SUNDAY MORNING
Mr. Frank Alington turned out to be a star of greater magnitude, in fact
a Saturday till Monday star, almost a comet. Lord Conybeare found that
the whirl and bustle of London did not allow of his seeing enough of
him, so he phrased it, and thus it happened that, some ten days after
the dinner at the Drapers' Company (Kit's playing and landing of the
fish having been masterly, for she had him dead-beat long before ten),
Mr. Alington arrived on a Saturday afternoon in June at what Kit called
their "cottage" in Buckinghamshire.
Strictly speaking--though she did not often speak strictly--it was not a
cottage at all; and it was certainly not in Buckinghamshire, but in
Berkshire. But there was a rustic, almost Bohemian, sound to Kit's mind
in Buckinghamshire, whereas Berkshire only reminded one of bacon, and a
few miles either way made a very little difference. "And if I choose to
call Berkshire the Malay Archipelago," said Kit, "who is to stop me?"
However, to adopt Kit's nomenclature, the cottage in question was a
large red-brick Elizabethan house on the banks of the Thames, with a few
acres of conservatories, and a charming flower-garden, leading down by
green degrees and cut yew hedges to the river. But the cottage idea was
not wholly absent, for they always dined in the room which had once
certainly been the kitchen. The range had been removed, leaving an
immense open fireplace, where it was sacrilege to burn anything but
logs, and the most charming dark oak dressers, bearing under the new
_régime_ quantities of old blue Nankin ware, ran round the walls.
Following the same idea, they always sat in the big hall which opened
straight on to the front-door, instead of in the drawing-room. "Quite
like hobnailed day-labourers," said Kit.
The analogy is obvious, and Kit's admirable taste had made the likeness
almost glaring. There was a grandfather's clock there, a couple of large
oak settles on each side of the fireplace, which had bronze dogs for the
fire-irons, and homely Chippendale and basket chairs. A few Persian
rugs, it is true, which it would have tasked a connoisseur to price,
happened to be lying on the floor, but otherwise it was quite
uncarpeted, and you trod on real naked wooden boards of polished oak. In
all the windows but one there were tiny diamond panes of old wavy glass,
which made the features of the landscape outside go up and down like a
switchback as you walked across the room; and in the other window, which
gave light to the serving-up-room (a highly inconvenient arrangement, in
which Kit, in the _rôle_ of labourer, delighted), were real
bottom-of-glasses panes, which looked charming. The roof was gabled and
not even whitewashed (being also of oak), and altogether an unexacting
labourer might have spent very fairly comfortable evenings in this
simple room.
The cottage idea was carried out in the garden also. The beds were all
of old-fashioned flowers, hollyhocks, London-pride, poppies,
wallflowers, dahlias, mignonette, quite rustic and herbaceous, with no
pincushion Italian beds, which Kit said were very expensive and out of
keeping with the prevalent simplicity. They also reminded her of
badly-mixed salads. Stern frugality further showed itself in the
clothing of the red-brick walls which bounded the garden. Here were no
flaunting, flaming creepers, bright and profitless, but homely
pear-trees and apricots, which bore quite excellent fruit. A common
wooden punt lay moored at the end of the garden, useful and homely, fit
for the carrying of the produce of the labourer's garden to market. A
pile of embroidered cushions happened at that moment to be lying in it,
and Kit had also left her jewelled Russian cigarette-case there, but
that was all. Even the cigarette-case was made of simple plaited straw,
and the monogram and coronet set in very blue turquoises at one corner
seemed to have got there by accident, as if they had been chips which
had fallen out of the sky, and might be shortly expected to float back
there again.
It was Sunday morning, obviously Sunday morning, and Nature was
proceeding as usual on her simple but pleasant way. A brilliant sun, a
gentle wind, the smooth, unruffled river, all testified to the
tenderness and benignity of the powers of the air. Spring, the watery,
impetuous spring of the North, had now a month ago definitely given
place to summer, leaving another year in which poets, with their
extraordinary want of correct observation, might forget what it had
really been like, and rhyme it a hundred undeserved and unfounded
courtesies. But summer had come in earnest in the latter days of May,
with a marked desire to make itself pleasant, and give to the sturdy
British yeoman, who had till then complained (with statistics of
rainfall) of the wetness of the spring, another excellent opportunity
of vilifying the dryness of the summer. Over such Providence watches
with a special care, and, knowing that the one thing worse than having a
grievance is to have none, gives them a kindly interchange of wet
springs, dry summers, wet summers, dry springs, secure of never pleasing
anybody.
