Part 3

The wife and daughter should come round too. And then as the lord of Strathfieldsaye said, "Good-night, Mossop," and was about to turn away from the open gate, he felt suddenly the hand of the solicitor upon his shoulder and the impact of a pair of grave, kind eyes. "I wish, my dear friend," said Lawyer Mossop, "you could see your way to taking a fortnight to think over that little matter."

It was not mere conventional man-of-the-worldly good feeling. It was the human father, and the sheer unexpectedness of the obtrusion through the highly polished surface of the city's foremost solicitor caused his client to take a sharp breath. But Josiah's strength had always been that he knew his own mind. And he knew it now. "No, Mossop." A final shake of the dour head. "That gel is comin' out of my will. Good-night."

The solicitor sighed gently and closed the gate. And then he stood a moment to watch the slow-receding lurch of the elephantine figure up the road.

VII

"If that boy had lived--which he didn't," reflected the lord of Strathfieldsaye as he opened carefully the fresh painted gate of his own demesne, "I'd like him to have been educated at Rugby."

Lawyer Mossop had been educated at Rugby. Somehow that gentleman always left in the mind of this shrewd, oddly perceptive client an impression of being "just right," of not having anything in excess. His reputation in Blackhampton was very high. Just as Dr. Perrin had been for years its leading physician, Mr. Mossop had been for years its leading lawyer. To be a patient of the one, a client of the other, almost conferred a diploma of merit. Not only was it a proof in itself of social standing, an ability "to pay for the best," but it also expressed a knowledge, greatly valued by the elect, that the best was worth paying for. Josiah was a firm believer in that maxim.

Still ... he closed the gate of Strathfieldsaye as carefully as he had opened it ... when all was said education was dangerous. Up to a point a good thing, no doubt. You couldn't be a Lawyer Mossop without it. But it was like vaccination: some people it suited, others it didn't.

There was a trim slight figure coming down the path, in a hat not without pretensions to fashion.

"Leaving us, Gert?" said Josiah. "Better stop to supper."

Miss Preston reluctantly declined the invitation.

"Why not? Always a knife and fork for you here, you know."

"I'd love to, Josiah, but they'll be waiting for me at home."

"Well, if you won't, you won't--but you'd be very welcome." And then he embraced the house and its surroundings in a large gesture. "One better than Waterloo Villa, eh?"

"It is," said Gerty, with tempered enthusiasm. She looked at her brother-in-law with wary eyes. "You must be a very rich man, Josiah."

He narrowed his gaze a little and scratched his cheek delicately with the side of his forefinger, an odd trick he had when thinking deeply on questions of money. "So, so," he said. "So, so."

"But a place like this means _heaps_ of money," Gerty waved a knowledgeable parasol.

"I daresay." It was the air of a very "substantial" man indeed. "The year after next I expect to be mayor. And then"--a note of triumph crept into his voice--"we may be able to show some of 'em a thing or two."

Miss Preston was diplomatically quite sure of that. And yet as she stood with the crude bulk of Strathfieldsaye behind her, she looked somehow a little dubious. It was as if, respect this brother-in-law of hers as she might, she had certain mental reservations in regard to him.

He was too busy with his own thoughts to detect what was passing in her mind; besides the curves of his own mind were too large for him to care very much even had he done so.

"You've got to come to the show, Gert," he said abruptly. "To-morrow week--don't forget."

Gerty began to hedge a bit, but he would take no denial. It was her duty "to bring Maria up to the scratch."

There was no way out, it seemed, so finally she must make up her mind to yield and to suffer. It would be a horrible affair--common people, brass band, a general atmosphere of vulgarity and alcohol; it would be all that her prim soul abhorred. And the heat would be terrific. Her spirit quailed, but how could the miserable Maria hope to get through without her to lean upon! Besides if she showed the white feather Josiah might lose some of his respect for her. And she couldn't afford that, especially after it had cost her so much for him to gain it.

"She must get into the habit of showing herself to the public as she's going to be mayoress."

