Part 14

It came to an end at last, and Iris ran away to change her dress, a sudden access of skittishness superimposed upon her shyness.

Douglas simultaneously took the opportunity of disappearing, and Sir Julian found himself enabled to put the question that had been making its way to his mind almost irresistibly all the morning.

"What does your business in Swindon consist of, Mr. Garrett?"

"Printing and stationery, Sir Julian," said the old man, proudly and simply. "A go-ahead little concern on the small scale, though I say it that shouldn't. It's enabled me to give my only son an allowance, so that he could see life in London for a while before settling down in Swindon like his father and grandfather before him."

"Your family has an old connection with Swindon, then?"

Sir Julian, interested, had forgotten the Keltic aspirations of Douglas until they were recalled by Mr. Garrett's answer.

"Two generations, Sir Julian. My grandfather came from the North, I believe, but he married a London gurrel, and they settled in Swindon after a year or two. Swindon is a fascinating town, I can assure you, and if ever you make a visit there I shall be happy to show you some of the glories of the dear old place."

Mr. Garrett wiped his glasses and walked about the room, talking gaily and persistently to while away the time of waiting for the bride's reappearance.

"And what's your opinion of a wedding, my dearr little fellow?" he genially enquired of Ambrose, who wore a rather forlorn aspect.

"Eh?" said Ambrose, with more dejection than usual in the delivery of his objectionable exclamation.

"What do you think of a wedding, now you've seen one? This is your first experience, I presume?"

Ambrose looked absent-minded, gazed up enquiringly through his spectacles for a moment, and then said, "Eh?" all over again.

"My dearr child, don't say 'eh,' like that!" rather testily exclaimed the old man, a prey to the universal impulse of annoyance which almost invariably assailed everyone entering into conversation with the unfortunate Ambrose.

"What does your little sister say?"

"I like being bridesmaid," Ruthie announced in self-satisfied tones. "Uncle Douglas gave me a bangle." She thrust the trinket forward for inspection, and old Mr. Garrett admired it gravely.

"I suppose that's what you call a sweet thing? Isn't that the great word? Well, my dearr child, I'm glad you're satisfied."

Ruthie looked at him intelligently.

"I only hope that Auntie Iris will have a baby soon, because then Sarah says it will be my first cousin, and I haven't got any."

On this delicate aspiration of Miss Easter's the conversation came to a rather abrupt conclusion.

"Iris ought to be ready now," said Mark; "they won't have too much time to get to the station."

He went upstairs.

Presently the bridegroom wandered into the drawing-room again, evidently self-conscious, and endeavouring to conceal it by an excessive display of anxiety as to the probability of missing the train.

"Here she is!"

"The car is waiting," proclaimed Ruthie.

Old Mr. Garrett gazed at the white favours adorning the motor.

"Isn't there a shoe tied on behind?" he demanded sharply.

"I--I don't see one," said Sir Julian, rather feebly, and with an unaccountable sense of having been remiss in omitting to provide this emblem of good fortune.

"Don't let them drive away without an old shoe!" pleaded Mr. Garrett. "My dearr child--Ruth, if that's your name--run up to the bedrooms and see what you can find. I couldn't let my boy go off on his wedding trip without a shoe for good luck."

In eager obedience to this flight of sentiment, Ruthie triumphantly rushed upstairs, the successive sounds of burst-open doors, hasty explorations, and triumphant pouncings conveying the rate of her progress with great accuracy to those in the drawing-room below.

In the excitement which Mr. Garrett diffused round the whole question, there was no possibility of an emotional farewell.

Mark put Iris into the motor--a radiantly pretty bride--and Douglas got in beside her, after muttering something about the old man being in extraordinarily good form to-day and inclined to get above his boots.

"We of the younger generation----" began Mr. Douglas Garrett, quite in his old manner, and then looked as though he had suddenly recollected the advanced years of Sir Julian himself, and subsided into the shelter of the motor without another word.

His father, having already hurried to the back of the car and affixed there a white satin shoe and a bedroom slipper, with much boisterous assistance from Ruthie, proceeded to deliver a valedictory harangue from the step.

