“Then we are prosperous?” inquired Dorothy, mindful of other greatschemes which had not always done their duty by their originator.
“Oh yes! We shall make a good thing out of this Malgamite. The labourer is worthy of his hire, you know. There is no reason why we should not take a better house than this. Mrs. Vansittart knows of one in Park Straat which would suit us. Do you like her—Mrs. Vansittart, I mean?”
His tone was slightly patronizing again. The Malgamite was a success, it appeared, and assuredly success is the most difficult emergency that a man has to face in life.
“Very much,” answered Dorothy, quietly. She looked hard at her brother; for Dorothy had long ago gauged him, and had recently gauged Mrs. Vansittart with a facility which is quite incomprehensible to men and easy enough to women. She knew that her brother was not the sort of man to arouse the faintest spark of love in the heart of such a woman as her of whom they spoke. And yet Percy's tone implied as clearly as if the words had been spoken that he had merely to offer to Mrs. Vansittart his hand and heart in order to make her the happiest of women. Either Dorothy or her brother was mistaken in Mrs. Vansittart. Between a man and a woman it is usually the man who is mistaken in an estimate of another woman. Dorothy was wondering, not whether Mrs. Vansittart admired her brother, but why that lady was taking the trouble to convey to him that such was the case.
“Le bonheur c'est être né joyeux.”
There are in the suburbs of London certain strata of men which lie in circles of diminishing density around the great city, likedebrisaround a volcano. London indeed erupts every evening between the hours of five and six, and throws out showers of tired men, who lie where they fall—or rather where their season ticket drops them—until morning, when they arise and crowd back again to the seething crater. The deposits of small clerks and tradespeople fall near at hand in a dense shower, bounded on the north by Finchley, on the south by Streatham. An outer circle of head clerks, Government servants, junior partners, covers the land in a stratum reaching as far south as Surbiton, as far north as the Alexandra Palace. And beyond these limits are cast the brighter lights of commerce, law, and finance, who fall, a thin golden shower, in the favoured neighbourhoods of the far suburbs, where, from eventide till morning, they play at being country gentlemen, talking stock and stable, with minds attuned to share and produce.
Mr. Joseph Wade, banker, was one of those who are thrown far afield by the facilities of a fine suburban train service. He wore a frock-coat, a very shiny hat, and he read theTimesin the train. He lived in a staring red house, solid brick without and solid comfort within, in the favoured pine country of Weybridge. He was one of those pillars of the British Constitution who are laughed at behind their backs and eminently respected to their faces. His gardeners trembled before him, his coachman, as stout and respectable as himself, knew him to be a just and a good master, who grudged no man his perquisites, and behaved with a fine gentlemanly tact at those trying moments when the departing visitor is desirous of tipping and the coachman knows that it is blessed to receive.
Mr. Wade rather scorned the amateur country-gentleman hobby which so many of his travelling companions affected. It led them to don rough tweed suits on Sunday, and walk about their paddocks and gardens as if these formed a great estate.
“I am a banker,” he said, with that sound common sense which led him to avoid those cheap affectations of superiority that belong to the outer strata of the daily volcanic deposit—“I am a banker, and I am content to be a banker in the evening and on Sundays, as well as during bank-hours. What should I know about horses or Alderneys or Dorking fowls? None of 'em yield a dividend.”
Mr. Wade, in fact, looked upon “The Brambles” as a place of rest, arriving there at half-past six, in time to dress for a very good dinner. After dinner he read in a small way by no means to be despised. He had a taste for biography, and cherished in his stout heart a fine old respect for Thackeray and Dickens and Walter Scott. Of the modern fictionists he knew nothing.
“Seems to me they are splitting straws, my dear,” he once said to an earnest young person who thought that literature meant contemporary fiction, whereas we all know that the two are in no way connected.
Joseph Wade was a widower, having some years before buried a wife as stout and sensible as himself. He never spoke of her except to his daughter Marguerite, now leaving school, and usually confined his remarks to a consideration of what Marguerite's mother would have liked in the circumstances under discussion at the moment.
Marguerite had been educated at Cheltenham, and “finished” at Dresden, without any limit as to extras. She had come home from Dresden a few months before the Malgamite scheme was set on foot, to find herself regarded by her father in the light of a rather delicate financial crisis. The affection which had always existed between father and daughter soon developed into something stronger—something volatile and half mocking on her part, indulgent and half mystified on his.
“She is rather a handful,” wrote Mr. Wade to Tony Cornish, “and too inconsequent to let my mind be easy about her future. I wish you would run down and dine and sleep at 'The Brambles' some evening soon. Monday is Marguerite's eighteenth birthday. Will you come on that evening?”
