“Life has been so wonderful ever since,” Nora murmured. “Dick looks ten years younger, and I feel it. The children you can see for yourself. I wonder,” she went on a little timidly, as she realised her host’s peculiar aversion to expressed gratitude, “I wonder whether you ever realise, Jacob, what it means to have taken two people from a struggle which was becoming misery and to have made them utterly and completely happy.”...
Jacob thought of her words as he lingered for an hour in his little sitting-room that night. His own memory travelled backwards. He realised the joy which he had felt at paying his debts, the even greater joy of saving the Daunceys from despair. He thought again of the small pleasures which his affluence had brought, the sense of complacency, almost of dignity, which it had engendered. There were many men, he knew, who thought him the most fortunate amongst all their acquaintance. And was he, he wondered? He looked across at the light in the Daunceys’ bedroom and saw it extinguished. He looked back with a sigh to his empty room. He had read many books since the days of his prosperity, but books had never meant very much to him. He realised, in those moments of introspection, his weakness and his failure. His inclinations were all intensely human. He loved kind words, happy faces, flowers and children. He was one of those for whom the joys and gaieties of the demimonde were a farce, to whom the delights of the opposite sex could only present themselves in the form of one person and in one manner. He was full of sentiments, full of easily offended prejudices. Fate had placed in his hands the power to command a life which might have been as varied as grand opera, and all that he desired was the life which Dauncey had found and was living.
Upstairs were the Harrises, sleeping together in comfort and happiness, the creatures of his bounty, his grateful and faithful servants. And he knew well how both of those two across the way, whom he envied, blessed his name. It was a happiness to think of them, and yet an impersonal happiness. He longed humanly for the other and more direct kind.
Dauncey found cause for some anxiety in Jacob’s demeanour during the course of the next few weeks.
“You know, Jacob,” he said, “in one way I never saw you look so well in your life. That bronze you got in the south of France is most becoming, and, if you’ll forgive my saying so, you seem to have gained poise lately, to have lost that slight self-consciousness with which you looked out upon life just at first. And yet you don’t look as I’d like to see you. I haven’t even heard you laugh as you used to.”
Jacob nodded.
“I’m all right, Dick,” he assured his friend. “Fact is, I think I am suffering from a surfeit of good things. Everything in the world’s lying ready to my hands, and I don’t quite know which way to turn.”
“Did you hear anything of Miss Bultiwell while you were abroad?” Dauncey asked a little abruptly.
“Not a word,” Jacob replied. “Her last letter to me seemed to end things pretty effectually.”