"God bless you, my two dearr children, and shower upon you all the blessing of the married state. Send the old man a postcard from your first stopping-place, and, Iris, my dearr new daughter, you'll keep my son up to writing, and I shall be ready for you both in the dearr little house at home, whenever you like to come there. Also," said Mr. Garrett hopefully, "we shall meet in London. I think nothing of running up there. Good-bye--good-bye--bless you both."

He stood at the door waving a large clean handkerchief delicately scented with eau-de-Cologne, his shiny top-hat rather to one side and the ends of his beautifully waxed moustaches standing out stiffly. His kind old eyes shone with emotion.

"Yourr loss," he remarked, with simple sententiousness, to Mark Easter, "your loss is ourr gain. That's a pretty gurrel and a good gurrel, I feel sure. I appreciate my boy's good fortune, I assure you."

He shook hands with them all, begged them to visit Swindon, thanked them again and again for their kindness to himself and his dearr boy Douglas, and took his leave.

"I will not intrude upon you any further," was all his reply to Mark's cordial invitation to remain. "You have been goodness itself to an old man. Good-bye to you all, good-bye."

"I think, in Auntie Iris' place, I should have preferred the father to the son," said Julian, as he went homeward with his wife.

"Poor old man! There's something very genuine about him, in spite of his vulgarity," replied Lady Rossiter, with that leniency of tone that most successfully drapes a rather disparaging utterance.

"I wonder," observed Julian, for once in a loquacious mood, "what the next production will be from Auntie Iris' pen? And whether the influence of Mr. Douglas Garrett will be very obvious."

"That might not be a bad thing."

"It couldn't be a much worse thing than 'Why, Ben!' was."

"Silly little girl! I wish she would stop writing altogether. I have locked up my copy of 'Why, Ben!' on account of the servants. I always hold that one is so wholly responsible for the books one leaves about, with either children or uneducated people in the house, to whom they might do so much harm."

"I shouldn't have thought that Mason's head was very easily turned," thoughtfully rejoined Sir Julian, who was aware of his wife's protracted and unsuccessful wrestlings with the recalcitrant spirit of Mason.

"I sometimes think that I shall have to get another maid," sighed Edna. "One goes on so gladly and willingly from day to day when there is the least little sign of any response, but Mason is at a very, very elementary stage. Of course it's all a question of soul-growth--hers is just a young, blind, struggling soul, and there is only the most pitying tenderness to be felt for that, but I suppose poor human nature is impatient, and longs to see a little dawning of that Divine Spark which one knows so well is there all the time."

But to this gently-spoken plaint Sir Julian, suddenly become silent, made no reply whatever.

Edna went into the morning-room rather dejectedly. An unsympathetic atmosphere, she often felt, wearied her more than any physical strain. She was unaware that this conviction is a singularly widespread one amongst those who have never been called upon for any excess of bodily toil.

Iris was married. There was no further occasion for matronly tact and tenderness, nor for the beautiful tolerance of maturity towards the crudities of youth.

Douglas Garrett had achieved his object, and returned to London with his bride. The necessity therefore no longer existed either for overlooking and graciously ignoring his many shortcomings, or for dropping those little kindly sayings that should serve to remind others, too rashly condemning Mr. Garrett, of that great question, "Is it kind--is it wise--is it true?"

Mr. Garrett's father, who might certainly have served as a substantial peg upon which to hang many a word of gentle forbearance, had gone away, and even the most determined philanthropy could see no hopeful outlet in the direction of Ruthie and Ambrose Easter.

Lady Rossiter began to think of Mark. This she did almost instinctively whenever her sense of the need for "giving out" was at a loss for an object. The situation of Mark Easter was one of such obvious tragedy, and daily reiterated pathos, that the consideration of it could minimise the rather incongruous light-heartedness with which he himself faced it. One could always help Mark.

His children needed help.

His whole household required the supervision of a feminine eye at the shortest possible intervals, and Edna had for years regarded herself as the only woman with eyes available for the purpose. Yet when, on leaving the villa after the wedding, she had suggested, with a very gentle hint of compassionate understanding in her voice, that Mark should come and dine at Culmhayes that night, he had replied, without confusion, that he was going straight up to the College and should remain there late.

