Read Ebook: Mammon and Co. by Benson E F Edward Frederic

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Ebook has 1835 lines and 101696 words, and 37 pages

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 , 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 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:

"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."

"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 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."

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