“Your consent! Your consent! What do you know about it? Did you ever mine a pound of copper in your life? Did you ever see a pound mined until you made this last trip? And yet you have the effrontery to set yourself up as an expert against one of the best men in his profession! Do you not know that you have made not only the firm but me ridiculous, by your stupid vacillation—and with the Seaboard, of all trust companies! Why didn’t you find out all this before you brought these people down here?”
“It is never too late to be honest, sir.”
“What do you mean by that!” snapped Eggleston.
“I mean just what I say.” Philip’s voice was without a tremor, low, forceful and decisive. “The floating of these bonds on the present condition of the mines would have been a fraud. I didn’t see it in that way at first, but I do see it now. It is done every day in the Street, I grant you, but it will never be done again with my consent so long as I am a member of this firm!”
Eggleston’s lip curled. “You seem to have grown singularly honest overnight, Mr. Colton,” he sneered. “According to your ideas Bates, Rankin & Co. were frauds when they floated the Imperial, and so were Porter & King when they sold out the Morningside for two millions of dollars.”
“None of them are paying, sir, and it was dishonorable to float the bonds.” He was still on his feet, facing his prospective father-in-law, holding him at bay really.
“What’s that got to do with it?” snarled Eggleston. “They will pay sometime. As to your honor: That’s the cheap sentiment you Southern men are always shouting. Your kind of honor won’t hold water here! It was your honor when you tried to hold on to your niggers; and it’s your honor when you murder each other in duels, and——”
“Stop, Mr. Eggleston!” said Philip, his face white as chalk, every muscle in his body taut—“this has gone far enough. No position that you hold towards me gives you the right to speak as you have. I have done what was right. I could not have looked either you or Madeleine in the face if I had done differently.”
Here the door was swung back, cutting short Eggleston’s reply, and a note was passed in, the clerk making a hurried inspection of the faces of his employers, as if to learn the cause of the disturbance.
Eggleston read it and handed it to his son, who so far had not opened his mouth. He could reach the game in time, anyhow.