CHAPTER II

Mr. Brett was aroused from his reverie by a firm, heavy tread along the brick path. He tilted his hat further back and watched the approaching figure with a kindly eye.

Mr. Brett liked John Sterling; he had chosen him three years previously out of fifty applicants to be his private secretary, and he had had no reason to regret it.

Mr. Brett had not been moved by sentimental reasons in his choice of a secretary, though John Sterling had distinguished himself by dogged pluck, where all were plucky, and lost an arm at Mons.

The reasons that decided the great inventor to take the unknown young Englishman were two. He explained them to one of his business friends afterwards.

“He knows what he doesn’t know,” Mr. Brett observed with satisfaction, “and he’s not too sharp to learn.

“I don’t want a sharp man. I’m kinder sharp myself. I had a brainy young secretary once who kept on having good ideas. He’d have ’em before breakfast and right on up to supper time. They kept him so busy, and me so busy listening to them, and pointing out from time to time where they wouldn’t work, that none of my own ideas panned out. I had to bounce him. I said, ‘Look here, my son, I paid you to carry out my notions, and I find I’m being loaded down with yours. Now I can stand quite a lot of other men’s notions, in general conversation, or once a week when I’m preparing my soul for Heaven—but not over my desk in my office. I just kinder like to keep that desk for any little notions of my own.’ Of course he was too sharp to see that, so he got bounced.

“Now John Sterling hasn’t got any ideas except how to carry out mine.

“All the other candidates made pace by telling me what they could do. They ought all to have been Prime Ministers—and they knew it—they’d have been thrown away as private secretaries. But John sat there looking at me with those steady grey eyes of his, and all he said was, ‘If you tell me what to do I think I can do it. I write a plain hand.’

“I guess the universe is going to remain just the way it was before John came into it. But that’ll suit me all right. I haven’t any quarrel with the universe.”

“You’re earlier than usual, John,” observed Mr. Brett as his secretary reached him, “and you’ve overlooked your tea. Has anything in that little village of yours on the Thames discomposed you?”

“No, Sir, everything has gone straight,” said John Sterling, taking a seat opposite his chief and drawing out some notes.

“I just took down what some of the Committee said in case you wanted to run over it. They were very disappointed you couldn’t be there. Young Simpson the engineer has sent in his report. He said he’d been over some of that Cork country you mentioned and it didn’t look like petrol; but he admitted it hasn’t been tested.”

“Well, you write to young Simpson,” said Mr. Brett, “and ask him if a germ looks like typhoid. Tell him if it does, not to worry about testing for oil. I’ll find another engineer. I guess he’s mistaken his vocation, and thought I wanted an artist to paint me a cork tree.

“Did you make any statement to the Committee, John, or did you just sit there and hear it talk its hind legs off?”

“No, Sir, I didn’t make any statements,” replied John. “They weren’t deciding anything in particular, and I thought if I just put down their main points you’d say what you wanted done after considering them.”

“I could say it before as far as that goes,” said Mr. Brett wearily. “You’ve got to have a Committee same as you have to have an umbrella in case it rains—but I just naturally hate walking about with an umbrella—I’d rather have both hands free.

“You haven’t said yet, John, why you didn’t stop with Elise and have your tea?”

John Sterling drew a deep breath. He folded up his notes and met his employer’s eyes across them.

Mr. Brett had long dark eyes with no expression in them. All his expression was in his smile; but he very seldom smiled. He was smiling now with an encouraging friendliness.

“I wanted to speak to you before I saw Elise,” began John nervously. “You may feel you’d rather I didn’t see her afterwards. The fact is—I’m afraid Mr. Brett I want to marry her. I can’t help it. I have only two hundred a year besides my salary and I’m nobody in particular. I have no earthly business to ask for a millionaire’s daughter, but I don’t want her to have a penny except what I can make, and I’ve seen enough of her to know that she doesn’t care about money either!”

John stopped defensively.

Mr. Brett was laughing softly.

“Of course she don’t care about money,” he said. “That man that was fed by ravens in the wilderness didn’t hanker after meat either. He had enough.

“See here, John, have you said anything to Elise?”

“No,” said John Sterling. “That’s why I didn’t go in to tea. I know I shall the next time I am alone with her, unless you turn me down.”

Mr. Brett laughed again.

“You’re a good boy, John,” he said, “and on this occasion I accept the European method of tackling the parent first.

“Elise is young. She’s full young. Unless Theodora misdirected me, Elise was nineteen last birthday. It kinder goes against the grain with me to think of her marrying yet awhile.

“But maybe it would go against the grain later on too. Parents are apt to jib at their children for being made the same way as themselves. They’d like to check ’em with a little spiritual gin, and keep them down to clock-work dolls.

“Elise has always been a child to me, and for a long time she was a sick child.

“I kept her away from home at a Sanatorium by the sea for four years. I guess she’s told you about it. There ain’t anything organic the matter with Elise now, but she’s frail.”

“I’d take care of her,” John interjected quietly and without emphasis; but his tone was convincing.

Mr. Brett nodded. “Sure you’d take care of her,” he agreed. “But it won’t be quite the kind of care you mean, John, that you’ll have to take. It’s a taller order.

