"Perhaps everything ought to be broken up. But I say nothing about that. What I do say is this. That as we sit here as directors and will be held to be responsible as such by the public, we ought to know what is being done. We ought to know where the shares really are. I for one do not even know what scrip has been issued."
"You've bought and sold enough to know something about it," said Melmotte.
Paul Montague became very red in the face. "I, at any rate, began," he said, "by putting what was to me a large sum of money into the affair."
"That's more than I know," said Melmotte. "Whatever shares you have, were issued at San Francisco, and not here."
"I have taken nothing that I haven't paid for," said Montague. "Nor have I yet had allotted to me anything like the number of shares which my capital would represent. But I did not intend to speak of my own concerns."
"It looks very like it," said Cohenlupe.
"So far from it that I am prepared to risk the not improbable loss of everything I have in the world. I am determined to know what is being done with the shares, or to make it public to the world at large that I, one of the directors of the Company, do not in truth know anything about it. I cannot, I suppose, absolve myself from further responsibility; but I can at any rate do what is right from this time forward,—and that course I intend to take."
"The gentleman had better resign his seat at this Board," said Melmotte. "There will be no difficulty about that."
"Bound up as I am with Fisker and Montague in California I fear that there will be difficulty."
"Not in the least," continued the Chairman. "You need only gazette your resignation and the thing is done. I had intended, gentlemen, to propose an addition to our number. When I name to you a gentleman, personally known to many of you, and generally esteemed throughout England as a man of business, as a man of probity, and as a man of fortune, a man standing deservedly high in all British circles, I mean Mr. Longestaffe of Caversham—"