CHAPTER XI

John looked across from the mass of papers on his desk to his father-in-law’s impassive face.

He was a young man with a generous share of self-control, but he could not help revealing that he was very much moved.

“You can’t really mean, Sir,” he said with a momentary trembling of his hand, as he turned over the mass of papers, “that _all_ your work is to be left with me. The reconstruction work as well; that I am to have the regulation of all this and take the proceeds? It’s a tremendous future—and a tremendous fortune!”

Mr. Brett lit a cigar in a leisurely way and tilted back his chair to his favourite angle.

“Yes,” he agreed indifferently, “there’s money in it, there’s most usually money in what occurs to me, but it ain’t anything to make a fuss about. Some people breed money, and some people breed dogs. I guess I’m what you might call a money-fancier. As for those old notes, I took ’em while I was prowling round this garden and the English Government has decided it wants to take them up. I made it my condition that you were to be managing director—that’s all there is to it.

“I sha’n’t be over here any more. I can’t be in two places at once, and I’ve run that Channel passage during this war as faithfully as if I were a German submarine, and I guess I’m just about as tired of it as German submarines are going to be. I’ll get along all right in Paris. Brains don’t go bankrupt. What I have left will come in mighty useful in France. France wants new machinery a sight more than you do. She’s commercially as flat as a plate, but she can be built up and she’s got to be. There’ll be plenty on the plate before France is through, and I’d like to be one of the men who put something there. Don’t you worry about me.”

John drew a deep breath. He could not keep still in his excitement. He walked up and down the long library at Mambles with his visions hot before him.

Mr. Brett looked at him with satisfaction. He liked John, and he liked pleasing him, but he knew that he wasn’t going on pleasing him. He waited for his bad moment with the same unshaken placidity with which he waited for his good ones. There was no homely truth of which Mr. Brett was fonder, or more content to practise, than that of taking the rough with the smooth.

“If I come to pieces over it,” John demanded, “or if I get cold feet, can I come over and see you? There’s such a lot of things to plan and think of—you’ve given me such powers, and the plans themselves are so big—I almost hesitate to undertake them, and yet I’d rather do it than anything else in the world!”

“You can come over and see me as long as I’m there,” said Mr. Brett cautiously. “But you won’t need to. You go into your own brain and pick at that. You’ve got a-plenty.

“I’ve studied the English mind some, since I’ve been over here, and I guess I’ve spotted what’s wrong with it. It’s as lazy as a dog! You don’t use what you’ve got: maybe you’re frightened it would look showy, maybe you’re so stuck on behaving the way you weren’t made that you’re afraid your wits will let you down into behaving the way you were made; but you’ve got wits.

“Look at your navy! When I read your newspapers I could cry. When I talk to your high-brows I could laugh—and when I hear the muddles your Government is liable to slide into, I wonder any of you are alive. But when I look at your navy I see the whole thing as clear as glass. Are there any folk—even the showiest broker in Wall Street, or the latest quick-thinking Jap—that acts more like a live wire than the lieutenant of one of your destroyers? Are there any men who see cooler and clearer than one of your young admirals? Or I might say, one of your infant middies—for they’re all as clear-eyed and hard-headed as professional burglars! No, Sir, you can’t find men in any country quicker or more spry than your naval officers. And why is it? I figure it out this way—they got to be. Sea fighting is like operatic singing, you haven’t one thing to think of, you have half a dozen—pace, sight, signals, men, guns, the sea. The sea does it. Men need all their sap to face the sea. You can’t soss down and get into a habit with it. You can’t trust to a prejudice, you got to change your mind and your behaviour as quick as a north-east gale.

“Well, John—if a man _can_ do a thing when he’s got to—all you have to do is to apply the emergency and take away his props.

“I guess that’s all you, or any other Englishman needs. This is a soft country and there are a lot of props in it for the well-to-do, and there ain’t many emergencies. So the English have got used to saying, ‘That’ll do,’ and ‘Don’t bother,’ and ‘It’ll probably come out all right without much trouble.’ But the war’s taken away some of the props, and it’s applied a pretty heavy pressure. So I reckon you _can_ do jobs you never thought of now—and follow trails you never heard of—and I’m banking on you to do it satisfactorily.”