A soft blue haze of heat and moisture hung over the river and the
low-lying water-meadows on the far side, but as the hills beyond climbed
upwards from the valley, they rose into an atmosphere extraordinarily
clear. Though the day was hot, there was a precision of outline about
the woods that cut the sky almost suggestive of a frosty morning, and
even here below the heat was of a brisk quality. Everything was steeped
in Sunday content, and from the gray church-tower standing guardian
among the huddled hamlet-roofs came the melodious jangle of bells
ringing for the eleven o'clock service. The labourers' garden was in
full luxuriance of midsummer flower (for a bright and cheerful garden
should be within reach of the humblest), and a rainbow of colour bounded
the close-shaven lawn. Nothing, as is right, was ever done on this lawn,
mossy to the foot, restful to the eye; no whitewash lines cut it up into
horrible squares and oblongs, no frenzied tennis-balls ever did
decapitation among the flower-beds that framed it, and you could wander
about it at dusk immune from anxiety as to whether your next step would
be tripped in a croquet-hoop or entangled in the snares of a drooped
tennis-net. During the weeks of spring it had been a star-sown space of
crocuses, like the meadow in Fra Angelico's Annunciation, but these were
over, and it had again become a green, living velvet.
Kit had developed that morning at breakfast a strange unreasoning desire
to go to church, and until Jack saw her eat he was almost afraid she was
going to be ill. To church accordingly she had gone, dragging with her
Alice Haslemere, who was staying with them. They had been put across the
river in the punt, Kit armed with a huge Church service, and it was
evident, so thought Conybeare as he strolled down to the water's edge
after the return of the punt, that Kit had smoked a cigarette as she
went across. This, by the standard of perfection, he considered a
mistake. If you are going to do a thing at all, do it thoroughly, he
argued to himself, and that a woman should smoke just before going to
church was a lapse from the proper level. But he took the cigarette-case
with its turquoise monogram from where it lay on the cushion, and put it
into his pocket. As like as not Kit would step on it when she got into
the punt again.
Jack had enjoyed a long conversation with Mr. Alington after dinner the
evening before, and he was now strolling about the garden expecting him
to come out and continue it. Alington was, as he had told Kit, a
heavy-looking man, but conversationally he had not found him in the
least heavy. He had the air of a solid, intelligent Englishman, whose
mind had been considerably widened by extensive travel abroad, and took
a large uninsular view of things. Had he been disposed to apply for a
situation as a butler, no householder could have reasonably hoped to
find a more trustworthy or respectable-looking man. Sobriety shone from
his large mild eye, and the lines of his firm, somewhat full-lipped,
mouth expressed steadiness in every curve. If as a butler he had been
told that the whole of the Royal Family were coming to high tea in ten
minutes, you would have felt yourself safe to bet that the intelligence
would not flurry him, and that a sufficient high tea would somehow
immediately appear. For so ample and well-furnished a man he had a
curiously small voice, rather suggesting that it came from a distance,
and he spoke his sentences in a precise manner, never correcting a word,
as if he had thought them out before he opened his mouth. Colour was
given to this supposition by the fact that he always paused a moment
before speaking. Such a habit of speech, when worn by the majority,
would predispose towards heaviness; but the result when it arrived was
not, in the case of Mr. Alington, heavy. On the contrary, it was
weighty--a far different thing. In the interval of reminding one of an
admirable butler he irresistibly suggested a member of a Conservative
Cabinet, safe of a peerage. It was only when considered as a floater of
gold mines that his appearance was against him, and even then it was
against him only on the score of probability, for it was impossible that
even an imaginative public could invent a man in whom more _primâ-facie_
confidence should be reposed as a trustee of the moneys of widows and
fatherless.
Jack strolled in the garden for nearly half an hour before he appeared,
chucking pebbles into the Thames and cigarette-ends into the
flower-beds. At breakfast Mr. Alington had been dressed in a black
frock-coat, but now when he made his unhurried exit from the low
drawing-room French window he wore a straw hat and a suit of decorous
tweed, the result, no doubt, of his observation that no one else wore
Sunday clothes. He carried a malacca cane in one hand; in the other a
large tune hymn-book with edges red in one light, gold in another.
"Lady Conybeare has started?" he inquired of Jack.
"Yes; she has gone to church. She went nearly half an hour ago."
Mr. Alington paused a moment.
"I had meant to go with her," he said. "I had no idea it was so late."
"There is the punt here," said Jack. "You can go now if you like. I had
no idea you meant to."