“He is not thirty-three yet,” reflected Mr. Wade, as he folded the letter and slipped it into an envelope, “and she is the sort of girl who must be able to give a man her full respect before she can give him—er—anything else.”
From which it may be perceived that the astute banker was preparing to face the delicate financial crisis.
Cornish received the invitation the day after returning from Holland. Mr. Wade had been his father's friend and trustee, and was, he understood, distantly related to the mother whom Tony had never known. Such invitations were not infrequent, and it was the recipient's custom to set aside others in order to reply with an acceptance. A friendship had sprung up between two men who were not only divided by a gulf of years, but had hardly a thought in common.
On arriving at Weybridge station, Cornish found Marguerite awaiting his arrival in a very high dog-cart drawn by an exceedingly shiny cob, which animal she proceeded to handle with vast spirit and a blithe ignorance. She looked trim and fresh, with bright brown hair under a smart sailor hat, and a complexion almost dazzling in its youthfulness and brilliancy. She nodded gaily at Cornish.
“Hop up,” she said encouragingly, “and then hang on like grim death. There are going to be—whoa, my pet!—er—ructions. All right, William. Let go.”
William let go, and made a dash at the rear step. The shiny cob squeaked, stood thoughtfully on his hind legs for a moment, and then dashed across the bridge, shaving a cab rather closely, and failing to observe a bank of stones at one side of the road.
“Do you mind this sort of thing?” inquired Marguerite, as they bumped heavily over the obstruction.
“Not in the least. Most invigorating, I consider it.” Marguerite arranged the reins carefully, and inclined the whip at a suitable angle across her companion's vision.
“I'm learning to drive, you know,” she said, leaning confidently down from her high seat. “And papa thinks that because this young gentleman is rather stout he is quiet, which is quite a mistake. Whoa! Steady! Keep off the grass! Visitors are requested to keep to—Well, I'm”—she hauled the pony off the common, whither he had betaken himself, on to the road again—“blowed,” she added, religiously completing her unfinished sentence.
They were now between high fences, and compelled to progress more steadily.
“I am very glad you have come, you know,” Marguerite took the opportunity of assuring the visitor. “It is jolly slow, I can tell you, at times; and then you will do papa good. He is very difficult to manage. It took me a week to get this pony out of him. His great idea is for somebody to marry me. He looks upon me as a sort of fund that has to be placed or sunk or something, somewhere. There was a young Scotchman here the week before last. I have forgotten his name already. John—something—Fairly. Yes, that is it—John Fairly, of Auchen-something. It is better to be John Fairly, of Auchen-something, than a belted earl, it appears.”
“Did John tell you so himself?” inquired Tony.
“Yes; and he ought to know, oughtn't he? But that was what put me on my guard. When a Scotchman begins to tell you who he is, take my advice and sheer off.”
“I will,” said Tony.
“And when a Scotchman begins to tell you what he has, you may be sure that he wants something more. I smelt a rat at once. And I would not speak to him for the rest of the evening, or if I did, I spoke with a Scotch accent—just a suspeecion of an accent, you know—nothing to get hold of, but just enough to let him know that his Auchen-something would not go down with me.”
She spoke with a sort of inconsequent earnestness, a relic of the school-days she had so lately left behind. She did not seem to have had time to decide yet whether life was a rattling farce or a matter of deadly earnest. And who shall blame her, remembering that older heads than hers are no clearer on that point?
On approaching the red villa by its short entrance drive of yellow gravel, they perceived Mr. Wade slowly walking in his garden. The garden of “The Brambles” was exactly the sort of garden one would expect to find attached to a house of that name. It was chiefly conspicuous for its lack of brambles, or indeed of any vegetable of such disorderly habit. Yellow gravel walks intersected smooth lawns. April having drawn almost to its close, there were thin red lines of tulips standing at attention all along the flowery borders. Not a stalk was out of place. One suspected that the flowers had been drilled by a martinet of a gardener. The sight of an honest weed would have been a relief to the eye. The curse of too much gardener and too little nature lay over the land.
“Ah!” said Mr. Wade, holding out a large white hand. “You perceive me inspecting the garden, and if you glance in the direction of McPherson's cottage you will perceive McPherson watching me. I pay him a hundred and twenty and he knows that it is too much.”
“By the way, papa,” put in Marguerite, gravely, “will you tell McPherson that he will receive a month's notice if he counts the peaches this summer, as he did last year?”
Mr. Wade laughed, and promised her a freer hand in this matter. They walked in the trim garden until it was time to dress for dinner, and Cornish saw enough to convince him that Mr. Wade was fully occupied between banking hours in his capacity as Marguerite's father.