Miss Preston quite saw that. She yielded with as much grace as she could muster. Josiah took her down to the gate and told her to mind the paint. And then as she was about to pass through, her gloved hand was laid upon his arm, almost exactly as Lawyer Mossop's had been, and she said softly and gravely in a voice curiously similar, "Josiah, if I were you, I should not be in a hurry about ... about Sally."

The grimness of the eyes that met hers would have scared most women, but Gertrude Preston was not one to be frightened easily. There was hesitancy, a slight nervousness, all the same.

Josiah shook his head. "No," he said slowly, "that gel is coming' out o' my will."

The look of him as he stood there with the sun's shadow falling across his heavy face told her that argument would be worse than useless. Rather abruptly she said good-night and marched primly away along the road.

VIII

The annual Flower Show and Gala in Jubilee Park was in part a serious function, in part a popular festival. But its secondary aspect was undoubtedly predominant.

Jubilee Park was sacred to those who thronged the close-packed southern and eastern areas of the city. Among many other things, held by the people of Blackhampton to be vastly more important, the town and its suburbs had a reputation for flowers. It was odd that it should have. Except perhaps a subtle quality in the soil, there was little in its corporate life or in its physical expression to account for the fact that it had long been famous for its roses. Among the hundreds of allotment holders on the outskirts of the city, practical rose growers abounded and these claimed an apotheosis at the annual show in Jubilee Park.

Almost the only vanity Mr. Josiah Munt had permitted himself in his earlier days was that he was a practical rose grower. He had competed at the show ever since there had been a show, and he had garnered so many prizes in the process that he now took rank as an expert. But he was more than that. He was now regarded as chief patron of a cult that was largely confined to the humbler and the poorer classes. A hard man, known throughout the city as very "near" in his business dealings, he was a despiser of public opinion and no seeker of popular applause. But of late years, having grown remarkably prosperous and a figure of ever-increasing consequence in the town, he made a practice just once in the year of "letting himself out a bit" at the function in Jubilee Park.

For one thing the Park itself was almost within a stone's throw of the Duke of Wellington; and in Josiah's opinion its sole merit was its contiguity to that famous public house. Personally he despised Jubilee Park and the class of persons who frequented it--they were a common lot--but now he had taken rank as the great man of this particular neighborhood, wherein he had been born and had sown the seeds of his fortune, it did him no harm in his own esteem or in that of the people who had known him in humbler days, once a year to savor his preëminence.

Tuesday, August the Fourth, was one of the hottest days within the memory of Blackhampton. And in that low-lying, over-populated area of which Jubilee Park was the center it seemed hotter than anywhere else. Being the day after Bank Holiday, a large section of the community "had taken another day off," therefore several thousand persons of all ages and both sexes assembled on the brown bare grass in the course of the afternoon.

To say that the bulk of these had been attracted to those shadeless precincts by a display of roses would be too polite a compliment. The Blackhampton Prize Brass Band was the undoubted magnet of the many. Then there were tea al fresco for the ladies, a baby show and a beauty competition, beer and bowls for the gentlemen, dancing to follow and also fireworks. When the Show was considered in all its aspects, the roses only appealed to a small minority; the roses in fact were hardly more than a pretext for a local saturnalia, but in the middle of the sward was a large tent wherein the competing blooms were displayed. Close by was a tent considerably less in size if intrinsically the more imposing, to which a square piece of cardboard was attached by a blue ribbon. It bore the legend "President and Committee."

At the entrance to this smaller tent a number of important looking but perspiring gentlemen were seated in a semicircle on garden chairs. And in the center of these, with rather the air of Jupiter among his satellites, was Mr. Josiah Munt. Several members of the committee, all badged and rosetted as they were, had removed their coats out of deference to the thermometer, but the President was not of these. Under the famous white pot hat, which in the southeastern district of his native city was as famous as the Gladstone collar and the Chamberlain eyeglass, was artfully disposed a cool cabbage leaf, and over all was a large white sun umbrella.

