# The Four Philanthropists/Chapter 21
### CHAPTER XXI A CONSOLIDATION OF INTERESTS

After Chelubai had been appointed Managing Director, and we had talked with the worthies of the Quorley district, assuring them of our resolve to have the company paying dividends before six months had passed, we came round to the Temple to discuss our next steps. I was for setting to work at once, for I was sure that we need fear no trouble from Pudleigh. I proposed, therefore, that Chelubai and Bottiger should go forthwith to Quorley and take the quarry in hand. They received the proposal in a glum silence.
"Come, come, don't shirk!" I said briskly. "Here you have a chance of doing honest work, such as you haven't done for years, Chelubai, and you, Bottiger, never in your life."
"What's the matter with the G. P. R C.? That was honest work enough," said Chelubai, and he seemed hurt.
"That was not work at all—really. That was Philanthropy, a noble delight to us," I said firmly.
"But look at the dividends," said Chelubai. ​"You don't get dividends without work," said Chelubai.
"There are some minds in which the accident always bulks bigger than the essential," I said, with some impatience. "However, it is not a question of philanthropy, but of your going to Quorley."
"It's all very well," said Bottiger, "but it means our burying ourselves in the country all the season. Why should we?"
"It's your duty to Humanity to establish the Children's Hospital in a sound financial position," I said.
"But I am doing my duty to Humanity by this philanthropy of the G. P. R. C. I don't want to do any other," said Bottiger.
Bottiger's intelligence is of a wearing type; but I only said patiently, "I thought we had wound up the G. P. R. C, but of course if you're going on removing alone, since I and my sister are out of it, I have no more to say. But Chelubai is far too conscientious to accept the managing directorship of a company and not throw all his heart into it and hustle. He will go to Quorley alone."
"I suppose I must," said the ever conscientious Chelubai, with no enthusiasm.
"Why shouldn't you go with him?" said Bottiger.
​"I am not a gentleman of leisure. I have my work here," I said coldly.
Bottiger sat frowning, Chelubai sat gloomy, I sat silent, waiting for reason to pierce Bottiger's skull.
At last Chelubai's face brightened a little and he said, "If only your sister and you would come up for a few days, now and then, it wouldn't be so dull."
"Seeing that you go into exile for our sakes, it seems to me that the least we can do is to come and brighten it with bridge, as often as possible," I said kindly; and I only wished I might get the chance of bringing her.
"I think that the sooner I get a move on the Quorley Granite Company the sooner will your hospital pay dividends," said Chelubai,with grave seriousness.
"Yours is a noble heart, Chelubai," I said warmly. "Angel has always recognized it."
Bottiger looked at him with a sharp jealousy. "Of course there's the fishing," he said sulkily.
I took it to mean that he would go.
On the third day, without more ado, they went. They were to come down again if there was any trouble about our directorships; but we had reason to believe that there would be none. Albert Amsted Pudleigh had dismissed Pleever, indeed, but showed no signs of fighting us. Perhaps he saw ​that our position was too strong, perhaps my happy allusion to the Oval had daunted for the time being his buccaneering spirit. We established Pleever, with a clerk, in two modest rooms at the top of a building in Chancery Lane, all the offices the Quorley Granite Company needed.
Now that this affair was settled, I found myself very much at leisure. I had my journalism, indeed, and the briefs came in; but journalism and the law barely filled my mornings, save when I was in court. I had all the more leisure to brood upon the loss of Angel.
As the days passed the sense of that loss by no means lessened, but rather I continued to learn, with more and more bitterness, how greatly she had filled my life, and what a gap her absence had made in it. Life, indeed, had again grown as trivial and unimportant a matter as it had been before she came into it. To think of the foolish carelessness by which I had let go her gracious and inspiring presence, set me raging at myself. Memories of her eyes, of her delightful smile, of her lips which I had never kissed, of the poignant tones in her voice, haunted me always, and consumed me with regret. Sometimes, when I was absorbed in my work, or lay awake of nights, I would hear her footfall in the passage or in the next room, and twice I awoke to hear her laugh dying away. Often a fever of restlessness wasted ​me, and it was under its spur that I first set about seeking her.
The pursuit soon grew upon me. It fed the flame of my hope, and it soothed me with the sense that I was acting. I walked miles and miles in the north of London, all about Regent's Park, St. John's Wood, Camden Town, Kentish Town, and Hampstead. I spent hours wandering over the heath, because I had made up my mind that she would come to it for fresh air. I looked into the windows of the houses of each street as I went slowly down it, and time and again I could not get myself out of a street for the assurance that as soon as I left it she would come into it at the further end. Time and again I saw her in the distance, and hurried after her with a heart beating high, only to find a stranger. I came to my club to dine always late, I played bridge badly, but my partners endured my play, for I was holding the splendid cards of the unlucky in love. I never refused an invitation to go round to another man's rooms and play after the closing of the club, for always I strove to return at the last possible moment to the loathed emptiness of my rooms.
