The russet gentleman looked at him with a fierce blue eye.
"Then, sir," he said, "we"ll come to business. For it"s on business that we"ve come. My friend Mr. MacHewlett, is, like myself, in charge of one of the biggest mills in the country; here"s Mossier Delmont of the great mill at Clermont-Ferrand, and Mr. Meyer from Germany. My own name"s a plain one--like myself--but an honest one; it"s John Thompson."
Lord Ferriby bowed, and Major White looked at John Thompson with a placid interest, as if he felt glad of this opportunity of meeting one of the Thompson family.
"And we"ve come to ask you to be so good as to explain your position as regards malgamite. What are ye, anyway?"
"My dear sir," began Lord Ferriby, with one hand upraised in mild expostulation, "let us be a little more conciliatory in our manner. We are, I am sure (I speak for myself and my fellow-directors, whom you see before you), most desirous of avoiding any unpleasantness, and we are ready to give you all the information in our power, when"--he paused, and waved a graceful hand--"when you have proved your right to demand such information."
"Our right is that of representatives of a great trade. We four men, that have been deputed to see you on the matter, have at our backs no less than eight thousand employees--honest, hard-workin" men, whose bread you are taking out of their mouths. We are not afraid of the ordinary vicissitudes of commerce. If ye had quietly worked this monopoly in fair compet.i.tion, we should have known how to meet ye. But ye come before the world as philanthropists, and ye work a great monopoly under the guise of doin" a good work. It was a dirty thing to do."
Lord Ferriby shrugged his shoulders. "My dear sir," he said, "you fail to grasp the situation. We have given our time and attention to the grievances of these poor men, whose lot it has been our earnest endeavour to ameliorate. You are speaking, my dear sir, to men who represent, not eight thousand employes, but who represent something greater than they, namely, charity."
"Ah"m thinking!" began Mr. MacHewlett, plaintively, and the very richness of his accents secured a breathless attention. "d.a.m.n charity,"
he concluded, abruptly.
And Major White looked upon him in solid approval, as upon a plain-spoken man after his own heart.
"And we," said Mr. Thompson, "represent commerce, which was in the world before charity, and will be there after it, if charity is going to be handled by such as you."
There was, it appeared, no possibility of pacifying these irate paper-makers, whose plainness of speech was positively painful to ears so polite as those of Lord Ferriby. A Scotchman, hard hit in his tenderest spot, namely, the pocket, is not a person to mince words, and Lord Ferriby was for the moment silenced by the stormy attack of Mr.
Thompson, and the sly, plaintive hits of his companion. But the chairman of the Malgamite Fund would not give way, and only repeated his a.s.surances of a desire to conciliate, which desire took the form only of words, and must, therefore, have been doubly annoying to angry men. To him who wants war there is nothing more insulting than feeble offers of peace. Major White expressed his readiness to fight Messrs.
Thompson and MacHewlett at one and the same time on the landing, but this suggestion was not well received.
Upon two of the listeners no word was lost, and Mr. Wade and Cornish knew that the paper-makers had right upon their side.
Quite suddenly Mr. Thompson"s manner changed, and he glanced towards the door to see that it was closed.
"Then it"s a matter of paying," he said to his companions. Turning towards Lord Ferriby, he spoke in a voice that sounded more contemptuous than angry. "We"re plain business men," he said. "What"s your price--you and these other gentlemen?"
"I have no price," answered Cornish, meeting the angry blue eyes and speaking for the first time.
"And mine is too high--for plain business men," added Major White, with a slow smile.
"Seeing that you"re a lord," said Thompson, addressing the chairman again, "I suppose it"s a matter of thousands. Name your figure, and be done with it."
Lord Ferriby took the insult in quite a different spirit to that displayed by his two co-directors. He was pale with anger, and spluttered rather incoherently. Then he took up his hat and stick and walked with much dignity to the door.
He was followed down the stairs by the paper-makers, Mr. Thompson making use of language that was decidedly bespattered with "winged words," while Mr. MacHewlett detailed his own thoughts in a plaintive monotone. Lord Ferriby got rather hastily into a hansom and drove away.
"There is nothing for it," said Mr. Wade to Cornish in the gay little office above the Ladies" Tea a.s.sociation--"there is nothing for it but to run Roden"s Corner yourself."
CHAPTER XVI.
DANGER.
"The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat one"s self."
Percy Roden was possessed of that love of horses which, like sentiment, crops up in strange places. He had never been able to indulge this taste beyond the doubtful capacities of the livery-stable. He found, however, that at the Hague he could hire a good saddle-horse, which discovery was made with suspicious haste after learning the fact that Mrs. Vansittart occasionally indulged in the exercise that his soul loved.
Mrs. Vansittart said that she rode because one has to take exercise, and riding is the laziest method of fulfilling one"s obligations in this respect.
