and her satisfaction in it supremely feminine?
A woman--and, to my thinking, a great woman, too; full of what we call
faults, full of what we hail as virtues--and quite with a mind of her
own as to the value of these qualities--a mind by no means always moving
on orthodox lines. Stubborn, self-willed, tortuous, jealous of
domination, tenacious of liberty (at what cost and risk she had clung to
that till the last moment!), not patient of opposition, suspicious of
any claim to influence or to guide her; generous to magnificence, warm
in affection, broad in mind, very farseeing, full of public spirit,
never daunted, loyal to death, and beyond the grave--that is Jenny--and
yet not all Jenny, for it leaves out the gracious puzzling woman in whom
all these things are embodied; the woman with her bursts of temper, her
fits of petulance, her joyous playfulness, her sudden looks and gestures
of love or friendship; her smiles gay or mysterious, her eyes so full of
fun or so full of thought, flashing while she scolds, mocking while she
cheats, caressing when she cajoles, so straight and honest when
suddenly, after all this, she lays her hand on your arm and says "Dear
friend!" Such is "The Empress"--the great Miss Driver of Breysgate
Priory. Such is my dear friend Jenny, whom I serve in freedom and love
in comradeship. I would that she were what they call her! None fitter
for the place since Great Elizabeth--whom, by the way, she seems to me
to resemble in more than one point of character and temperament.
So we live side by side, and work and play together--with love--but with
no love-making. There are obvious reasons on my side for that last
proviso. I am her servant; the fourth part of twenty-seven pounds per
annum represents, as I have hinted, the most I have earned save the
salary she pays me. I should make a very poor Prince Consort--and Jenny
would never trust me again as long as she lived--though it is equally
certain that she would never tell me so. And there's another reason,
accounting not for my not having done it, but for the odder fact--my not
having wanted to do it. Humble man that I am, yet I was born free and am
entitled not only to the pursuit of happiness, but to the retention of
my liberty; the latter offers, in my judgment, the most favorable
opportunity for the former. Jenny likes liberty--so do I. As we are, we
can both enjoy it. If by any miraculous freak Jenny had made me her
husband, she would have made me her slave also. Or would Jenny have been
the slave? I fancy not. I know her--and myself--too well to cherish that
idea; which is indeed, in the end, little more attractive.
For her decision is right for herself, as once I told her. She has found
happiness--more happiness than would have come to her if she had never
fled from Hatcham Ford, more happiness, I dare to think (though never to
say!), than would in the end have been hers, had Octon never faced the
Frenchman's pistol at Tours. She is not made for an equal partnership,
no more than for a submission or surrender. How hardly she accepted a
partnership at all, even with the man whose love has altered all her
life! It is her nature to be alone, and through a sore ordeal she came
to that discovery. Once, I think, and in just one sentence she showed me
her true heart, what her true and deepest instinct was--even about
Leonard Octon.
We were sitting by the fire one evening alone. Talk dragged and she
looked listless, tired after a busy day's work, thoughtful and brooding.
"What are you thinking of?" I asked.
"Oh, my thoughts had gone back to the early days here. I was thinking
how pleasant it would be if we had Leonard back at Hatcham Ford,
dropping in after dinner."
At Hatcham Ford, mind you! Dropping in after dinner! That was the time
to which her wandering thoughts flew back--that the point on which their
flight instinctively alighted. Not the heart-trying, heart-testing,
perhaps heart-breaking, days of union and partnership, but the days of
liberty and friendship.
I must have smiled to myself over her answer, for she said sadly, yet
with a smile herself, "I can't help it! That was what I was thinking,
Austin."
So think, dear mistress--and not on the harder days! Defiance, doubt,
despair, are over. Abide in peace.
THE END