Be the cause what it may, when Mr Barnett returned to lead Mr Burden to another guest, so far from having brought my friend into greater harmony with the astounding energies of the new movement, he had produced, by that interview with Major Pondo, a sentiment—I repeat it, a morbid sentiment—approaching disgust.
There was nothing which, at that moment, Mr Burden would not have believed. There was no anti-patriotic libel, no little-England mania or lie, no dead and gone Cobdenism of the sixties, which he would not have accepted after that brief experience.
He left the house that night, full of a kind of angry determination to go next day and do what he had never yet dared to do: to speak to Mr Abbott. But he would speak to him in a sense very different from that which Mr Barnett had intended when he had asked him to call upon that life-long friend, and to offer him a directorship.... He would see Abbott, he would tell him of the risk to a considerable fortune, of his doubts, of the torturing alternation of his mind: he would find true stable comradeship and relief.
Fate, and the nature of men, led on to their meeting indeed, but brought it, in spite of them both, to a very different end.
When Mr Burden awoke next morning, the deep sleep of fatigue and the good light of a new day had somewhat changed his mood. There remained of it nothing but an undercurrent of anxiety, which the conversation of Cosmo that morning did very much to allay.
The day’s business at the office was prosperous, the air bracing and sunny; if he found himself walking towards Mr Abbott’s office that evening for the first time in so many weeks, it was only because he was a business man, trained to method, and that therefore he detested to abandon any resolve he had formed.
He came severely, and with a purpose, into the little panelled room which had seen for 123 years the growth of the Abbott Line.
The place reeked of our past; but there was that in it which has justly provided the financial press with a pet subject for ridicule. It was as small as the cabin of a ship; indeed it had sheltered three generations of men who had sailed as owners perpetually in their own craft. It suggested the punch and the tobacco of that lazy race of seamen, who knew of nothing but England, and cared for nothing but her; and yet—in a way—we love them. It suggested very primitive methods of business: phrases about “The position of the house,” the plodding and the short-sightedness of the men whose theories in government and finance we have, please God, finally abandoned. And at the old large desk, in this old small room, sat a figure most worthy of its frame.
Mr Abbot was in everything one of the characters which, pleasing as they may still be in fiction to-day, would be sand in the bearings of England, ruining the machine, were they to reappear in our modern life.