For a long minute, Monsieur du Chainat regarded him in courteous but unmistakable appraisal. Then a genial smile lifted the ends of his small black mustache.
“It is a confidential matter, as Monsieur Millard says, but there is nothing—how do you say?—equivocal concerning it. We of France do not make our transactions ordinarily as you do in America; we discuss, we deliberate, we wait. And yet in this affair which I have undertaken haste is, alas, of the utmost need. Time is of value; such value that I will pay twice over for three hundred thousand francs.”
“You see, it’s a factory in one of the devastated towns,” Millard interjected eagerly. “Old feud, trying to get ahead of the other fellow. It means sixty thousand in our money, and the French government’s giving him a grant of a hundred and twenty thousand in three months, but it means ruin to wait. Other man’s got his capital now——”
“But, my friend, Monsieur Storm is perhaps not interested; we bore him,” Monsieur du Chainat interrupted. “The letter which our consul here has given me to your great banker, Monsieur Whitmarsh, has interested him to such an extent that the affair is all but closed.”
“Whitmarsh?” Storm pricked up his ears. The proposition must be good if that most astute of international financiers considered it.
“But, yes.” The Frenchman shrugged deprecatingly. “It is, of course, a trifling matter to engage his attention, but I am to have a second interview with him to-morrow at three. I shall be happy to conclude my mission, for there is attached to it the sentiment as well as what you call business.”
A second interview! Whitmarsh wasted no time, and this must mean a deal. Sixty thousand dollars, and doubled in three months! Storm leaned impulsively across the table.
“What is your proposition, Monsieur, if I may ask? It sounds a trifle—er, unusual.”
“It is.” The Frenchman smiled again. “You will understand, Monsieur Storm, that in France it is not the custom to develop a manufacturing concern until it grows too big for us and then sell out to a corporation. With us business descends from generation to generation, it becomes at once the idol and life of the family.
“My father-in-law, Henri Peronneau of Lille, has a soap factory established by his grandfather. Twenty years ago, a dishonest chemist in his employ stole the formula which rendered the Peronneau soap famous and set up a rival factory. Both, of course, were dismantled during the German occupation.