The sun umbrella marked a precedent. It was a symbol, a herald of the President's ever advancing social status. All the same it was not allowed to mar a certain large geniality with which he always bore himself at the Rose Show. By nature the proprietor of the Duke of Wellington was not an expansive man, particularly in the world of affairs, but once a year, at least, he made a point of unbending as far as it was in him to do so.

This afternoon the President was accessible to all and sundry as of yore. Moreover he had followed his time-honored custom of regaling the committee, most of whom were "substantial men" and the cronies of an earlier, more primitive phase in the ascending fortunes of the future mayor of the city, with whisky and cigars, conveyed specially from the Duke of Wellington by George the head barman. But it was clear as the afternoon advanced and the heat increased with the ever-growing throng, that the subject of roses and even the martial strains of Rule Britannia, Hearts of Oak and other accepted masterpieces rendered with amazing _brio_ by the B.P.B.B. did not wholly occupy the thoughts of these distinguished men.

Among the Olympians who sat in the magic semicircle at the mouth of their own private tent and enjoyed the President's whisky and cigars and the privilege of personal intercourse with him was a foxy-looking man with large ears and large spectacles. Julius Weiss by name, he had migrated from his native Germany thirty years before, and by specializing in what was technically known as "a threepenny hair-cut" had risen to the position of a master hair-dresser with six shops of his own in the city. A man of keen intelligence and cosmopolitan outlook, there were times in the course of the afternoon when he seemed to claim more of the President's attention than the ostensible business in hand.

"No, I don't trust our gov'ment," said Josiah for the tenth time, when a cornet solo, the Battle of Prague ("Bandsman Rosher") had been brought to a triumphant close. "Never have trusted 'em if it comes to that."

"That's because you're a blooming Tory," ventured the only hungry looking member of an extremely well-nourished looking committee--an obvious intellectual with piercing black eyes and fiercely picturesque mustache whose hue was as the raven.

"Politics is barred, Lewis!" It was the President's Saturday morning manner at the City Hall, but its austerity was tactfully mitigated by a dexterous passing of the cigar box. "We ought to go in now ... this minute. What do you say, Weiss?"

The master hair-dresser screwed up a pair of vulpine eyes and then replied in a low harsh guttural, "It is a big t'ing to fight Chermany."

"We are not afraid of you," interjected a pugnacious Committee-man. "Don't you think that."

The President held up a stern finger. "No, no, Jennings." It was a breach of taste and the President glared at the offender from under his cabbage leaf. He had a deep instinct for fair play, a curious impartiality that enabled him to see the merits of Weiss as a taxpayer and a citizen. In the lump he approved of Germans as little as any one else, but such a man as Weiss with his unceasing industry, his organizing capacity, his business ability and his social qualities was a real asset to the city.

The little hair-dresser broke a solemn pause. "_We_ are not ready for war." He stressed the "we" to the plain annoyance of several committee-men, although Josiah was not of the number. "A month from now they'll be in Paris."

"I don't think," said the truculent Jennings.

"You'll see, my tear," said Julius Weiss.

IX

At five o'clock Maria and Aunt Gerty arrived on the scene. Blackhampton's future mayoress had been taken very firmly in hand by her step-sister who was fully determined that the social credit of Alderman Munt should not be lowered in the sight of the world. Gerty had really taken enormous pains with a naturally timid and weakly constituted member of society.

After a battle royal, in which tears had been shed, the hapless Maria had been compelled to renounce a pair of old-fashioned stays which on common occasions foreshortened her figure to the verge of the grotesque, in favor of sinuous, long-lined, straight-fronted corsets. With such ruthless art had outlying and overlapping portions of Maria been folded away within their fashionable confines, that, as she breathlessly remarked to her torturer as she looked in the glass, "She didn't know herself, she didn't really."