“Well, I can’t do more than try,” said John reflectively.

“Yes you can,” said Mr. Brett incisively. “You can succeed. I never had any hankering for an ‘also ran’.”

John laughed and Mr. Brett gave a reluctant smile. Then he said, “And now, John, there’s one more point we’ve got to go into, and then I think we’re wound up. I want your help on a point of domestic policy. Before I leave here I want to be sure of one thing—”

John turned round and faced him attentively.

“Yes, Sir,” he said, “is it about Elise?”

“It has to do with Elise,” said Mr. Brett slowly. “I want your word, John, never to invite nor to accept the offer of a visit from Hermione. She has given me already her word that she will not suggest it, nor accept any such invitation from you or Elise, but Hermione’s words are apt to be fluid. Facts don’t worry her, and people who ain’t worried by facts come through their promises like damp through an outside wall.

“Before my mind can be perfectly free I must have a solid word from you, John—and then I’ll feel all right.”

John flushed painfully.

“I really don’t know, Sir,” he said awkwardly, “that I can agree to give it. Of course I remember that the first part of Hermione’s visit was not a success, and it did seem as if Elise was a little overstrained by it. But I am sure now that all those little difficulties were caused by Hermione’s very serious ill health. Now that she is so much better, no one could be a more delightful guest.”

John paused. Mr. Brett regarded him thoughtfully.

“Have you forgotten the lawn-mower, John?” he asked, with a slight lift of his heavy brows. “Or Bodger? I don’t somehow feel as if they were the ordinary symptoms of a disease.”

John moved restlessly to the window.

“Hermione is very sensitive,” he said, with his back turned. “She felt at a great disadvantage when she first came down. She thought I was prejudiced against her. It is extraordinary how people will misunderstand each other under those circumstances.”

“Sure,” said Mr. Brett in a low voice. “Folks were made to misunderstand each other—but as far as I know, they weren’t made to hit out at every one who don’t take them at their own valuation.”

John let this pass. He did not understand what his father-in-law meant, but he knew that he did not wish to understand it. He was thinking of his last talk with Hermione, and their last talk had been an appeal from Hermione, not to his understanding, but to his emotion, and John did not find it easy to resist appeals to his emotion.

“It seems to me you are asking a great deal,” he said after a pause, “and more than I ought to promise—at least without her free consent. If Hermione wishes me to promise—I will consent to do it, but I couldn’t, as it were, do it behind her back.”

“You show remarkably good feeling, John,” said Mr. Brett cordially, “and remarkably poor sense. I’ve often noticed the way those two things hang together. However, you can send for Hermione and ask her in my presence what she does wish. I guess I’d rather see for myself how she tackles the subject. Sometimes it regulates the way a cat jumps if you’re watching the cat. If you’ll touch the bell we’ll ask Humphreys to let the Princess know we’d like to see her here.”

John obeyed reluctantly. He felt very up in arms about Hermione: he would stand by her whatever happened, even if it meant the loss of his future, but the worst of it was that it would not mean any such sacrifice and John knew it. Mr. Brett would never recall his generosities. Somehow or other whether John opposed him or not he would see that John didn’t lose. It made fighting against Mr. Brett much more difficult when one realised that he attached no penalties to his opponent in the hour of defeat. He was not even put out with John for insisting on the presence of Hermione.

Hermione kept them waiting ten minutes. At the end of that time she sailed into the library as if she were leading a procession. She looked every inch a Princess.

She wore a dress of a soft black material wonderfully lightened by Venetian point lace. Round her neck was a long string of pearls which fell to her waist.

“I think you want me, Papa,” she said without reproach, but as if it were strange that she had been sent for, and not sought.

“I can’t say that I do,” said Mr. Brett. “Accurately speaking John wants you; but I’m an interested party.”

Hermione turned her beautiful lifted head towards John. She smiled at him, as it is possible that martyrs, if they had time to think of it, smiled at their rather cowardly fellow Christians who had not joined them at the stake. John hesitated and stammered. He drew a chair forward for her, and then stood beside her as if he was there to protect and not to challenge her.

