Lord Benthorpe’s descent and training, of which my readers have
received an account, forbade him to exhibit haste in his further
dealings with Mr Burden. His long administrative experience in the
Orient, with which these papers have already rendered the Anglo-Saxon
race familiar, equally forbade him to leave his associates and
friends long ignorant of Mr Burden’s views. He wrote to Mr Barnett
immediately after Mr Burden’s departure from Placton, and was charmed
to discover, in the reply, that the Empire Builder was not so wrapt
in his dreams as to forget that a certain delay in money matters is
the mark of good birth. Indeed Mr Barnett advised that several weeks
should pass before the matter was mentioned again.
Mr Burden, meanwhile, who was chiefly acquainted with the narrow
world of business, read such delay to mean that his colleagues were
yet uncertain. At moments he feared some governmental interference
acting through the powerful connection of Lord Benthorpe; at others
he regretted the enthusiasm he had shown at Placton for the new
scheme. As the days passed, he grew into a feverish and restless
state, very favourable for the due fruition of Mr Barnett’s plans;
and while I am bound to regret the pain which such a process
inevitably caused my old friend, I am none the less constrained to
admit its ultimate wisdom. Without some exercise of discipline, no
organiser can marshal his forces; and it is to Mr Barnett’s honour,
that he never pursued such a method beyond the limits strictly
necessary to the mutual benefit of himself and of the friends he
would acquire.
Three weeks went by, and Mr Burden had worked himself into a state of
nervous irritation pitiful for any to behold save those who, like his
son, were aware of the ultimate advantage to which it would lead.
The merchant no longer mentioned the M’Korio directly, but he
continually brought home new books upon that river; he purchased a
new atlas; he visited upon two occasions the rooms of ill-frequented
museums. His dignity, which prevented him from betraying to Cosmo
his immeasurable anxieties, did not debar him from a ceaseless
conversation which was unnatural and strange in him; he spoke of
Oxford, of Placton, of geography, of the Roman Empire, of savages,
of command of the sea, of governing races, of the _Times_ newspaper,
of wars. And, all the while, Cosmo, with tenacious care, warded off
every allusion that pointed to the forbidden subject; under his
indefatigable calm, his imperturbable goodhumour, his father’s health
threatened to give way.
In early May a coincidence brought to maturity this period of
preparation. Mr Burden saw in the _Times_ (which paper he read at
breakfast) that a German company designed to acquire concessions in
the Delta; in the full agony of this news, he learnt—upon the same
morning—that Cosmo would meet Mr Barnett at luncheon. The father and
the son went into town together. The morning was not without tension.
Towards one o’clock came the moment when the tension could no longer
endure.
There was perfect restraint and good feeling in the little scene.
Cosmo took his hat in the office, and remembered to say that he
should be a trifle late in returning, because he expected Mr Barnett
would appear at the club. Just as he went out, his father, with
unnatural joviality, suggested that they should lunch together—they
so rarely lunched together. Cosmo’s hesitation was not noticeable. Mr
Burden rose; and so, for the second time, he came to, and was not
sought by, Imperial things.
They sat at a little table in a vast room, over-luxurious but grand;
they had already ordered and received the baked mutton and cabbage of
their choice; when Cosmo stood up and greeted warmly a figure, large
and benignant, which had appeared beside him. It was Mr Barnett.
A whirl of confused emotions ran through the mind of Mr Burden.
The public reputation was one thing to him, the splendid coat of
astrachan quite another; and when speech began, the accent, gesture,
and expression meant yet a third. At the introduction, Mr Barnett
bowed from the hips, mechanically and low, his chin upon his chest—a
fourth confusion combined with the others, where had Mr Burden seen
that posture before? He could not remember—then it returned to him:
it was in 1878, in a farce called _The Cologne Express_; never in
real life had he seen such a salutation.
Mr Barnett drew a chair to the table, sat down, and cleared his
throat with the energy characteristic of a master. Several men in
the club started round, and, seeing who it was, smiled; two nodded:
to one of them his nod was returned. Then Mr Barnett, putting both
his weighty hands upon the table, slowly twirled his powerful if
spatulate thumbs. He spoke at last in the tone of decision and
initiative which gives such men authority. His voice was directed
towards a waiter of terrified appearance; he ordered a bottle of
“one hundred and eighty,” and, when the bottle came, a fifth emotion
entered Mr Burden’s mind, to observe that it was champagne.
