A Servant of the Public

Now one of the riddles about her seemed to find an explanation. He understood how she had passed through the dangers and the ordeal, and had come out still with her freshness and her innocence; how her taste had saved her from those who would have been deaf to the appeal that had arrested him, how powerful and sufficing a shield that appeal was to any man whom her taste would allow to come close to her in comradeship. You could not be false to a confidence like that; if you were a man who could, you would never have the chance. Thus Ashley summed up a case which a little while ago had seemed to him very strange. It seemed strange and unusual still, with a peculiar charm of its own. It was weakness breeding strength, surrender made security. It put a man on his honour; it took away the resistance which might make honour forget itself in the passion of victory. It was like being made guardian of another's treasure; you were careful of it, however heedless you were of your own.

As they journeyed home, she was mirthful and joyous. This day was done, but she did not despair of the world; there should be other days, and the work of this day should endure. She made plans by which they were to meet, to be much together, to unite their lives by many ties. She let him see how much he had entered into her schemes; she told him plainly again and again that he had become to her quite different from all other men. She revealed to him her little habits, her tempers, her ways, her manœuvres, her tricks; she had plenty of all of them. She shewed an open delight in the love which she had won from him and made no pretence of concealing anything of what he was to her. Of Jack Fenning she said not a word; of caution in the externals of her own behaviour, of what people might think or say, of any possible difficulties in their relation to one another, not a word. She was happy and she was grateful. He took her to the door of her own house; she was not hurt but seemed a little surprised that he would not go in. He did not offer to kiss her again, but could not avoid thinking that she would have been neither angry nor grieved if he had. His last memory was of her looking round her door, smiling delightedly and nodding to him, her eyes full of a thousand confidences. "Come soon," she called at last before she hid herself from his sight.

When he reached his own rooms, he found awaiting him a note from Sir James Muddock, begging him to come to the office at Buckingham Palace Road at eleven the next morning. "I have had an interview with my doctor," the old man wrote, "which makes it necessary for me to consider very seriously certain immediate steps. I hope that I shall be able to rely on your assistance." The note was sent by hand and marked "Immediate." Its meaning was plain enough. The long-expected verdict had come; Sir James must be relieved; another head was wanted in the firm of Muddock and Mead. With his brain still full of Ora Pinsent the matter of the message seemed remote to Ashley, but he forced himself to descend to it. He was to have the offer of a partnership, the offer of great wealth, the opportunity of a career limited only by his own talents and no longer clogged by poverty. Would the offer be free, or hampered by a tacit unacknowledged understanding? He knew well enough Sir James' mind about his future. How strange that future looked in the after-glow of this day! Yet what future had this day? Here was a question that he could not bring himself to discuss patiently. Future or no future, this day had altered his life, seemed at this moment to have altered it so completely that on it and on what had happened in it would turn his answer to the offer of great wealth and the prospect of a career. Even in his own thoughts he observed that reticence about Alice Muddock which would have governed his tongue in speaking of her to another; but, affect as he would, or thought himself obliged to, he knew that she formed a factor in the situation, that she was in her father's mind when he wrote, no less than that other object of the old man's love, the great firm in Buckingham Palace Road.

"It's strange," he thought, "that the thing, after dragging on so long, should come to a head now, to-night, just when – ." He broke off his reflexions and, going to the window, looked out on the lights of the bridge and listened to the lessening noise of the town. He was dimly conscious that in this day of long idleness, by the slow low river and in the little inn, he had done more to draw the lines and map the course of his life than in any hour of labour, however successful and however strenuous. Fate had surprised him with a point-blank question, the Stand-and-deliver of a direct choice. Saying he would think it all over, he sat late that night. But thoughts will not always be compelled and disciplined; his vigil was but a pictured repetition of the day that he had lived. The day had been Ora's day. Hers also was the night.

CHAPTER VI

AWAY WITH THE RIBBONS!

Few things make the natural man, a being who still occupies a large apartment in the soul of each of us, more impatient than to find people refusing to conform to his idea of the way in which they ought to seek and find happiness. So far as sane and sensible folk are concerned – there is no need to bring the Asylums into the argument – his way is the way; deviations from it, whether perversely deliberate or instinctive and unreasoned, are so many wanderings from the only right track. He likes money – then only fools omit to strive for it. Stability of mind is his ideal – what more wretched than to be tossed from mood to mood? A regular life is the sole means of preserving health in stomach and brain – it is melancholy to see persons preferring haphazard and ill-regulated existences. Nay, it makes this natural man rather vexed if we do not like his furniture, his favourite vegetable, his dentist, and so forth; his murmured "De gustibus" has a touch of scorn in it. He conceives a grudge against us for upsetting established standards of excellence in matters of life, conduct, upholstery, and the table. Our likings for people in whom he sees nothing puzzle and annoy him equally; the shrug with which he says, of a newly married couple for instance, "They seem very happy," adds quite clearly, "But on no reasonable grounds have they a right to be, and in my heart I can't quite believe they are."