“I see I’ll have to go into this thing with you pretty thoroughly.

“I warned my first son-in-law, but he was a Roumanian, and he hadn’t made much study of nervous temperaments. Roumanians sound kind of playful and romantic, but when they aren’t pleased I understand they get rough. He said nobody in his family had ever had nerves, and as it was about fifteen hundred years old, it was what you might call an encouraging record. But Hermione broke it. She is a high-strung American woman and she showed that Roumanian family what nerves mean—she showed it them from start to finish.”

Mr. Brett looked away from John Sterling and drew a long breath.

“Now John,” he said, “I guess I’ve got to go into things deeper with you than I did with that Roumanian Prince. I’ll go slow and you follow slow—there are things I can’t say, and there are things I must.

“Did you know you’re the first secretary I ever had in my house?”

John nodded.

“But you don’t know why?” asked Mr. Brett. “I didn’t have a secretary to live in till Theodora died. After that I had. It was more convenient. The reason I didn’t have one before was that in two days he’d have been Theodora’s secretary or he’d have been out of the house.

“I expect you know that Theodora means the gift of God?

“Well, Theodora was no slouch of a gift: she was what the French call a ‘Maîtresse femme.’ I presume that means a winner, don’t it? Sometimes Theodora won because she’d extracted my kick—sometimes she won because she was at death’s door, and made me feel the draught from under it—and sometimes she won because I didn’t know what she was up to. But she always won.

“Now Elise isn’t like her mother. She’s got no nervous energy, but she’s got no resistance to nervous energy either. I guess I used all the resistance up in my home life from day to day, and hadn’t any to hand on to the child.

“Marriage is a queer thing, John, and the results of it are queerer.

“Most young people think marriage is going to set them free to do what they like. It doesn’t. It ties them up to do what they like.

“There ain’t any harm in being tied up, providing you like what you’re tied up to, and go on liking it.

“If you don’t marry you get tied up sooner or later, to your business, or your habits, or maybe to a dog.

“But they ain’t quite so incessant. Nothing is so incessant as marriage. Even parents die sooner or later, and children grow up.

“It’s not so easy to get rid of a contemporary, bar murder, and there’s nothing, not even in the new divorce laws, to justify the murder of one married person by the other.

“Now don’t run away with the idea that I’m against marriage. If there is a place where you can go most wrong, you can bank on it that it’s the place where you can go most right.

“All I say is choose your partner and then look out for squalls. You get to know which way the wind’s blowing and act according.

“Now you take Elise. Naturally she has to see her sister sometimes. And _that’s_ what’s going to be the matter with your marriage.

“Hermione is her mother all over again. She’s just full of nervous energy. You haven’t met her but you will; and she won’t like Elise’s marrying. First thing she don’t want Elise _to_ marry—and second she’s got a grudge against marriage. Well, when Hermione don’t like things they very seldom happen.”

John laughed reassuringly.

“I knew there would be a good many solid reasons against my marrying Elise, Sir,” he said, “but I don’t think I need worry about the influence of a sister-in-law. If Elise loves me, and I would never have dared to come to you if I hadn’t hoped she did, the Princess Girla won’t stand in my way.”

Mr. Brett smoked in silence for a few minutes. He made no reply to this jaunty forecast; but he said, after a pause:

“Well, John—nothing else does. I like you. I trust you. It don’t matter to me a row of pebbles whether you have money or not, or who your great-grandparents thought they were.

“I’ve got enough money for anything any of my family are likely to want this side of Judgment; and it’s this generation I keep my eye on—not family vaults.

“You’ve got the kind of grit I’d like in Elise’s husband. You have horse sense and you’ll be gentle with her.

“But mind, Theodora and Hermione could get ill and recover conveniently to suit themselves. It won’t be so with Elise.

“If she gets ill, it’ll be because she can’t help it, and she’ll not be able to get better to suit either you or herself.”

“I don’t see why she should get ill,” said John sturdily.

“She got ill before,” said Mr. Brett, withdrawing his cigar and speaking slowly and impressively, “because her mother and Hermione couldn’t get on. They pulled two ways and Elise loved them both—she was one of the ways they pulled. They all but tore her life out. I got her away and kept her away for four years, the doctors helping me; then mercifully Hermione married, and started in on that Roumanian Prince.

“Elise is all right under one influence; but she can’t stand two. What you’ve got to see to, John, is that the influence is yours.”

“Do you really mean, Sir,” asked John, trembling for the first time in his life, with excitement and felicity, “that you give your consent to our marriage?”

Mr. Brett held out his hand unsmilingly, but with great heartiness.

“I’ll back you, John, with the last ounce I’ve got,” he said quietly. “Cut along now and get that cold tea.”

“I can’t thank you,” John exclaimed. “It’s too jolly fine of you.” Then he hurried off to Elise.

Mr. Brett looked after his solid figure with a curious solemnity.

“All that talk of mine,” he said to himself, “has been so much cotton batting. John only took out of it what he wanted.

“I bought my wisdom dear, but wisdom’s a mighty cheap goods second hand and it don’t hardly seem to pay for its keep.”