He was at his office every day, first for a short spell only, but soon for the old full working hours; and in the midst of twenty other interests which were rather recreations than labours, he watched Congoes. In the eagerness of that watch he neglected all the marvels the newspapers had to tell him of an energy that was transforming the old hell of the equator into a paradise. He even neglected the great spiritual work which Dr. Perry and his assistant clergy had so manfully begun. It must honestly be confessed that he watched nothing but the fluctuation of the Company's shares.
Mrs. Clutterbuck went to the seaside without him. He saw them touch seven in the heat of the summer; he was confident they would go further. They fell to six before the opening of August, to five a week later. His sound commercial instinct bade him beware; at four and a half he sold. Then and then only did he take his long holiday away from the strain of business; a holiday marred to some extent by the observation that the moment he had disposed of them Congoes rose like a balloon to a point still higher than that at which he might himself much earlier have realised.
But though this secret thorn remained in his own side, to the world he was a marvel; first Croydon talked of him, then the City, then Mayfair, and the sportsmen, and even the politicians. In ever-increasing circles, at greater and greater distances from himself, fantastically exaggerated even in his own immediate neighbourhood and growing to be a legend in the mouths of great ladies, the story of his one fortune, among the others of that flotation, expanded into fame.
The story rose beneath him like a tide; it floated him out of his suburb into a new and a greater world; it floated him at last into the majestic councils of the nation. It all but bestowed upon him an imperishable name among the Statesmen of England.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Habakkuk xvi. 8.
[4] The sometime Mayor of Rome; not to be confounded with Sir Henry Nathan, whom we recently came across in the matter of the eggs.
CHAPTER IV