Yet in that moment it all seemed to him of little worth, little real value. After all, to have your name in men's mouths for a season, what is it? Success and enmity go hand in hand; the man or woman who finds the highest is beset by a thousand treacheries and betrayals. The little bank clerk, with his hundred and fifty pounds a year, setting out to his work in the morning unnoticed, and unenvied, and returning to the woman he loves at the close of office hours, has a happier lot than the most important statesman in the empire. His small cup is full to the brim with wholesome wine and water; that of the other is mixed with vinegar and gall.
What had Farquharson's country done for him that he should work for it? It had given him a legacy of dishonour, it had torn his heritage from him. Why should he sow in blood, that the wastrel and incompetent should reap the fruit of his toil in ease? Why should he spend himself that England, who reared heroes only to spit upon them, should put him on that pedestal which had so often, of late years, turned to a pillory? And yet other men had braved and achieved so much more than he.
His mind leapt back to Kabul; to the doings of a little Corps of Guides, Hamilton, Jenkyns, Kelly and the rest. Who remembered those deathless heroes now? Hamilton, the most intrepid, he who had charged over two thousand of the enemy, first with four men, and then with three, and last of all alone, had his memorial in stone at Dublin. But stone cannot speak or glow. Cold and immovable, it is the symbol of a nation's heart.
Yet the call of one's country is strong. Now, at this moment, when he, the strong man, wavered between allegiance to her service and denial of her claims, weighing duty in the scale with happiness, her voice rose with the calm insistence which drives a man to do the thing he would not—to achieve what, humanly speaking, we should call impossible. Peace and ease might have been Farquharson's in Taorna—life with the woman he loved. He knew his power; he underrated Evelyn's. He faced again in that moment the temptation to take her away against her will, maybe, strong in the certainty that he could satisfy her, that they would find together something which the average man and woman could never attain.
But the voice of the nation spoke, implacably. "I want you. You must stay. I shall bruise and break you. No matter, you are dust, you can return to the dust from which you came. You may ride in my car of progress day and night, neither sleeping nor resting so long as your wits are keen and your intellect alert. Once your eyes fail or your hand trembles, I shall have no further use for you. From nothing you came, to nothing you may then return. But my car will go on, and you will have driven it for a little time."
Yes, he must stay. And if he stayed, he must make this sacrifice for Evelyn; he must give up his dearest dream. For, grimly as he faced life as a whole, he had always cherished the thought of marriage as his one hope of human salvation. What he had said to Evelyn was true; not mere words, but conviction. He believed that a man should only give himself in marriage to the one woman who could make an equal gift of mind, body and soul, the supreme trinity of surrender. Marriage was a sacrament—marriage as God instituted it, not the false union that convention recognized.
"And now the dream must go," he said aloud. His thoughts went back to the old phrase of the picture gallery when he had spoken to Dan. "Yes, dreams are only made to break, I suppose." He got up. "Since one woman is as much or as little to me as another, if I can't have Eve as my wife—I'll leave it to chance, and propose to the first unmarried woman, if she will let me, who speaks to me to-night at Hare's."
"At last!" Miss Beadon said. "I thought you were never coming." She was standing near the door, awaiting Farquharson's entry. She knew the value of a convenient position. "We have hardly seen anything of you of late." For once she was a trifle nervous. "But I've read all your speeches. Father has told me how splendidly you've got on."
Not the ideal woman this, but a woman who at least could sympathize, who would not need to be taught the necessities of her position. Farquharson looked at her gravely. Something of her self-complacency had left her; she was nervous and a little tremulous as to the result of this meeting, for which she had plotted so eagerly.
"I have something to say to you," he said. "I must speak to these people first, and then—— See, there are chairs in that little recess. Will you wait for me there in ten minutes' time?"