"I thought everyone went to church on Sunday morning in England when
they were in the country," he said. "But I would sooner not go at all
than arrive in the middle of the prayer of St. Chrysostom."
"And I would sooner arrive in the middle of the prayer of St. Chrysostom
than at the beginning of it," remarked Jack.
A slight look of pain crossed Mr. Alington's face, as if he had a twinge
of neuralgia; but he made no further comment on Jack's levity. He leaned
his tune hymn-book carefully against the bottom of his basket-chair,
after feeling that the lawn was dry, and lit a cigarette.
"An exquisite morning," he said, after a moment's reflection. "The hills
look as if they had been painted with cream for a medium, an effect so
rare out of England."
Lord Conybeare did not reply immediately, for he had not waited all this
time in the garden for Alington to hear him talk about cream. Then he
went straight to the point:
"All you said last night interested me very much," he began, "and your
kind offer to invest some money for me in your new group of mines----"
Mr. Alington held up a large white, deprecating hand. On the little
finger was a plain gold signet-ring, bearing the motto, _Fortiter
fideliter feliciter_.
"It is nothing," he replied; "pray don't mention it. Indeed, Lord
Conybeare, if I may say so, I only made that offer as a sort of feeler.
Your reply to me then, your further reference to the subject now, show
me that you are kind enough to be interested in my new undertakings."
"Profoundly," said Lord Conybeare; then, with disarming frankness:
"Money is the most interesting thing in the world and the most
desirable. I often wish," he added, "that I saw more of it."
Alington flicked a morsel of ash off the end of his cigarette.
"That confirms me in what I was thinking of saying to you," he replied.
"Now will you allow me to speak with your own frankness? Ah, observe
that beautiful line traced by that skein of starlings!"
Jack looked up.
"Lovely!" he said. "Pray speak."
"It is this then. My honest belief is that there are immense fortunes to
be made in West Australian mining. I believe also, again with absolute
honesty, that these claims which I own are--some of them, at least,
extremely rich. Now, I wish very much that I was wealthy enough to work
them by myself. I regret to say that I am not. I must therefore form a
company. To form a company I must have directors."
"Surely your name----" began Conybeare politely, but with only the
faintest conjecture of what might be coming.
"My name, as you so kindly suggest, will no doubt be a little
assistance," said Alington, "for I am not wholly unknown in such
matters. But it is not enough. This Company must be English; it must be
formed here; the shareholders should be largely English. Why? For a
variety of reasons. In the first place, you can raise ten thousand
pounds here more easily than you can raise one thousand in Australia.
Again, the British public is getting ready to go mad about West
Australian mining, while in Australia they regard Australian mining
without, well, without any premonitory symptoms of insanity. Perhaps
they underrate its future; I think they do. Perhaps the British public
overrates it; that also is possible. But I bring my wares to the best
market. Now I ask you, Lord Conybeare, will you be on my board? Will you
be my chairman?"
He turned briskly round with the first quick movement that Conybeare had
yet seen him make.
"I," he asked, "on a board of mining directors? I know about mines
exactly what you told me, last night--that is to say, unless I have
forgotten some of it."
The ghost of a smile flickered across Mr. Alington's broad face, and he
laid his large white hand on Jack's knee. The latter seemed to regard it
just as he might have regarded a harmless moth that had settled there.
The poor thing did not hurt.
"You saw that I smiled," he said. "I saw that you saw it. I smiled
because you spoke so far from the point. That is frank enough, is it
not, to show you that I am telling you the truth. There are further
proofs also."
Both in his action with his hand and in his speech the plebeian showed
plain, but Jack did not resent it. He had not asked Alington down to the
cottage to enjoy his refined conversation and his well-bred presence,
but to talk business. That he was doing. Jack was quite pleased with
him.
"I do not follow you," he said.
Mr. Alington lit another cigarette from the stump of his old one before
replying, and rose to deposit the other out of sight in a garden-bed.
"Cigarette-ends are so terribly dissonant with this charming garden," he
said. "Now, I am speaking to you from a purely business point of view. I
supposed--it was natural, was it not?--that you were so kind as to ask
me to your delightful house in order to discuss these mines. You see how
frank I am."
Conybeare let his eye travel slowly down a reach of the Thames.
"Yes, that was the reason why I asked you," he said.
"And I came for exactly the same reason. The pleasure of visiting you at
your 'cottage,' as Lady Conybeare so playfully calls it, is great--very
great; but plain business-men like me have little time for such
pleasures. Frankly, then, I should not have come unless I guessed your
reason. I, too, wished to talk about these mines, Lord Conybeare, and I
ask you again to be a director on my board."
