Part 2

"Thanks," said Julian laconically.

Cooper hastened ahead of them, murmuring as he went:

"I'll just give a knock on Fuller's door, and look in to say Sir Julian's here, and then I can get rid of all these books ... down the stairs, and one hand on the books so that they don't slip from under my arm...."

In an incredibly short space of time he had sped up the stairs again and made the rather self-evident announcement:

"Run up again to let you know Fuller's there, Sir Julian. I thought I'd let you know, so I ran up again."

"Right. See you at the meeting, I suppose, Cooper?"

"Yes, Sir Julian. I think I've always attended every meeting since we first opened here. Half-past eleven, the meeting this morning; that gives me just half an hour. I leave you here, then, and turn off to the locker room.... Dear me, a sneeze is coming: now, can I get at a handkerchief in time?"

They left him rehearsing the procedure of his sneeze in a sub-audible manner.

"That boy always reminds me of a curate," said Sir Julian unkindly.

In the ground-floor room where the Supervisor sat intrenched behind an enormous table piled with papers, the subject of the vacant post of Lady Superintendent was embarked upon.

"The girl I wrote to you about from London, Sir Julian, is practically a lady," said Fuller, in a very earnest manner, fixing a pair of black, straight-gazing eyes on his chief. "In a general way, I wouldn't have a girl who is a lady on the staff for anything you could offer me, but this one has had three years' experience in Southampton Row, and has the highest testimonials, and certificates for shorthand and typewriting and a diploma for French."

"What salary does she want?" said Mark Easter.

"She'd take the figure we decided on, because she wants to come to the west of England."

"A hundred-and-twenty and exes?"

"That's right."

"Free to come at once?"

"To-morrow, if we want her."

"That's good. She's prepared to undertake a certain amount of tuition, and supervision of the staff, of course?"

"Quite."

"Well, Sir Julian," said Mark Easter, turning to him, "shall we put it to the directors?"

Sir Julian made no immediate reply, and Fuller, nothing if not intent upon his business, laid both arms upon the paper-bestrewn table, leant well forward, and began in an earnest and expostulating tone:

"I see you're hesitating, sir. I wish you could have had a personal interview with the young lady, for I really was most favourably impressed--most favourably. As I say, a superior young woman is always an influence, if there's no nonsense about her, and Miss Marchrose certainly has none, so far as I could judge. Of course, sir, the decision rests with you, but I must say I should like to give her a trial. I believe we might do worse."

"What sort of age is she?"

"She told me she was twenty-eight," said Fuller, with a grin that revealed dazzling teeth in his swarthy face, and thereby considerably increased his already marked resemblance to a Southern State negro.

"I should have preferred an older woman."

"I doubt if she'll ever see thirty again, sir," said Fuller simply.

"Well, Fuller, I know you've the interests of the College very much at heart, and I'm quite willing to give her a trial on your recommendation," said Julian. "We'll put it before the directors at the meeting."

"Thank you, Sir Julian. I thought you'd probably trust my judgment," Fuller remarked, with satisfaction. "And I don't think you will regret it. She struck me as being a thorough woman of business, most capable, and as hard as nails."

At this final qualification Sir Julian looked rather glum, irresistibly reminded of the heroine of that episode which had wrought so much havoc in the household of his wife's relatives.

"However," he remarked to Mark Easter, as they went towards the committee-room at the appointed hour, "I really do trust Fuller's judgment, so far as the good of the College goes, though I haven't his own implicit belief in his absolute infallibility."

"He thinks the whole show rests on him," said Mark Easter, and added with belated justice, "And for the matter of that, I really don't know where we should get another man like him. He's a nailer for work."

"I hope his protégée will be a success. If he talks to the directors about her being practically a lady, as distinguished, I suppose, from a 'young lady in business,' he'll fetch that old snob Bellew."

"He probably won't mention it," said Mark Easter shrewdly. "He looks upon it as a disadvantage in the abstract, but he told me yesterday that he thought he could explain it if any objection were raised."

