Fenella was calm enough now to smile wanly at her mother's words. But even she could not guess how unlike any old times the new ones were to be.
PART II
I
FINANCIAL INTELLIGENCE
Four years ago—no very long time, even to those who must count it by the ruins and ghosts it has made—the light-hearted wayfarer amid financial pitfalls—vacuus coram latrone viator—not more a snob than an antiquary with a wistful regard for survivals need confess himself, spared a glance, as he passed along Throgmorton Avenue, for a big brass plate on the door of the corner building which overlooks the crouched statue and smoky fig-trees of the "Draper's Garden." For him the legend it bore called up a vision, unique amid the alien and masqueradingly Semitic names with which the dreary canyon is plastered, of other and very different days, fiercer perhaps but at least less meanly cruel; of hard knocks given and taken in a selfless quarrel; of blows upon helmet and corselet, thrusts that the buff coat haply turned; of a fight that raged one whole September afternoon through the streets of the "ever faithful city."[2]
"Bryan Lumsden, Calvert & Co.,
Stock and Share Brokers."
A stranger to the ephemeral record of London society—if such a one can be imagined in this day of "open letters" and the ubiquitous lens—who met the genial head of the firm upon the lawn at Cowes, or among his yearlings at Stanmore, at the pigeon butts of Pau and Cannes, or in the thrice-guarded sanctuary of the Turf Club writing-room, or who, as is likelier far, merely passed him in Austin Friars, silk hat cocked rakishly, one hand holding the lapel of his coat and the other laid lightly and characteristically upon the shoulder of some olive-skinned lord of the market, would probably have carried away a totally false impression of the man and of his history. Official text-books—the one, for instance, in which poor Fenella discovered a romance so enthralling, would not greatly have helped him. He would have learned from them that Sir Bryan Lumsden was twelfth baronet of either a very old or a very short-lived dynasty; that he was the son of Denzil Lumsden, of Coffers Castle, Kincardineshire; that he had served his country in the Scots Guards, been an aide-de-camp during the Tirah Campaign (medal and clasps), and had left the service at twenty-five. No less than three residences housed all this greatness: the castle aforesaid, "The Chase," Stanmore, and 369 Mount Street. "Clubs: the Turf, Marlboro, and Royal Yacht. Unmarried." And from the silence concerning the sphere in which three parts of his life were spent, and upon whose harvest, presumably, these glories were supported, he would have conjectured that here was a case common enough in latter-day life: the scion of an old house, bought in to finance by family money and connection, gradually acquiring sufficient zest for the game to justify a predominant interest, and, with position assured, returning blithely to the life of his younger days, while, under the griffin wings that hatch so many a clutch of golden eggs, Calvert, imaginable as a rather vulgar but discreet person, buttoning a black coat high on his chest and redressing the senior partner's ebullience by Apollinaris and bulb-culture at Sutton, watched the processes that, by a law of growth as simple as that which sows the pollen on the wind, make the rich man daily and hourly richer.
They would have been quite wrong. No titled food-adulterer or gutter journalist—no drab figure in all the broadclothed gallery with which Dr. Smiles seeks to fire the imagination of youth—was more literally the architect of his own fortunes. Twelve years ago, when he was an attaché at Vienna, with a long night of ruinous play behind him and a scented but heartless letter under his elbow, Bryan Lumsden had spun a coin to decide whether he should continue the battle elsewhere and under less tangled conditions or pass to the completer simplification which was all his pagan soul conceived of death. He had tossed the double thaler into the air simply, with no consciousness of pose, and since it fell for life, had played the game out that way. Returning to London, he had sent in his papers, paid his debts with what was left of an attenuated property, and asked for "desk-room" in the office of the broker through whom the final transactions were conducted—a dark, secretive man, little susceptible to the appeal of the incongruous or to the glamour of a barren title.
At the end of a year, upon the quarter per cent. margin allowed to those outside the house for business they introduce, he was earning an income in excess of many sworn members of repute, who struggle on from settlement to settlement with the hammer suspended over their heads like a sword of Damocles. In three years he was a member of the house and a partner. Business flowed to him. His gay, casual manners, his cheery voice, melted the senile heart of Mammon. The baffling blue eye, behind which a purpose quick and strong as steel was kept bright, pierced its pompous parade from the outset, and, holding his adversary at a deflated value, he was never tempted to take himself any the more seriously for his success. To the last the moves for which the market watched would be made between a chat with his trainer and a chaffing and recondite conversation over the telephone with the Tower mess. History is always repeating itself in unlooked for fashions. A hundred and sixty years ago the great Marshal Saxe, forming his squadrons for the charge that was to give Lauffeld to the French, ordered aside their black-avised brigadier and picked on a subaltern, careless and rosy, whom he espied laughing in his saddle, to lead the human avalanche. And in the meaner struggle that seems to have displaced war indefinitely, it will still happen that a light heart with a constitutional cheerfulness in taking risks finds all manner of blind forces following headlong at its heels.
His great chance came when he was just over thirty. For two hours of a sunny afternoon, and to the clouding of a fair brow at Ranelagh, a gaunt, hungry-eyed Western American, referred to him in despair by a friend whose time the stranger had daily and pertinaciously returned to waste, sat in his private office. The man's story was a fantastic one. Of a tunnel which he had been excavating under subvention, for years, and timbering furlong by furlong, sometimes more, sometimes less, as the rusty ore with which the mountain teemed assayed well or ill; of a suspicion, dawning on him little by little as he proceeded, that a wild miner's tale of the district—the legend of the lost lode of Troublesome Gulch—might not, after all, be a myth; the sudden discovery of free gold in the rarest and most precious of ores, "running up through the rock, sir, like a fern"; the theft of the samples that would have justified him; the sudden withdrawal of his subvention, and the decision of the railroad to build its connecting line at a lower level and at an easier gradient; the offers that had been made him for his property, in all of which his fevered mind saw only a threat and evidence of conspiracy. The man was no smooth-tongued exploiter: he spoke roughly, uncouthly, chewing to rags the first dry cigar he had ever smoked, in an evident sweat of fear lest somehow or other his secret should be torn from him—straining to be back and on guard again. His eyes blazed as he talked and his hand shook. He had been nursing his dreams on aerated bread and coffee.