‘Yes, it was much worse than an ordinary—spree.’
‘If it were not that I never knew you to do anything of the kind before—— Yes, I was there; you had two men with you, and I didn’t like the looks of them. Now, look here: I didn’t understand then, and I don’t inquire now, what was the matter; you’ve always been a steady fellow so far as we have known; you’ll have to be so more than ever, mind you, if you go into this big thing. The thing’s so big that it will make your fortune—with the help our experience can give you—and if it’s accepted, as I have little doubt it will be. But you’ll have to be careful. Bad company and bad hours, and that sort of thing, will never do for a rising man.’
John made no reply. Bad company! yes, it had been bad company. It was hard to sit quietly under an imputation which went so entirely against all the traditions of his life, but it was better perhaps that they should think so than that they or anyone should know the truth.
The elder Mr. Barrett shook his solemn head like a wise old sheep, with his white hair and beard.
‘Depend upon it,’ he said, ‘without good principles, no man ever did anything. Clever notions are all very well, but without good principles——’
‘It’s well to have the notions and the principle too,’ said the junior partner, interrupting hastily. ‘Here are some jottings I have put on paper, Sandford. You can run your eye over them. That’s what, in case your plan should be accepted, we would propose. You had better think it well over and consult your friends: and in the meantime make use of any assistance you want in the office to put it all in right form. If you will take my advice, you will lose no time.’
John looked over the paper put into his hand with a dimness in his eye and a throbbing in his head, as if all the machinery that would be wanted in the work had suddenly been set going in his brain. It clanged, and whirred, and rang as if all the great wheels were going and the pistons falling, and every motive power in action; and then there suddenly rolled out before him like a panorama the future life which he had planned and hoped, the great works in which his mind should be the directing force, and all the industries that depended thereupon. It was not, perhaps, what the youthful dreamer would ordinarily think a romantic picture. He seemed to see all the great workshops, the men in the foundries in the glare of their red furnaces, the brickworks, the regiments of excavators on the soil, a whole busy world of men, with plenty and prosperity around them. He saw all this in one lightning flash. This was what had set his imagination soberly aflame when he was a boy. This was the lighthouse that Elly had shaped among the boundless possibilities of life in Mr. Cattley’s study. Elly! Ah! that drove away his dream in a moment, and brought him back to himself, standing in a great confusion of being in Mr. Barrett’s office, studying the paper—the paper which was only half visible to him, which made fortune and favour sure.
‘I’ll take to-day,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I can settle to anything to-day.’
They shook hands with him, even the old sheep, looking out with his white locks with an immovable face still distrustful of John, yet compelled to that complaisance; and he went out with that in his pocket—that which proved his early dreams to be real, which was the test and touchstone of his value in the eyes of those who had been his masters, and were best able to judge. He went out, forgetting everything else that had happened, taking up for the moment his life where he had dropped it a week before. A week ago he would have taken that paper to the family at the rectory, and the humbleness of his origin—his origin, which was so respectable, yet not on the level of the Spencers—would have been forgotten. Again for one moment more the elation of his success got into John’s brain. Again he trod on air. He thought, his brain all dizzy with the sudden rapture, of showing it all to Elly, making her understand. She would not understand, but she would think she did, in her heart, if not in her brain, and would jump to the delight of it, and all that would follow. They would say to each other that this was the lighthouse, the first idea that had struck their youthful fancy, Elly’s lighthouse, which had caught John’s imagination in its earliest dawning, and flashed at last into this great thing.
The young man in his misery had a revelation, a vision of overpowering sweetness and delight. Without that spark of divine light from her, he said to himself, it would never have been, this great work, which he knew would bring comfort and well-being over a whole district, and make his name famous, and bring many a blessing: his name; but they should know, everybody should know that by himself he never would have thought of it, that it was Elly who had been the first. How could he let the world know that it was Elly who was the first—not, indeed, to think of the Thames Valley and its drainage, or how to make an end of the floods, she who could not, God bless her, manage her algebra even, or work out a problem to save her life—but only to light up the thoughts that were good for that sort of thing, to light the first divine beacon of which all lighthouses were only the development? He was very young in spite of all his maturity and experience; and for one blissful moment, nay hour, this elation and rapture took possession of his soul, and made him forget the horrible passage through which he had gone, and all the bitter realities around him. He floated once more into a world of light and brightness, and boundless hope and enthusiasm. All the more heavenly, for the depth of despair in which he had been dwelling, was the glory of this, the confidence, the anticipation of everything that was best both in work and in life, the happiness of carrying it all out, the delight of talking it over with Elly, explaining it all to her day by day. She would not understand, not a bit, he said to himself, with tears of pleasure in his eyes; but it would come to the same thing: for she would understand him and what he wanted, and it would be her work as well as his—Elly’s lighthouse, of which the foundations were laid in Mr. Cattley’s study long ago.