That young lady came down as the bell rang, in a white dress as fresh and girlish as herself, and during the meal, which was long and somewhat solemn, entertained the guest with considerable liveliness. It was only after she had left them to their wine, over which the banker loved to linger in the old-fashioned way that Mr. Wade put on his grave financial air. He fingered his glass thoughtfully, as if choosing, not a subject of conversation, but a suitable way of approaching a premeditated question.
“You do not recollect your mother?” he said suddenly.
“No; she died when I was two years old.”
Mr. Wade nodded, and slowly sipped his port. “Queer thing is,” he said, after a pause and looking towards the door, “that that child is startlingly like what your mother used to be at the age of eighteen, when I first knew her. Perhaps it is only my imagination—not that I have much of that. Perhaps all girls are alike at that age—a sort of freshness and an optimism that positively take one's breath away. At any rate, she reminds me of your mother.” He broke off, and looked at Cornish with his slow and rather ponderous smile. His attitude towards the world was indeed one of conscious ponderosity. He did not attempt to understand the lighter side of life, but took it seriously as a work-a-day matter. “I was once in love with your mother,” he stated squarely. “But circumstances were against us. You see, your father was a lord's younger brother, and that made a great difference in Clapham in those days. I felt it a good deal at the time, but I of course got over it years and years ago. No sentiment about me, Tony. Sentiment and seventeen stone won't balance, you know.” The great man slowly drew the decanter towards him. “She got a better husband in your father—a clever, bright chap—and I was best man, I recollect. It was about that time—about your age I was—that I took seriously to my work. Before, I had been a little wild. And that interest has lasted me right up to the present time. Take my word for it, Tony, the greatest interest in life would be money-making—if one only knew what to do with the money afterwards.” The banker had been eating a biscuit, and he now swept the crumbs together with his little finger from all sides in a lessening circle until they formed a heap upon the white tablecloth. “It accumulates,” he said slowly, “accumulates, accumulates. And, after all, one can only eat and drink the best that are to be obtained, and the best costs so little—a mere drop in the ocean.” He handed Tony the decanter as he spoke. “Then I married Marguerite's mother, some years afterwards, when I was a middle-aged man. She was the only daughter of—the bank, you know.”
And that seemed to be all that there was to be said about Marguerite's mother.
Tony Cornish nodded in his quick, sympathetic way. Mr. Wade had told him none of this before, but it was to be presumed that he had heard at least part of it from other sources. His manner now indicated that he was interested, but he did not ask his companion to say one word more than he felt disposed to utter. It is probable that he knew these to be no idle after-dinner words, spoken without premeditation, out of a full heart; for Mr. Wade was not, as he had boasted, a person of sentiment, but a plain, straightforward business man, who, if he had no meaning to convey, said nothing. And in this respect it is a pity that more are not like him.
“We have always been pretty good friends, you and I,” continued the banker, “though I know I am not exactly your sort. I am distinctly City; you are as distinctly West End. But during your minority, and when we settled up accounts on your coming of age, and since then, we have always hit it off pretty well.”
“Yes,” said Cornish, moving his feet impatiently under the table.
There was no mistaking the aim of all this, and Mr. Wade was too British in his habits to beat about the bush much longer.
“I do not mind telling you that I have got you down in my will,” said the banker.
Cornish bit his lip and frowned at his wine-glass. And it is possible that the man of no sentiment understood his silence.
“I have frequently disbelieved what I have heard of you,” went on the elder man. “You have, doubtless, enemies—as all men have—and you have been a trifle reckless, perhaps, of what the world might say. If you will allow me to say so, I think none the worse of you for that.”
Mr. Wade pushed the decanter across the table, and when Cornish had filled his glass, drew it back towards himself. It is wonderful what resource there is in half a glass of wine, if merely to examine it when it is hard to look elsewhere.
“You remember, six months ago, I spoke to you of a personal matter,” said the banker. “I asked you if you had thoughts of marrying, and suggested something in the nature of a partnership if that would facilitate your plans in any way.”
“That is not the sort of offer one is likely to forget,” answered Cornish.
“I asked you if—well, if it was Joan Ferriby.”
“Yes. And I answered that it was not Joan Ferriby. That was mere gossip, of which we are both aware, and for which neither of us cares a pin.”
