The Great Miss Driver

by Anthony Hope

A man of business she is—and a very fine one; tactful and conciliatory, daring and subtle. But not a woman? Never was there more a woman since the world began—never one who leaned more on her woman's power, nor turned the arts of woman more to practical account. She has had many wooers; Dormer returned to the charge three or four times, till at last he fell back—in a mood little above resignation—on Eunice Aspenick; we have had an ambitious young merchant from Catsford, a curate or two, and one splendid aspirant, a former brother-officer of Lacey's, a man of great name and station. All went away with the same answer—but all were sent away friends, praisers of Jenny, convinced, I think, that they had only just failed and that no other man could have come so near success. There lies her instinct, and she cannot help using it—sometimes for her purposes, sometimes for her instinctive pleasure, which is still to lose no adherent, and to make friends even in refusing to be more. She will not marry, but she is marriageable—eminently marriageable—and that is as much an asset now as when she threatened to use it against Lord Fillingford if he would not take her bribe. Not a woman? How little we know of ourselves, Jenny! Is not her great triumph—Leonard's triumph, for which she planned and wrought and risked—is it not a woman's triumph all over, and her satisfaction in it supremely feminine?

A woman—and, to my thinking, a great woman, too; full of what we call faults, full of what we hail as virtues—and quite with a mind of her own as to the value of these qualities—a mind by no means always moving on orthodox lines. Stubborn, self-willed, tortuous, jealous of domination, tenacious of liberty (at what cost and risk she had clung to that till the last moment!), not patient of opposition, suspicious of any claim to influence or to guide her; generous to magnificence, warm in affection, broad in mind, very farseeing, full of public spirit, never daunted, loyal to death, and beyond the grave—that is Jenny—and yet not all Jenny, for it leaves out the gracious puzzling woman in whom all these things are embodied; the woman with her bursts of temper, her fits of petulance, her joyous playfulness, her sudden looks and gestures of love or friendship; her smiles gay or mysterious, her eyes so full of fun or so full of thought, flashing while she scolds, mocking while she cheats, caressing when she cajoles, so straight and honest when suddenly, after all this, she lays her hand on your arm and says "Dear friend!" Such is "The Empress"—the great Miss Driver of Breysgate Priory. Such is my dear friend Jenny, whom I serve in freedom and love in comradeship. I would that she were what they call her! None fitter for the place since Great Elizabeth—whom, by the way, she seems to me to resemble in more than one point of character and temperament.

So we live side by side, and work and play together—with love—but with no love-making. There are obvious reasons on my side for that last proviso. I am her servant; the fourth part of twenty-seven pounds per annum represents, as I have hinted, the most I have earned save the salary she pays me. I should make a very poor Prince Consort—and Jenny would never trust me again as long as she lived—though it is equally certain that she would never tell me so. And there's another reason, accounting not for my not having done it, but for the odder fact—my not having wanted to do it. Humble man that I am, yet I was born free and am entitled not only to the pursuit of happiness, but to the retention of my liberty; the latter offers, in my judgment, the most favorable opportunity for the former. Jenny likes liberty—so do I. As we are, we can both enjoy it. If by any miraculous freak Jenny had made me her husband, she would have made me her slave also. Or would Jenny have been the slave? I fancy not. I know her—and myself—too well to cherish that idea; which is indeed, in the end, little more attractive.

For her decision is right for herself, as once I told her. She has found happiness—more happiness than would have come to her if she had never fled from Hatcham Ford, more happiness, I dare to think (though never to say!), than would in the end have been hers, had Octon never faced the Frenchman's pistol at Tours. She is not made for an equal partnership, no more than for a submission or surrender. How hardly she accepted a partnership at all, even with the man whose love has altered all her life! It is her nature to be alone, and through a sore ordeal she came to that discovery. Once, I think, and in just one sentence she showed me her true heart, what her true and deepest instinct was—even about Leonard Octon.

We were sitting by the fire one evening alone. Talk dragged and she looked listless, tired after a busy day's work, thoughtful and brooding.

"What are you thinking of?" I asked.

"Oh, my thoughts had gone back to the early days here. I was thinking how pleasant it would be if we had Leonard back at Hatcham Ford, dropping in after dinner."

At Hatcham Ford, mind you! Dropping in after dinner! That was the time to which her wandering thoughts flew back—that the point on which their flight instinctively alighted. Not the heart-trying, heart-testing, perhaps heart-breaking, days of union and partnership, but the days of liberty and friendship.

I must have smiled to myself over her answer, for she said sadly, yet with a smile herself, "I can't help it! That was what I was thinking, Austin."

So think, dear mistress—and not on the harder days! Defiance, doubt, despair, are over. Abide in peace.