Maria could hardly breathe as she waddled across the parched expanse of Jubilee Park. She was more miserably self-conscious than she had ever been in the whole course of a miserably self-conscious existence. Her corsets, she was sure, filled the world's eye. At her time of life to take such liberties with the human form was hardly decent, it wasn't really. Moreover Gerty had perched a great hat on the top of her, almost a flower show in itself, the sort that was worn, Gerty assured her, by the local duchess on public occasions; and it was kept in place on a miraculous new-fangled coiffure by a white veil with black spots. Then her comfortable elastic-sided boots, the stand-bys of a fairly long and very honorable life, had gone by the board at the instance of the ruthless Gerty. She had to submit to patent leathered, buckled affairs, that could only be coaxed on to the human foot by a shoehorn. No wonder that Mrs. Alderman Munt walked with great delicacy across the baking expanse of Jubilee Park. And the intensely respectable black kid gloves that for more than half a century had served her so well for chapel goings, prayer meetings, weddings, funerals, christenings and the concerts of the Philharmonic Society had been forced to yield to a pair whose virgin whiteness in Maria's opinion carried fashion to the verge of immodesty. Nor did even these complete the catalogue of Gerty's encroachments. There was also a long-handled black and white parasol.

As Maria and Gerty debouched across the grass, Josiah arose from his chair in the midst of the committee and strutted impressively past the bandstand to receive them.

"Why, Mother, I hardly knew you." There was high approval in the greeting. "Up to the knocker, what!" He offered a cordial hand to his heroically beaming sister-in-law, "How are you, Gert?"

The ladies had been careful to have tea before they came but this precaution did not avail. Josiah insisted on their going into the special tent labeled "Refreshments." Here they had to sit on a form rickety and uncomfortably narrow which promised at any moment either to lay them prone beneath the tea urn or enable them to form a parabola over against the patent bread-cutter at the other end of the table.

The tea was lukewarm and undrinkable, the bread and butter was thick and so uninviting that both ladies were sure it was margarine, but after a moment's hesitation in which she felt the stern eye of Josiah upon her, the heroic Gerty dexterously removed one white glove and came to grips with a plate of buttered buns. In the buns were undeniable currants, and their genial presence enabled Gerty to make a spirited bluff at consuming them.

Where Gerty walked, Maria must not fear to tread. The ladies got somehow through their second tea and then they were haled into the open, past the bandstand and through the crowd surrounding it, to the large tent containing the exhibits. Here, in a select corner, draped with festoons of red cloth, were the prizes which Maria, half an hour hence, would be called upon to distribute with her own white-gloved hands to the victorious competitors.

The heat in the tent being unbearable the President's party had it to themselves. Therefore Maria's audible groan at the sight of the task before her was heard by none save her lord.

"Bear up, Mother," Josiah's tone was a highly judicious blend of sternness, banter and persuasion. "It's not as if you had to make a speech, you know. And if you did have there's nobody here who'd bite you. I'd see to that."

This was encouraging, yet certain gyrations of the black and white parasol betrayed to the lynx-eyed Gerty the sinister presence of stage fright. "Maria," said the inexorable monitress, "you must show Spirit. Hold your sunshade as I've shown you. Keep your chin up. And try to smile."

This counsel of perfection was, at the moment, clearly beyond Maria. But the President's nod approved it, and Gerty, one of those powerful spirits that loves to do with public affairs, proceeded on a flute-like note, "Dear me, what lovely prizes!"

It was hyperbole to speak of the prizes as lovely, but it was, of course, the correct thing to say, and in the ear of Josiah the correct thing was said in the correct way. It would have been difficult for the duchess herself to have bettered that pure note of lofty enthusiasm.

"Not so bad, Gert, are they? What do you think o' that little vawse? Presented by Coppin, the jeweler."

To assess the gift of Coppin, the jeweler, it was necessary for Miss Preston to bring into action her famous tortoiseshell folders. She had no need for glasses at all. But Lawyer Mossop's aunt, the late Miss Selina Gregg, had aroused in her a passion for their use on appropriate occasions. "A ducky little vahse!" That vexed word was pronounced after the manner of the late Miss Gregg, from whose practice there was no appeal.

"Not so bad--for Coppin. Better anyway than his silver-plated eggstand last year."

