"That's just what I do mean. You can work with your hands, and so can I. I reckon it's our destiny. Grimes has given me a job—you remember Grimes, don't you? He's a bit of a builder at Tottenham nowadays, and calls himself a contractor. Well, he's given me a job, sort of foreman, at two quid a week, and good pay, too. It's a sight more than I'd have done for an old bankrupt fellow, close on sixty. I'm going to work for Grimes. I begin to-morrow, and you'll have to put up with the fact the best way you can that your father's no longer Archibold Masterman, Esq., as might have been Sir Archibold, but just a common workman."
XXII
MRS. BUNDY PHILOSOPHISES
"I can't see what your father wanted to do it for. He had no call to do it. It's a most extraordinary piece of perversity."
The speaker was Bundy, and the scene was his new house in Kensington. After his many wanderings and adventures, Bundy appeared to have found permanent anchorage at last. His final apotheosis had begun, and a prophetic eye perceived that it was likely to include all the elements of eminent British respectability. He had begun to collect pictures again, was planning a library, drove daily in the park, was already known as a generous patron of many well-intentioned charities, and had even lectured in a parish-room on the wonders of the Yukon. There was ground to believe that in course of time he might even become a churchwarden, and it was only a total fluidity of opinion on local politics which denied him a seat upon the Borough Council.
Even the boys had suffered a transformation into something rare and strange. They no longer lassoed dogs upon the plains of Texas in the back-garden, and their interest in Indians had declined. They wore white collars which were fresh every morning, practised a difficult propriety, and walked gravely to church on Sundays, top-hatted and circumspectly clothed. There could be no manner of doubt that the short-lived glory of irresponsible poverty was fast fading into the light of common day, and that shades of respectability were closing round these growing minds.
And as for Mrs. Bundy—dear, slovenly, warm-hearted Mrs. Bundy—the historian relates with sadness that even she was tamed. Her force of speech remained, her sincerity, her lovableness; to the end of her days she would remain the sort of woman who addresses angry umbrella-emphasised allocutions to drivers who flog their horses, who gives hospitality to stray dogs, and opens her impulsive heart to the sorry fabrications of every histrionic beggar. But she had returned to unoccupied woman's first love, which is dress. Exiled from her kitchen, she had plunged recklessly into the study of fashion-papers. To hear her disputing with dressmakers, upholsterers, and house-decorators, to follow her in her many animated controversies with servants and a long succession of nefarious butlers, gave assurance that the wonted fires still burned ardently in her veins. But she was tamed. Wealth had riveted upon her golden fetters. She submitted to them, not without reluctance. Perhaps, if the entire truth was told, she was much happier as the mistress of the kitchen in the old house in Lion Row than as the mistress of a mansion in Kensington.
It was in the library of this house at Kensington that Arthur sat discussing the situation with his old friends. It was a spacious room, furnished after a plan which a celebrated firm had described as mediæval. The mediævalness of the room appeared to consist mainly in an imitation stucco ceiling, and in modern oak-panelling which declared its newness by uncanny loud explosions, as the wood cracked under the influence of heat. Before the open hearth Bundy stood oracular, with his hands behind him spread out to the warmth; and Mrs. Bundy sat at the table, mending socks—an example of the survival of primeval instincts.
"No, I don't see it at all," said Bundy. "Your father's wasting himself. There are plenty of men who would have helped him to recover his position. I would have given him anything he liked to ask, and been glad of the chance."