Sir James Muddock – once again the occasion of generalisations – had never been able to understand why Ashley Mead did not jump at the chance of Alice Muddock's hand and a share in Buckingham Palace Road. The lad was poor, his prospects were uncertain, at the best they could not yield wealth as Sir James had learnt to count it; the prejudice against trade is only against trade on a small scale; any ambitions, social or political, would be promoted, not thwarted, by his entry into the firm. As for Alice, she was the best girl in the world, clever, kind, trustworthy; she was very fond of him; he was fond of her and appreciated her company. Ashley was turned thirty; he was not asked to surrender the liberty of early youth. He had had his fling, and to sensible men this fling was a temporary episode, to be enjoyed and done with. It was time for him to get into harness; the harness offered was very handsome, the manger well filled, the treatment all that could be desired. When Sir James summed up the case thus, he had no suspicion of what had passed during one Sunday in the country; it is fair to add that it would have made no difference in his ideas, if he had known of it. The day in the country with Ora Pinsent would have been ticketed as part of the fling and thus relegated to after-dinner memories. Sir James did not understand people to whom the fling was more than an episode, to whom all life went on being a series of flings of ever-changing dice, till at last and only in old age the box fell from paralysed fingers. Therefore he did not understand all that was in the nature of Ashley Mead; he would have understood nothing at all of what was in Ora Pinsent's.

Ashley's decision had taken itself, as it seemed, without any help or effort on his part. Here was the warrant of its inevitability. He thought, when he first read the old man's summons, that he was in for a great struggle and faced with a hard problem, with an anxious weighing of facts and a curious forecast of possibilities, that he must sit down to the scrutiny in idleness and solemnity. But somehow, as he slept or dressed or breakfasted, between glances at his paper and whiffs of his pipe, he decided to refuse many thousands a year and to ignore the implied offer of Alice Muddock's hand. In themselves thousands were good, there was nothing to be said against them; and of Alice he had been so fond and to her so accustomed that for several years back he had considered her as his most likely wife. She and the thousands were now dismissed from his life – both good things, but not good for him. He sighed once with a passing wish that he could be different; but being what he was he felt himself hopelessly at war with Sir James' scheme as a whole, and with every part of it. Contrast it with the moods, the thoughts, the atmosphere of life which had filled his yesterday! And yesterday's was his native air; thus it seemed to him, and he was so infected with this air that he did not ask whether but for yesterday his decision would have been as easy and unfaltering.

The old man was hurt, grieved, and, in spite of previous less direct rebuffs, bitterly disappointed; he had not thought that his offer would be refused when expressly made; he had not looked to see his hints about his daughter more openly ignored the more open they themselves became. His anger expressed itself in an ultimatum; he flung himself back in his elbow chair, saying,

"Well, my lad, for the last time, take it or leave it. If you take it, we'll soon put you through your facings, and then you'll be the best head in the business. But if you won't have it, I must take in somebody else."

"I know, Sir James. Don't think I expect you to go on giving me chances."

"If it's not you, it's got to be Bertie Jewett." Bertie Jewett was Herbert, son of Peter Jewett who had served through all the changes and lately died as Manager in Buckingham Palace Road. "He won't refuse, anyhow." The tone added, "He's not such a fool."

"No, he's not such an ass as I am," said Ashley, answering the tone and smiling at poor Sir James with an appealing friendliness.

"That's your word, not mine; but I'm not going to quarrel with it," said Sir James without a sign of softening. "What you're after I can't see. What do you want?"

Ashley found himself unable to tell the Head of the Firm what he wanted.

"I can get along," he said lamely. "I make a bit writing for the papers, and there's a brief once in a blue moon; and of course I've got a little; and this secretaryship helps for the time."

This beggarly catalogue of inadequate means increased Sir James' scorn and bewilderment.

"Are you above it?" he asked with sudden heat.

"Good God, sir, don't think me a snob as well as an ass," prayed Ashley.

"Then I don't know what you do want."

Matters seemed to have reached a standstill. But Sir James had a last shot in his locker.

"Go up and lunch in Kensington Palace Gardens," he said. "Talk it over with the ladies, talk it over with Alice."

Ashley wanted to refuse; on this day he had no desire to see Alice. But refusal seemed impossible.

"All right, Sir James, I will," he said.

