A Man of Means.
II.—The Bolt From the Blue.
By C. H. Bovill and P. G. Wodehouse.
Illustrated by Alfred Leete.
It was a delightful sunny morning in mid-July, and Dermot Windleband, sitting with his wife at breakfast on the veranda which overlooked the rolling lawns and leafy woods of his charming Sussex home, was enjoying it to the full. His Napoleonic features (his features were like that because he was a Napoleon of Finance) were relaxed in a placid half-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 mail.
Mrs. Windleband liked to act sometimes as her husband's secretary, because it recalled old times. In point of fact she had once been his secretary. Dermot had married her, with the least possible delay, on discovering that she had provided herself with a duplicate key to his safe and was in the habit, during his absence, of going very thoroughly through his private papers.
Almost all financiers of anything like real eminence marry their secretaries. It is, on the whole, cheaper to keep a wife who knows all one's secrets than to pay the salary which a secretary who happened to know them would demand.
"There's an article here, in the Financial Argus, of which you really must take notice," Mrs. Windleband gently insisted. "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 that perfectly well when you floated the company." She put down the paper for a moment and looked inquiringly at her husband. "That's not true, is it? You had the usual mining expert's report, didn't you?"
"Of course we had. Very satisfactory report, too. Unfortunately the fellow who wrote it depended rather on the ineradicable optimism of his nature than on any examination of the mine. As a matter of fact he never went near it."
Mrs. Windleband whistled.
"That's rather awkward. The Argus say that they have sent out an expert of their own to make inquiries, and hope to have his report for publication within the next fortnight. What are you going to do about it?"
"Nothing," replied Dermot, with a yawn. "And, to save you the trouble of wading any farther through that mass of dreary correspondence, I may inform you that, for the future, I propose to do nothing about everything."
"Dermot!"
Her husband went on placidly:—
"Not to put too fine a point on it, dear Heart-of-Gold, the gaff is blown—the game is up. The Napoleon of Finance is about to meet his Waterloo."
"Surely things are not as bad as all that?"
"They're worse. I'm absolutely up against it this time."
The failure to lay his hands upon so pitiful a sum as twenty thousand pounds was, he proceeded to explain to his wondering wife, to be his undoing. Twenty thousand pounds had to be found within the next fortnight, or—they would have to book their passages to the dear old Argentine.
"But twenty thousand pounds!" objected Mrs. Windleband, incredulously; "you must be able to get that. Why, it's a mere fleabite."
"On paper—in the form of shares, script, bonds, promissory notes—twenty thousand pounds is, I grant you, a fleabite. But when the sum has to be produced in the raw—in
Vol. xlvii—71.