Mr Barnett smiled.
Leaders of men have led men always by a smile. Here also was a
leader, and it is my duty to describe at great length this individual
charm.
When Mr Barnett smiled, his lips, which he kept closed, did not bend
upwards as they do with commoner and weaker men, but downwards like
an arch, lending an astonishing vigour to his expression: the lower
one, never of a retiring curve, was thrust out superbly, glorying in
its capacity, and the whole mouth, never exiguous, assumed heroic
dimensions; the while for a moment his considerable eyes gleamed with
kindly intelligence. At their corners, three deep furrows spread
rapidly to his temples to disappear in the massive substance of his
face, when its features reassumed their normal and somewhat drooping
calm.
[Illustration: THE SMILE]
Such was Mr Barnett during these rare flashes which his friends
already knew, and which, after he had made the M’Korio, were
destined to captivate no less than two crowned heads, a Prime
Minister, four Admirals, ten General Officers, editors in great
profusion, innumerable professors, and a whole army of divines.
Such was the smile which illuminated the very man from within,
irradiated his genius and his vision, fascinated for a moment—and was
gone.
Not till he had drunk one glass of “one hundred and eighty” did Mr
Barnett fix his eyes upon Mr Burden, and tell him, in a measured
manner, with what pleasure he now met, by chance, a gentleman with
whom their arrangements were so soon to be made. Having once broken
the subtle barrier which separates individuals and races from one
another, Mr Barnett manifested himself a moulder and a maker of
things in justly ordered sentences, whereby he settled, within a few
moments, permitting no interruption, the nature of the syndicate
which would be formed, the few to whom any knowledge of it should be
confined, and its object in the laying of a foundation for what was
to be the development of the M’Korio.
Before Mr Burden well knew what had been done, he was pledged to meet
his colleagues upon that day week at the Plantagenet Club.
His adhesion had been but one disconnected phrase at the close of Mr
Barnett’s order of the day: of so urgent a kind is the influence of
those who once perhaps led armies, but who are now the captains of
greater forces, leading to victories which no soldier of the past
could understand.
This done, Mr Barnett drank another glass of champagne, and then the
best part of a third, in silence, holding the edge of the table with
his bent hands, and gazing down. At last he twice pronounced the
English word “So,” sighed heavily across the table, rose up, as rise
the terrible but majestic pachyderms of the Asiatic continent, smiled
once again, bowed, turned to the distant door, shook its lintel with
the stately emphasis of his tread, and disappeared in an atmosphere
of dignity which nothing marred, save the slight, continuous curve of
his back—an accident due to the obesity of his advancing years.
The influence of the rare over the more common mind, though by it
alone can the purpose of the world be forwarded, is not imposed
without friction and occasional pain.
Mr Burden suffered from an anarchy of thought, perhaps, more than
from a sense of dependence or of peril; yet he suffered, and Cosmo
noted that he suffered. When, therefore, his father hinted that he
should return with him to Norwood and share another unaccustomed
meal, he had the self-control to postpone the pleasure of a dinner he
had promised himself among friends in Covent Garden, and to come to
the comfort and aid of the parent, of whose old age he had become a
kind of guardian and director.
Safe back at Avonmore, when they had dined together alone in more
than a hour of silence, Mr Burden begged his son, upon whose judgment
he had begun to lean with pathetic but insufficient faith, to come
a walk with him towards the heights of the hills. They had not gone
far in the warm, long evening, before Mr Burden, who had been looking
towards the setting sun in silence, spoke out.
“Cosmo,” he said—his voice had in it hesitation, and something
approaching querulousness, “these things have a way of becoming much
bigger than one likes.” Then he added: “I have not had anything yet
to do with the,” he hesitated, “the ... preparation of a chartered
company; but I know that it may cost very little or a great deal
... and you know, Cosmo, the money would be in other hands. I could
furnish my share for that preliminary expense; I could do nothing
more.” Then he waited as though for a reply, though he had asked no
question.