Gerty made an admiring survey of the bounty of the patrons of the Blackhampton Rose Growers' Association. "And here, I see, is the President's special prize." She had kept in reserve her appreciation of this _chef d'oeuvre_ of public munificence, a much beribboned silver gilt goblet to which a card was attached, "President's Special Prize for Rose of Purest Color. Donor Alderman Munt J.P." It was the first thing her eye had lit on, but she had worked up to it slowly, via the lesser gifts of lesser men, so that anything in the nature of anticlimax might be avoided.

"Josiah, tell me, who is the fortunate winner?" The archness of the tone verged upon coquetry.

"Look and see, my gel." The response was unexpectedly gruff. But, as soon as Gerty had looked and seen, the reason for the President's austerity grew clear. On a second card, smaller but beribboned like the first, was inscribed in a fair clerkly hand, "Presented to Mr. W. Hollis for Exhibit 16."

X

Had a pin fallen in the tent at that moment, any one of those three people might have expected to hear it do so. Gerty was too wise to ask why the husband of the outcast Melia had come to enjoy the special gift of his father-in-law; Maria simply dare not. In truth it was an odd story. Josiah did his best to put a gloss on an incredible fact of which he was rather ashamed; it looked so much like moral weakness, a public giving in; but, as he informed Gerty with a half apologetic air, Jannock was Jannock. In other words, fair play in the eyes of honest men was a jewel.

There could be no question that, in point of color, the fairest bloom sent in was Exhibit Sixteen. It was a rose of such a dazzling snowy whiteness that it had caught and held the expert eye of the President at the morning inspection. "An easy winner, Jennings," he had said, as soon as he had seen it, "Nothing to put beside it, my boy."

The astute Jennings, a professional nurseryman along The Rise, made no comment. He had taken the trouble to find out the name of the grower before bringing a mature judgment to bear on the fruits of his craft. "Sound" criticism is always a priori. Critics who value their reputation are careful not to pronounce an opinion on any work of art until they know who has produced it. Otherwise mistakes are apt to occur. None knew better than Jennings that the grower of Exhibit Sixteen could not hope to receive the President's prize; indeed Jennings was amazed at the little tick's impudence in daring to compete at all for his father-in-law's silver gilt goblet. It was an act of bravado. Jennings, therefore, shook his head coldly. He declined to show enthusiasm in the presence of what to the unsuspecting eye of the President was an almost too obvious masterpiece.

"All over a winner, Jennings, that is."

Jennings shook the sober head of a professional expert. "To me," he said, "Twenty-one 'as more quality."

"Rubbish, man!" The President threw up his head sharply, a favorite trick when goaded by contradiction. "Twenty-one can't be mentioned on the same day o' the week. What do you say, Penney?"

Before Mr. Councilor Penney, an acknowledged light of the a priori school of criticism, ventured to express an opinion he winged a glance at Nurseryman Jennings. And that glance, in the technical language of experts, conveyed a clear request for "the office."

"The office" was given sotto voce behind the adroit hand of Jennings, "Mester Munt--Twenty-one, Sixteen--Bill Hollis."

Thereupon Mr. Councilor Penney closed one eye and proceeded to examine the competing blooms. "Well, Mester Munt," he said solemnly, "I am bound to say, to my mind Twenty-one 'as it."

The impetuous president had a short way with the Councilor Penneys of the earth. "Have you no eyes, man! Twenty-one can't live beside Sixteen. Not the same class. Look at the color--look at the shape--look at the size----"

It was realized now that it had become necessary to warn the President. And the situation must be grappled with at once. The deeper the President floundered, the more perilous the job of extrication. Rescue was a man's work, but finally in response to a mute appeal from the pusillanimous Jennings, Mr. Councilor Penney took his courage in his hands. "Mr. Munt," he said warily, "don't you know that Twenty-one was sent in by Joe Mellers, your own gardener?"

It was the best that Mr. Councilor Penney could muster in the way of tact. But at all times a very great deal of tact was needed to handle the President. Clearly the shot was not a lucky one. "Nowt to do with it, Penney." The great man nearly bit off his head. "Ought to know that. Sixteen's the best bloom on the bench."

"Sixteen's that Hollis!" It was an act of pure valor on the part of Mr. Councilor Penney. Nurseryman Jennings held his breath.