"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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.s 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 inst.i.tution--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 a.s.suredly 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 n.o.body 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 a.s.sociated.

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.

CHAPTER XIV.

UNSOUND.

"Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so."

If Major White was not a man of quick comprehension, he was, at all events, honest in his density. He never said that he understood when he did not do so. When he received a telegram in barracks at Dover to come up to London the next day and meet Cornish at his club at one o'clock, the major merely said that he was in a state of condemnation, and fixing his gla.s.s very carefully into his more surprised eye, studied the thin pink paper as if it were a unique and interesting proof of the advance of the human race. In truth, Major White never sent telegrams, and rarely received them. He blew out his cheeks and said a second time that he was d.a.m.ned. Then he threw the telegram into a waste-paper basket, which was rarely put to so legitimate a use; for the major never wrote letters if he could help it, and received so few that they hardly kept him supplied in pipe-lights.

He apparently had no intention of replying to Cornish's telegram, arguing very philosophically in his mind that he would go if he could, and if he could not, it would not matter very much. A method of contemplating life, as a picture with a perspective to it, which may be highly recommended to fussy people who herald their paltry little comings and goings by a number of unnecessary communications.

Without, therefore, attempting a surmise as to the meaning of this summons, White took a morning train to London, and solemnly reported himself to the hall porter of a club in St. James's Street as the well-dressed throng was leisurely returning from church.

"Mr. Cornish told me to come and have lunch with him," he said, in his usual bald style, leaving explanations and superfluous questions to such as had time for luxuries of that description.

He was taken charge of by a b.u.t.ton-boy, whose head reached the major's lowest waistcoat b.u.t.ton, was deprived of his hat and stick, and practically commanded to wash his hands, to all of which he submitted under stolid and silent protest.

Then he was led upstairs, refusing absolutely to hurry, although urged most strongly thereto by the boy's example and manner of pausing a few steps higher up and looking back.

"Yes," said the major, when he had heard Cornish's story across the table, and during the consumption of a perfectly astonishing luncheon--"yes; half the trouble in this world comes from the incapacity of the ordinary human being to mind his own business." He operated on a creaming Camembert cheese with much thoughtfulness, and then spoke again. "I should like you to tell me," he said, "what a couple of idiots like us have to do with these confounded malgamiters.

We do not know anything about industry or workmen--or work, so far as that goes"--he paused and looked severely across the table--"especially you," he added.

Which was strictly true; for Tony Cornish was and always had been a graceful idler. He was one of those unfortunate men who possess influential relatives, than which there are few heavier handicaps in that game of life, where if there be any real scoring to be done, it must be compa.s.sed off one's own bat. To follow out the same inexpensive simile, influential relatives may get a man into a crack club, but they cannot elect him to the first eleven. So Tony Cornish, who had never done anything, but had waited vaguely for something to turn up that might be worth his while to seize, had no answer ready, and only laughed gaily in his friend's face.

"The first thing we must do," he said, very wisely leaving the past to take care of itself, "is to get old Ferriby out of it."

"'Cos he is a lord?"

"Partly."

"'Cos he is an a.s.s?" suggested White, as a plausible alternative.

"Partly; but chiefly because he is not the sort of man we want if there is going to be a fight."

A momentary light gleamed in the major's eye, but it immediately gave place to a placid interest in the Camembert.

"If there is going to be a fight," he said, "I'm on."

In which trivial remark the major explained his whole life and mental att.i.tude. And if the world only listened, instead of thinking what effect it is creating and what it is going to say next, it would catch men thus giving themselves away in their daily talk from morning till night. For Major White had always been "on" when there was fighting. By dint of exchanging and volunteering and asking, and generally bothering people in a thick-skinned, dull way, he always managed to get to the front, where his compet.i.tors--the handful of modern knights-errant who mean to make a career in the army, and inevitably succeed--were not afraid of him, and laughingly liked him. And the barrack-room balladists had discovered that White rhymes with Fight. And lo! Another man had made a name for himself in a world that is already too full of names, so that in the paths of Fame the great must necessarily fall against each other.

After luncheon, in the smaller smoking-room, where they were alone, Cornish explained the situation at greater length to Major White, who did not even pretend to understand it.