Walking slowly by his side, and in a tone of thought, Cosmo, with
one of those flashes of modest common sense, which had recently so
delighted his father, pointed out, that the sums subscribed to such
syndicates were necessarily large, but that they were by no means
necessarily spent. They were a margin. He gave instances from his
reading, and one or two from the experiences of his friends. He
defended the Press from any silly accusation of corruption; but he
insisted upon the great expense of producing a modern newspaper,
upon its vast circulation, upon the cost of advertisement, which was
sometimes spared by the spontaneous action of public interest, but
had always to be provided for.
His father assented and listened.
Cosmo then showed how, in such a State as ours, it is necessary that
men of great position should ultimately take their share in any
quasi-political adventure, and, though, of course, no direct expense
was incurred in exciting the interest of politicians, yet indirectly
the charges were sometimes heavy, and must, in any case, be foreseen.
Mr Burden, for his part, reminded his son that the smaller the number
of an original syndicate the larger the individual contribution.
He feared that he must be prepared for an immediate sinking of many
thousands of pounds; it might be thirty, it might even be forty. Much
more than that had been sunk by the first founders of the Seychelles
Company.
Cosmo did not miss so obvious an introduction to his theme. His
father could not deny that the men who risked so much upon the
Seychelles were now among the greatest and best of the commonwealth;
and he showed very clearly that, if such syndicates were not formed
by a limited number of men, and those able to and ready to invest
largely, the chances of success would be small. Nor did he omit to
praise Lord Benthorpe with respect, Mr Barnett with awe, and Mr
Harbury with affection.
Across Mr Burden’s mind there passed suddenly the features of his
friend, Mr Abbott. For a moment, perhaps, he thought of taking advice
in that quarter also. He wisely dismissed the thought from his mind,
or at least postponed it until the first step should have been taken.
They had by this time arrived at the top of the hill, and were turned
in reverie northward and westward, to where the light was declining
redly behind evanescent effects of smoky cloud.
The soft air of Surrey blew upon them as they gazed; it was laden
with those peculiar subtleties which only Londoners can understand.
It came from the glorious heaths of Putney; from Kingston where
the woods and the river meet; it bore the spirit of Battersea, of
Clapham, of the Kennington Oval ... there lingered in it suggestions
of the “Elephant and Castle,” of Camberwell, of the majestic Thames
itself: it blew upon and soothed the father and the son, so that
their conclusions ran together, and the old man was ready for the
venture which the younger man defended.
When they had stood still a moment, to receive this influence before
turning back homewards, Mr Burden, even as they turned, looked at
Cosmo and said more softly:
“It will be your money, Cosmo. Remember that. I am speaking to you
about your own money.”
Cosmo answered in the voice of one who is touched: a voice, which was
perhaps the noblest thing of the many noble things he had acquired in
his academic training:
“People talk like that, father ... but it is yours, and will be yours
for very many years; it is you who may treble it or lose it.”
In the emotion of the moment, they walked from Nelson Street to the
corner of Kipling Gardens before Cosmo spoke again, then he said:
“If it were mine to-day, I should do it all the more. You know more
about it, father, but you’ve asked me, and I have told you what I
think.”
Cosmo was right.
He is, indeed, no longer a shareholder in the company, nor was he
even a shareholder when the Government bought at 5⅜xd; but he held
for a full seven months after his father’s death, he sold at 17¼, and
a good two-thirds of the fortune he now enjoys is due to his sound
judgment during that evening walk in Upper Norwood.
* * * * *
I have written “when the Government bought at 5⅜.” The thought has
perhaps no right to appear in this account, but I cannot forbear
to place on record my regret that Mr Burden did not live to see
that great silent scene in the House of Commons when the Government
announced their intention of buying out the Company. It would have
set his foolish doubts at rest, and would perhaps have preserved a
life of such value to the Empire, to the City, and to the residential
portion of South London. I knew him perhaps better than other men
knew him (if Mr O’Rourke will forgive the phrase); and I am most
confident that the King’s Own Ministers purchasing, in their public
capacity, the rights of the Company for the nation, at the price of
5⅜xd, would have satisfied every murmur and every suspicion in the
mind of the man who some months before, was for casting all away at
2-5/16. Alas! before even the first negotiations had been opened at
Lady Manningham’s garden party, my dear old friend was dead.
