At the same time it was going to hurt. He could have wished now that he hadn’t been quite so hasty in the matter. It was not his way to indulge in vain regrets or to pay much attention to unsolicited advice, but it seemed a pity that he had not listened to Mossop in the first instance. This business of Sally, in a manner of speaking, would be in the nature of a public climb down. And there had been one already.
As far as Melia and her husband were concerned his conscience pricked him more than a little. At first it had gone sorely against the grain to revoke the ban upon his contemptuously defiant eldest daughter and his former barman. But once having done so, it had come suddenly upon him that he had gone wrong in that affair from the outset. The provocation had been great, but he had let his feelings master him. Melia and Hollis were not exonerated. She ought to have shown more respect for his wishes, and a man in the position of Hollis ought to prove himself before he ventures to ask for his employer’s daughter; but, if he had to deal with the episode again, he felt, in the light of later experience, that he would have acted differently.
However, by the end of November, Josiah had made up his mind to restore Melia and Sally to his will. It was only a question of when he should do so. But this was a matter in which his usual power of volition seemed to desert him. In other affairs of life to decide on a thing was at once to do it; but now he hesitated, putting off from day to day. It was a dose of particularly disagreeable medicine that there seemed no immediate need to swallow.
A day soon came, however, when he was rather bitterly to rue his vacillation. One morning Josiah arrived at the City Hall at a quarter to ten. A meeting of the Ways and Means Committee was called for a quarter past and he had to take the chair in the Mayor’s parlor. When he entered the room he found the Town Clerk standing in front of a fire of the Best Blackhampton Bright, a twinkle in his eye and a formidable sheaf of documents in his hand.
“Good morning, Mr. Mayor." Perhaps a faintly quizzical greeting, respectful though it was. But this shrewd dog Aylett, with a pair of humorous eyes looking through gold-rimmed glasses which hung by a cord from his neck, had a slightly quizzical manner with everybody. He knew his value to the city of Blackhampton; he was the ablest Town Clerk it had ever had.
“Mornin’, Aylett,” said his worship in that official voice which seemed to get deeper and deeper at every meeting over which he presided.
“I suppose you’ve read your Tribune this morning?” Aylett had an easy chatty way with everybody from the Mayor down. He was so well used to high affairs that he could be slightly jocular without impairing the dignity of a grandee and without loss of his own.
“As a matter of fact I haven’t,” said the Mayor. “The girl forgot to deliver it this morning at Strathfieldsaye. Don’t know, Aylett, what things are coming to in this city, I don’t really. We’ll have to have an alteration if we are not going to lose the war altogether.”