“It’s all right,” he said. “De Windt will take your offer. The other people are keen as mustard and want to go higher, but he says he wouldn’t sell to them at any price.”
“I want it fixed up at once,” she said feverishly.
“As soon as you like. He asked me to hustle it along too, in case you changed your mind. The poor fellow has had a bad go of fever, but the news quite cheered him up, and he’ll be about in a day or two. He seems greatly pleased at your wanting the place.”
Vivienne was assailed by a choking sensation, and a bitter flavour came into her mouth, but she knew that as a prospective millionaire she must get accustomed to such discomforts. They were part of the training. As also was the skilful fencing she began to practise on the unsuspecting Montague. Certainly it was a case of Greek meeting Greek, but sometimes it seemed to her more like a duel between a sucking dove and a serpent. And she was not the dove. A London journalist had once said to her that he believed all women were natural-born crooks, and now she began to believe it.
“The black drop was in me all the time,” she thought bitterly. “But it has taken Africa to bring it out!”
Although the negotiations for the sale went forward apace, they were not pushed on fast enough to please her, and she almost worried Cornwall out of his wits in her determination to have the thing signed and sealed before de Windt was well enough to get about. She did not yet feel quite hardened enough in the ways of millionaires to be able to face over a deed of sale the man whose gold she was stealing.
Another miserable part of the transaction was the receiving of Wolfe Montague’s cheque. That was a bad moment. The paper burnt her hand like flame. But she examined it carefully, and pulled Montague up sharply when she found that it was drawn on a local Bank.
“That would never do,” she said firmly. “I cannot have my affairs all over Buluwayo.”
“I thought you wanted it for immediate use,” he replied suavely, “and Banks don’t talk.”
“I wouldn’t trust them,” she averred; “I give my confidence to few.” But she smiled her confidence in him at least with such lovely eyes that he went away with content in his heart to arrange the matter on such lines as only millionaires can command. Forty-eight hours later the money was to hand by cabled draft from London on the Standard Bank, Buluwayo.