Beaufort Chance stayed a while alone in the drawing-room before he went down to join Fricker over a cigar. He had enjoyed Connie's company that night; the truth stood out undeniable. She had made him forget what her company meant and would cost—nay, more, what it would bring him in worldly gain. She had made him forget, or cease to wish for, Trix Trevalla. She had banished the thought of what he had been and once had hoped to be. If she could do that for him, would he be unhappy? For a moment he almost prayed to be always unhappy in the thing which he was now set to do. For after an hour of blindness there came, as often, an hour of illumination almost unnatural. In the light of it he saw one of the worst things that a man can see. Enough of his old self and of his old traditions remained to make his eyes capable of the vision. He knew that the worst in him had been pleased; he saw that to please the worst in him threatened now to become enough. His record was not very good, but had he deserved this? It is useless to impugn the way of things. The knowledge came to him that, as he had more and more sought the low and not the high, so more and more the low had become sufficient to him. The knowledge was very bitter; but with a startled horror he anticipated the time when he would lose it. He had lost so much—public honour, private scruples, delicacy of taste. He had set out with at least a respect for these things and with that share in them which the manner of his life and the standard of his associates imparted to him. They were all gone. He was degraded. He knew that now, and he feared that even the consciousness of it would soon die.
There was no help for it. In such cases there is none, unless a man will forsake all and go naked into the wilderness. To such a violent remedy he was unequal. It did not need Fricker's smooth assumption that all was settled to tell him that all was settled indeed. It did not need Fricker's welcome to the bosom of the family to tell him that of that family he would now be. Fricker's eulogy of his daughter was unnecessary, since soon to Beaufort too she would seem a meet subject for unstinted praise.
Yet Fricker did not lack some insight into his thoughts.
'I daresay, old fellow,' he remarked, warming his back before the fire—which he liked at nights, whatever the season of the year—'that this isn't quite what you expected when you began life, but, depend upon it, it's very good business. After all, we very few of us get what we think we shall when we set up in the thing. Here am I—and, by Jove, I started life secretary to a Diocesan Benevolent Fund, and wanting to marry the Archdeacon's daughter! Here are you—well, we know all about you, Beaufort, my boy! Old Mervyn hasn't quite done the course he set out to do. Where's our friend Mrs. Trevalla? What's going to happen to pretty Peggy Ryle?' He dropped his coat-tails and shrugged his shoulders. 'Between you and me, and not for the ladies, we take what we can get and try to be thankful. It's a queer business, but you haven't drawn such a bad ticket after all.'
Beaufort Chance took a long pull of whisky-and-soda. The last idea of violent rebellion was gone. Under the easy tones, the comfortably pessimistic doctrine (there is much and peculiar comfort in doctrine of that colour), proceeding from the suave and well-warmed preacher on the hearthrug, there lay a polite intimation of the inevitable. If Fate and the Frickers seemed to mingle and become indistinct in conception, why, so they did in fact. Whose was the whip on the peg—Fate's or Fricker's? And who gives either Fate or Frickers power? Whatever the answer to these questions, Beaufort Chance had no mind that the whip should be taken down.
'I've nothing to complain of,' said he, and drank again.
Fricker watched the gulps with a fatherly smile.