"Surely your name——" began Conybeare politely, but with only the faintest conjecture of what might be coming.
"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."