Anthony Hope - A Servant of the Public

"I'm beginning rather to hate your audiences," he said.

A shrug and a smile sent the audiences to a limbo of inexpressible unimportance.

"You'll think differently about that to-morrow," he warned her.

"Be content with what I feel to-night; I am."

They had finished dinner; both again had smoked cigarettes.

"How long before the train?" she asked.

"An hour and a half," he answered with a hint of triumph in his voice; the end was not yet; even after the time for the train there was the journey.

Evening fell slowly, as it seemed with a sympathetic unwillingness to end their day. She moved to an arm-chair by the side of the window and he sat near her. Talk died away unmissed and silence came unnoticed. She looked a little tired and leant back in her seat; her face shewed pale in the frame of dark hair that clustered round it; her eyes were larger and more eloquent. The fate that he had braved, or in truth invited, was come; he loved her, he so loved her that he must needs touch her. Yet there was that about her which made his touch timid and light; a delicacy, an innocence which he was inclined to call paradoxical, the appeal of helplessness, a sort of unsubstantiality that made her seem the love for a man's soul only. One of her hands lay on the arm of her chair; he laid his lightly on it and when she turned smiled at her. She smiled back at him with deprecation but with perfect understanding. She knew why he did that; she did not resent it. She turned her hand over and very lightly grasped his fingers in a friendly tender pressure; she gazed again into the little garden while their hands were thus distantly clasped. She seemed to yield what she must and to beg him to ask no more. He longed to be able to do her will as it was and not to seek to change it, to offer her no violence of entreaty and to bring her into no distress. But the sweetness of love's gradual venturing allured him; it might be still that she only tolerated, that she gave a return for her day's happiness, and allowed this much lest she should wound a man she liked. With that he was not content, he was hotly and keenly discontent. She had become everything to him; he must be everything to her; if it must be, everything in sorrow and renunciation, but everything; if not for always, at least for now, for the end of this golden day, everything. He could not go home without the memory of her lips. He leant forward towards her; she turned to him. For a moment she smiled, then grew grave again; she let him draw her nearer to him, and with averted face and averted eyes suffered his kiss on her cheek. In the very midst of his emotion he smiled; she preserved so wonderfully the air of not being responsible for the thing, of neither accepting nor rejecting, of being quite passive, of just having it happen to her. He kissed her again; after much entreaty, once she kissed him lightly, shyly, under protest as it were, yet with a sincerity and gladness which called out a new tenderness in him; they seemed to say that she had wanted to do it very much long before she did it, and would want to do it again, and yet would not do it again. The kiss, which from many women would have levelled all barriers, seemed to raise new ones round her. He was ashamed of himself when his love drove him to besiege her more. Even now she was not resentful, she did not upbraid or repel him; she broke into that little nervous laugh of hers, as she lay back passive in the chair, and murmured so low that he hardly caught the words, "Don't. Don't make love to me any more now."

Her prohibition or request had availed with Bowdon's hesitating conscience-ridden impulse; perhaps there was small cause to wonder at that. It availed now no less with Ashley Mead's impetuous passion. Her low whisper protected her absolutely; the confession it hinted disarmed him; he caught both her hands and held them in a long clasp, looking the while into her appealing eyes. But he entreated her no more and he kissed her no more. A moment later he rose, went and sat on the window-sill, and lit a cigarette; the glow seemed a tiny beacon of fire to shew the harbour, that danger was past, that her orders were understood and accepted. She lay very quiet, looking at him with steady, grateful, loving eyes, acknowledging a kindness that she had not doubted and yet found fine in him. His transgression – perhaps she hardly counted it one – was forgiven because he stayed his steps at her bidding. He knew that she trusted him; and in spite of her prohibition he believed that she loved him.

Now one of the riddles about her seemed to find an explanation. He understood how she had passed through the dangers and the ordeal, and had come out still with her freshness and her innocence; how her taste had saved her from those who would have been deaf to the appeal that had arrested him, how powerful and sufficing a shield that appeal was to any man whom her taste would allow to come close to her in comradeship. You could not be false to a confidence like that; if you were a man who could, you would never have the chance. Thus Ashley summed up a case which a little while ago had seemed to him very strange. It seemed strange and unusual still, with a peculiar charm of its own. It was weakness breeding strength, surrender made security. It put a man on his honour; it took away the resistance which might make honour forget itself in the passion of victory. It was like being made guardian of another's treasure; you were careful of it, however heedless you were of your own.

As they journeyed home, she was mirthful and joyous. This day was done, but she did not despair of the world; there should be other days, and the work of this day should endure. She made plans by which they were to meet, to be much together, to unite their lives by many ties. She let him see how much he had entered into her schemes; she told him plainly again and again that he had become to her quite different from all other men. She revealed to him her little habits, her tempers, her ways, her manœuvres, her tricks; she had plenty of all of them. She shewed an open delight in the love which she had won from him and made no pretence of concealing anything of what he was to her. Of Jack Fenning she said not a word; of caution in the externals of her own behaviour, of what people might think or say, of any possible difficulties in their relation to one another, not a word. She was happy and she was grateful. He took her to the door of her own house; she was not hurt but seemed a little surprised that he would not go in. He did not offer to kiss her again, but could not avoid thinking that she would have been neither angry nor grieved if he had. His last memory was of her looking round her door, smiling delightedly and nodding to him, her eyes full of a thousand confidences. "Come soon," she called at last before she hid herself from his sight.

When he reached his own rooms, he found awaiting him a note from Sir James Muddock, begging him to come to the office at Buckingham Palace Road at eleven the next morning. "I have had an interview with my doctor," the old man wrote, "which makes it necessary for me to consider very seriously certain immediate steps. I hope that I shall be able to rely on your assistance." The note was sent by hand and marked "Immediate." Its meaning was plain enough. The long-expected verdict had come; Sir James must be relieved; another head was wanted in the firm of Muddock and Mead. With his brain still full of Ora Pinsent the matter of the message seemed remote to Ashley, but he forced himself to descend to it. He was to have the offer of a partnership, the offer of great wealth, the opportunity of a career limited only by his own talents and no longer clogged by poverty. Would the offer be free, or hampered by a tacit unacknowledged understanding? He knew well enough Sir James' mind about his future. How strange that future looked in the after-glow of this day! Yet what future had this day? Here was a question that he could not bring himself to discuss patiently. Future or no future, this day had altered his life, seemed at this moment to have altered it so completely that on it and on what had happened in it would turn his answer to the offer of great wealth and the prospect of a career. Even in his own thoughts he observed that reticence about Alice Muddock which would have governed his tongue in speaking of her to another; but, affect as he would, or thought himself obliged to, he knew that she formed a factor in the situation, that she was in her father's mind when he wrote, no less than that other object of the old man's love, the great firm in Buckingham Palace Road.