“People talk like that, father ... but it is yours, and will be yours for very many years; it is you who may treble it or lose it.”
In the emotion of the moment, they walked from Nelson Street to the corner of Kipling Gardens before Cosmo spoke again, then he said:
“If it were mine to-day, I should do it all the more. You know more about it, father, but you’ve asked me, and I have told you what I think.”
Cosmo was right.
He is, indeed, no longer a shareholder in the company, nor was he even a shareholder when the Government bought at 5⅜xd; but he held for a full seven months after his father’s death, he sold at 17¼, and a good two-thirds of the fortune he now enjoys is due to his sound judgment during that evening walk in Upper Norwood.
I have written “when the Government bought at 5⅜.” The thought has perhaps no right to appear in this account, but I cannot forbear to place on record my regret that Mr Burden did not live to see that great silent scene in the House of Commons when the Government announced their intention of buying out the Company. It would have set his foolish doubts at rest, and would perhaps have preserved a life of such value to the Empire, to the City, and to the residential portion of South London. I knew him perhaps better than other men knew him (if Mr O’Rourke will forgive the phrase); and I am most confident that the King’s Own Ministers purchasing, in their public capacity, the rights of the Company for the nation, at the price of 5⅜xd, would have satisfied every murmur and every suspicion in the mind of the man who some months before, was for casting all away at 25/16. Alas! before even the first negotiations had been opened at Lady Manningham’s garden party, my dear old friend was dead.
It took five days to make those arrangements which Mr Burden found necessary to put within his immediate call the sum of £50,000. What those arrangements were my commercial readers can easily guess, my non-commercial readers would be at a loss to comprehend. That large class who, like myself, comprehend them, and yet are not commercial, would discover nothing but tedium in their recital.
That so considerable an amount was realised so soon, was due to a variety of settlements; the selling of stock, the immediate discounting of certain maturing bills, but principally to an advance very readily made by the bank, and that at a rate of interest which seemed to Mr Burden so generous as to be, in the technical language of commerce, “almost nominal.” Indeed, it raised him very appreciably in his own opinion; and made him see in himself a man of greater position than he had imagined.