It was the same Mr. Gregory who had jumped off his stool in the office many years ago to open the door for the future partner of Mardyke and Campion. But the stooping mind was now matched by the stooping body, and what was left of his hair was white. He brought with him documents to be signed and letters to be considered.
“The ordinary correspondence I have dealt with myself, my lord, as general manager. But you will find that there are a good many matters here which really needed a decision a few weeks ago.”
“Quite so, Gregory.”
For an hour the two men worked busily in the great library overlooking the lawn and the river.
“You’ll stay for luncheon, Gregory,” said Mark, rising quickly. “Meanwhile—”
“Your lordship is very kind, and meanwhile perhaps for a few minutes I may speak my mind,” said Mr. Gregory.
“Certainly,” said Mark with resignation. He knew the sort of wigging he was going to get from the old servant of the firm. He had vainly hoped to stave it off until after luncheon.
“Fire away, Gregory.”
It was an old story, said Mr. Gregory, but with the recent expansion of their industry it had even greater force. Since old Mr. Mardyke had gone the work was too much for one man, and after all his lordship was no longer so young as he had been.
“Well, I have offered you a partnership half a dozen times, Gregory. Why don’t you take it and stop bullying me?” Mark asked testily.
Gregory shook his head stubbornly.
“I am a born servant, my lord. I can manage a machine, I can’t create one. I can develop a policy, I can’t originate one. I have neither the courage nor the imagination. There are only a few things, my lord, in which all men can be equal; and one of them is the dignity which comes from knowing clearly to what one can’t aspire.”
No doctrine could be imagined with which a man of Mark Thewliss’ temper was less in sympathy. He never heard it without a distaste which it needed all his knowledge of Gregory’s long and devoted service to overpower.
“Very well,” he said. “We must go on as we are.”
“That’s not necessary, my lord,” Gregory urged. “For you have a born master at your elbow.”
Mark looked up and stared.
“Who?”
“Colonel Crayle.”
Mark’s first thought was to cry out “He? Why I have known him all my life. Nonsense!” quite in the spirit of an old fogy.
But he caught himself up. Derek Crayle? Under thirty — well, all the better for that. And he had commanded four thousand men, had risen to the command of them. As it was, Derek half the time made his home with himself and Olivia. He already knew a good deal of Mark’s affairs.
“Yes, that’s a good idea, Gregory. I don’t know what Colonel Crayle’s point of view may be. There won’t be much opportunity for him in the army for a long time, if ever. I should certainly like him as a partner.”
“I was thinking of him less as a partner,” Gregory suggested, “than as a director of the Board.”
Mark Thewliss looked at Gregory with interest.
“You, too, think that we ought to become a company? I have been turning that question over in my mind for some time past. We are reaching out pretty far as it is, and next year I think we shall reach out a great deal farther still. Too much perhaps for one man. Yes! A limited liability company with myself as chairman and Derek on the Board, getting ready to follow me? Yes! Colonel Crayle may be at Gissens. I’ll get him over and have a talk to him.”
Derek Crayle was amusing himself amongst the pretty people at Deauville, but he turned his back on them when he received a letter from Mark and came straight to Upper Theign.
“I should like to join you,” he said. “I have been hoping ever since the war ended that you would find room for me.”
“Then if you can manage it, we’ll go up to London to-morrow and push the business through.”
Three busy weeks followed. There were meetings at the offices of Hawker, Hawker and Lyndhurst, arrangements were made with the heirs of Campion and the heirs of Mardyke. The staff at Brooke’s Market was assembled. Derek Crayle was introduced formally, the proposal for the formation of a company in which all the employees should be shareholders was explained and accepted. There was for the moment to be no offer of shares to the public, but it was more than probable that the expansion of their business would in the autumn render that course advisable. Early in August the new company was registered, and Mark and Derek Crayle returned to Upper Theign. A family dinner party took place that night. Angela, who had been married then five years to young Lord Ilsenham of the Foreign Office, came over from Gissens with her husband and Tony Westram. Mark sat at the head of his table, the genial hero and benefactor. Everyone was in the highest spirits. Tony Westram was outspoken.
“Here’s your health, Mark. I wish I had some of this port in my cellar. By Gad, I did a good stroke of work for my decadent old family when I asked the rising M.P. to Gissens.”
“All very well for you to say that, my father,” said Angela. “My recollections are a sheer humiliation to me. I did all that a properly brought up maiden could do, and he just looked at Olivia. I taught him to fish — yes, I gave up a whole day to it, and he looked upon me as a daughter.”
Perhaps Olivia flinched for a second at this point. But to her, too, the evening was one of pride. There was a scar no doubt still upon her heart. There was a graveyard at Pietermaritzburg which she had never seen, never would see, and had now learnt not to imagine. On the whole, she had more than the happiness which fell to most of the women she knew in the daily ran of their lives. They missed one thing of course, both of them, Mark and herself, the dream-daughter with the starry eyes. But to-night in the warmth of this intimate gathering that aching want was, except for the moment of Angela’s untimely sally, lulled into oblivion. The party broke up at midnight in a boisterous good-humour.