* * * * *
It took five days to make those arrangements which Mr Burden found
necessary to put within his immediate call the sum of £50,000. What
those arrangements were my commercial readers can easily guess, my
non-commercial readers would be at a loss to comprehend. That large
class who, like myself, comprehend them, and yet are not commercial,
would discover nothing but tedium in their recital.
That so considerable an amount was realised so soon, was due to
a variety of settlements; the selling of stock, the immediate
discounting of certain maturing bills, but principally to an advance
very readily made by the bank, and that at a rate of interest which
seemed to Mr Burden so generous as to be, in the technical language
of commerce, “almost nominal.” Indeed, it raised him very appreciably
in his own opinion; and made him see in himself a man of greater
position than he had imagined.
I am betraying no confidence when I say that the ease with which this
loan was obtained was in no small part due to the universal activity
of One Who has often appeared in the pages of this sad record. If any
further reward beyond the natural pleasure which proceeds from a good
action may be of value to Him, He may take this assurance from my pen
that He made a good man happy for more than thirty-six hours.
On the evening before his rendezvous at the Plantagenet Club, Mr
Burden, as usual, returned to his home by the 5.13. Cosmo he did not
expect; for the young man moved, as his father well knew, in another,
and as he hoped, a better world. He read, therefore, all that
evening, to beguile his thoughts, a novel dealing with the conflict
between science and religion. At half-past ten he went to bed.
It is a matter somewhat curious, but vouched for by a serving maid of
the name of Hannah, who brought hot water to his room, that he said
his prayers. I mention the point only to illustrate the attitude of
his mind at this critical moment. He went to sleep before eleven; but
his sleep was disturbed with dreams; in these dreams the grotesque,
unhappily, mixed with the terrible, and there ran through them
that reminiscence of the immediate past which is a sure sign of
disturbance in the Ganglions of the Cerebellum.
[Illustration: THE BISHOP OF SHOREHAM (THE HONBLE. THE REV. PEREGRINE
MAUCLERC) SITTING AS AN ASSESSOR AT THE TRIAL OF CANON CONE FOR
HERESY, PIRACY, CONSPIRACY AND SCHISM
AN EXCELLENT LIKENESS, WHICH WE TAKE FROM THE “CONE TRIAL ILLUSTRATED
SUPPLEMENT” OF “CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS”]
He dreamt that many men of many kinds were offering him money in
incredible amounts, as loans, as gifts, as reversions, as exorbitant
prices for securities which he held; and yet these offers did not
please, but vaguely disturbed him, for they were made by sundry
beings with faces always distorted, sometimes horrible, who sat
beside him on the seat of a hansom cab, wherein he drove. In the
corners of this cab, before him, were bottles of champagne. It was
brilliantly lit, and he could see outside in the darkness between
the shafts, that it was drawn not by a horse, but by his friend Mr
Abbott. The dream was evil, and, though he knew not by what the cab
was driven, yet he knew there sat up there some Thing which he did
not care to think of, and which he did not dare to see. Twice he
would have lifted the trap to glance furtively; twice his hand failed
him and his body grew quite cold with fear. Such is the nature of
dreams, that he found the event but ordinary when the hansom turned
into a bath chair, running of itself, and this again to his own
bed, which seemed to be at once in his own bedroom, and yet in a
crowded street; up and down this street he noticed a multitude of
people, nearly all of whom he knew, going to their business. The last
of them came, a healthy, up-standing figure, tall, strong, rubicund;
he was well familiar with it: it was that of the Honourable, the
Reverend Peregrine Mauclerc, vicar of St Judas’s, Denmark Hill, a
church he constantly attended. This figure, passing rapidly, nodded
at him in a breezy way, and cried cheerfully and very loudly: “It
will be paid for in shares.” Then an awful spasm of pain, come and
gone in a twinkling, incredibly severe, shot through his chest; and
Mr Burden suddenly awoke.
He was gasping and sitting upright; to his astonishment it was quite
dark. Never had his regular sleep been broken by such a sharp and
dreadful agony: rarely had it been broken at all for many years.
Indeed, since his father’s death, and the relief from political
discussion which followed it, he could remember nothing of the night
save evening, and then daylight again.
But now he found himself staring at darkness, with his left hand
at his chest. The pain had darted and vanished like the stab of a
dagger; but the shock was still in his brain.
