“I hope it will not be quite so bad as that,” she said. For the next three or four days he could talk of little else than the electrification of the Manor. She explained to him the way in which the course of the stream could be diverted at a trifling cost and at the sacrifice of none of the picturesqueness of the place of primroses.
“I would not have a primrose interfered with,” she cried. “The Primrose Dell is a sacred place.”
“I will take steps to have it incorporated on our coat of arms,” he said. “And I will see that it has a special motto to itself. Yes ‘Priscilla and Charybdis.’ Oh! we mustn’t spoil the primroses. If it hadn’t been for them where should I be to-day? What should I be to-day?” And then some of the books arrived, and with his usual aptitude for picking up new ideas, he mastered all the essentials to the schemes which Priscilla had initiated.
But before he had quite made up his mind as to the most suitable part of the stream to touch, something occurred which interfered materially with the development of his plans; for one morning he got a telegram signed “Franklin Forrester,” enquiring if he could be seen at 2.30 that day. “Very important.”
“What the mischief!” he exclaimed. “How does he know that I’m here? What can Franky Forrester want with me that’s very important?”
“Who is Franky Forrester?” asked Priscilla.
“Oh! Franky Forrester was one of the chaps who just escaped being sent down at Oxford when I enjoyed that distinction,” he replied. “Franky was a little too sharp for the powers. He had a genius for organizing; and that’s how he got through. He could organize a row with any man, but it was invariably part of his organization that he should be outside the row when it was going on. He has made his way in the world by the exercise of his genius. I saw him in London a few months ago. He is still organizing things—politics, I believe he said, What can he want with me?”
“Money,” suggested Priscilla. “I have heard that funds are the soul of politics, if principles are the body.”
“He’ll get no money out of me,” said Jack. “But somehow I don’t think that it’s money he wants. I suppose I had better see him. He is a nice chap and well connected. He never loses sight of a man that’s well off or that’s likely to be well off.”
“That’s the art of organization in a nutshell,” said she. “I suppose it is,” he said. “Anyhow, the phrase is a good one. There are a lot of good phrases knocking about; it’s a pity that so many of them are in nutshells—some of them are hard to crack. Franky was great at phrases. You always needed to carry a pair of nutcrackers in your pocket when he was in the offing. I wonder how he heard that I was here.”