But though he replied beautifully and in moving terms, he was not at ease. During the speech of the Archbishop he had sat thinking:
‘What shares remotely resembling the Puto-Congo Consolidated do I possess? Whatever can the man have got hold of?’
Suddenly the words, ‘Native Industries Ltd.’ flashed into his mind. Those shares paid him about fifty pounds a year, on an investment of two hundred; and every year the directors sent him a reassuring report of the well-being and prosperity of the natives in whose interests it was run. But what had these to do with the Puto-Congo Consolidation Company? He was not good at geography; beyond the fact that they both hailed from the same continent he was aware of no possible connection.
All the same, as soon as the meeting was over he sped home in trepidation, and after a short search through a fat bundle of small but varied investments he found the share certificate he was in search of. The sight of it froze him, as it had been the eye of Davidina fixed in judgment: terror and desolation opened under him as a gulf into which he descended alive. For though in the original certificate the name of the Puto-Congo Consolidation Company was nowhere mentioned, the certificate bore endorsement of a later date (he remembered faintly sending it, at request, for that purpose) from which it appeared that Native Industries had become affiliated—consolidated was perhaps the awful and correct word—with certain other companies operating in the same district, the Ray River Rubber Company being one of them: and ‘Ray River Rubber’ with its beautiful rolling sound had now acquired a horrible familiarity to his ears; only that very night he had himself rolled it upon his oratorical tongue, enjoying the rich flavour of it. And though the name of the Puto-Congo Consolidated did not even now appear, his certificate bore nevertheless that notorious official stamp which he and the Free Churches had so fiercely held up to scorn—a large adhesive label of embossed paper, blood red, bearing as its emblem a white man and a black holding hands, and over them the punning motto ‘Nihil alienum puto’—I hold nothing foreign.
How devoutly he wished that for him the motto could have been true. But that he did hold this damnable and damning share in that commercial atrocity which he had been denouncing, there was no longer room for doubt. And how, in Heaven’s name, or the name of anything equally incredible, how was he to explain it away?
That was the question which, for the next hour or two, he continued putting to me with great fervour and insistency. I listened, but I said nothing; for though I was much interested, I did not intend to intervene. That is not my method. And so, while I paid due attention to what he actually said, I let the nimbler speed of his brain for one moment escape me; and was taken suddenly by surprise when I saw him jump up from his knees and start into definite action.
During the next forty-eight hours the meteoric speed of his career, his swift adjustment of means to ends, his varied and almost instantaneous decisions, and above all the driving force of the moral arguments which he addressed to those larger shareholders of Native Industries Limited whom in so brief a time he succeeded in running to earth, all this gave me a conception of his abilities to which, I confess, that till then I had hardly done justice. Nor do I think the average reader could follow through all its ramifications that inspired sauve qui peut, which, in such short space of time, carried moral devastation to so many Free Evangelical back-parlours—fortresses for all the virtues.
Suffice it that Mr. Trimblerigg, having obtained a complete list of the shareholders in Native Industries Limited, discovered for truth what his sanguine mind had envisaged as a blessed possibility—that nearly half of the Company’s shares were actually in the hands of Free Church ministers and of other prominent and privileged members of their congregations, and that all unknown to itself the Free Evangelical Body—that great instrument for the establishment of God’s Kingdom on earth—had got one of its feet well planted in that very stronghold of the Devil against which it was directing its assault—an awkward, or an advantageous position according to the use made of it.
Mr. Trimblerigg, whose apprehension and anguish had been so great that in the first ten hours after his discovery he could eat no breakfast, had during the next ten, with travel, telegram, and telephone, done such an enormous amount of work and to such good purpose, that before the day was out he had begun almost to enjoy himself.
In that brief space of time he had captured not only the council of the Free Church Congress, and three of its ex-Presidents, but the President-elect and five of its most shining lights in the financial world as well—men who had always maintained publicly that they held their wealth as a sacred trust from the Powers above for the service of humanity.