"Yes, I think it's safe." He broke into a laugh. "If anybody had told me this!"
They discussed the fight in all its aspects, especially the last great meeting in the Town Hall the night before. The Nun mimicked Andy's croaking notes with much success, and Miss Dutton commented on popular institutions with some severity. They were full of excitement as to the morrow, when the three girls meant to follow Andy's progress through the Division. Mrs. Belfield gave tokens of an inclination to doze. Belfield sat listening to the girls' voices, to their eager excited talk, and their constant appeals to the hero of the day.
The hero of the day! It was Andy Hayes, son of old Mr. Hayes of the Grammar School, protégé, for his stepmother's sake, of Jack Rock the butcher. He had nearly gone back abroad in failure; he had nearly taken on the shop. He stood now the winner in the fight, triumphant in a contest which he had never sought, from the idea of which he would have shrunk as from rank folly and rank treason. Into that fight he had been drawn unconsciously, insensibly, irresistibly, by another man's doings and by his own, by another man's character and by the character that was his. His conscious part had always been to help his adversary; his adversary unconsciously worked all the while for him. What his adversary had bestowed in ready kindness stood as nothing beside what he had given unwittingly, by accident, never thinking that the results of what he did would transcend the limits of his own fortunes, and powerfully mould and shape another's life. Whom Andy loved he had conquered; whom he followed he had supplanted. The cheers and applause which had rung out for him last night had, a short year ago, been the property of another. His place was his by conquest.
So mused Belfield, father of the vanquished, as he sat silent while the merry voices sounded in his ears. A notable example of how each man finds his place, in spite of all the starts, or weights, or handicaps with which he enters on the race! These things tell, but not enough to land an unsound horse at the post before a sound one. The unsound falters; slowly and surely the sound lessens the gap between them. At last he takes the lead. Then the cry of the crowd is changed, and he gallops on to victory amidst its plaudits. Jack Rock had made no mistake when he entered his horse and put up the stakes.
The hero of that day, the victor in that fight, yes! Against his wishes, without premeditation, so he stood. There was another day of strife, another fight to be waged, one that could not be unmeant or unconscious. Here the antagonism must come into the open, must be revealed to the mind and heart of the fighter. Here he must not only follow, he must himself drive out; he must not only supplant, he must strive to banish, nay, to annihilate. There was a last citadel which, faithful to faithlessness and true against desertion, still flew the flag of that loved antagonist. Would the flag dip and the gates open at his summons? Or would the response to his parley be that, though the faithless might be faithless, yet the faithful must be faithful still? Before that answer his arm would be paralyzed.
"Well, I'm sure you'll deserve your success, Mr. Hayes," said Mrs. Belfield, rising and preparing to retreat indoors. "I hear you've worked very hard and made an extremely good impression."
A quiet smile ran round the circle. The speech, with its delicate, yet serenely sure, patronage would have sounded so natural a year before. In the darkness Andy found himself smiling too. A sense of strength stirred in him. The day for encouragement was past; he did not need it. Save for that last citadel! There still he feared and shrank. With his plain mind, in his strenuous days, he had done little idealising. Only two people had he ever treated in that flattering exacting fashion. His idealising stood in his path now. The weak spot of his sturdy common-sense had always been about Harry; it was so still, and he had an obstinate sense of trying to kick his old idol, now that it was overthrown. And for her—how if his approach seemed a rude intrusion, the invasion of a desolate yet still holy spot, sacrilege committed on a ruined shrine? On the one side was Harry, or the memory of Harry, stronger perhaps than Harry himself. On the other he himself stood, acutely conscious of his associations for her, remembering ever the butcher's shop, recollecting that what favour he had won had been in the capacity of a buffer against the attack of others. How if the buffer, forsaking its protective function, encroached on its own account?
Yet in the course of the months past they had grown into so close a friendship, so firm an alliance. On his part there had been no wooing, on hers neither coquetry nor sentiment displayed. To Harry Belfield their relations to each other would have appeared extremely dull, unpermissibly stagnant, reflecting no credit on the dash of the man or the sensibility of the lady. Sally Dutton, suspecting Andy's hopes, had a caustic word of praise for his patience—the sort of remark which, repeated to Harry about himself, would have sent him straight off to a declaration (the like had happened once by the lake at Nutley). But through these long days, as Andy came and went on his twofold work, from Division to business, from business to Division, they had become wonderfully necessary to one another. For her not to expect him, for him not to find her, would have taken as it were half the heart out of life. Who else was there? Vivien had drawn a little nearer to that dour father of hers, but nearness to him carried the command for self-repression, for reticence. Andy seemed to have no other with whom to talk of himself and his life, as even the strongest feel a craving to talk sometimes. Perhaps there was one other ready to serve. He did not know it; she ranked for him among the cherished friends of his lighter hours. He craved an intimate companionship for the deeper moments, and seemed to find it only in one place.
At his own game, his speciality, Harry Belfield could give away all the odds, and still be a formidable opponent. The incomparable love-maker could almost overcome his own treasons; he left such a memory, such a pattern. Isobel loved still; Mrs. Freere was ready to come back; Lady Lucy owned to herself that she was in danger of being very silly. Even the Nun was in the habit of congratulating herself on a certain escape, with the implication that the escape was an achievement. To resist him an achievement! To forget him—what could that be? To Andy it seemed that for any woman it must be an impossibility. In the veiled distance of Vivien's eyes, when the talk veered towards her unfaithful lover, he could find no dissent. Was oblivion a necessity? Here he was—in Harry's place. Did he forget?
They let him rest—with his thoughts; they saw that the big fellow was weary. The old Belfields conducted one another into the house; Vivien took Sally off again with her. Only Doris Flower sat on by him, silent too, revolving in her mind the chronicles of Meriton, the little town with which her whim had brought her into such close touch, from which she was not now minded wholly to separate herself. It seemed like an anchorage in the wandering sea of her life. It offered some things very good—a few firm friends, a sense of home, a place where she was Doris Flower, not merely the Nun, the Quaker, or Joan of Arc. Did she wish that it offered yet more? Ah, there she paused! She was a worker born, as Andy himself was. No work for her lay in Meriton. Perhaps she desired incompatibles, like many of us; being clear-eyed, she saw the incompatibility. And she was not subjected to temptation. She was taken at the valuation which she so carefully put on herself—the good comrade of the lighter hours. No cause of complaint then? None! She did not cry, she did not fall in love. She did not break her records. There is small merit in records unless they are hard to make, and sometimes hard to keep.