"Fuller would think he could explain it," Sir Julian rejoined drily, "if the creation of the world were in question."

The committee-room was a long, low annexe to the main body of the building, with the usual green-baize covered table placed lengthways down the middle of the room, mahogany chairs at regular intervals round it, an armchair at the head for the chairman, and on the table the usual disposition of clean blotting-paper, pencils, note-books, and a carafe of water covered with an inverted glass.

A clock ticked on the chimneypiece.

Young Cooper was the sole occupant of the room, and observed brightly, "No one has arrived yet, sir, but I see the clock gives it as two minutes to the half-hour."

"Got an agenda there, Cooper?" said Mark, and proceeded to study the typewritten slip of paper.

Sir Julian went to the chair at the head of the table.

He also looked idly at the agenda, listening the while with the rather revolted fascination with which young Cooper's peculiar style of sub-audible self-communion always inspired him.

"I must move my chair or pull down the blind--sun coming right in through the window. If I lift it--so--that oughtn't to interfere with anyone else. Just caught the edge of the carpet, though--that won't do ... put the chair-leg down on it, and then we're all right."

"Now, Sir Julian, it's just striking the half-hour."

"I hear it."

"So do I," agreed Cooper agreeably, as the clock on the chimneypiece chimed loudly. "I'm just going to the window, to see if Mr. Bellew's car is in sight."

Having, as usual, suited the action to the word, Cooper was shortly able to announce that the car was there, and that he would come back to the table and see if the blotting-paper was straight.

"They'll draw on it," he said mournfully. "They always do. That's a thing I couldn't do myself, even if I weren't taking down the Minutes. I couldn't pay attention if I were drawing."

They did draw on the blotting-paper.

Sir Julian, leaning back at the head of the table, giving only half his attention to the meeting, which followed lines so habitual as to have become almost routine, watched with idle amusement the verification of Cooper's resignedly doleful prophecies.

Old Alderman Bellew, oily and apoplectic, made meaningless circles and semi-circles with a pencil grasped between the swollen knuckles of his first and second fingers, and only glanced up once or twice as a question of finance was touched upon by Fuller, Financial Secretary to the College as well as Supervisor of Classes.

Another director was yawning almost unconcealedly, until, catching the eye of the chairman, he assumed an expression of acute concern and hastily inserted a forefinger into his still open mouth as though in search of an aching tooth. This simple manœuvre was apparent to Sir Julian, and his eyes half involuntarily met Mark Easter's laughing blue ones in an instant's exchange of silent amusement.

Julian looked down again at his own share of blotting-paper, left immaculate in deference to Cooper's feelings, and his thoughts dwelt upon Mark Easter.

He thought of the good-looking, light-hearted fellow that Mark had been all his life, of his casual marriage, embarked upon out of pure good-nature, with a woman older than himself, and for no better reasons than the ones that he had once put forward, half apologetically, to Julian himself.

"She was having such a rotten time when I met her in Ireland--no one ever asked her to dance, and the other girls all seemed to be younger and prettier and having more fun. I used to take her for drives, you know, and then dance with her in the evenings; and upon my word, I was the only chap that ever took any notice of her, I do believe. And I really did want to settle down and have a home, and it somehow seemed more likely she'd take me than one of the pretty little fly-aways who could get all the fun they wanted before settling down. She was by way of being a good housekeeper, too, and fond of kids. I'm fond of kids myself," said Mark Easter wistfully.

Sir Julian wondered, not for the first time, how long that fondness had survived the shrieking, stamping, bullying era inaugurated by Ruthie, and the whining, unwashed, question-asking proclivities of her junior.

Mark Easter never spoke of his children except with a sort of apologetic tolerance, but neither was he often to be seen in their company.

He was agent to the Rossiter estate, and more often found about his work and at the College in Culmouth than in his untidy, servant-ridden, mistressless house.