“Then it comes to this,” said Mr. Wade, drawing lines on the tablecloth with his dessert knife as if it were a balance-sheet, and he was casting the final totals there. “You are a man of the world; you are clever; you are like your father before you, in that you have something that women care about. Heaven only knows what it is, for I don't!” He paused, and looked at his companion as if seeking that intangible something. Then he jerked his head towards the drawing-room, where Marguerite could be dimly heard playing an air from the latest comic opera with a fine contempt for accidentals. “That child,” he said, “knows no more about life than a sparrow. A man like myself—seventeen stone—may have to balance his books at any moment. You have a clear field; for you may take my word for it that you will be the first in it. My own experience of life has been mostly financial, but I am pretty certain that the first man a woman cares for is the man she cares for all along, though she may never see him again. I don't hold it out as an inducement, but there is no reason why you should not know that she will have a hundred and fifty thousand pounds—not when I am dead, but on the day she marries.” Mr. Wade paused, and took a sip of his most excellent port. “Do not hurry,” he said. “Take your time. Think about it carefully—unless you have already thought about it, and can say yes or no now.”
“I can do that.”
Mr. Wade bent forward heavily, with one arm on the table.
“Ah!” he said. “Which is it?”
“It is no,” answered Cornish, simply. The banker passed his table-napkin across his lips, paused for a moment, and then rose with, as was his hospitable custom, his hand upon the sherry decanter. “Then let us go into the drawing-room,” he said.
“Heureux celui qui n'est forcée de sacrifier personne à sondevoir.”
“You know,” said Marguerite the next morning, as she and Cornish rode quietly along the sandy roads, beneath the shade of the pines—“you know, papa is such a jolly, simple old dear—he doesn't understand women in the least.”
“And do you call yourself a woman nowadays?” inquired Cornish.
“You bet. Bet those grey hairs of yours if you like. I see them! All down one side.”
“They are all down both sides and on the top as well—my good—woman. How does your father fail to understand you?”
“Well, to begin with, he thinks it necessary to have Miss Williams, to housekeep and chaperon, and to do oddments generally—as if I couldn't run the show myself. You haven't seen Miss Williams—oh, crikey! She has gone to Cheltenham for a holiday, for which you may thank your eternal stars. She is just the sort of person whowouldgo to Cheltenham. Then papa is desperately keen about my marrying. He keeps trotting likelypartisdown here to dine and sleep—that's why you are here, I haven't a shadow of a doubt. None of thepartishave passed muster yet. Poor old thing, he thinks I do not see through his little schemes.”
Cornish laughed, and glanced at Marguerite under the shade of his straw hat, wondering, as men have probably wondered since the ages began, how it is that women seem to begin life with as great a knowledge of the world as we manage to acquire towards the end of our experience. Marguerite made her statements with a certain carelessaplomb, and these were usually within measurable distance of the fact, whereas a youth her age and ten years older, if he be of a didactic turn, will hold forth upon life and human nature with an ignorance of both which is positively appalling.
“Now, I don't want to marry,” said Marguerite, suddenly returning to her younger and more earnest manner. “What is the good of marrying?”
“What, indeed,” echoed Cornish.
“Well, then, if papa tackles you—about me, I mean—when he has done theTimes—he won't say anything before, theTimesbeing the first object in papa's existence, and yours very truly the second—just you choke him off—won't you?”
“I will.”
“Promise?”
“Promise faithfully.”
“That's all right. Now tell me—is my hat on one side?”
Cornish assured her that her hat was straight, and then they talked of other things, until they came to a ditch suitable for some jumping lessons, which he had promised to give her.
She was bewilderingly changeable, at one moment childlike, and in the next very wise—now a heedless girl, and a moment later a keen woman of the world—appearing to know more of that abode of evil than she well could. Her colour came and went—her very eyes seemed to change. Cornish thought of this open field which Marguerite's father had offered, and perhaps he thought of the hundred and fifty thousand pounds that lay beneath so bright a surface.
On returning to “The Brambles,” they found Mr. Wade reading theTimesin the glass-covered veranda of that eligible suburban mansion. It being a Saturday, the great banker was taking a holiday, and Cornish had arranged not to return to town until midday.
“Come here,” shouted Mr. Wade, “and have a cigar while you read the paper.”
“And remember,” added Marguerite, slim and girlish in her riding-habit; “choke him off!”
She stood on the door-step, looking over her shoulder, and nodded at Cornish, her fresh lips tilted at the corner by a smile full of gaiety and mysticism.
“Read that,” said Mr. Wade, gravely.
But Mr. Wade was always grave—was clad in gravity and a frock-coat all his waking moments—and Cornish took up the newspaper carelessly. He stretched out his legs and lighted a cigar. Then he leisurely turned to the column indicated by his companion. It was headed, “Crisis in the Paper Trade: the Malgamite Corner.”
And Tony Cornish did not raise his eyes from the printed sheet for a full ten minutes. When at length he looked up, he found Mr. Wade watching him, placid and patient.