"I don"t like horsy women," she said; "and I cannot understand how my s.e.x has been foolish enough to believe that any woman looks her best, or, indeed, anything but her worst, in the saddle."
There is a period in the lives of most men when they are desirous of extending their knowledge of the surrounding country on horseback, on a bicycle, on foot, or even on their hands and knees, if such journeys might be accomplished in the company of a certain person. Percy Roden was at this period, and he soon discovered that there are tulip farms in the neighbourhood of The Hague. A tulip farm may serve its purpose as well as ever did a ruin or a waterfall in more picturesque countries than Holland; for, indeed, during the last weeks in April and the early half of May, these fields of waving yellow, pink, and red are worth traveling many miles to see. As for Mrs. Vansittart, it may be said of her, as of the rest of her s.e.x under similar circ.u.mstances, that it suited her purpose to say that she would like nothing better than to visit the tulip farms.
Roden"s suggestion included breakfast at the Villa des Dunes, whither Mrs. Vansittart drove in her habit, while her saddle-horse was to follow later. Dorothy welcomed her readily enough, with, however, a reserve at the back of her grey eyes. A woman is, it appears, ready to forgive much if love may be held out as an excuse, but Dorothy did not believe that Mrs. Vansittart had any love for Percy; indeed, she shrewdly suspected that all that part of this woman"s life belonged to the past, and would remain there until the end of her existence. There are few things more astonishing to the close observer of human nature than the accuracy and rapidity with which one woman will sum up another.
"You are not in your habit," said Mrs. Vansittart, seating herself at the breakfast-table. "You are not to be of the party?"
"No," answered Dorothy. "I have never had the opportunity or the inclination to ride."
"Ah, I know," laughed the elder woman. "Horses are old-fashioned, and only dowagers drive in a barouche to-day. I suppose you ride a bicycle, or would do so in any country but Holland, where the roads make that craze a madness. I must be content with my old-fashioned horse. If, in moving with the times, one"s movements are apt to be awkward, it is better to be left behind, is it not, Mr. Roden?"
Roden"s glance expressed what he did not care to say in the presence of a third person. When a woman, whose every movement is graceful, speaks of awkwardness, she a.s.suredly knows her ground.
Mrs. Vansittart, moreover, showed clearly enough that she was on the safe side of forty by quite a number of years when it came to settling herself in the saddle and sitting her fresh young horse.
"Which way?" she inquired when they reached the ca.n.a.l.
"Not that way, at all events," answered Roden, for his companion had turned her horse"s head toward the malgamite works.
He spoke with a laugh that was not pleasant to the ears, and a shadow pa.s.sed through Mrs. Vansittart"s dark eyes. She glanced across the yellow sand hills, where the works were effectually concealed by the rise and fall of the wind-swept land, from whence came no sign of human life, and only at times, when the north wind blew, a faint and not unpleasant odour like the smell of sealing-wax. For all that the world knew of the malgamite workers, they might have been a colony of lepers.
"You speak," said Mrs. Vansittart, "as if you were a failure instead of a brilliant success. I think"--she paused for a moment, as if the thought were a real one and not a mere conversational convenience, as are the thoughts of most people--"that the cream of social life consists of the cheery failures."
"I have no faith in my own luck," answered Percy Roden, gloomily, whose world was a narrow one, consisting as it did of himself and his bank-book. Moreover, most men draw aside readily enough the curtain that should hide the world in which they live, whereas women take their stand before their curtain and talk, and talk--of other things.
Mrs. Vansittart had never for a moment been mistaken in her estimate of her companion, of--as he considered himself--her lover. She had absolutely nothing in common with him. She was a physically lazy, but a mentally active woman, whose thoughts ran to abstract matters so persistently that they brought her to the verge of abstraction itself.
Percy Roden, on the other hand, would, with better health, have been an athlete. In his youth he had overtaxed his strength on the football field. When he took up a newspaper now he read the money column first and the sporting items next.
Mrs. Vansittart glanced at neither of these, and as often as not contented herself with the advertis.e.m.e.nts of new books, pa.s.sing idly over the news of the world with a heedless eye. She, at all events, avoided the mistake, common to men and women of a journalistic generation, of allowing themselves to be vastly perturbed over events in far countries, which can in no way affect their lives.
Roden, on the other hand, took a certain broad interest in the progress of the world, but only watched the daily procession of events with the discriminating eye of a business man. He kept his eye, in a word, on the main chance, as on a small golden thread woven in the grey tissue of the world"s history.
It was easy enough to make him talk of himself and of the Malgamite scheme.
"And you must admit that you are a success, you know," said Mrs.
Vansittart. "I see your quiet grey carts, full of little square boxes, pa.s.sing up Park Straat to the railway station in a procession every day."
"Yes," admitted Roden. "We are doing a large business."
He was willing to allow Mrs. Vansittart to suppose that he was a rich man, for he was shrewd enough to know that the affections, like all else in this world, are purchasable.