At intervals of several days business details, of no great importance, but such as gradually reawakened in Mr Burden the old interest, began to come to his table; later he dined with Mr Harbury and met a very charming American actress, the manager of the Banque des Pyrénées, Lord John Mackintosh and his wife, and Lothingbury Grail, a gentleman who had written verses. They talked of Art.
A week later Cosmo and he lunched with Lord Benthorpe at Cosmo’s club, and the very next day, walking in the best of moods towards the City, they met by accident Mr Barnett himself, fresh with the morning, and in the most sympathetic of moods.
And all this while around Mr Burden, in the papers, in the conversation of men, the M’Korio grew and grew. The season continued, the debates in Parliament languished, the heat increased, and the spirit of the great African River ran through the veins of London.
The prospectus was drafted: many little inconclusive conversations were held; in a word, by all those small preliminaries which are necessary to a great and worthy enterprise, Mr Burden was re-introduced to the routine he knew. His active interest returned. But deeper down the pall lay over his mind, and could not be lifted.
The struggle between these two things, his fatal lack of comprehension, his eager and patriotic pride, has been hitherto the matter of my record. Alas! the victory of the former must now lead on to my conclusion!
Mr Burden permitted his colleagues to undertake the necessary details, and he was even glad that they should look after such wearisome business. The registration of the Company, the finding of Brokers for it, and of Bankers, and of Solicitors, would have interfered with what he honestly believed to be his own engrossing labours in connection with his trade.
He was profoundly thankful that no further word was spoken of Mr Abbott; but it was the thankfulness of respite, not of reprieve. He saw before him an inevitable day, and he dreaded it. He consoled himself with guesses; he tried to forget that his great friendship had turned into an instrument—an instrument which could wound as well as work for him.
Eddies of uncertainty swirled in his mind. The Bankers were as firm as the Bank of England, the Brokers were of immense respectability, the very name of the Solicitors seemed like a part of the Constitution; but all these things did but increase his disease—they seemed to him to be at the same time England, and not England. It was as though a man should be given a picture framed in a solid familiar frame—a frame suited to hold the portrait of his father—and hung before his table; and as though, in such a setting, the picture within constantly shifted and changed, now terrifying, now evil, now grotesque, now merely irritant, but always a nightmare of discord. In this mood a critical day found him—the day when his presence in the new offices was demanded to hear the prospectus read, and to pass it finally for printing.
The new offices were in Broad Street. Their position I have described in an earlier part of this book; with their magnificence perhaps most of my readers are acquainted. I have but to recall the two plaster lions that guard the staircase, symbolising, it is believed, the majesty of our race; the splendid negro, in Vienna ware of life-size, holding the lamp in the central gallery, and clothed as to his middle with a belt of ostrich feathers—whose ring of white against the shining darkness of his skin naturally led on to the row of smiling teeth above and the very conspicuous eyes. This masterpiece, which Mr Barnett had accepted long ago in lieu of payment of a debt, was already familiar to London—little reproductions of it were to be seen in the shops of the West End—the symbols of the M’Korio. The interiors were worthy of such apparatus. The doors of the main rooms were of oak; the doorplates and the locks were Marie Antoinette bronze gilding, embossed, single and reversible. It was a matter of pride to the Promoters that no two were exactly alike. A large male black cat, bearing round its neck a silver collar, added the note of domesticity, and was already familiar to Britain through the personal paragraphs of the daily press. The whole was rendered complete by a porter, than whom nothing more splendid could serve a sovereign in arms, whether in London or Berlin.