Julian's thoughts turned for an unwilling moment to the recollection of the rapidly-growing gossip that had saddled Mark Easter, ten years ago, with an alternatively morphomaniac, drug-taking inebriate or homicidally insane partner. To his own ever-increasing, silent certainty that disaster threatened the only human being whom he cared for in the world, to Mark's haggard face and prolonged absences from home.

Then to a grey dawn, when Mark had ridden up to ask in three inarticulate words for help that Julian had given in almost unbroken silence. Mrs. Easter had gone away, and there was no more occasion for furtive surmise, for everyone knew at last that she had been steadily drinking her way into the home for inebriates that now had sheltered her for more than seven years.

And Mark, with an elasticity at which Julian had never yet ceased to marvel, had recovered his habit of easy laughter, his keen interest in his work, his old enthusiasm for the Commercial and Technical College schemes.

Sir Julian secretly admired and envied his almost childlike absorption in the College. He sent sidelong glances from time to time at Mark's keen, handsome face, at the shrewdness of the gaze which he kept upon each speaker.

Fairfax Fuller--never was there a worse misnomer, thought Julian, with a grim half-smile, as he looked at his swarthy-faced subordinate--Fairfax Fuller might have made a good speaker--say, a political agent. Kept to his facts, always sound, and with a weight of personal conviction that told. But there was nothing to look interested about, Julian reflected, as Mark Easter was looking interested.

Fuller always put forward the same arguments: for a better class of teacher, for an extension of advertisement, always with the same implication of his own indispensability as managing Supervisor.

Alderman Bellew was tedious, obviously only speaking at all so as to impress the fact of his presence on his fellow-directors, and Mark Easter said nothing, until Miss Marchrose's application for the post of Lady Superintendent was brought forward by Fuller.

The discussion of the appointment was merely formal, and Sir Julian gave it formal sanction.

"I think that concludes our business for to-day, gentlemen. Thank you all very much."

The chairman rose.

"Anything else you want me for, Fuller?" he enquired, as the meeting dispersed.

"I don't think so, thank you, sir," said Fuller, with a manifest air of dissatisfaction.

Sir Julian, knowing his Supervisor, lingered.

"Lady Rossiter has kindly asked the members of the staff out to Culmhayes on Sunday, Sir Julian."

Sir Julian looked quite as much annoyed as did Mr. Fuller.

Few things were, in the opinion either of the Supervisor or of his employer, less to be commended than Lady Rossiter's benevolent attempts at keeping in touch with the staff of the College.

Appearances, however, were discreetly maintained.

"I hope as many of them will come as care for the walk," said Sir Julian, with gloomy civility.

"I am sure they will be delighted, and it will make a nice beginning for Miss Marchrose on her first Sunday."

Sir Julian walked away even gloomier than before at the recollection that his wife's hospitality would not improbably be extended to the perpetrator of the outrage which had driven Captain Clarence Isbister to such extreme demonstrations of despair.

"Do you happen to remember--did you notice--what that woman's Christian name was?" he enquired of Mark Easter.

"The new Superintendent?"

"Yes."

"Let me see. I saw her letter to Fuller--something unusual.... Was it Pauline?"

"I thought so," said Sir Julian.

It was characteristic both of Sir Julian's dislike to anything which came, in his opinion, under the extremely elastic heading of officiousness, and of the care with which he had impressed his dislike upon Mark Easter, that his companion did not ask him why he thus dejectedly took for granted the name bestowed at baptism upon Miss Marchrose. Mark Easter, talkative and open-hearted, was yet the only man from whom Sir Julian said that he had never received an officious enquiry or an unasked offer of assistance.

If the remark might be looked upon as a form of the highest commendation, it was one which Sir Julian had never yet shown any disposition to make in regard to his wife.

Nothing had as yet persuaded Edna Rossiter of the inadvisability of addressing personalities to a man whose surface cynicism was used to cloak extreme sensitiveness, and whose bitterness of speech was the outcome of such disillusionment of spirit as comes only to those capable of an idealism as delicate as it is reserved.

"Are you going home, Mark, or will you lunch at the club?"

