His lordship presently appeared, carrying a number of voting papers, which he threw carelessly on the table. He was, it seemed, a subscriber to many institutions for the blind, the maimed, and the halt.
“Ah!” he said, “I generally get through my work in the morning, but I find myself behindhand to-day. It is wonderful,” he added, directing his conversation and his benevolent gaze towards White, “how busy an idle man may be.”
“M—m—yes!” answered the major, with his stolid stare.
Cornish broke what threatened to be an awkward silence by referring at once to the subject in hand.
“It seems,” he began, “that this Malgamite scheme is not what we took it to be.”
Lord Ferriby looked surprised and slightly scandalized. Could it be possible for a fashionable charity to be anything but what it appeared to be? In his eyes, wandering from one face to the other, there lurked the question as to whether they had seen Roden and Von Holzen quit his door a minute earlier. But no reference was made to those two gentlemen, and Lord Ferriby, who, as a chairman of many boards, was a master of the art of conciliation and the decent closing of both eyes to unsightly facts, received Cornish's suggestion with a polite and avuncular pooh-pooh.
“We must not,” he said soothingly, “allow our judgment to be hastily affected by the ill-considered statements of the—er—newspapers. Such statements, my dear Anthony—and you, Major White—are, I may tell you, only what we, as the pioneers of a great movement, must be prepared to expect. I saw the article in the Times to which you refer—indeed, I read it most carefully, as, in my capacity of chairman of this—eh—char—that is to say, company, I was called upon to do. And I formed the opinion that the mind of the writer was—eh—warped.” Lord Ferriby smiled sadly, and gave a final wave of the hand, as if to indicate that the whole matter lay in a nutshell, and that nutshell under his lordship's heel. “Warped or not,” answered Cornish, “the man says that we have formed ourselves into a company, which company is bound to make huge profits, and those profits are naturally assumed to find their way into our pockets.”
“My dear Anthony,” replied the chairman, with a laugh which was almost a cackle, “the labourer is worthy of his hire.”
Which seems likely to become the dernier cri of the overpaid throughout all the ages.
“Even if we contradict the statement,” pursued Cornish, with a sudden coldness in his manner, “the contradiction will probably fail to reach many of the readers of this article, and as matters at present stand, I do not see that we are in a position to contradict.”