“Can't make head or tail of it,” he said, with a laugh.
“I will make both head and tail of it for you,” said Mr. Wade, who in his own world had a certain reputation for plain speaking.
It was even said that this stout banker could tell a man to his face that he was a scoundrel with a cooler nerve than any in Lombard Street.
“What has occurred,” he said, slowly folding the advertisement sheet of theTimes, “is only what has been foreseen for a long time. The world has been degenerating into a maudlin state of sentiment for some years. The East End began it; a thousand sentimental charities have fostered the movement. Now, I am a plain man—a City man, Tony, to the tips of my toes.” And he stuck out a large square-toed foot and looked contemplatively at it. “Half of your precious charities—the societies that you and Joan Ferriby, and, if you will allow me to say so, that ass Ferriby, are mixed up in—are not fraudulent, but they are pretty near it. Some people who have no right to it are putting other people's money into their pockets. It is the money of fools—a fool and his money are soon parted, you know—but that does not make matters any better. The fools do not always part with their money for the right reason; but that also is of small importance. It is not our business if some of them do it because they like to see their names printed under the names of the royal and the great—if others do it for the mere satisfaction of being life—governors of this and that institution—if others, again, head the county lists because they represent a part of that county in Parliament—if the large majority give of their surplus to charities because they are dimly aware that they are no better than they should be, and wish to take shares in a concern that will pay a dividend in the hereafter. They know that they cannot take their money out of this world with them, so they think they had better invest some of it in what they vaguely understand to be a great limited company, with the bishops on the board and—I say it with all reverence—the Almighty in the chair. I would not say this to the first-comer because it would not be well received, and it is not fashionable to treat Charity from a common-sense point of view. It is fashionable to send a cheque to this and that charity—feeling that it is charity, and therefore will be all right, and that the cheque will be duly placed on the credit side of the drawer's account in the heavenly books, however it may be foolishly spent or fraudulently appropriated by the payee on earth. Half a dozen of the fashionable charities are rotten, but we have not had a thorough-going swindle up to this time. We have been waiting for it ... in Lombard Street. It is there....”
He paused, and tapped the printed column of theTimeswith a fat and inexorable forefinger. He was, it must be remembered, a mere banker—a person in the City, where honesty is esteemed above the finer qualities of charity and beneficence, where soul and sentiment are so little known that he who of his charity giveth away another's money is held accountable for his manner of spending it.
“It is there, ... and you have the honour of being mixed up in it,” said Mr. Wade.
Cornish took up the paper, and looked at the printed words with a vague surprise.
“There is no knowing,” went on the banker, “how the world will take it. It is one of our greatest financial difficulties that there is never any knowing how the world will take anything. Of course, we in the City are plain-going men, who have no handles to our names and no time for the fashionable fads. We are only respectable, and we cannot afford to be mixed up in such a scheme as your malgamite business.” Mr. Wade glanced at Cornish and paused a moment. He was a stolid Englishman, who had received punishment in his time, and could hit hard when he deemed that hard hitting was merciful. “It has only been a question of time. The credulity of the public is such that, sooner or later, a bogus charity must assuredly have followed in the wake of the thousand bogus companies that exist to-day. I only wonder that it has not come sooner. You and Ferriby and, of course, the women have been swindled, my dear Tony—that is the head and the tail of it.”
Cornish laughed gaily. “I dare say we have,” he admitted. “But I will be hanged if I see what it all means, now.”
“It may mean ruin to those who have anything to lose,” explained Mr. Wade, calmly. “The whole thing has been cleverly planned—one of the cleverest things of recent years, and the man who thought it out had the makings of a great financier in him. What he wanted to do was to get the malgamite industry into his own hands. If he had formed a company and gone about it in a straightforward manner, the paper-makers of the whole world would have risen like one man and smashed him. Instead of that, he moved with the times, and ran the thing as a charity—a fashionable amusement, in fact. The malgamite industry is neither better nor worse than the other dangerous trades, and no man need go into it unless he likes. But the man who started this thing—whoever he may be—supplied that picturesqueness without which the public cannot be moved—and lo! We have an army of martyrs.”
Mr. Wade paused and jerked the ash from his cigar. He glanced at Cornish.
“No one suspected that there was anything wrong. It was plausibly put forth, and Ferriby ... did his best for it. Then the money began to come in, and once money begins to come in for a popular charity the difficulty is to stop it. I suppose it is still coming in?”
“Yes,” said Cornish. “It is still coming in, and nobody is trying to stop it.”