It was tragically inevitable, Edna told herself, that one should realise what this implied.

Edna sat in reflection for some time, her face shadowed and saddened, but with that absence of mobility of expression that had left her smooth skin almost altogether unlined throughout her life.

At dinner that night, notwithstanding, she met Sir Julian with an unclouded brow. She often said that part of her rule of life was to leave all her cares locked up in her own room, so that she might always diffuse serenity when with others.

By some perversity of fate, however, Edna's effect upon her husband was never the one at which she so carefully aimed. On this occasion the diffusion of serenity engineered by Lady Rossiter appeared only to leave Sir Julian rather more satirically ill-tempered than it found him.

"Julian, you've thought about the question of sending someone from the staff here to Gloucester, haven't you? It will be rather a big responsibility."

"For Gloucester?"

"For the representative of our College," said Edna, with a little low laugh, quite obviously meant to imply that she thought it best to look upon Sir Julian's captiousness as having been humorously intended.

"There won't be very much in it. Only a question of looking at the buildings, and answering anything the local authorities may want to ask."

"Would that young Mr. Cooper be competent?"

"Anyone would be competent."

An all but imperceptible smile hovered on Lady Rossiter's lips.

"Then, Julian, why don't you send that unfortunate Miss Marchrose? If a break is made, easily and naturally, she can begin again at the College on a different footing. You know there's a certain amount of talk going on there?"

There was a long pause. Sir Julian did not ask, "What about?"

Finally he said: "It's Fuller's business to decide who's going to Gloucester. I'm not responsible for the details of running the staff there in any way. Nor is the question an important one."

"Ah," breathed Edna, "you know that I can't quite think with you there, Julian. To me, they are all immortal souls."

"How will Gloucester affect the immortality of their souls?" Sir Julian enquired.

But his wife gazed at him very earnestly.

"A woman's instinct is not very often wrong. There's tension in the air, and--why shouldn't I speak out?--I want to put out a helping hand--to save Mark, before things come to a head and he is faced with a crisis."

"In that case," said her husband blandly, "I had better arrange that Mark should be the person who goes to Gloucester."

XVII

"A very cold north wind," said Sir Julian, entering the room set ready for a General Committee meeting.

"Damnably cold," said Mark Easter, who never swore.

Sir Julian made an elaborate rearrangement of the pencils and blotting-paper on the table in front of him and then looked at Mark.

They were the first arrivals.

Mark's gaze met Sir Julian's, but it was unusually clouded.

"I don't know what's the matter with the place," he said irritably.

"What's happened?"

"Nothing at all, that I know of. It's just in the air. Fuller's like a bear with a sore head, and those two women--Farmer and Sandiloe--whispering together in corners and exchanging glances like conspirators in a gunpowder plot. What on earth is the matter with them all?"

There was silence, and then Mark said, still in the same irritable voice:

"I suppose they think one's a perfect fool. If I've had one of them into my office this morning, I've had half a dozen--on the flimsiest excuses you ever heard of in your life. I don't know what they expected to find there, I'm sure."

If Sir Julian could have enlightened his agent on the point, he did not do so.

But he became himself very acutely aware of the state of tension pervading the College during the course of the committee meeting. Mark, contrary to his usual habit, scarcely spoke at all; Mr. Fuller sat with a face like a thundercloud, and, looking up occasionally under his closely-knitted eyebrows, fixed inscrutable eyes upon Miss Marchrose opposite.

She looked tired and nervous, and Sir Julian remembered that it was less than a week since he had thought her looking beautiful at Iris Easter's wedding.

Edna, he noticed, did not glance at Miss Marchrose, but from time to time her eyes rested thoughtfully upon Mark Easter.

Even Alderman Bellew, far from susceptible to shades of atmosphere, struck Sir Julian as being vaguely and uneasily watchful.

The meeting was poorly attended, and when it was over Mark said rather doubtfully to Lady Rossiter:

"You'll have some tea before you go, won't you?"

"Thank you," she said graciously. "Only if you're quite sure that it wouldn't put anyone out, give any extra trouble."