There lay under his pillow a gold watch, presented to him, after
their release, by the officers and men of the Commander-in-Chief’s
Own Fighting Body-guard, in recognition of his services and generous
subscription to the Prisoners’ Funds. It was of great value; upon
sliding a small spring along the side this watch would strike the
hours and the quarters and the minutes, while pressure upon one of
three jewelled buttons caused it to render _Hearts of Oak_, or _The
Wearing of the Green_, or Mr Kipling’s _Kill ’im wid yer mouf_; but
these Mr Burden very properly left silent, save when he would amuse
the children of his friends.
Mr Burden pressed the spring: it chimed him half-past two, and then
three little tinkling minutes. Mr Burden did not lie down. He still
sat up there in bed, his left hand on his chest, his right hand upon
the pillow supporting him: and still he stared at darkness.
There are moments, under the brooding fixity of the night, when
the mind loses foothold. The man was old, his infirmity of purpose
in the single matter of this new investment I have described; his
doubts, which were the product of a morbid atmosphere rather than of
a reasoned view; his fear, which had become an irritable fear.
All these the night increased. The magnitude of the sum he risked,
the still greater peril of the adventure into which that day would
lead, appalled him. He was in great dread and disquiet of mind, and
he felt, though he did not know it, like those young poetasters
who put into their verse the longing to be in other times and away
from something evil in the modern world. It was a mood of intense
weakness, due, I believe, to illness alone, but it affected all his
attitude during the ensuing days.
After some twenty minutes of this suffering he slept again, uneasily,
dreaming confused dreams; he woke again in the grey light for a
moment, his mind troubled by some phantasm of a quarrel waged in
sleep, and he tossed into the morning. By seven he could rest no
more. He got up and dressed; day and activity began to invigorate his
mind. The quiet confidence of Cosmo at breakfast, the leader in _The
Times_ upon the corruption of Russia, the cat upon the rug—all the
familiar things of home strengthened him, like sacraments, for the
thing that he had to do.
Only once that morning did his miserable hesitation return. It was
when he found himself in the station at Norwood, standing, not on
the platform for the City, but opposite, on that for Victoria. The
novelty of the thing again disturbed him; but he was brave. He shook
off the influence, and, when he stepped out at his journey’s end,
the movement and the vigour of the streets revived in him a better
mood. His confidence increased as he stepped through the summer
morning; he entered Pall Mall briskly, in the attitude of expectation
and advance, and he went up the steps of the Plantagenet Club with
something as near triumph in his heart as men of that sober and even
temper can feel.
This was not an end for which he had worked; it came as a kind of
unexpected reward for a life that had been regular, industrious, and,
in its fundamental emotions, consistently patriotic. Of the many
feelings which men have mixed in them upon those great days when they
are admitted to take an active part in the expansion of our power,
two were supreme in him at that moment. He felt, with a freshness
almost of youth, as though he were himself about to create a new
thing on the map of the world.
He felt the warmth which cannot but accompany a prospect of
additional fortune.
From these two sources there proceeded an exultation which was not
ignoble, and which went forward with a conquering movement, lifting
his heart as he entered the great doors.
Within those doors some indefinable cold breath did strike him. Even
in that present mood of his, he could not shake off an impression of
strangeness. The furniture was not what he knew; it was recent; it
belonged to a more glorious but certainly a less commodious age.
It was bent into the strangest patterns; fantastic curves met here
and there in the faces of young unhappy women. There was applied to
it by screws moulding which would have required the utmost art of the
sculptor had it not consisted of composition.
The club quartered the three leopards of Anjou, gules regardant on a
field argent with the Lys semé argent upon a field azure: in chief
a crown royal and supporters, dexter, a lion rampant languetirant,
sinister an unicorn, enchainé: gartiered the device, “Honi soit qui
mal ‘pense,’” and the legend “Dieu et mon Droit” real. This coat
was blazoned above the mantelpiece, on the backs of the sofas, the
buttons of the servants’ livery, the notepaper and the china; it was
woven into the tapestry; it covered the seats of the chairs; nowhere
was the proud title of that house left unsymbolised.