"The club," said Mark decidedly, with an intonation that brought before Sir Julian's inner vision a lively picture of the probable congealed mutton, underdone potatoes, the lumpy milk-pudding of Sarah's providing, doubtless to be consumed to an accompaniment of senseless comments and enquiries from Ruthie and Ambrose on the engrossing subject of "Why, Ben! A Story of the Sexes." As the thought crossed his mind, Mark observed:

"Iris is coming down here later on. Of course, she wants to be in London for the publication of her novel, but that won't be out till the winter, she says. Poor girl! I wish people would not put it into her head that it is her duty to come and look after me and the children at intervals."

"Who does put it into her head?"

"Various old aunts. I wish people would mind their own business. Poor Iris hates the country."

"Is she still living in the flat?"

"Yes, with another girl. I believe they sleep in the boot-hole and do their own cooking, but it's all a great success, and Iris is very happy, and has the sort of Bohemian society she likes. It is a much better arrangement than her being down here with me. I'm not sure," said Mark thoughtfully, "that I approve of relations living together after they are grown-up."

Sir Julian agreed with him so cordially as to suggest that the case in point was emphatically one in which the proposed arrangement would be eminently undesirable.

"I don't know that Iris, devoted though she is to them, is the best possible person to be with the children."

"No," said Julian, with restraint, considering his private opinion to be that if anything on earth could render Mark Easter's progeny more insufferable than nature and the maternal shortcomings had already made them, it was the society of their affected, suburban, and distinctly underbred young relative. It was a source of continual wonder to him, what sort of a person the second Mrs. Easter could have been, to have presented Mark with such a half-sister as the twenty-year-old perpetrator of "Why, Ben!"

The conclusion, long ago come to by him, that Mark had been afflicted with the most intolerable set of relations ever owned by man, was destined to be furnished with yet another proof of validity at the end of the day.

As the two men came back across the fields of Sir Julian's property late in the afternoon, Mark whistling under his breath and Julian silent in the comfortable companionship of long association and mutual understanding, a sound of hoarse, ceaseless yelling that could have been produced by no other human larynx than that of Mark Easter's daughter came from the garden of the villa.

"I'm afraid that's Ruthie," said her parent, sensibly slackening his pace.

"I'm certain it is."

Ruthie was bent double across the dangerously creaking top bar of the wooden paling.

She raised a face, flushed and distorted, indeed, as much from her unnatural position as from her vocal efforts, but unstained by tears, and proclaimed aloud:

"Daddy, Peekaboo has been such a naughty boy. Sarah is putting him to bed and I'm singing so that he can hear me from the night-nursery window. He has written up in ink all over the drawing-room door, and the dining-room door, and the nursery door, 'The two best books in the world are "Why, Ben!" and the Bible.'"

III

Edna Rossiter, in common with the majority of her sex, supposed herself to be a religious woman because she had, from early girlhood, indulged nightly in five minutes spent on her knees beside her bed, her face pressed against the satin quilt, while she thought about herself.

Very soon after her marriage she formed the habit of prolonging the five minutes into ten, or even fifteen, while she consecrated a few vindictively earnest thoughts of forgiveness to her husband.

Within the last ten years, all the forbearance which she was capable of displaying being apparently without any effect upon Sir Julian, Lady Rossiter had rather disgustedly transferred her allegiance from the Almighty, _in propria persona_, to God as He is found in Nature.

Nature, primarily, meant out-of-doors generally, in warm weather, and the sound of the sea two miles off, audible from beside the boudoir fire, in the colder seasons.

Lately, however, Nature had also embraced such of humanity as had its place rather lower than that of the Rossiters in the social scale.

Edna sought for the Divine Spark in her fellow-creatures, and frequently discovered it, with renewed satisfaction to herself and to its possessor.

As she often said, smiling a little:

"There's so much bad in the best of us, There's so much good in the worst of us----"

She never finished the quotation, except by the smile, because she knew it to be at all times easy to trip over its inversions and repetitions, and thus risk the transition from the sublime to the ridiculous.

