"Do you know anything about them?" said Mr. Clutterbuck undaunted, and turning to Charlie Fitzgerald.
His wife issued one of her commanding glances, but he avoided it.
"The—Anapootra—Ruby—Mines?" said Charlie Fitzgerald, hesitating between each syllable. "No, I don't. I know about the Brahmapootra: it's a river."
"Yes," said Mr. Clutterbuck, and this singularly unfruitful conversation ended.
But Charlie Fitzgerald wondered and wondered more deeply what on earth he was to do. His task had been difficult enough already; it was becoming impossible.
Next day he took his bag and was off, but he promised to be home before the end of the week, and he promised still more sincerely, in private to Mr. Clutterbuck, to do everything that could possibly be done, and if he failed, to form some further plan. He was careful not to use any of the cars—he had used them quite enough lately, and the weather was foul. He took the train in the common fashion and drove from Victoria straight to Barnett House. The telephone had prepared them for his visit, and the Duke of Battersea, always the kindest and the warmest of friends to the young men of his rank, took him affectionately into the inner room, and heard all he might have to say.
The Duke of Battersea, now well stricken in years, was of that kind which age matures and perfects.
The bitter struggles of his youth when, in part a foreigner, ill acquainted with our tongue and bewildered by many of our national customs, he had made his entry into English finance, had given him all the wisdom such trials convey, but they had left nothing of that bitterness too often bred in the souls of those who suffer. The failure of the Haymarket Bank would not indeed have checked so tenacious a character, but the undeserved obloquy which he suffered in the few years succeeding that misfortune, and during the period when it was falsely imagined that he had finally failed, might have put him out of touch with the national life and have given him a false and uncharitable estimate of the country of his adoption. So far from permitting any such acidity to warp his soul, Mr. Barnett (as he then was) had but the more faithfully gone forward in the path which destiny offered him, and he had reaped the reward which modern England never fails to give to those of her sons who have preserved, throughout all the vicissitudes of life, a true sense of proportion and a proper balance between material prosperity and the public service.