Читать книгу The Million Pound Deposit - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 7

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"What made you so late, Charles?" Lucille Bessiter asked her fiancé, as he sat on the arm of her chair about a quarter of an hour later.

"A man I simply couldn't send away came to see me at the last moment," he explained—"old Sir Matthew Parkinson who runs our show up in Yorkshire. I'm terribly sorry. I'm afraid your mother's angry with me."

"She'll get over it," Lucille predicted. "I didn't know they ever bothered you about the business."

"They don't, as a rule," he admitted. "This was something rather exceptional. I say, who is the tall young fellow, looks like a foreigner, who was talking to you so earnestly when I came in? He's been glowering at me ever since."

"That is a very important person," she confided. "His name is the Baron de Brest, and he's a Dutch financier and banker. He's a client of the firm, or going to become one."

"Is he?" Dutley muttered. "Well, I don't like the fellow."

Lucille arched her fine eyebrows.

"Why, you don't know him!"

"And I hope I never shall."

The girl laughed, but her frown deepened a little.

"You certainly will," she said. "During your extremely protracted and tactless absence, he has been my chief consoler."

"Well, he's out of a job," Dutley declared.

Lucille eyed her fiancé speculatively.

"You take a good deal for granted."

"Too much?"

"That depends. What are you doing to-morrow morning?"

He indulged in a little grimace.

"Interviewing Sir Matthew, and opening my letters."

"I'll come and go through them for you," she promised. "I've always wondered what the correspondence of a millionaire was like."

"I'm not quite so sure that Charles is a millionaire," her brother, a very smart young man and a shining light on the Stock Exchange, remarked. "His shares dropped a quarter this afternoon, and finished weak. You will probably read to-morrow morning in the financial column of the Times that it was due to profit-taking, but one never knows. They may have heard that you're back, Charles, and that you're thinking of going into the business."

"If I should consider doing such a thing," Dutley observed, with dignity, "there would probably be a boom in the shares, not a fall. I don't think, Lucille," he complained, "that your family supports my interests strongly enough."

"Can't say that for the head of the firm," Mr. Bessiter remarked, from the other end of the room. "There was a little chap, an occasional client of ours, in a few days ago, talked of opening a 'bear' account against Boothroyds from the first of the month. I strongly advised him to do nothing of the sort—told him, in fact, we wouldn't consider it on a margin. He left without doing business. That's what I call supporting the credit of the family."

Mrs. Bessiter, good-hearted, charming, a very distinguished figure in her world, and a very popular woman, broke off in her conversation with a well-known diplomat.

"I'm not quite sure about Charles ever belonging to the family," she intervened. "These long absences in barbarous countries are very dangerous things. I think that Lucille is becoming dissatisfied, and I am not sure that I blame her. I am quite convinced, although she is my own daughter, that she is the sort of girl who requires a stay-at-home fiancé."

"Lucky for me, I've often thought," her husband reflected, "that I was a home bird myself."

"A most uncalled-for speech," was his wife's severe retort. "If I go to Cannes, even for a month, I come back in three weeks."

The announcement of dinner interrupted the badinage. Dutley found himself between his fiancée, and a grave-faced, bespectacled, elderly gentleman, whose name he had not caught.

"Couldn't get my numbers right to-night," Mrs. Bessiter apologised, from the end of the table. "Anyway, I thought that Charles, if he had the faintest sense of duty, would neglect his other neighbour to talk to Lucille, so I didn't worry about getting another woman."

"I regret," the elderly gentleman said, with a courteous inclination of the head, "that I am to be neglected, because I find much pleasure and interest in meeting Lord Dutley. I am, in a sense, a competitor of your firm's," he added.

"Is that so?" Dutley murmured politely. "I am afraid I didn't catch your name."

"My name is Hisedale—Doctor Hisedale. I am connected with the German company of Meyers of Offenbach. Just now, however, I am over here to make experiments at a friend's laboratory. Yours is the envied firm of the world, Lord Dutley."

"I'm afraid that I don't know as much about it as I ought to," was the frank reply. "I only went into the business for a year or two. I chucked it for the war, and never went back again."

"You are still Managing Director, though, I understand."

"Well, I am Chairman of the Directors," Dutley acknowledged. "That is simply because of my holding of shares. I turn up once a year, and address the shareholders."