One of the most recent manifestations of what Julian had once designated in his wife's hearing as the "Hunting of the Spark," was her wholesale invitation to the staff of teachers at the College to spend Sunday afternoon at Culmhayes.

A few stray and tentative young women had availed themselves of it once, showing a marked disposition towards wandering arm-in-arm round the gardens, avoiding their hostess as much as possible, and Cooper had twice walked over from Culmouth and made nervously easy conversation to Lady Rossiter, which had dwindled into a sort of alert silence when her husband came in.

"Mind you bring them _all_ next week," had been Lady Rossiter's farewell injunction, to which Cooper had replied with great confidence and assurance.

Preparing for her guests on Sunday afternoon, therefore, Lady Rossiter gazed smilingly out of her window at a cloudless day of August. Evidently Nature was in league with her votary.

Lady Rossiter told her maid to bring the black-and-white _mousseline de soie_. No other colours suited her fairness so admirably, and she always wore the combination when embarking upon any enterprise of particular benevolence. The thick pallor of her complexion could afford to defy the sun, and she seldom wore a hat in the garden. A black-and-white-striped sunshade made quite as effective a background for her mass of auburn hair and black eyebrows and lashes.

Before going downstairs she thoughtfully slipped the rings from her long white fingers, and bade her maid substitute a small crystal cross on a velvet ribbon for her pearl necklace.

The maid had not been with her very long, and obeyed the mandate with such wooden matter-of-factness that Lady Rossiter added gently:

"One doesn't want anyone to feel the least little--difference--in any way. We have all grown to have such false ideas of values...."

"Yes, m'lady," said Mason, looking so thoroughly bewildered that Lady Rossiter resolved to read extracts from Ruskin aloud to her while her hair was being brushed at nights.

She went downstairs slowly, to find Julian reading in the hall.

"Jorrocks?" she enquired playfully, but with a meaning that she knew would not be lost upon her husband.

Ever since she had wrung from a monosyllabic Julian the admission that neither Ruskin, Pater, nor Stevenson "meant" to him that which they meant to her, Edna had assumed, by almost imperceptible degrees, that her husband's only literature consisted of Jorrocks and the volumes of the Badminton series.

Dickens she had unwillingly conceded to him, since Dickens made no appeal to her personally, but she was more apt to dwell upon his liking for the "Pickwick Papers" and "Nicholas Nickleby" than for "Great Expectations" or "David Copperfield."

At her enquiry Julian closed his book.

"Jorrocks, of course," he assented expressionlessly, putting down Huysman's "En Route," and not troubling to display the title.

"Did Mr. Fuller tell you how many of my staff meant to come this afternoon?"

"No. I don't suppose, in any case, that they would have told him."

"That's so curious to me, Julian. To work together all the week, and yet know nothing of one another's _real_ life--nothing of what goes on in the free time, or the one holiday of the week."

"What generally goes on, I imagine, is that the girls have their hair waved on Saturday afternoons, stay in bed on Sunday mornings, and go out with their young men on Sunday evenings. I doubt if the procedure ever varies."

"And that with God's own blue sea less than a mile away!" ejaculated Lady Rossiter under her breath, but nevertheless quite audibly.

"Cooper generally goes for a walk on Saturday afternoon," said Sir Julian consolingly; "and Fuller, and I imagine a good many of the other fellows as well, to a football or cricket match."

"Can you wonder that we long to win them to clearer, wider ideals?" his wife enquired.

She waited for no reply, aware of old that Julian invariably professed a supreme indifference to the outlook of the College staff when outside their College walls, but trailed into the wide, cool drawing-room containing little furniture and an abundance of roses and heliotrope.

Lady Rossiter arranged the flowers herself, and did so exquisitely. She often said that flowers were literally a necessity to her--an opinion frequently held by those whose financial situation has never compelled them to regard flowers as an alternative to, let us say, butter for breakfast, in which case the relative value of the commodities in question is apt to undergo alteration.

Poised over her bowls of pink roses, Lady Rossiter was taken by surprise when her guests eventually arrived.