Mr. Wade laughed in his throat, as fat men do. “And,” he cried, sitting upright and banging his heavy fist down on the arm of his chair—“and there are millions in your malgamite works at the Hague—millions. If it were only honest it would be the finest monopoly the world has ever seen—for two years, but no longer. At the end of that period the paper-makers will have had time to combine and make their own stuff—then they'll smash you. But during those two years all the makers in the world will have to buy your malgamite at the price you chose to put upon it. They have their forward contracts to fulfil—government contracts, Indian contracts, newspaper contracts. Thousands and thousands of tons of paper will have to be manufactured at a loss every week during the next two years, or they'll have to shut up their mills. Now do you see where you are?”
“Yes,” answered Cornish, “I see where I am, now.”
His face was drawn and his eyes hard, like those of a man facing ruin. And that which was written on his face was an old story, so old that some may not think it worth the telling; for he had found out (as all who are fortunate will, sooner or later, discover) that success or failure, riches or poverty, greatness or obscurity, are but small things in a man's life. Mr. Wade looked at his companion with a sort of wonder in his shrewd old face. He had seen ruined men before now—he had seen criminals convicted of their wrong-doing—he had seen old and young in adversity, and, what is more dangerous still, in prosperity—but he had never seen a young face grow old in the twinkling of an eye. The banker was only thinking of this matter as a financial crisis, in which his great skill made him take a master's delight. There must inevitably come a great crash, and Mr. Wade's interest was aroused. Cornish was realizing that the crash would of a certainty fall between himself and Dorothy.
“This thing,” continued the banker, judicially, “has not evolved itself. It is not the result of a singular chain of circumstances. It is the deliberate and careful work of one man's brain. This sort of speculative gambling comes to us from America. It was in America that the first cotton corner was conceived. That is what the paper means when it plainly calls it the malgamite corner. Now, what I want to know is this—who has worked this thing?”
“Percy Roden,” answered Cornish, thoughtfully. “It is Roden's corner.”
“Then Roden's a clever fellow,” said the great financier. “The sort of man who will die a millionaire or a felon—there is no medium for that sort. He has conducted the thing with consummate skill—has not made a mistake yet. For I have watched him. He began well, by saying just enough and not too much. He went abroad, but not too far abroad. He avoided a suspicious remoteness. Then he bided his time with a fine patience, and at the right moment converted it quietly into a company—with a capital subscribed by the charitable—a splendid piece of audacity. I saw the announcement in the newspaper, neatly worded, and issued at the precise moment when the public interest was beginning to wane, and before the thing was forgotten. People read it, and having found a new plaything—bicycles, I suppose—did not care two pins what became of the malgamite scheme, and yet they were not left in a position to be able to say that they had never heard that the thing had been turned into a company.” The banker rubbed his large soft hands together with a grim appreciation of this misapplied skill, which so few could recognize at its full value.
“But,” he continued, in his deliberate, practical way, as if in the course of his experience he had never yet met a difficulty which could not be overcome, “it is more our concern to think about the future. The difficulty you are in would be bad enough in itself—it is made a hundred times worse by the fact that you have a man like Roden, with all the trumps in his hand, waiting for you to throw the first card. Of course, I know no details yet, but I soon shall. What seems complicated to you may appear simple enough to me. I am going to stand by you—understand that, Tony. Through thick and thin. But I am going to stand behind you. I can hit harder from there. And this is just one of those affairs with which my name must not be associated. So far as I can judge at present, there seems to be only one course open to you, and that is to abandon the whole affair as quietly and expeditiously as possible, to drop malgamite and the hope of benefiting the malgamite workers once and for all.”
Tony was looking at his watch. It was, it appeared, time for him to go if he wanted to catch his train.
“No,” he said, rising; “I will be d——d if I do that.”
Mr. Wade looked at him curiously, as one may look at a sleeper who for no apparent reason suddenly wakes and stretches himself.
“Ah!” he said slowly, and that was all.
“Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell themso.”
If Major White was not a man of quick comprehension, he was, at all events, honest in his density. He never said that he understood when he did not do so. When he received a telegram in barracks at Dover to come up to London the next day and meet Cornish at his club at one o'clock, the major merely said that he was in a state of condemnation, and fixing his glass very carefully into his more surprised eye, studied the thin pink paper as if it were a unique and interesting proof of the advance of the human race. In truth, Major White never sent telegrams, and rarely received them. He blew out his cheeks and said a second time that he was damned. Then he threw the telegram into a waste-paper basket, which was rarely put to so legitimate a use; for the major never wrote letters if he could help it, and received so few that they hardly kept him supplied in pipe-lights.
