“He says he will not keep you long,” Mrs. Helter explained, “and his business is not immediately pressing if you are otherwise engaged. But, if not, he says it would be convenient if you could see him now.”
“Mr. Thoyne,” I echoed. “H’m, that’s rather funny. But show him in, anyway.”
Ronald Thoyne entered the room a moment or two later, a large, rather lumbering figure in appearance but moving with a curiously alert lightness. His bulk signified strength, not fat. I rose and greeted him, then returned to my own chair.
“You will wonder why I have come,” Thoyne began, as he took the seat indicated and selected a cigarette from the box I offered him. Apparently, he wanted to maintain at least an appearance of friendship. “No, thanks, I’ll have nothing to drink,” he added, as I motioned towards the whisky on the table. “But, now, as to the reason for coming, well, in the first place, I have wanted to make your acquaintance. The fact that you are a near neighbour renders you—shall I say?—an object of interest. No, do not smile. If that had been all I should have waited. There is something else, but we shall come to that presently.”
I nodded, but offered no comment on these obviously preliminary observations. I was quite well aware that this was no mere friendly call—that Thoyne had some very definite purpose in his mind—and I was quite content to wait until it should suit him to disclose it. Thoyne, probably, had expected some sort of a reply, something that would, so to speak, open a conversation and for a moment or two he paused. But he did not allow my calculated silence to disconcert him.
“I dare say,” Thoyne began again, “that my manner may seem a little abrupt to you, Mr. Holt, but I always go straight to the point. Perhaps it would have been more tactful if I’d talked a bit first—yes. I have noticed that the people of these old countries like to go round and round the mulberry bush before they come to the point, but that is not our way—no, sir. I had a lesson on that from old Silas Pegler when I was a very young man. He was president of the Trans-Central and scores of other big things and he pulled all sorts of wires. I had to see him once about a deal and I began: ‘Good morning, Mr. Pegler, a fine morning, isn’t it?’ But he only wrinkled his ugly old face and glared at me. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘I am here to talk dollars, not weather.’ And since then I have cultivated the habit of straight talk. It pays in New York but not so well in this country. A lot of people write me down as bad form and a man over here who is once labelled bad form had far better be dead and buried.”
I lay back in my chair and regarded my visitor smilingly. Certainly for a person who cultivated a habit of straight talk, he was singularly discursive.
“Are you intending to remain in Cartordale?” Thoyne asked, seeing that I remained silent.
“I shall be here for a little while yet, though I cannot say that I have made any definite plans,” I replied.
“But I mean as a permanent resident. You see, somebody, I think it was Dr. Crawford told me—hinted that you—. Now, if you wanted to sell this house, I’d like to buy it.”