"Why don't you do it." said Albert, nastily. "Five pounds is nothing to you."
"Why should I?"
"Ah! Why should you?"
It would be useless to assert that Mr. Potter's tone was friendly. It stung Roland. It seemed to him that Muriel was looking at him in an unpleasantly contemptuous manner.
In some curious fashion, without doing anything to merit it, he had apparently become an object of scorn and derision to the party.
"All right, then, I will," he said suddenly.
"Easy enough to talk," said Albert.
Roland strode with a pale but determined face to the spot where M.
Feriaud, beaming politely, was signing a picture post-card.
Some feeling of compunction appeared to come to Muriel at the eleventh hour.
"Don't let him," she cried.
But Brother Frank was made of sterner stuff. This was precisely the sort of thing which, in his opinion, made for a jolly afternoon.
For years he had been waiting for something of this kind. He was experiencing that pleasant thrill which comes to a certain type of person when the victim of a murder in the morning paper is an acquaintance of theirs.
"What are you talking about?" he said. "There's no danger. At least, not much. He might easily come down all right. Besides, he wants to. What do you want to go interfering for?"
Roland returned. The negotiations with the bird-man had lasted a little longer than one would have expected. But then, of course, M. Feriaud was a foreigner, and Roland's French was not fluent.
He took Muriel's hand.
"Good-by," he said.
He shook hands with the rest of the party, even with Albert Potter. It struck Frank that he was making too much fuss over a trifle--and, worse, delaying the start of the proceedings.
"What's it all about?" he demanded. "You go on as if we were never going to see you again."
"You never know."
"It's as safe as being in bed."
"But still, in case we never meet again----"
"Oh, well," said Brother Frank, and took the outstretched hand.
The little party stood and watched as the aeroplane moved swiftly along the ground, rose, and soared into the air. Higher and higher it rose, till the features of the two occupants were almost invisible.
"Now," said Brother Frank. "Now watch. Now he's going to loop the loop."
But the wheels of the aeroplane still pointed to the ground. It grew smaller and smaller. It was a mere speck.
"What the dickens?"
Far away to the West something showed up against the blue of the sky--something that might have been a bird, a toy kite, or an aeroplane traveling rapidly into the sunset.
Four pairs of eyes followed it in rapt silence.
THE EPISODE OF THE FINANCIAL NAPOLEON
Second of a Series of Six Stories [First published in _Pictorial Review_, June 1916]
Seated with his wife at breakfast on the veranda which overlooked the rolling lawns and leafy woods of his charming Sussex home, Geoffrey Windlebird, the great financier, was enjoying the morning sun to the full. His chubby features were relaxed in a smile of lazy contentment; and his wife, who liked to act sometimes as his secretary, found it difficult to get him to pay any attention to his morning's mail.
"There's a column in to-day's _Financial Argus_," she said, "of which you really must take notice. It's most abusive. It's about the Wildcat Reef. They assert that there never was any gold in the mine, and that you knew it when you floated the company."
"They will have their little joke."
"But you had the usual mining-expert's report."
"Of course we had. And a capital report it was. I remember thinking at the time what a neat turn of phrase the fellow had. I admit he depended rather on his fine optimism than on any examination of the mine. As a matter of fact, he never went near it. And why should he? It's down in South America somewhere. Awful climate--snakes, mosquitoes, revolutions, fever."
Mr. Windlebird spoke drowsily. His eyes closed.
"Well, the Argus people say that they have sent a man of their own out there to make inquiries, a well-known expert, and the report will be in within the next fortnight. They say they will publish it in their next number but one. What are you going to do about it?"
Mr. Windlebird yawned.
"Not to put too fine a point on it, dearest, the game is up. The Napoleon of Finance is about to meet his Waterloo. And all for twenty thousand pounds. That is the really bitter part of it. To-morrow we sail for the Argentine. I've got the tickets."
"You're joking, Geoffrey. You must be able to raise twenty thousand.
It's a flea-bite."
"On paper--in the form of shares, script, bonds, promissory notes, it is a flea-bite. But when it has to be produced in the raw, in flat, hard lumps of gold or in crackling bank-notes, it's more like a bite from a hippopotamus. I can't raise it, and that's all about it. So--St. Helena for Napoleon."
Altho Geoffrey Windlebird described himself as a Napoleon of Finance, a Cinquevalli or Chung Ling Soo of Finance would have been a more accurate title. As a juggler with other people's money he was at the head of his class. And yet, when one came to examine it, his method was delightfully simple. Say, for instance, that the Home-grown Tobacco Trust, founded by Geoffrey in a moment of ennui, failed to yield those profits which the glowing prospectus had led the public to expect. Geoffrey would appease the excited shareholders by giving them Preference Shares (interest guaranteed) in the Sea-gold Extraction Company, hastily floated to meet the emergency. When the interest became due, it would, as likely as not, be paid out of the capital just subscribed for the King Solomon's Mines Exploitation Association, the little deficiency in the latter being replaced in its turn, when absolutely necessary and not a moment before, by the transfer of some portion of the capital just raised for yet another company. And so on, ad infinitum. There were moments when it seemed to Mr. Windlebird that he had solved the problem of Perpetual Promotion.
The only thing that can stop a triumphal progress like Mr. Windlebird's is when some coarse person refuses to play to the rules, and demands ready money instead of shares in the next venture. This had happened now, and it had flattened Mr. Windlebird like an avalanche.
He was a philosopher, but he could not help feeling a little galled that the demand which had destroyed him had been so trivial. He had handled millions--on paper, it was true, but still millions--and here he was knocked out of time by a paltry twenty thousand pounds.
"Are you absolutely sure that nothing can be done?" persisted Mrs.
Windlebird. "Have you tried every one?"