‘Oh, but Herbert—-!’
‘And I am no longer that impersonal factor in City life, mere
secretary to the Board of a company—-‘
‘Oh, Bertie, dear!’
‘But private secretary to Mr. Henry Rogers—private and
confidential secretary at—-‘
‘Bert, darling—-!’
‘At 300 pounds a year, paid quarterly, with expenses extra, and
long, regular holidays,’ he concluded with admirable dignity and
self-possession.
There was a moment’s silence.
‘You splendour!’ She gave a little gasp of admiration that went
straight to his heart, and set big fires alight there. ‘Your reward
has come at last! My hero!’
This was as it should be. The beginning of an epic poem flashed
with tumult through his blood. Yet outwardly he kept his admirable
calm.
‘My dear, we must take success, like disaster, quietly.’ He said it
gently, as when he played with the children. It was mostly put on, of
course, this false grandiloquence of the prig. His eyes already
twinkled more than he could quite disguise.
‘Then we can manage the other school, perhaps, for Frank?’ she
cried, and was about to open various flood-gates when he stopped her
with a look of proud happiness that broke down all barriers of further
pretended secrecy.
‘Mr. Rogers,’ was the low reply, ‘has offered to do that for us—as
a start.’ The words were leisurely spoken between great puffs of
smoke. ‘That’s what I meant just now by saying that he lived poetry in
his life, you see. Another time you will allow judgment to wait on
knowledge—-‘
‘You dear old humbug,’ she cried, cutting short the sentence that
neither of them quite understood, ‘I believe you’ve known this for
weeks—-‘
‘Two hours ago exactly,’ he corrected her, and would willingly have
prolonged the scene indefinitely had not his practical better half
prevented him. For she came over, dropped upon her knees beside his
chair, and, putting both arms about his neck, she kissed his foolish
sentences away with all the pride and tenderness that filled her to
the brim. And it pleased Minks hugely. It made him feel, for the
moment at any rate, that he was the hero, not Mr. Henry Rogers.
But he did not show his emotion much. He did not even take his pipe
out. It slipped down sideways into another corner of his wandering
lips. And, while he returned the kiss with equal tenderness and
pleasure, one mild blue eye looked down upon her soft brown hair, and
the other glanced sideways, without a trace of meaning in it, at the
oleograph of Napoleon on Elba that hung upon the wall. …
Soon afterwards the little Sydenham villa was barred and shuttered,
the four children were sound asleep, Herbert and Albinia Minks both
lost in the world of happy dreams that sometimes visit honest, simple
folk whose consciences are clean and whose aims in life are
commonplace but worthy.
When the creation was new and all the stars shone in their first
splendour, the gods held their assembly in the sky and sang ‘Oh, the
picture of perfection! the joy unalloyed!’
But one cried of a sudden—’It seems that somewhere there is a
break in the chain of light and one of the stars has been lost.’
The golden string of their harp snapped, their song stopped, and
they cried in dismay—’Yes, that lost star was the best, she was the
glory of all heavens!’
From that day the search is unceasing for her, and the cry goes on
from one to the other that in her the world has lost its one joy!
Only in the deepest silence of night the stars smile and whisper
among themselves—’Vain is this seeking! Unbroken perfection is over
all!’
RABINDRANATH TAGORE. (Prose translation by Author from his original
Bengali.)
It was April 30th and Henry Rogers sat in his rooms after
breakfast, listening to the rumble of the traffic down St. James’s
Street, and found the morning dull. A pile of letters lay unopened
upon the table, waiting the arrival of the discriminating Mr. Minks
with his shorthand notebook and his mild blue eyes. It was half-past
nine, and the secretary was due at ten o’clock.
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