"Amidst scenes of wild excitement," Lucille put in, "when the dividend is large enough. When it isn't, they boo."

"Boothroyds' dividend," Doctor Hisedale said, with a smile, "is usually large enough to satisfy the most exacting shareholder. We look upon your people, sir," he continued, "as the most favoured in the world. You—or rather the chemists whom your illustrious father was clever enough to discover—have inaugurated a new industry. We all grope in the darkness whilst you triumph."

Dutley sipped his champagne. It seemed an odd co-incidence that he should have a conversation of this sort forced upon him.

"I wish I knew more about it," he confessed. "You should come up and have a look at our Works, and meet Sir Matthew Parkinson, Doctor."

The latter smiled—a thin smile of derision.

"I have met your Sir Matthew Parkinson," he confided. "I do not fancy that if I visited your Works I should learn very much. He is one of those magnificent Yorkshiremen who knows how to keep his mouth very tightly closed. Indeed, why not? In Germany we work, too, with locked doors. The preservation of our secrets is the measure of our commercial success."

Lucille leaned forward with a little pout.

"Do you know that you are poaching, Doctor Hisedale?" she complained. "This is my fiancé, whom I have not seen for many months until this morning."

"I apologise," the scientist said solemnly, turning to his neighbour on the other side. "You will take pity on me, Mrs. Saunderson. You will tell me what theatres a foreigner who has not many friends in England should visit."

Lucille laughed softly up at her companion.

"Poor dear!" she murmured. "How all this talk of business does bore you, doesn't it? And what a good thing it is you don't have to earn your own living."

"Supposing I had to," he speculated.

"You may have some gift for stuffing wild animals. They tell me that is quite a profession. Or perhaps, if you are as good with a shotgun as they say you are with a rifle, you could earn a little by going about to country houses in the season, shooting their game for them. Otherwise, old dear, I'm afraid your chances would be a little vague. Passionately attached though I am to you, I am not at all sure that I would entrust myself, with my love of creature comforts, to your efforts."

Dutley laid down his knife and fork.

"I knew it," he groaned. "You're marrying me for my money."

"Of course I'm marrying you for your money," she agreed. "You'll never be able to take care of it unless you have some one like me to do it for you. Nevertheless, it may have occurred to you sometimes, in your moments of bloated arrogance, that I am rather well off myself."

"That is good news," he declared. "I sha'n't have to make you an allowance, or settlements, or anything of that sort."

"Oh, won't you?" she scoffed. "Dad will see to that, I can promise you. Dad, how much do you think Charles ought to settle on me? We thought of going in to see the lawyers together next week."

Mr. Bessiter knew his daughter well, but he was a man of some dignity, with the gift of reticence, and he was a little shocked.

"These things, my dear," he told her, "are not discussed at even a friendly dinner table."

"Snubbed," she sighed, under her breath. "Nevertheless, I warn you, that I shall insist upon settlements."

"We'll go into it and see how much I have to settle," Dutley promised her. "I don't like that little chap going to your father's office and wanting to open a 'bear' account against us. My knowledge of Stock Exchange affairs is limited, but I imagine that he's laying the odds against our prosperity, or something of the sort."

"Admirably put," Baron de Brest declared, from the other side of the table, with a little bow. "Lord Dutley will end by being a business man, I am sure."

Doctor Hisedale's florid eyebrows were slightly contracted.

"Did I understand," he asked, "that some man has been imprudent enough to suggest opening a 'bear' account against Boothroyds?"

"Happened only a few days ago," Dutley assured him. "What with that, and the quarter drop in my shares, owing to profit-taking, whatever that may mean, I am not sure that I shall be able to afford to get married this year."

"We get married before Christmas," Lucille said firmly, "or not at all. I have arrived at that dangerous age between flapperdom and young womanhood when I need a guiding hand, constant attentions, and flowers every morning. A lover in Abyssinia is not of the slightest use to me."

"Almost as bad," her mother mused, "as a husband who is in the City all day."

"How modern our elders get!" Lucille sighed.

"Baron," Mrs. Bessiter continued, with a glance at the frown on his face, "I really am afraid that you must be shocked at my daughter's levity. When you discuss us in your own country, please don't believe that all our young women are like this. They are not, I can assure you. Lucille was always, unfortunately, brought up with her brothers, and you know what that means—either a touch of the hoyden, or a step in front of her generation."

