“Not an American? Well, send him along.” Falloden raised his eyebrows. “If my father doesn’t feel able to see him, I can tackle him. He can choose his own day and hour. All our best pictures are at Flood.”
“And they include—”
“Four Rembrandts,” said Falloden, looking at his list, “two Titians, two Terburgs, a Vermeer of Delft, heaps of other Dutchmen—four full-length Gainsboroughs, and three half-lengths—two full-length Reynoldses, three smaller—three Lawrences, a splendid Romney, three Hoppners, two Constables, etc. The foreign pictures were bought by my grandfather from one of the Orléans collections about 1830. The English pictures—the portraits—have all been at Flood since they were painted, and very few of them have ever been exhibited. I scribbled these few facts down before I left home. There is, of course, an elaborate catalogue.”
For the first time the lawyer’s countenance as he listened showed a flash of active sympathy. He was himself a modest collector, and his house at Richmond contained a number of pretty things.
“Sir Arthur will mind parting with them very much, I fear,” he said with real concern. “I wish with all my heart it had been possible to find some other way out. But we have really done our best.”
Falloden nodded. He sat looking straight before him, one hand drumming on the table. The whole attitude was haughtily irresponsive. The slight note of compassion in Mr. Gregory’s tone was almost intolerable to him, and the lawyer guessed it.
“Insolent cub!” he thought to himself; and thenceforward allowed himself no departure from a purely business tone. It was settled that the buyer—with legal caution, Mr. Gregory for the moment threw no further light upon him—was, if possible, to be got hold of at once, and an appointment was to be made for Flood Castle, where Falloden, or his father, would receive him.
Then the solicitor departed, and Falloden was left to pace up and down the dismal room, his hands in his pockets—deep in thought.
He looked back upon a fortnight of unbroken worry and distress. The news with which his father had received him on his return from Oxford had seemed to him at first incredible. But the facts on which it was based were only too substantial, and his father, broken in health and nerve, now that silence was once thrown aside, poured out upon his son a flood of revelation and confession that soon made what had happened tragically clear. It was the familiar story of wealth grasping at yet more wealth, of the man whose judgment and common sense begin to play him false, when once the intoxication of money has gone beyond a certain point. Dazzled by some first speculative successes, Sir Arthur had become before long a gambler over half the world, in Canada, the States, Egypt, Argentina. One doubtful venture supported another, and the City, no less than the gambler himself, was for a time taken in. But the downfall of a great Egyptian company, which was to have extracted untold wealth from a strip of Libyan desert, had gradually but surely brought down everything else in its train. Blow after blow fell, sometimes rapidly, sometimes tardily. Sir Arthur tried every expedient known to the financier in extremis, descending ever lower in the scale of credit and reputation; and in vain. One tragic day in June, after a long morning with the Gregory partners, Sir Arthur came home to the splendid house in Yorkshire, knowing that nothing now remained but to sell the estates, and tell Douglas that his father had ruined him. Lady Laura’s settlement was safe; and on that they must live.
The days of slow realisation, after Douglas’s return, had tried both father and son severely. Sir Arthur was worn out and demoralised by long months of colossal but useless effort to retrieve what he had done. Falloden, with his own remorse, and his own catastrophe to think over, was called on to put it aside, to think for and help his father. He had no moral equipment—no trained character—equal to the task. But mercifully for them both, his pride came into play; his shrewd intelligence also, and his affection for his father—the most penetrable spot so far in his hard and splendid youth. He had done his best—a haughty, ungracious best—but still he had done it, and in the course of a few days, now that the tension of concealment was over, Sir Arthur had become almost childishly dependent upon him.