“heureux celui qui n'est forcée de sacrifier personne à son
devoir.”
“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 who would go to cheltenham. then papa is desperately keen about my marrying. he keeps trotting likely partis down here to dine and sleep—that's why you are here, i haven't a shadow of a doubt. none of the partis have 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 careless aplomb, 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 the times—he won't say anything before, the times being 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 the times in 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 the times, “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 the times with 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.
