Cosmo although he had received so much wider a training than his father, retained a trace, perhaps hereditary, of those conventions which I have already condemned. He felt the colour come into his face; but the darkness screened him, and his knowledge of the world restored him his balance in a moment.
“He’ll be all right,” he said cheerfully. He opened the carriage door (not without the thanks of his chief) and tenderly arranged a warm rug around Mr Barnett’s knees. The young man in livery, hired for such purposes, stood by in somnolent respect. Then they bade each other good-night, and the last word Cosmo heard that evening as he turned back towards the house was the great and comforting word “Hôme,” rolled out by Mr Barnett to his servant in the accent of command.
When Cosmo had re-entered the house and approached, with great reluctance, the room whose atmosphere still seemed full of failure, he found that his father had gone to bed, and he was glad; for, like most men possessed of wisdom, he trusted half his fortunes to the influence of other men’s sleep.
If the effect of a misunderstanding or a quarrel were immediate, with what rapidity would not the tragedies of the world develop! With what certitude could one not foresee, and perhaps provide against, the climax of an evil fortune.
If things led on from logical step to step, what simple stories would crowd the world. Then indeed the epic and the lyrical, which we perpetually seek in fiction, would divert us in the common affairs of our own lives.
But the real world around us, the world one corner of which it is here my business to describe, is not arranged in that fashion. A crime, a miscalculation, will produce consequences, not immediate but ultimate. Suspicions confirmed, quarrels brought perhaps to the point of violence, seem rather to sink into the mind and to make a soil there, than to bear their full fruit at once; so that, when the catastrophe falls, it is commonly at an insignificant and nearly always at an unsuspected moment.
So it was with what I can only call the tragedy of my friend.
It was inevitable that when his even, narrow, and placid mind should finally come face to face with the broad and rugged power of Mr Barnett, sharp pain, and possibly misfortune, should follow from such a meeting. The unhappy accident of the visit to Mr Abbott, and of a couple of hours delay, had brought those two minds in the presence one of the other; and a very grave hour had passed. But so are men made, that this experience led to nothing at the time. A night’s long sleep, the activities of the following day, sufficed to blur the image. Is it not Seneca who tells us that our own judgment is qualified by the expressed judgment of others? The public character of Mr Barnett recovered its place in Mr Burden’s mind. Many days at his business, a sudden change in the weather, a small but lucky investment, a very active quarrel with his cook, who demanded and received instant dismissal—these good and evil things soon put the misfortune of Mr Barnett’s visit into its true perspective. It produced no visible, certainly no deplorable, result; what it did do was to leave Mr Burden all ready for further irritation, and for a growing misconception of his surroundings, until at last the great misfortune fell, after apparently the most trivial of accidents. The heart of his confidence had been eaten out; it held by the outer shell alone, and a touch was enough to make it crumble. But, for the moment, his faith held firm.
Moreover, if Mr Burden had been inclined to let the incident weigh upon him Cosmo’s efforts alone would have dispersed such an inclination. He returned home quite regularly day after day; he entertained his father with a thousand things. It was not till a week had passed that he permitted so much as a letter concerning the affairs of the Company to come under the old man’s eyes. When such a letter did arrive, he had carefully provided that it should be a short note of congratulation from a country gentleman, a distant acquaintance, a man of great possessions, wholly ignorant of the Delta and of most other things; one that hoped, if all went well, to be a shareholder, and who very warmly said so in his letter to Norwood.