He apparently had no intention of replying to Cornish's telegram, arguing very philosophically in his mind that he would go if he could, and if he could not, it would not matter very much. A method of contemplating life, as a picture with a perspective to it, which may be highly recommended to fussy people who herald their paltry little comings and goings by a number of unnecessary communications.
Without, therefore, attempting a surmise as to the meaning of this summons, White took a morning train to London, and solemnly reported himself to the hall porter of a club in St. James's Street as the well-dressed throng was leisurely returning from church.
“Mr. Cornish told me to come and have lunch with him,” he said, in his usual bald style, leaving explanations and superfluous questions to such as had time for luxuries of that description.
He was taken charge of by a button-boy, whose head reached the major's lowest waistcoat button, was deprived of his hat and stick, and practically commanded to wash his hands, to all of which he submitted under stolid and silent protest.
Then he was led upstairs, refusing absolutely to hurry, although urged most strongly thereto by the boy's example and manner of pausing a few steps higher up and looking back.
“Yes,” said the major, when he had heard Cornish's story across the table, and during the consumption of a perfectly astonishing luncheon—“yes; half the trouble in this world comes from the incapacity of the ordinary human being to mind his own business.” He operated on a creaming Camembert cheese with much thoughtfulness, and then spoke again. “I should like you to tell me,” he said, “what a couple of idiots like us have to do with these confounded malgamiters. We do not know anything about industry or workmen—or work, so far as that goes”—he paused and looked severely across the table—“especially you,” he added.
Which was strictly true; for Tony Cornish was and always had been a graceful idler. He was one of those unfortunate men who possess influential relatives, than which there are few heavier handicaps in that game of life, where if there be any real scoring to be done, it must be compassed off one's own bat. To follow out the same inexpensive simile, influential relatives may get a man into a crack club, but they cannot elect him to the first eleven. So Tony Cornish, who had never done anything, but had waited vaguely for something to turn up that might be worth his while to seize, had no answer ready, and only laughed gaily in his friend's face.
“The first thing we must do,” he said, very wisely leaving the past to take care of itself, “is to get old Ferriby out of it.”
“'Cos he is a lord?”
“Partly.”
“'Cos he is an ass?” suggested White, as a plausible alternative.
“Partly; but chiefly because he is not the sort of man we want if there is going to be a fight.”
A momentary light gleamed in the major's eye, but it immediately gave place to a placid interest in the Camembert.
“If there is going to be a fight,” he said, “I'm on.”
In which trivial remark the major explained his whole life and mental attitude. And if the world only listened, instead of thinking what effect it is creating and what it is going to say next, it would catch men thus giving themselves away in their daily talk from morning till night. For Major White had always been “on” when there was fighting. By dint of exchanging and volunteering and asking, and generally bothering people in a thick-skinned, dull way, he always managed to get to the front, where his competitors—the handful of modern knights-errant who mean to make a career in the army, and inevitably succeed—were not afraid of him, and laughingly liked him. And the barrack-room balladists had discovered that White rhymes with Fight. And lo! Another man had made a name for himself in a world that is already too full of names, so that in the paths of Fame the great must necessarily fall against each other.
After luncheon, in the smaller smoking-room, where they were alone, Cornish explained the situation at greater length to Major White, who did not even pretend to understand it.
“All I can make of it is that that loose-shouldered chap Roden is a scoundrel,” he said bluntly, from behind a great cigar, “and wants thumping. Now, if there's anything in that line—”
“No; but you must not tell him so,” interrupted Cornish. “I wish to goodness I could make you understand that cunning can only be met by cunning, not by thumps, in these degenerate days. Old Wade has taken us by the hand, as I tell you. They come to town, by the way, to-morrow, and will be in Eaton Square for the rest of the season. He says that it is his business to meet the low cunning of the small solicitors and the noble army of company promoters, and it seems that he knows exactly what to do. At any rate, it is not expedient to thump Roden.”
Major White shrugged his shoulders with much silent wisdom. He believed, it appeared, in thumps in face of any evidence in favour of milder methods.
“Deuced sorry for that girl,” he said.
Cornish was lighting a cigarette. “What girl?” he asked quietly.
“Miss Roden, chap's sister. She knows her brother is a dark horse, but she wouldn't admit it, not if you were to kill her for it. Women”—the major paused in his great wisdom—“women are a rum lot.”
Which, assuredly, no one is prepared to deny.
Cornish glanced at his companion through the cigarette smoke, and said nothing.
“However,” continued the major, “I am at your service. Let us have the orders.”
