All the guests agreed there had never been in their recollection such a merry Christmas gathering in the county.
CHAPTER LIX.—GLIMPSES.
‘’Tis in ourselves that we are thus, or thus.’
The sun still bright on the hilltop; figures rising to its crest, and there halting, with hands shading their eyes, to take a glad or sad look backward.
See there; Dick Crawshay and his dame can look down and smile on the road they have travelled, although there are sundry small black patches that they would have wished away. But they can see Madge and Philip in their joyous course, waving orange blossoms towards them, laughing at the slips and hollows of the hillside, because they march hand in hand, and when the one falters, the other possesses sustaining power enough to keep both in the safe path.
‘Lucky dog, that Philip!’ says old Dick Crawshay, fumbling with his fob-chain. ‘He has got the finest woman in the world to wife—bar my missus.’
‘They are very happy,’ observed the dame contentedly; ‘and Austin was not so far wrong as I fancied he was, when he said that the real test of a man’s nature was money. I never liked it; for losing money makes men mad or bad, and gaining it seems to do the same thing—but neither way seems to have hurt Philip much, good lad.’
And Philip and Madge were walking quietly up the hillside, halting here and there to give a friendly hand to those who were stumbling by the way. Hadleigh, sitting in his easy-chair, is glad at last, for he has found the Something which he had sought so long without avail, in the fair-haired grandchild sitting on his knee. The love that was so slow of growth in the man’s heart has blossomed in this child.
In the work which Philip had started, Austin Shield with his ally Jack Hartopp was working with might and main; and the speculation promised to be not only successful in a commercial way, but also in a moral way. They had all the idea that in course of time it would come to be the universal system of work—that men should be allowed to do as much as they could, and that they should be remunerated in accordance with the results, calculated by the market value of quality and quantity. The men themselves were rapidly coming to understand that their real advantage lay not in combinations which restricted the labour of one who was quicker of wit and hand than the average labourer, but in doing their best to keep up to him, and beat him if that were possible, allowing the lazy and the stupid to fall back into their natural places.
Miss Hadleigh as Mrs Crowell was permitted all the joys she desired; for she had grand dinner-parties; her dear Alfred became an alderman, with every prospect of being chosen Lord Mayor in due course of time, and the possibility of a baronetcy attached to the office.