He took off his straw hat--for they were sitting in the shade--and
propped it carefully up against his chair by the side of the large tune
hymn-book. Its removal showed a high white forehead and a circular
baldness in the centre of flossy, light-brown hair, like a tonsure.
"I am a plain business man," he went on, "and when I am engaged in
business I do not offer an advantageous thing to others unless I get an
advantage myself; for to introduce sentiment into business is to make a
pleasure of it and a failure. You must remember, my dear Lord
Conybeare, that England is essentially aristocratic in her ideas. At
least, so far as your nobility is Conservative, she is aristocratic.
Think if Lord Salisbury joined a board how the public would clamour for
allotments! Dear me, yes, the master of Hatfield might be a very rich
man--a very rich man indeed."
Jack Conybeare was completely himself; he was not dazzled or unduly
delighted at the offer. He merely wished to know what he got by it,
taking for granted, and justly, that the man was sincere.
"Marquises still count, then," he said. "I give you my word I had no
idea of it. I am glad I am a marquis. But what," he added, "do I get by
it?"
"A salary," said Mr. Alington, and his usual pause gave the remark
considerable weight. "But we will pass over that," he went on.
"Directors, however, have the privilege of taking a great many shares
before the concern is made public. In fact, in order to qualify for
being a director, you must hold a considerable number."
"I am very poor," said Jack.
"That, fortunately, can be remedied," said Mr. Alington.
Jack was immensely practical, and very quick, and it was obvious at once
that this was capable of two interpretations. He took the right one.
"You mean it is a certainty for me?" he said.
Again Mr. Alington let a perceptible pause intervene before he answered.
"I mean this," he said, "if you want plain speaking, and I think you do;
it also suits me better. You shall be allotted a certain number of
shares, say ten thousand, in my new group of mines. You will probably
only have to pay the first call. You will be a director of these
mines--and, by the way, there is another name I have in my mind, the
owner of which I should also like to have on my board. I had the
pleasure of seeing him at your house in London. Very well, I issue my
prospectus, and my name, as you so kindly observed, counts for
something. I, of course, as vendor, shall join the board after
allotment. Yours and another I hope will be there too. Now, I feel
certain in my own mind that such a board (with certain other names,
which shall be my affair) will be advantageous to me. It will pay. I am
certain also--I say this soberly--that between my prospectus and my
board the shares will at once go up, so that if you choose you can sell
out before the second call. Thus you will not be without your advantage
also. We do no favour to each other; we enter into partnership each for
his own advantage."
"And my duties?" asked Jack.
"Attendance, regular attendance at the meetings of the company. On those
occasions I shall want you to take the chair, read the report of the
manager, if there is one to hand, make the statement of the affairs of
the company, and congratulate the shareholders."
"Or condole?" asked Jack.
"I hope not. I should also ask you to immediately approach Lord
Abbotsworthy, and ask him to be on the board. His is the other name I
mentioned."
"Whatever do you want Tom Abbotsworthy for?" asked Conybeare
surprisedly.
"For much the same reason as I want you. He is already an earl--he will
be a duke. Dear me, if I was not a man of business I should choose to
be a duke."
Jack pondered a moment.
"It is your own concern," he said. "I will ask him with pleasure, and I
think very probably he will consent. Oddly enough, he and I were talking
about this sudden interest in West Australia only yesterday morning."
"I think that many other people will be talking of it before long," said
Alington.
"I consent," said Jack.
Mr. Alington showed neither elation, relief, nor surprise. But he
paused.
"I think you will find it worth your while," he said. "And now, Lord
Conybeare, there is another point. In the working of a big scheme like
this--for, I assure you, this is no cottage-garden affair--there is, as
you may imagine, an enormous deal of business. Somebody has to be
responsible for, or, at any rate, to sanction, all that is done. Whether
we put up fresh stamps, or whether we decide to use the cyanide process
for tailings, or sink a deep level, or abandon a vein, or use the
sulphide reduction, to take only a few obvious instances, somebody has
to be able to answer all questions, difficult ones sometimes, possibly
even awkward ones. Now, are you willing to go into all this, or not? If
you wish to have a voice in such matters you must go into it. On that I
insist. I hear you are a first-rate authority on chemical manures--a
most absorbing subject, I am sure. Are you willing to learn as much
about mines? On the other hand, it is open to you and Lord Abbotsworthy
to leave the whole working of such affairs to me and certain business
men whom I may appoint. But, having left it, you leave it altogether.