"I can find out the state of the commissariat first, if you like," he rejoined, and left the room.

Miss Marchrose had gone already.

Edna's manner altered to one of businesslike determination on the instant.

"I'm going to make a little suggestion," she said clearly.

The Alderman looked up, and at the same instant Fairfax Fuller took two steps forward.

"It isn't, perhaps, a very easy thing for me to say," Lady Rossiter said unfalteringly, "but we all know one another here. And I believe--oh, so intensely!--in having courage. But never mind that. I needn't go into any details, but it's this--I think the general feeling amongst the staff is that there might be some slight alteration in the duties of the Lady Superintendent. They don't altogether like her doing so much. It's natural enough, isn't it? Perhaps they feel that inordinately long hours kept by one person cast a slur upon the others, who don't seem to be quite so devoted. Perhaps she hasn't been very tactful about it. I don't know about that. But at all events, couldn't we give her a holiday from evening work for the present? Let her go at about four o'clock?"

The Alderman's prawn-like eyes were fixed admiringly upon Lady Rossiter, but he said nothing.

Sir Julian spoke.

"You can't make an invidious distinction of that sort, Edna. It would be impossible."

"But she looks very tired," said Edna smoothly. "She has certainly been doing too much. We can put it on that score."

"Who has been objecting to the hours that Miss Marchrose puts in?" demanded Fairfax Fuller bluntly.

Edna's little smile admirably blended a protest at the question and a quiet determination to leave it unanswered.

"Because," said Fuller, "if you'll be good enough to tell that person to address his or her complaint to _me_, Lady Rossiter, I will deal with it in the proper way. I never yet heard of a good worker being sent off duty early because a slack one didn't like the sight of over-work."

"Come, come, Fuller," said the Alderman uncertainly.

Fairfax Fuller turned a black gaze upon him that actually caused the old man to move his chair backwards.

"Leave it alone, Edna," said her husband. "If there's jealousy amongst the staff, Fuller is quite right in saying that he's the person to adjust it. They had no business to appeal to you."

"You force me to speak plainly," said Lady Rossiter. "It isn't only a little jealousy, though there is that as well. But--to put things exactly as they are--the staff doesn't like the habit that Miss Marchrose has fallen into of staying on overtime till all hours, and then being taken home. And, frankly, I don't think you can blame them. That sort of thing isn't done. It makes talk at once."

"Evidently."

The fury in Fuller's voice was hardly suppressed.

"I believe that I am not censorious," said Lady Rossiter. "It is utterly foreign to my nature, and I would sooner blind myself to evil than look out for it--yet there are things which go against one's every instinct. This is a very little community and has always been a very peaceful and happy one. It hurts me very much, somehow, that there should be talk of the kind that I know has been going on lately."

"Mischief-making----" muttered Fuller fiercely and without completing his sentence.

"Officiousness is the curse of the age!" exclaimed Sir Julian, neither for the first nor the second time. "Why can't people mind their own business? What has it to do with them?" As he spoke, some part of his mind commented upon the futility of these disjointed exclamations, and the irrationality of the desire to gain time that had caused him to utter them.

The three men gazed at Lady Rossiter.

"Oh, how I hate saying it!" she cried in an impulsive manner. "It isn't that I think there's any harm in it all--indeed, I don't. But I myself have seen little things--tiny, infinitesimal incidents, if you like--that somehow seem to carry significance by repetition. That sort of thing _doesn't_ do."

She looked at her listeners for an instant, and made inevitable selection amongst them.

She turned to the Alderman appealingly.

"I'm only a woman, but I know that sort of thing doesn't do in business offices. Isn't it true?"

"Quite true, Lady Rossiter," said the Alderman instantly. "It's an undesirable sort of element altogether. And once people start talking--especially a lot of girls, if you'll excuse my saying so--it's hopeless. It ought to be got rid of."

Edna hesitated a moment. Then she said:

"Shall I--shall I speak to poor Miss Marchrose? It might be easier for another woman to do it, and I don't think she would resent it from me."

Two, at least, of those present might reasonably have received this assertion with a considerable amount of surprise, in view of certain past incidents apparently shrouded in complete oblivion by the forgiving Lady Rossiter.