In the general decoration of the hall and of the rooms, enormous
masses of perfectly new gilding lit up the interior with a grandeur
that recalled Empire indeed, but suggested also the strain
inseparable from great possessions; and, in between the gilding,
panels of a dead foreign white forbade Mr Burden such repose as he
imagined should pervade a London room.
There were, it is true, upon the walls, reproductions of eighteenth
century engravings, very charmingly framed in the American manner.
The good taste of their arrangement was marked: they were few and
widely spread; but of this Mr Burden knew nothing; his age had
narrowed him, and he did not comprehend our day.
He stood in the midst of the hall, as might some sea-faring man who
had sailed and found a people most unlike his own. He stood and
waited. Then the stronger mood returned to him, and he forgot these
things; for Lord Benthorpe, Mr Barnett and Mr Harbury had come into
the room together. He went forward to meet them.
When they had shaken hands, Mr Barnett, absent-minded as are many men
of his calibre, went before them with unconscious mastery, and led
them into a little room apart, where they could talk undisturbed;
and this had been reserved for him, for in that club Mr Barnett
held already the position which in a few years he was to hold in
the commonwealth itself. Here, in this small room, were the same
good taste, the same grandeur of decoration; but, for Mr Burden, now
recovered, no longer the same feeling of ill-ease.
They sat grouped round a table of fumed oak, on which a dainty
printed card begged members to pay for the refreshments of their
guests, while above them hung a very sensible admonition against the
bestowal of gratuities upon the domestics of these regal rooms.
They sat for a full quarter of an hour, talking in sparse and
careless sentences, now of politics, now of some book, and each from
time to time would look up cheerfully and say that they should be
getting to business.
Already had Mr Burden professed his interest in the architecture of
the club (for they had drifted on to that topic), when Mr Barnett
replied, quite suddenly, that they had but one thing to settle that
day, and that thing was the sum which they four must syndicate
before the promotion was entered upon. He waited for no comment, but
continued with equal abruptness, saying that, so far as he could
see, a hundred thousand pounds between them would command all that
was required for the security of their further steps; and, when he
had said this, he sat silently, with his great hands upon his great
knees, looking down upon the floor at his feet.
Lord Benthorpe had the advantage of Mr Barnett in a wider knowledge
of the world, and, from his Parliamentary training, a kind of subdued
fluency. Mr Barnett had brought out the sum of money almost brutally.
He had spoken rather slowly, choosing his words, as he always did. It
was a necessity for him, if he was to avoid the slight foreign accent
and the suspicion of foreign idiom, which even so he could not quite
eliminate. After that hard and broken phrasing, it was a relief to
hear Lord Benthorpe. His amiable mouth lay open between each phrase,
his eyes roved from one object to another around the room; he sat,
indeed, too far from the table to relieve upon it the appetite for
movement which pursued his fingers, but he twisted them in and out by
way of pastime during his discourse.
“I think,” he said, in a thin voice, well suited to dialectic, “I
think the sum is large ... larger perhaps than is necessary. In
theory, as it were, there is very little needed.... I know one
must always have a platform, as it were ... we shall have initial
expenses, so to speak ... but....”
And then the voice of Lord Benthorpe died away.
Mr Harbury joined in with a more definite remark:
“If anything the sum should be greater.”
He said it with the decision and simplicity common to men of his type
when they discuss a great financial matter. They are in daily contact
with these things, and they speak of them as you and I speak of a
road with which we are familiar, or of any of the common actions of
life. He continued:
“It should be greater, because the whole thing is a reserve for a
very important campaign. Lord Benthorpe is right. In theory there
is nothing needed; in practice, very often the expenses are small.
But one must have a perfectly free hand. One must know exactly what
one is doing, and one must never be forced to hesitate from lack of
funds.” He paused a moment, as though looking about him to find a
convenient phrase which would not wound.
“A thing like this,” he went on, still firmly, “which is mainly
political, may mean less expense than a scheme purely commercial, but
it may also mean a sudden and unexpected strain.”
Then, as men do who are wiser than their fellows in the matter they
discuss, he added an abrupt example:
“Do you remember the Thibet irrigation loan?”
Lord Benthorpe looked at him and nodded, more from courtesy than from
any other motive, for, as a fact, he had never heard of it.
“I remember it too,” said Mr Harbury grimly, “and that came of what I
call starving.”