“By Gad, Mark, this is the best evening I’ve ever had,” cried Tony from the motor-car, and, “Don’t cry, Uncle,” said Derek. “There’s still some of the port left.”
And so the evening ended. But on the next morning a visitor came to Upper Theign who thrust so vital a disturbance into the lives of the people of this history that the dinner party was never followed by one like to it, and even the remodeling of the firm of Mardyke and Campion to suit the conditions of to-day, became to them a matter of no significance.
It was twelve o’clock. Mark Thewliss was in his library, taking his ease over a copy of the day’s Times, with a Cabanas Corona cigar to assist him; and a card was brought in to him.
“I can see no one. I am busy,” said Mark to his butler.
Renson the butler stopped. He had a salver in his hand and the card upon the salver.
“It is a lady, my lord.”
“She is collecting money for an orphanage.”
“I think not, my lord,” said Renson. He appeared to be firm and Mark testily gave way.
“Oh, very well I Let me see the card!”
It was Renson the butler, therefore, who was the immediate cause of all that was to happen. Had he not been moved by some obscure perception that this visitor deserved to be seen, he would have retired with his salver and announced that his lordship was too immersed in his affairs to see anyone. And had he acted thus, certainly the visitor would have gone away with a head held high and death itself at her heart; and never would she have returned. But as it was Renson advanced with the salver and Mark Thewliss read the card, and was so startled that he sat for a moment or two like a man paralysed. Then he said:
“Of course, I’ll see the lady. Thank you, Renson.” He gave his butler a nod of acknowledgment for his insistence.
“Very well, my lord.”
But before Renson had reached the door, Mark stopped him.
“I want five minutes, Renson. Will you show the lady into the morning-room, and be careful to tell her that I am asking her to wait so that I may hold myself completely at her
disposal. When I ring, you’ll show her in.”
“Very well, my lord.”
Had Renson been a butler of another calibre, he would have said to himself cunningly, “Hallo-o-o!” lengthening out the last syllable on a rising inflection into an innuendo of illimitable suggestion. But he did not belong to that school. He had induced his lordship to be reasonable and he was satisfied.
Mark, left to himself, did not quite understand why his instinct had clamoured for those five minutes delay. Some strong need certainly had brought Mona Perriton, after twenty-five years of silence, to his door. Mona was in a difficulty and a difficulty of very recent date. For Mr. Wyatt’s latest report was only two months old and it contained nothing which was either new or alarming. But Mark was under no apprehension. It was a difficulty, obviously, which he could help to dissolve and he was very glad that Mona had turned to him. It was just some vague nervousness which had made him claim this interval of a few minutes, a medley of half a hundred unformulated questions in his mind.
What was Mona like after these twenty-five years? Was there anything left of the nimble high-spirited girl with the moments of real loveliness who had decorated the Sea Flower on that cutter’s memorable cruise? With what a countenance and with what words would he greet her? Ghosts were always disconcerting. He crushed the end of his cigar in his ash tray as though he were receiving a stranger instead of one in whose company for a month he had smoked a pipe. Then he rang the bell and waited, his heart beating unreasonably fast. But as the door opened his nervousness left him.
“How do you do, Mona?”
“Very well. And you, Mark?”
“Fine;” and they shook hands.
It had not been so difficult a business after all. Mona had changed of course, as no doubt he himself had done. Twenty-five years must leave their fingermarks on forehead and cheek and round the eyes and the mouth. The bloom, too, flits to younger faces. And fatigue comes — yes, perhaps more than a due share of it. But the thick copper-coloured hair had not thinned nor faded, the eyes had lost none of their mystery, the voice none of its melody.
“Come and sit down here!”
He pulled up a chair for her.
“I was afraid that you wouldn’t know who I was,” Mona said as she sat down.
“I knew very well,” Thewliss returned. “At least I guessed it without any difficulty.”
It would never do, he realised, to let Mona suspect that he had kept a watch upon her. Her pride would be up in arms in a second, demanding that the watch should cease.
“You had mentioned to me that a man called Perriton was your employer, so when your card was brought in I hadn’t much doubt,” he explained.
“No,” she answered.
She could not remember that she had ever mentioned Henry Perriton’s name to Mark, but she might have certainly, she reflected. At the lily pond in Staple Inn, or on any of a hundred occasions between Poole and the final anchorage in Southampton Water.
“I know something else about you, too, Mona,” he said laughing, and yet with a note of envy in his voice.
Mona was too disturbed by his words to apprehend the accent which informed them.
“What do you know, Mark?” she asked, sitting up very straight.
“That you have what I’d give the world to have, my dear. A perfectly crashing daughter.”
The blood rushed into Mona’s face, and her eyes shone and her mouth laughed. She had dreaded some allusion to her poverty and the unhappiness of her home, and she was sitting ready to deny every word of it. But the one thing of which he knew was the one glory of her life.
“Isn’t she a darling?” she cried, and stopped in surprise. “How do you know anything about Lois, Mark?”
