The sound of his own voice, moaning in his ears, had a magical effect upon him. He lifted his head, gazed about him, and then flushed deeply. His nerveless cowardice had all at once become unbelievable to himself. With a shamed frown he straightened himself, and stood thus for a long minute, engrossed in the definite task of chasing these phantoms from his mind. Once a manly front was displayed to them, they slunk away with miraculous facility. He poured out some brandy, and sipped it neat, and laughed scornfully, defiantly, aloud.
He had over half a million--with power and force and courage enough to do with it what he liked. He had fought luck undauntedly, unwearyingly, during all those years when his hands were empty. Was he to tremble and turn tail now, when his hands were full, when he was armoured and weaponed at every point? He was amazed and hurt, and still more enraged, at that fit of girlish weakness which had possessed him. He could have beaten himself with stripes for it. But it could never happen again--never, never!
He told himself that with proud, resolute reiteration, as he got his hat and stick, and put in his pockets one or two papers from the desk, and then glanced about the Board Room for what was, most likely, the last time. Here he had won his great victory over Fate, here he had put his enemies under his feet, and if innocent simpletons had wandered into the company of these foes, it mattered not a whit to him that they also had been crushed. Figuratively, he turned his back upon them now; he left them, slain and trampled, in the Board Room behind him. They no longer concerned him.
Figuratively, too, as he walked with firmness to the door, he stepped over the body of old Tavender, upon the threshold, and bestowed upon it a downward mental glance, and passed on. By the time he reached the street, the memory of Tavender had become the merest shred of a myth. As he strode on, it seemed to him that his daughters came again, and took his hands, and moved lovingly beside him--lovingly and still more admiringly than before.
BY the autumn of the following year, a certain small proportion of the people inhabiting the district in Hertfordshire which set its clocks by the dial over the stable-tower of Pellesley Court had accustomed themselves to give the place its new name of High Thorpe. These were for the most part the folk of peculiarly facile wits and ready powers of adaptation, like pushing small tradesmen, and the upper servants in county houses. An indolent and hazy compromise upon Pellesley Thorpe had drifted into use by perhaps a larger number. To the puzzled conservatism of the abiding huge majority nearest to the soil--the round-backed, lumpish men who tie strings round their corduroys under the knee, and the strong, cow-faced women who look at passers-by on the road from the doors of dark little cottages, over radiant patches of blossoming garden--it seemed safest to drop family names altogether, and call it merely the Court.