My temper grew uncertain, or rather certainly bad. I began to point out the mistakes of my partners at bridge to them with an excessive bitterness, and to resent their pointing out mine with even greater bitterness. I bullied mercilessly the ​opposing witnesses in my cases. I was bearish—there was no other word for it—to my acquaintances; and when Dolly Delamere, wondering and angry at my neglect of her letters, descended on me one morning soon after breakfast, I saw in her the spring of my ill fortune, and quarrelled with her with a violence that drove her away in tears of mangled vanity. When I was not absorbed in my fruitless search for Angel, or in gambling, I went in a dull heaviness, forever cursing the tiresome emptiness of life.
Chelubai and Bottiger came down from Quorley for a day or two a fortnight later, on the pretence that they wanted a taste of town, really to see Angel. Both of them asked me what ailed me, and showed a concern at my haggardness which touched me the more that I had given them no sympathy in their disappointment at the absence of Angel. Of course, it was not as bitter as mine, because she had not, after all, filled a great place in their lives; but now I was sorry for them. Chelubai thought very highly of the Granite Company; Pudleigh had never let the output fall below the payment of its working expenses and the directors' fees; it was merely a matter of increasing that output. Chelubai was finding markets and to spare for that increase; he was renewing relations with old customers whom Pudleigh had ceased to supply, and already he saw his way to ​a six per cent. dividend on the paid-up capital at the end of the year; and he talked with confidence of a fifteen and even twenty per cent. dividend on the whole capital in three or four years, since the property had never hitherto been developed as it should.
The coming of Chelubai and Bottiger lifted me out of my heaviness for the time being, and braced me to the point of resolving to strive to prevent life forcing its triviality upon my attention. They begged me to go back with them to Quorley for a week, assuring me that it would make another man of me. But I could not bring myself to leave London; the idea that Angel was in it was fixed in my mind, and the thought of missing that one chance in a thousand of finding her veritably frightened me.
But when they had gone, in spite of my resolve to be blind to the hopeless triviality of life without her, I soon fell into my former heaviness. It was not so heavy as it had been, and I began to see that if I did not want to come utterly to grief I had better take some effective measures. It seemed to me best to betake myself abroad as soon as the courts rose and try the exhilaration of the Continent. I made no doubt that in time I should recover my old cheerfulness, a bitter cheerfulness, perhaps, but still valuable. As it was, I was losing even the spirit to be cantankerous.
One night I left the club at twelve, and tempted ​by the languorous June air blowing from the south, set out to walk home. I walked listlessly enough, and unthinkingly turned at the bottom of the Strand down Northumberland Avenue on to the Embankment. It was a foolish thing to do, for my mind at once filled with the memory of my first walk with Angel from Vauxhall on that inclement autumn night. I reached my rooms utterly dispirited, and opened the door with that sinking of the heart at their loneliness to which I had grown so used. I went into the sitting-room, groped for the matches on the mantel-piece, struck one, and dropped it, with a sharp cry; its light had shown me Angel sitting in her easy-chair, looking at me with a white, strained face. I stood quite still, utterly taken aback, striving to collect my wits, scattered by the shock; then I said, in a trembling voice I hardly knew for my own, "Why—why—have you come back?"
"I couldn't—stay away—any longer," she said, almost under her breath, but not so low that I did not catch the spent weariness of her tone.
A flood of joy surged through me, overwhelmingly. I fell on one knee beside her, caught her hands and kissed them again and again, murmuring, "Oh, why did you go away—why did you leave me?"
I felt her stiffen at the touch of my lips, and then relax to my kisses. Then she began to sob, slowly and heavily. I put my arm round her and ​drew her to me; for a breath she held back, then leaned forward, threw her arms round my neck, and our lips met.
I was drunken with triumphant joy. I kissed her lips again and again; I kissed away her tears, and then I lifted her out of the chair, sat down in it, and took her on my knee, murmuring endearments and reproaches. It was a while before we were really in our senses and coherent. Then I learned that she had been lodging at Chislehurst, trying to soothe herself with long walks into the country at her gates; and I gathered that she had been in no better case than myself, in worse, indeed; for on the edge of the country she had been defenceless to the spring, and the spring is no time for lovers to be parted.
She ended by saying mournfully, but her regret did not ring very sincere, "And I had to come back—I had to—and I shall always be ashamed of myself—always."
"What we want, and what well get to-morrow is a special license," I said firmly.
"A special license—what for?"
"To get married in the afternoon."
"To-morrow—oh, no!" she cried. "That would be too soon! I am not ready! I should have to get things!"
The library clock struck two.
"You mean you'll be married to-day," I said; and I hugged her and laughed joyfully.