"Take a week, take a week more. If you say no then, it's Bertie Jewett – and your chance is gone for ever. For Heaven's sake don't make a fool of yourself." Affection mingling with wrath in the entreaty made it harder to resist.

Ashley walked off with the last words ringing in his ears; they recalled Lord Bowdon and the Athenæum corner. After reflexion and against inclination Bowdon had determined not to make a fool of himself, and had intrenched his resolution with apparent security against the possibility of a relapse into a less sensible course. Here was Ashley's example; but he shied at it.

"And how the devil am I to talk to Alice about it?" he exclaimed petulantly, as he struck across the front of Buckingham Palace and headed up Constitution Hill. There had been a general impression that he would marry Alice Muddock, and a general impression about us assumes to ourselves a vaguely obligatory force. We may not justify it, but we feel the need for some apology if we refuse. Besides Ashley had, up to a certain point, shared the impression, although in a faint far-off way, regarding the suggested alliance not as the aim of his life but as a possible and not unacceptable bourn of his youth. His entrance into the firm was a topic so closely connected that he felt much awkwardness in discussing it with Alice Muddock. Of her feelings he thought less than of his own; he was not by nature a selfish man, but he had now fallen into the selfishness of a great pre-occupation. The smallest joy or the lightest sorrow for Ora Pinsent would have filled his mind. It is difficult to feel in anything like this way towards more than one person at a time. His sympathy for Alice Muddock was blunted and he excused its want of acuteness by an affected modesty which questioned her concern in him.

It chanced that Lady Kilnorton was at lunch. She seemed in high spirits and talked vigorously. Her theme was the artistic temperament; she blamed its slavishness to the moment. Lady Muddock showed an anxiety to be furnished with details for purposes of increased disapproval; Alice was judicial. One man among three women, Ashley would have been content to listen, but, when appealed to, he defended the aspersed disposition. He felt the conversation approaching Ora Pinsent, step by step; she was in all their minds; the only case in point known to Lady Muddock, the instance most interesting to Alice, an unwelcome persistent presence to Irene, to him a subject to be neither encouraged nor avoided without risk of self-betrayal. It was curious how she had come into the circle of their lives, and having entered seemed to dominate it. But presently he grew sure of his face and, for the rest, preferred that they should abuse her rather than not speak of her; he grudged every abstraction of his thoughts which banished her image.

The discussion brought its trials. Irene's well-restrained jealousy and Lady Muddock's inquisitive disapproval were merely amusing; it was Alice's judicial attitude which stirred him to resentment. To assess and assay with this cold-blooded scientific accuracy seemed inhuman, almost from its excess of science unscientific, since it was a method so unsuited to the subject.

"Now take Ora," said Irene, at last grasping the nettle. "There's nothing she wouldn't do for you at one moment, the next she wouldn't do anything at all for you."

"For her acquaintances, you mean?" Alice asked.

"Oh, no, my dear. For anybody, for her best friend. You can't call her either good or bad. She's just fluke, pure fluke."

"Well, I know it's the thing to pretend not to like flukes – " Ashley began. The thin jocularity served for a shield.

"Oh, what's the use of asking a man? He just sees her face, that's all. Nobody's denying her looks." Lady Kilnorton seemed petulant.

"Of course a life like hers," observed Lady Muddock, "is very demoralising."

"My dear Lady Muddock, why?" asked Ashley, growing exasperated.

"Well, I only know what Minna Soames says, and – "

"Mother dear, Minna Soames is a goose," Alice remarked. Ashley was grateful, but still with reservations as to the judicial tone.

Irene Kilnorton, engaged in her secret task of justifying herself and taking a rosy view of Bowdon's feelings, talked more for her own ends than for those of the company.

"That sort of people suit one another very well," she went on. "They know what to expect of each other. Harm comes only when people of a different sort get entangled with them."

"You're vague," said Ashley. "What different sort?" He had partly fathomed her mood now, and his eyes were mischievous as he looked at her.

"Sensible people, Mr. Mead." There was a touch of asperity in the brief retort, which made a thrust from him seem excusable.

"Suppose Lord Bowdon had never seen you," he said with plausible gravity, "and, being in that state of darkness, had fallen in love with Miss Pinsent; would it have been so very surprising?"

"Very," said Irene Kilnorton.

"And dreadful?"

"Well, bad for him. He'd never have got on with her and – "

"There's Mr. Fenning," interposed Alice with a quiet laugh. A moment's pause ensued. Ashley had been startled at the introduction of the name, but he recovered himself directly.

"Oh, well," he said, "of course there's Mr. Fenning. I'd forgotten him. But he's quite accidental. Leave him out. He's not part of the case."

"But there's so often a Mr. Fenning," Alice persisted. "Can he be considered quite accidental?"