“There goes a consignment of men's lives,” said Mrs. Vansittart to her companion.
“A human life, madam,” answered the banker, “like all else on earth, varies much in value.” For Mr. Wade belonged to that class of Englishmen which has a horror of all sentiment, and takes care to cloak its good actions by the assumption of an unworthy motive. And who shall say that this man of business was wrong in his statement? Which of us has not a few friends and relations who can only have been created as a solemn warning?
As Mrs. Vansittart and Mr. Wade stood at the window, Marguerite joined them, slipping her hand within her father's arm with that air of protection which she usually assumed towards him. She was gay and lively, as she ever was, and Mrs. Vansittart glanced at her more than once with a sort of envy. Mrs. Vansittart did not, in truth, always understand Marguerite or her English, which was essentially modern.
They were standing and laughing at the window, when Marguerite suddenly drew them back.
“It is Lord Ferriby,” replied Marguerite.
And looking cautiously between the lace curtains, they saw the great man drive past in his hired carriage. “He has recently bought Park Straat,” commented Marguerite.
And his lordship's condescending air certainly seemed to suggest that the street, if not the whole city, belonged to him.
Mr. Wade pointed with his thick thumb in the direction in which Lord Ferriby was driving.
“To the malgamite works,” replied Mrs. Vansittart, with significance. And Mr. Wade made no comment. Mrs. Vansittart spoke first.
“I asked Major White,” she said, “to lunch with us to-day, but he was pledged, it appeared, to meet Lord Ferriby and his daughter, and see them installed at their hotel.”
Mrs. Vansittart, who in truth seemed to find the banker rather heavy, allowed some moments to elapse before she again spoke.
“Major White,” she then observed, “does not accompany Lord Ferriby to the malgamite works.”
“Major White,” replied Marguerite, demurely, “has other fish to fry.”
“It is as difficult to be entirely bad as it is to be entirely good.”
Percy Roden, who had been to Utrecht and Antwerp, arrived home on the evening of the day that saw Lord Ferriby's advent to The Hague. Though the day had been fine enough, the weather broke up at sunset, and great clouds chased the sun towards the west. Then the rain came suddenly and swept across the plains in a slanting fury. A cold wind from the south-east followed hard upon the heavy clouds, and night came in a chaos of squall and beating rain. Roden was drenched in his passage from the carriage to the Villa des Dunes, which, being a summer residence, had not been provided with a carriage-drive across the dunes from the road. He looked at his sister with tired eyes when she met him in the entrance-hall. He was worn and thinner than she had seen him in the days of his adversity, for Percy Roden, like his partner, had made several false starts upon the road to fortune before he got well away. Like many--like, indeed, nearly all--who have to try again, he had lightened himself of a scruple or so each time he turned back. Prosperity, however, seems to kill as many as adversity. Abundant wealth is a vexation of spirit to-day as surely as it was in the time of that wise man who, having tried it, said that a stranger eateth it, and it is vanity.