The Alderman was less responsive this time.

"It's very good of you, Lady Rossiter--very good indeed. I'm sure we all appreciate your keen interest in the welfare of the College and the staff. But at the same time--I don't know----" He stopped rather helplessly.

"You mustn't think of me," gently said Edna. "Just speak out, quite frankly, and tell me what would be best for everyone. Anything I can do, you know----"

"The fact is, it's least said soonest mended, in these cases," blurted out the Alderman. "The girl had better go. Don't you agree with me, Sir Julian?"

"It will probably end in that."

There was a certain surprise visible on Lady Rossiter's face as she heard her husband's reply.

"It's her livelihood," she reminded them; "we mustn't forget that. But at the same time, the College interests come first, and the one thing to be avoided, at any cost, is a crisis. So much can be done by staving things off."

"The doctrine of expediency," inaudibly muttered Julian through his teeth.

It was a doctrine that had never failed to rouse him to wrath.

Fairfax Fuller's deep, angry voice broke out suddenly:

"I should like to know what the girl is being accused of, that we should send away the best worker we've ever struck."

No one replied, until Edna said solemnly, "I accuse no one."

"I beg your pardon, Lady Rossiter, but it is too late to say that now. The girl _has_ been accused, and she knows it, and everyone else knows it. The whole thing is in the air. The place stinks of it," said Mr. Fuller with reckless candour. "There was some talk of my being sent off to Gloucester on business, but I don't leave this place until this mess is cleared up. Why, the atmosphere is like a barrel of gunpowder, simply waiting for a lighted match."

"Then why light it, Mr. Fuller?" sweetly enquired Lady Rossiter. "Why insist upon having things put into words?"

"Because it's common justice," said Mr. Fuller doggedly. "We can't send the girl away without giving her a reason, and there isn't a reason to give, that I can see."

"That question will rest with the directors, surely," Lady Rossiter reminded him. She looked straight at Alderman Bellew.

"She'll know fast enough what the reason is, without being told," the Alderman gloomily supported the lady. "She's not a chicken. A girl with any business experience knows very well that this sort of thing isn't tolerated in any office. Nothing serious, of course, as Lady Rossiter has just said, but it makes talk, and it won't do."

Fuller swung round and faced the Alderman.

"I'd like to have the sort of thing you've just alluded to, specified. I'm Supervisor of this staff, and I've nothing against Miss Marchrose."

"As you have just been reminded," pointedly said the Alderman, also becoming heated, "the question rests ultimately with the directors."

"Then my position here is a farce," the Supervisor retorted.

"Anything but that, Mr. Fuller," said Edna earnestly, and with the evident intention of laying a soothing hand upon his arm.

Fuller almost backed into the wall in his avoidance of it.

"Indeed," said Lady Rossiter pleadingly, "no one minimises your position here, nor the responsibility that rests upon you with regard to the staff. But you force me to say something that I would much, much rather leave unsaid."

Sir Julian wondered whether it would be of any use to ask her to do so, and decided that it would not.

"I used to hear about this poor creature years before she ever came here. It isn't the first time that there's been--trouble."

Sir Julian's eyes almost involuntarily met those of the Alderman as this pregnant announcement fell upon the air. He interposed in a level voice:

"My wife means nothing that is derogatory to Miss Marchrose, Mr. Bellew. We are, however, in a position to know that a few years ago she broke off an engagement of marriage under circumstances that were certainly painful, but perfectly honourable to herself. That matter, of course, concerns her private life, and has nothing whatever to do with the point at issue."

"Excepting this, Julian," his wife said resolutely, "that a girl who has once put herself into a false position of that kind is liable to do the same sort of thing again."

"She may get engaged to the whole office one after another and chuck them next day, for all I care, so long as she does her work properly," said Fuller, quite as resolutely as, and a good deal more vehemently than, Lady Rossiter.

"It would scarcely be good for the office generally," replied Edna drily.

"Now, my dear fellow," began the Alderman, "you must look at this matter in the light of reason. The greater good of the greater number, you know. This young woman mustn't be allowed to upset the office."

"She hasn't done so."