"Something ought to be done about Mother," Lucille declared.

It was a pleasant household, intimate conversation, personalities freely indulged in all the time without possibility of offence. By degrees, Dutley forgot that disquieting half an hour earlier in the evening, and felt himself for the first time really at home again. Only two trifling circumstances were faint sources of annoyance to him. The first was that De Brest, from across the table, scarcely once removed his eyes from Lucille, and was always chipping into the conversation when possible. The second, that his neighbour, Doctor Hisedale, with typically Teutonic persistence, rarely left him alone for more than a few minutes.

"You have visited your Works since your arrival from foreign parts, Lord Dutley?" he enquired, during a momentary pause in the conversation.

"Not yet," was the brief reply.

"They are working overtime, I hear," the doctor continued, with a little sigh of envy. "That comes of manufacturing the one perfect production in the world. Soon I think that all of us smaller concerns will be absorbed in the great House of Boothroyd."

Dutley turned and looked at his neighbour with the birth of a new suspicion stirring in his mind. This persistence was, in a sense, extraordinary, and there was an unpleasant, almost a sinister undernote in that last sentence which puzzled him.

"I don't see why that should happen," he remarked. "After all, there are other clever chemists in the world. One of you people may stumble upon the formula which made our fortunes at any time."

There was a curious curve of the full lips, a glint of light behind Hisedale's spectacles.

"It is a possibility, of course," he admitted. "For my part, I am quite candid. I try. I spend my life trying."

"Good luck to you!" Dutley said indifferently. "There's plenty of room in the world for all of us."

"You show the British sporting spirit, Lord Dutley," his neighbour acknowledged. "Still, it is easy for you who have it to talk lightly to those who have not. Your last dividend was, I believe, forty per cent. None of us others can manage more than eight or nine, and now and then one of us goes under. All for a touch of the chemist's genius! You have never been afraid of spies in your factory, Lord Dutley, or of having your formula stolen?"

Dutley sipped his champagne thoughtfully.

"Well," he admitted, "if the formula were stolen, it would mean more competition, but after all we've been first in the field for a long time, and I suppose our own people must pretty well know it off by heart by now."

"There was always a legend in the trade that your wonderful father would permit no copy, and that he had inaugurated a system of manufacture—"

"My wonderful father," Dutley interrupted, at the end of his patience, "has been dead for some years."

He turned back to Lucille, and they talked together in undertones. The meal drew towards its close, and Dutley's left shoulder preserved all the time its obstinate angle. Nevertheless, old-fashioned customs persisted in the house, and the men lingered at the table after the women had departed. Dutley promptly carried his glass up to his host's side.

"Old man been worrying you?" the latter whispered.

"He's damnably inquisitive."

"Don't take any more notice of him," Mr. Bessiter advised. "He had a letter of introduction to me, so I had to do the civil. His firm are making a new issue of stock and they wanted our name on the prospectus. We've made up our mind, though, to have nothing to do with it. A glass of wine with you, Charles. I'm glad to see you back again. You'll forgive just one word, eh?" he added, with a glance down the table towards De Brest. "I think, if I were you, now that you're here, I'd fix it up with Lucille. She's a good girl, but it's a gay life nowadays."

"I'm all for it," Dutley declared, as he nodded his greetings over the wine. "Can't think how you keep vintage port like this in a house you've only had for seven or eight years," he commented, as he set down his empty glass.

Mr. Bassiter smiled and passed the decanter. He liked his port praised.

"When I bought those pipes of 1890," he explained, "I had them bottled at my wine merchant's, and I've never had them moved. I have a few bottles sent down decanted when an occasion arrives. I look upon this as an occasion."

"Very nice of you, sir," Dutley acknowledged. "It feels good to be home again, I can tell you."

"Glad to hear you say so," his prospective father-in-law rejoined. "I should stick it out at home now for a bit, if I were you. There's plenty of sport to be had in this country for a man in your position. You ought to be good for a few more years' polo before you begin to put on weight. If you take my advice, Charles, you'll slip along now. That old bore Hisedale's got his eye on you, and I know Lucille wants to go on somewhere and dance."

Dutley, with a word of thanks, rose hastily and made for the door. The doctor looked after him regretfully.