“Yes, darling,” he said at last. “But you must not sacrifice yourself for me. It would be grossly unfair. I am ruined through no fault of my own, I trust—ruined by a gambling partner who cared for nothing save his obsession with regard to games of chance. Let us say no more about it. Rutherford may take his concession elsewhere, and I will face the music. I have my comfort in my Yogi teaching—in those two words ‘I am.’ I have done my best in life, and to my knowledge have never injured anyone. I have tried to act up to my Yogi teachers, with their magnificent philosophy of the East. Therefore I will face disaster unflinchingly.”
And seeing his daughter in tears, his further words were choked by emotion. He merely patted her upon the shoulder and, unable to bear the interview longer, withdrew.
For a fortnight past Rex Rutherford, like many crooks of his calibre, had actually engaged a “Press agent”—one of those parasites who fasten themselves upon the ambitious and put forward lies and photographs to the Press at so many guineas a time. The crook, in the financial Press, read of his own wonderful financial operations in Paris and in New York, reports which were calculated to raise him in the estimation of the great house of Sandys and Hornton. The City had read of Rex Rutherford day after day, and there were rumours of a great scheme he had for a new electric tube rail system for the outer suburbs of Paris, for which he was negotiating with the French Government.
Purcell Sandys had read all this—a Press campaign which had cost the master criminal a mere three hundred pounds. With that sum he had established a reputation in the financial papers. Editors of newspapers cannot always exclude the “puff paragraphs” when they are cleverly concealed by a master of that craft. And it often takes even a shrewd sub-editor to detect the gentle art of self-advertisement.
That afternoon the old financier walked alone through the Park as far as Kensington Gardens and back. He knew that the crash must come at latest in a day or two, and Sandys and Hornton must suspend payment.
There was no way out.