"You really won't go? I shall have the clever girl, you know—for the notes and the accounts!"
"Have the girl, and be—satisfied with that!"
"You really refuse to leave me, Austin?"
"This is my home," I said. "Here I stay till I'm turned out."
She came to me and put her arm through mine. "If this is your home, nobody shall turn you out—neither before my death nor after it. As long as you live, the Old Priory is there for you. Even you can't refuse that?"
"No, I won't refuse that. Let me stop in the Old Priory and do the odd jobs."
She pressed my arm gently. "It would have been very curious to have nobody to talk to about things—especially about the old things." Her voice shook a little. "Very curious—and very desolate, Austin!"
It is now a good many years since we had that conversation—and we have never had another like it. I must plead guilty to one or two books, but I manage to save a little of Jenny's work from the clutches of the clever girl, and old Cartmell is on the shelf—so I get some of his; and still I dwell in the little Old Priory under the shadow of big Breysgate on the hill above. Changes have come elsewhere. There are children at Oxley Lodge; the succession is prosperously—and indeed amply—secured. Mrs. Jepps has departed this life—stubborn to the last in her protest; a donor, who was, and insisted on remaining, anonymous, has founded a Jepps Scholarship at the Institute "as a mark of respect for her honorable life and consistent high principle"; I am inclined to hope that Mrs. Jepps is not permitted to know who that donor was. Lady Sarah is gone, too, and Alison has been promoted to a suffragan bishopric. But over us at Breysgate no change passes, save the gentle change of the revolving years—unless it be that with every year Jenny's sway increases. Down in Catsford they have nicknamed her "The Empress." The seat of empire is at Breysgate; by her proconsuls she governs the borough, Oxley, even Fillingford Manor; for though its rigid master has never become her friend, has no more passed than he has fallen short of the limits of punctilious courtesy which he accepted, yet in all business matters he leans more and more on her. So her power spreads, and will increase yet more when, in due course, Lacey and Margaret take possession of the Manor. The despotism is veiled; she is only First Citizen, like Augustus himself. She will grow no richer—"There is more than enough for them after I am gone"—and pours back into the town and the countryside all that she receives from them—panem et circenses—and better things than that. The Institute is even such a model to all institutes as Bindlecombe would have it; his dream of its broadening into a university is an openly avowed project now. No wonder that by public subscription they have placed a portrait of her in the Memorial Hall, facing the picture of Nicholas Driver which she herself presented. From where she hangs, she can see the old roof of Hatcham Ford, surrounded and dwarfed by the great buildings that she has erected. The painter of Jenny's portrait never saw the Eleanor Lacey at Fillingford Manor—indeed it has gone from its old place, and is to be found somewhere in a cupboard, as I suspect—but the likeness is indubitably there, all undesigned. You see it in the firm lips and jaw, in the straight brows on the pale face, above all in the hazel eyes, so bright and yet profound. Eleanor Lacey had little luck after her luckless flirtation. Fortune has been kinder to Jenny. She has a full life, a good life, a very useful one. The story has grown old; the name of Octon is merged; time has obliterated well-nigh all the tracks she made in her evening flight from Hatcham Ford.
Yet not in her heart; there is no obliteration there, but rather an indelible stamp; it may be covered up—it cannot be sponged or scratched out. For her, Leonard is not forgotten; he triumphs. He lives again in the son of Margaret his daughter; in the person of that son—his grandson—he is to reign where he was spurned. That is the triumph of the scheme she made—and to her it is Leonard's triumph. In her eyes her own triumphs are little beside that.
"My day is done," she said to me once. "Bad it was, I suppose, and God knows that it was short! But it was my day, and it is over." But she did not speak in sorrow. "I am content—and at peace." She broke into a smile. "Don't think of me as a woman any more. Think of me as just a man of business!"