The Great Miss Driver Part 54

"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 s.h.i.+llings, 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, n.o.body 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 n.o.body 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 Scholars.h.i.+p at the Inst.i.tute "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 pa.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sed 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 Inst.i.tute is even such a model to all inst.i.tutes 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.set 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 fa.r.s.eeing, 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 friends.h.i.+p; her smiles gay or mysterious, her eyes so full of fun or so full of thought, flas.h.i.+ng 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 comrades.h.i.+p. 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 ent.i.tled 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 partners.h.i.+p, no more than for a submission or surrender. How hardly she accepted a partners.h.i.+p 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 partners.h.i.+p, but the days of liberty and friends.h.i.+p.

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