The Great Miss Driver

CHAPTER XXVII

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.