He looked at them with a steady confidence, knowing his ground
thoroughly, and continued:
“We are all of us men of substance, and men of affairs, and we can
all, if we like, increase the sum.”
Here Mr Burden nodded. For the first time in the conversation he
clearly understood one whole phrase.
Lord Benthorpe was almost agitated.
“We could always add,” he said, “if there were any necessity;” and,
as he said it, the little nervous trick with his hands began again.
Mr Harbury shut his lips very tight. When he opened them it was to
say:
“You can’t do business that way,” and then he shut them again.
Mr Burden thought he would speak, and did so, with a mixture of sense
and self-respect:
“I shall be happy to abide by any decision that you come to,
gentlemen. I was certainly prepared, now or ultimately, for a much
larger sum.... But I will, of course, be bound by Lord Benthorpe’s
prudence; and by the sense of you all, gentlemen; ... by the sense
of you all.”
Mr Burden delighted in these phrases; they gave him a solid pleasure;
and he went on:
“For my part,” ... he was about to tell them that for his part he
thought that more was needed, when he suddenly remembered that he was
hopelessly out of his depth, and putting on a look of firmness and
reflection, he was silent.
Lord Benthorpe began:
“Still, so far as I can see ...” then he also remembered that he knew
nothing at all about such things, and was silent in his turn, still
preserving over his projecting teeth that wide, open, permanent and
kindly smile, still twisting his refined and lengthy fingers.
Mr Harbury had already said: “After all, we shall only be out of our
money for a few” ... when Mr Barnett interrupted, with his strong and
ponderous voice.
When two such men begin talking together, there is usually a kind of
battle to see which voice shall survive; but the relations between Mr
Harbury and Mr Barnett were such, that Mr Harbury at once yielded,
not without grace, and Mr Barnett, choosing his words, and speaking
very slowly, taking care to make a “d” a “d,” and a “t” a “t,” and
steering firmly past the “th,” rolled out:
“It must be a hundred thousand.”
Mr Harbury said that the Magnetic syndicate, if he remembered
rightly, had subscribed something of the same kind during the
Greenland excitement. Mr Burden, who had read all about the Greenland
excitement in the papers, exclaimed: “What a time that was!” Mr
Harbury then added that there were infinite possibilities all across
the north of Canada, and especially on the lower Snake river.
Lord Benthorpe told, at somewhat too great a length, a story about
his cousin, Charlie Corne, who had gone shooting up there. Mr Harbury
listened with great interest, and remarked that it was nothing to the
Big Moose country; and that led him to speak about the fishing there,
and that to the harbour, and that to the dispute with Russia.
For close upon an hour their speech turned thus upon those things
wherein a conquering race delights; and if I have painted the scene
of their first meeting at so great a length, and in such detail, it
is but due to my desire that every member of this race, who may read
these pages, shall know in what an atmosphere the crucial decisions
of their history are decided.
[Illustration: MR BURDEN OFFERING TO SUBSCRIBE WHATEVER MAY BE
NECESSARY]
The interest flagged. Lord Benthorpe had repeated the same sentence
two or three times; Mr Harbury had not spoken for close upon eight
minutes, when Mr Barnett closed the scene. He got up with the air of
a man, heavy with creative power, one who has accomplished a long and
finally successful task; Mr Harbury got up like an athlete ready for
new labours, standing erect and supple. Lord Benthorpe got up, as
politicians do, wearily, and by sections of his frame; and Mr Burden
got up, as do merchants, with some fuss, rubbing his hands, and
pulling occasionally at his coat.
It was not his habit to leave a business interview without some final
phrase. He would have thought it discourteous. He stood, therefore,
a little pompously, and, looking at Mr Barnett, addressed him in the
plural, and said:
“Remember, gentlemen, I shall be very happy, if there is any
occasion, to post you my cheque to-night for a larger....”
But Mr Harbury put up his hand with authority, and interfered:
“Do not mention it, Mr Burden; the suggestion was mine, but I think
Mr Barnett has thoroughly proved to us that the sum proposed is
sufficient.”
Then he let his hand drop again, and Mr Burden bowed, and they all
went out of the room.
So it was that, two days afterwards, Mr Burden paid not forty, nor
even thirty, but only twenty-five thousand pounds.