“So you have told me before; so the mother has told me. It is unfortunate that I have no taste for anything. I don’t find that I care about doing the same thing for two days together.”
“Does it never occur to you that there is such a thing as duty?”
“A very useful dissyllable, no doubt, sir, and telling in a song; but it is very much gone out of fashion nowadays, with the Church Catechism, high pews, and church clerks. No one considers that he ought to be ‘content with that state of life,’ etc.”
“Gilbert,” said Mr. Echlin, more sternly than he had ever spoken to his son, “if you do not woo duty as a mistress, she will drive you as a taskmistress. The man who has no love of duty had better never have been born. He has no high aims, no ennobling thoughts. Do not, I beseech you, give me the misery of knowing that my only son is an idle man.”
“Do not distress yourself, father. I suppose I shall drop into something before long. There can be no hurry. If you had ten children it would be another matter. There’s Elgitha; she has energy enough, and cares about lots of things. If you would send her to Girton, sir, I feel sure she’d take a double first, and like it.”
“She might do very much worse, I believe,” said Mr. Echlin, turning away. He went into his study with a sore heart to write his Sunday sermon on the beauty of holiness, and Gilbert found half an hour’s amusement in teasing his sister’s canaries.
It was not long before Mark Fenner’s start in life brought changes to Rosenhurst. The more Miles Echlin knew him, the better he liked him. Mark possessed one of those strong natures that rests in itself, never impatient to thrust itself forward, and never much occupied with a consideration of its own wants or pleasures. Accepting in the fullest and heartiest sense all the duties that were comprehended in the partnership offered him by his mother’s cousin, and loving them because they were duties, he set himself with all his heart to master the technicalities of the business, and entered into the enthusiasms of the old publisher with all a young man’s energy.
“It was a lucky thing, sir, that visit to Rosenhurst,” said Evans, Mr. Echlin’s head clerk and factotum, when Mark had been some six months in London. “Mr. Fenner is a born publisher. He takes to the printer’s ink as a babe to its mother’s milk. As things have turned out, it really seems quite providential.”
“I am glad you think so, Evans; it is my own opinion exactly. I hope the lad is satisfied. How those dear ladies at the cottage must miss him!”
When Mr. Echlin left his office after this conversation, he took his leisurely way to Manchester-square. It had always been a principle with him to live within an easy walk of his business, having early imbibed a taste for that most healthy of all exercises, and having found that there was no better time for thinking over business. Indeed, for many years he had never embarked upon an undertaking until he had turned it over in his mind during two or three days’ walk to and fro.