“To-morrow,” answered Cornish, “is Monday, and therefore the Ferribys will be at home. You and I are to go to Cambridge Terrace about four o'clock to see my uncle. We will scare him out of the Malgamite business. Then we will go upstairs and settle matters with Joan. Wade and Marguerite will drop in about half-past four. Joan and Marguerite see a good deal of each other, you know. If we have any difficulty with my uncle, Wade will give him thecoup de grâce, you understand. His word will have more weight than ours We shall then settle on a plan of campaign, and clear out of my aunt's drawing-room before the crowd comes.”
“And you will do the talking,” stipulated Major White.
“Oh yes; I will do the talking. And now I must be off. I have a lot of calls to pay, and it is getting late. You will find me here to-morrow afternoon at a quarter to four.”
Whereupon Major White took his departure, to appear again the next day in good time, placid and debonair—as he had appeared when called upon in various parts of the world, where things were stirring.
They took a hansom, for the afternoon was showery, and drove through the crowded streets. Even Cambridge Terrace, usually a quiet thoroughfare, was astir with traffic, for it was the height of the season and a levee day. As the cab swung round into Cambridge Terrace, White suddenly pushed his stick up through the trap-door in the roof of the vehicle.
“Ninety-nine,” he shouted to the driver in his great voice. “Not nine.”
Then he threw himself back against the dingy blue cushions.
Cornish turned and looked at him in surprise. “Gone off your head?” he inquired. “It is nine—you know that well enough.”
“Yes,” answered White, “I know that, my good soul; but you could not see the door as I could when we came round the corner. Roden and Von Holzen are on the steps, coming out.”
“Roden and Von Holzen in England?”
“Not only in England,” said White, placidly, “but in Cambridge Terrace. And “—he paused, seeking a suitable remark among his small selection of conversational remnants—“and the fat is in the fire.”
The cab had now stopped at the door of number ninety-nine. And if Roden or Von Holzen, walking leisurely down Cambridge Terrace, had turned during the next few moments, they would have seen a stationary hansom cab, with a large round face—mildly surprised, like a pink harvest moon—rising cautiously over the roof of it, watching them.
When the coast was clear, Cornish and White walked back to number nine. Lord Ferriby was at home, and they were ushered into his study, an apartment which, like many other things appertaining to his lordship, was calculated to convey an erroneous impression. There were books upon the tables—the lives of great and good men. Pamphlets relating to charitable matters, missionary matters, and a thousand schemes for the amelioration of the human lot here and hereafter, lay about in profusion. This was obviously the den of a great philanthropist.
His lordship presently appeared, carrying a number of voting papers, which he threw carelessly on the table. He was, it seemed, a subscriber to many institutions for the blind, the maimed, and the halt.
“Ah!” he said, “I generally get through my work in the morning, but I find myself behindhand to-day. It is wonderful,” he added, directing his conversation and his benevolent gaze towards White, “how busy an idle man may be.”
“M—m—yes!” answered the major, with his stolid stare.
Cornish broke what threatened to be an awkward silence by referring at once to the subject in hand.
“It seems,” he began, “that this Malgamite scheme is not what we took it to be.”
Lord Ferriby looked surprised and slightly scandalized. Could it be possible for a fashionable charity to be anything but what it appeared to be? In his eyes, wandering from one face to the other, there lurked the question as to whether they had seen Roden and Von Holzen quit his door a minute earlier. But no reference was made to those two gentlemen, and Lord Ferriby, who, as a chairman of many boards, was a master of the art of conciliation and the decent closing of both eyes to unsightly facts, received Cornish's suggestion with a polite and avuncular pooh-pooh.
“We must not,” he said soothingly, “allow our judgment to be hastily affected by the ill-considered statements of the—er—newspapers. Such statements, my dear Anthony—and you, Major White—are, I may tell you, only what we, as the pioneers of a great movement, must be prepared to expect. I saw the article in theTimesto which you refer—indeed, I read it most carefully, as, in my capacity of chairman of this—eh—char—that is to say, company, I was called upon to do. And I formed the opinion that the mind of the writer was—eh—warped.” Lord Ferriby smiled sadly, and gave a final wave of the hand, as if to indicate that the whole matter lay in a nutshell, and that nutshell under his lordship's heel. “Warped or not,” answered Cornish, “the man says that we have formed ourselves into a company, which company is bound to make huge profits, and those profits are naturally assumed to find their way into our pockets.”
“My dear Anthony,” replied the chairman, with a laugh which was almost a cackle, “the labourer is worthy of his hire.”
Which seems likely to become thedernier criof the overpaid throughout all the ages.
“Even if we contradict the statement,” pursued Cornish, with a sudden coldness in his manner, “the contradiction will probably fail to reach many of the readers of this article, and as matters at present stand, I do not see that we are in a position to contradict.”