You will have no right of being consulted at all about technical points
unless you will make them your study. If you decide to leave these
things to those whose life has been passed in them, good. You put
implicit confidence in them, and if required, you will say so, honestly,
at the meetings. If, on the other hand, you wish to have a voice in
technical affairs, your voice must be justified. You must make mines,
technically, your study. You must go out and see mines. You must
acquire, not a superficial, but a thorough knowledge of them. You must
be able to form some estimate of what relation one ounce of gold to the
ton bears to the cost of working, and the capital on which such a yield
will pay. Now which? Choose!"
And Mr. Alington faced round squarely, a little exhausted on so hot a
morning by a volubility which was rare with him, and looked Jack in the
face.
"Which do you advise?" asked the other.
"I cannot undertake to advise you. I have merely given you the data of
your choice, and I can do no more."
"Then spare me details," said Jack.
Mr. Alington nodded his head gravely.
"I think you are wise," he said, "though I could not take the
responsibility of influencing your own opinion. I pay you for your name.
Your name, to tell you the truth, is what I want. You delegate business
to business men. I hope you will put the matter in the same light to
Lord Abbotsworthy. With regard to your salary as chairman, I cannot make
you a precise offer yet; tentatively, I should suggest five thousand a
year."
Lord Conybeare had to perfection that very useful point of good
breeding, namely, the ability to preserve a perfectly wooden face when
hearing the most surprising news. Mr. Alington, for all the effect this
information apparently had on it, might have been speaking to the leg of
a table.
"That seems to me very handsome," he replied negligently.
"It seems to me about fair," said Mr. Alington.
Lord Conybeare was puzzled, and he wondered whether Kit would understand
it all. How his name on a "front page," as Mr. Alington called it, with
attendance at a few meetings, at which he would read a report, could be
worth five thousand a year, he did not see, though he felt quite certain
that Mr. Alington thought it was. Whether it would turn out to be so or
not, he hardly cared at all; clearly that matter did not concern him. If
anyone was willing to pay five thousand a year for his name they were
perfectly welcome to have it; indeed, he would have taken a much smaller
figure. He had no idea that marquises were at such a premium. His
distinguished ancestry had suddenly become an industrial company, paying
heavily. "The new Esau," he thought to himself, "and a great improvement
on the old. I only lend my birthright, and the pottage I receive is
really considerable."
Some time before they had reached this point in their conversation the
punt had been taken across the river again to fetch Kit and Alice
Haslemere back from church, and as Mr. Alington said his last words it
had returned again with the jaded church-goers. He put on his straw hat,
picked up the big tune hymn-book, and with Conybeare strolled down to
the bottom of the lawn to meet them.
"Devotion is so very fatiguing," said Kit, in a harassed voice, as she
stepped on to the grass. "Alice and I feel as if we had been having the
influenza--don't we, dear? And I've lost my cigarette-case. It is too
tiresome, because I meant to pawn it. I am sure I left it in the punt."
Jack took it out of his pocket and returned it to her.
"Thank your dear husband you didn't step on it," he remarked.
Kit took it petulantly, and lit a cigarette.
"Oh, Jack, I wish you wouldn't be so thoughtful," she said. "Thoughtful
people are such a nuisance. They always remind one of what one is doing
one's best to forget, and put one's cherished things in safe places. Oh,
I'm so glad I'm not a clergyman. I should have to go to church again
this evening. What's that book, Mr. Alington? Oh, I see. Have you and
Jack been singing hymns on the lawn? How dear of you! I didn't know you
thought of going to church, or I would have waited for you. I understood
you were going to talk business with Jack. There is business in the air.
Just a trifle stuffy."
Mr. Alington paused.
"We have been having a long and interesting talk," he replied. "One can
say more on Sunday morning than in the whole of the rest of the week put
together."
"Yes, that's so true," said Kit, walking on ahead with him, and smoking
violently. "The man who preached knew it too. It was like a night
journey, I slept so badly. And was your talk satisfactory?"
"To me, very," said Mr. Alington. "I am convinced it will also prove
satisfactory to Lord Conybeare. He has kindly consented to become my
chairman and a director of my new group of mines, the Carmel mines, as
they will be called."
"What a nice name!" said Kit. "And shall we all make our fortunes?"
Mr. Alington nodded his massive head.
"I shall be very much surprised if we do not get a modest competence out
of the Carmel mines," said he.