“When I once went to see the Director of Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty during the war, Lois guided my failing limbs to his room, clearly under the impression that I was a nonagenerian who might decay before her eyes unless she was very quick and helpful. I recognised her by her likeness to you, before I heard her name.”
“Thank you!” said Mona. “For she is lovely, isn’t she?”
It wasn’t a compliment to herself that she was asking for, but admiration for the adorable daughter, from a man who must have seen all the flower of young beauty decked out in its most exquisite attire.
“There’s only one word for her,” said Mark firmly. “She’s a crasher.”
“And very good at her work,” the mother insisted.
“She couldn’t have held the position in which I found her for five minutes, if she hadn’t been,” Thewliss agreed.
“Thank you,” said Mona gratefully. “You have made it very easy for me. If I had had to describe Lois to you and persuade you how clever she is, you would have thought ‘That’s the mother talking. I’ll have to write off half of what she says.’ As it is you know that I have been speaking the truth. And it’s because of Lois that I have come to see you.”
“Yes?”
Mona had come now to the point where she must choose her words.
“You must know,” she began, making the little speech which she had during the last two days so often rehearsed, “that although we” — she could not bring herself even at this moment to say Henry and I— “have a great deal to be thankful for and contented with, we aren’t terribly well-off. We get along all right, but we can’t save very much and Lois has to work. Even if there were no actual need for her to do so, I am sure that her independence would make her insist upon working. Besides, she enjoys it.”
“Yes,” said Mark.
“Well, I want her to have her opportunity,” and that word broke the barrier of Mona’s reticence.
She became eloquent as one charged with a mission. She pleaded with the passion which brings the right word to the lips and the compelling magic to the voice.
“I can’t endure to think that she shall have to live out a whole long, dull, insignificant life in some drab town, her youth ebbing away in a mean struggle to make a halfpenny go as far as a penny. And she’s a glorious girl, Mark. For her to lose the spring out of her walk, the light out of her eyes, all her radiance — to become toneless before her youth has half gone! No, it would be a shame, a waste — really a waste of something precious. I want her while she works — and she won’t spare herself — to enjoy a wider life than we can help her to, to feel a little more of the grace of it, to know a little more of the exquisite dainty side of it than we can show to her. And she’ll be at home too on that side. She found her own way there without our help during the war. She made charming friends for herself. She had a salary which enabled her to live daintily — for she’s an excellent manager — but when the war ended, her good days ended too. Does it sound brutal and heartless to say that? But it’s true of thousands of people, my girl amongst them. Since then she’s been getting a precarious job every now and then and breaking her heart between whiles. So I have come to you, Mark. Can you do something?”
“Of course,” said Mark.
“You are sure? It’ll have to be something real — with responsibility.”
Mark nodded his head.
“I understand that.”
He rose and, opening a silver cedar-lined box, offered a cigarette to Mona.
“Smoke one and I’ll smoke another,” he said and as he lit the two cigarettes: “I am grateful that you came to me, Mona. And you came just at the right moment. We are expanding tremendously. I want help. Just give me a moment. There’s so much choice that selection’s actually difficult.”
He exaggerated the truth no doubt, but he understood that Mona could not have brought herself to the point of asking help from him without a heavy pain of humiliation. And if she could be persuaded that she was actually doing a service the humiliation would be forgotten. He took a turn across the room, he stood by the big glass door opening on to the garden, he was apparently selecting. In fact he was considering how much time ought reasonably to elapse before he could turn round and say with a cry, “I
have it!” For he had made his selection even while Mona was speaking. He swung the glass door backwards and forwards. “I think that’ll do,” he said to himself, and without considering what he was doing he shut the glass door and turned the handle.
“I know,” he said, turning back into the room. “Listen to me, Mona! I have always been in trouble about a private secretary. I can’t bear men, because I always think that a man ought to be busy doing something on his own. I have tried men and I can’t get over a feeling of disdain for them, and with that inevitably, of course, a want of confidence. For women, however, it seems to me almost ideal work. They identify themselves with your interests as men don’t do and oughtn’t to do; they take your affairs over in a general way. When you’re likely to go off at the deep end they manage somehow to stop you on the very edge of the spring board, and they like responsibility. I once had a really good one, but she got married of course, which was all in order. Well, I think the best thing your daughter could do is to come to me in that capacity. She’ll have her own rooms in my house in London, where she can do her work and have her friends. She’ll have her room here. She’ll be one of the family and yet quite independent of it when she chooses. What do you say?”
“Mark!” Mona returned. “Do you mean that? It sounds to me wonderful! But you are taking her on trust.”
“Not a bit of it, Mona. She’s your daughter — that’s one thing. And I know her history at the Admiralty — that’s another.”
He mentioned the salary he was prepared to pay. He made it definitely high, but not too high.
“It will be three hundred and fifty pounds a year besides the living and travelling expenses. And I promise you, Mona,” he added with a smile, “that she shall see that pleasanter side of life you want for her. Now when can I see her?”
“She’s here.”
“Here?”
“Yes. We came together from London. I left her in the taxi whilst I came in to see you. She said that she would wander about the park if I was long.”
“We’ll send for her,” said Mark, getting up and going towards the bell.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 601