“Yes,” he confessed, “I do want to ask you something. Your father has suggested that I should give him a promise from Elise and myself—and I am not prepared to do so unless I have your consent. He has asked me not to invite nor to accept a visit from you—I gather for the rest of our lives.”

Hermione took it wonderfully. She did not lower her raised chin, or change the benevolent light of her clear grey eyes. She merely looked from one man to the other. John’s eyes were fixed anxiously upon her face, but Mr. Brett regarded without concern, but without appreciation, the points of his patent leather slippers. He did not consider that English servants understood patent leather.

“For the rest of our lives?” repeated Hermione. Her voice did not break, but it literally wrung John’s heart.

“You quite understand,” he urged, “that I have made no such promise; it has only been put to me as a condition of your father’s going with you to Paris, and what is more, I will not make it without your agreement.”

Hermione rose to her feet, she gave an exquisite gesture of mingled surrender and protection in the direction of her father’s unresponsive figure.

“Thank you, John,” she said with heroic fortitude, “for having consulted me. I don’t think we need go into the painfulness of the question—you will know, without my speaking of it, what it means to me. I must only urge that as far as possible Elise is spared; to put such a decision into her hands would torture her.

“As far as I am concerned the decision is already made. Since Papa makes it the express condition of our being together, I—consent.”

She turned and without faltering walked towards the door.

John sprang to open it for her, and as she passed out of it, he took one of her hands in his and kissed it. It seemed to him that he had been present at the sacrifice of Iphigenia.

He was so moved that he could hardly force himself to return to Mr. Brett. When he spoke to his father-in-law all the friendliness and gratitude had gone out of his voice.

“I should like to know, Sir,” he asked coldly, “how I am to explain this extraordinary arrangement to my wife?”

Mr. Brett raised his eyes and looked at John.

“Well,” he said slowly, “my way would be _not_ to explain it. Half the trouble in life comes from explanations. When they’re honest they hurt, and when they’re dishonest, and most explanations are dishonest, they’re a waste of breath.

“If the question has to come up you can tell Elise that the arrangement is mine, that you only agreed to it at Hermione’s wish, and that she only agreed to it in order to succour the declining years of her hard-hearted old parent. That lets you out, that lets Hermione out—I guess that’s all that’s necessary.”

“The fact remains,” said John inexorably, “that by your action you deprive Hermione of her sister’s companionship.”

“Sure, Hermione can’t have us both,” said Mr. Brett with a sudden chuckle.

“And Elise can’t have you both either,” said John, ignoring his father-in-law’s untimely mirth.

“It’s wonderful how you put two and two together, John,” said Mr. Brett mildly. “But don’t you feel too bad about Elise; you can bring her over to Paris whenever you feel inclined. I don’t want to put up any unnecessary barriers, and Hermione and I will always be pleased to see you.”

John was silent. He loved his father-in-law, and he wanted him to justify himself. He waited expectantly for what Mr. Brett might have to say. But Mr. Brett made no attempt at self-justification. He too paused a little, but without expectation, and then he recalled John’s attention to the question of the new chrysanthemums.

Two days were given over to packing and farewells, then the electric brougham once more drew up at the door, followed by a luggage cart for the Princess’s ten boxes, the French maid and Bichette. Bichette’s increasing clamour almost outbarked the ghost of Bichon, if indeed she was not privately reinforced by his spiritual tongue.

John and Elise stood at the gate and waved their handkerchiefs until the electric brougham glided in ease and security out of sight. Mr. Brett did not wave: he contented himself with a long grave look at Mambles as if he were running over in his mind some secret inventory. The Princess and the French maid bowed farewell and all the servants, handsomely tipped and generously inclined, stood at the windows appreciatively watching their departure.

“It’s just too wonderful,” said Elise, turning to her husband with sparkling eyes. “I can hardly believe it—and it’s all due to you! You’ve brought them together just as I always hoped and prayed you would, and oh! John, isn’t it too perfectly lovely to think that dear Papa has _got_ Hermione?”

THE WORM