Richard Dowling - Miracle Gold - A Novel (Vol. 2 of 3)

"Well," said Mr. Anstruther, the composer, "I don't know. I think they might be reduced. Anyway," dropping his voice, and bending over her ladyship, "our little friend here, whom Mr. Hanbury brought in, manages to hold his own, and more than hold his own, with less of such relics of barbarism than most of us."

"I was just saying to Sir Julius when you, Mr. Anstruther, came up, that I consider the stranger the most remarkable man I ever met in this house, and quite capable of undertaking and carrying out any social revolution, even to the discrediting of soap. If you have been introduced bring him to me."

"I haven't, unfortunately, but I'll tell Hanbury, who looks as black as thunder, that you would like to speak to him."

"I have scarcely seen Miss Ashton to-day. Let us go to them. That is the simplest way," said Lady Forcar, rising and moving towards the place where Dora, Hanbury, and Leigh stood.

When Leigh finished eating the bread-and-butter and drinking the tiny cup of tea, he said: "You wish, Miss Ashton, to know in what way I have been lucky to-day?"

She looked in perplexity at Hanbury, and then at the dwarf. She had no doubt he had alluded to her when he spoke of having found a model for the Pallas-Athena. An average man accustomed to ordinary social observances would not pursue that kind of flattery any further, but could this man be depended on? He certainly was not an ordinary man, and as certainly he was not accustomed to ordinary social observances. If he pursued that subject it would be embarrassing. It was quite plain John was in very bad humour. He deserved to be punished for his pusillanimous selfishness to-day, but there were limits beyond which punishment ought not to be pressed. She would forgive John now and try to make the best of the situation. She felt convinced that John would not have brought this man here except under great pressure. Let him be absolved from further penalties.

She said pleasantly: "One always likes to hear of good fortune coming to those in whom one is interested." Nothing could be more bald, or commonplace, or trite, yet in the heart of Leigh the words made joyous riot. She had implied, even if she did not mean her implication, that she took an interest in him .

"I was speaking a moment ago about the figures of time in my clock. I had the honour of telling Mrs. Ashton that there would be thousands of them, and that they would be modelled, not chiefly or at all for the display of mechanism, but in the first place as works of art; to these works of art mechanism would be adapted later."

"Which will make your clock the only one of the kind in the world," said she, much relieved to find no pointed reference to herself.

"Precisely. But I did not do myself the honour of telling Mrs. Ashton of what material the figures were to be composed."

"No. I do not think you said what they would be made of. Wax, is it not?" With the loss of apprehension on her own account, she had gained interest in this wonderful clock.

"The models will of course be made of wax, but the figures themselves, the figures which I intend to bequeath to posterity, will be made of gold."

"Gold! All those figures made of gold! Why, your clock will cost you a fortune."

"It will not cost me as much as it would cost any other man living. I am going to make the gold too." He drew himself up, and looked proudly round.

At this moment Lady Forcar and Mr. Anstruther came up, and introductions took place. Leigh submitted to the introductions as though he had no interest in them beyond the interruption they caused in what he was saying.

Miss Ashton briefly placed Lady Forcar and Mr. Anstruther in possession of the subject, and then Leigh went on. He no longer leant upon his stick. He straightened himself, threw back his head haughtily, and kept it back. He shifted his stout gnarled stick into his left hand and thrust the long, thin, sallow, hairy fingers of his right hand into the breast of his coat, and looked around as though challenging denial.

"I have," he said, "invented a metal, a compound which is absolutely indistinguishable from gold, which is in fact gold, and of which I shall make my figures. Mystery gold was a clumsy juggle that one found out in the fire. My gold is bonâ fide a miracle, and I have called it Miracle Gold. My gold will resist the acid, and the blow-pipe, and the crucible. As I live, if they provoke me, I will sell them not metal miracle gold, but perchloride of miracle gold. No one can doubt me then!"

"And will you be able, Mr. Leigh, to make not only enough for your figures but some for sale also?" asked Mr. Anstruther.

"I may be able to spare a little, but my gold cannot be sold for a chapman's price. It will cost me much in money and health and risk, and even then the yield will be small."

"In health and risk?" said Miss Ashton, in a tone of concern and sympathy. "How in health and risk?" He seemed even now to have but little store of health.

He lowered his head and abated the arrogance of his manner. "The steam of fusing metals and fumes of acids are not for men who would live long, Miss Ashton. They paralyse the muscles and eat into the wholesome flesh of those whose flesh is wholesome, while with one who is not fashioned fair to the four winds of attack, the end comes with insidious speed. Then for the risk, there are conjunctions of substances that, both in the dry and the wet, lead often to unexpected ebullitions and rancorous explosions of gas or mere forces that kill. There may spring out of experiments vapours more deadly than any known now, poisons that will slay like the sight of the angel of death."

"Then, Mr. Leigh," said the girl, with eyes fixed upon him, "why need you make these figures of time of such costly material?"

"Ah, there may be reasons too tedious to relate."

"And does the good fortune you speak of concern the manufacture of this miracle gold?" she asked with a faint flush, and eyes shining with anxiety.

"It does."

"A discovery which perhaps will make the manufacture less dangerous?"

"Which would make the manufacture unnecessary."

She clasped her hands before her with delight, and cried while her eyes shone joyously into his, "Oh, that would be lucky indeed. And how will you know if your augury of good fortune will come true?"

"You are interested?" He bent his head still lower, and his voice was neither so firm nor so harsh.

"Intensely. You tell us your life may be endangered if you go on. Tell us you think you can avoid the risk."

"I do not know yet."

"When can you know?"

"Would you care to hear as soon as I know?"

"Oh, yes."

"I shall, I think, be certain by this day week."

"Then come to us again next Thursday. We shall all be here as we are now?"

"Thank you, Miss Ashton, I will. Good day."

He backed a pace and bowed to her, and then turned round, and, with head erect and scornful eyes flashing right and left, but seeing nothing, strode out of the room.

"Dora," whispered Lady Forcar, "you have made another conquest. That little genius is in love with you."

The girl laughed, but did not look up for a moment. When she did so her eyes were full of tears.

Dealers in marine stores generally select quiet by-ways, back-waters of traffic, for the scene of their trade. In the open high roads of business the current is too quick for them. They buy and sell substantial and weighty articles; their transactions are few and far between. Those who come to sell may be in haste; those who come to buy, never. No one ever yet rushed into a marine-store dealer's, and hammered with his money on a second-hand copper, in lieu of a counter, and shouted out that he could not wait a moment for a second-hand iron tripod. It is extremely doubtful if a marine-store dealer ever sells anything. Occasionally buying of ungainly, heavy, amorphous, valueless-looking bundles goes on, but a sale hardly ever. Who, for instance, could want an object visible in the business establishment of John Timmons, Tunbridge Street, London Road? The most important-looking article was a donkey-engine without a funnel, or any of its taps, and with a large rusty hole bulged in its knobby boiler. Then there lay a little distance from the engine the broken beam of a large pair of scales and the huge iron scoop of another pair. After this, looking along the left-hand side out of the gloom towards the door, lay three cannon-shot, for guns of different calibres; then the funnel of a locomotive, flat, and making a very respectable pretence of having been the barrel from which the cannon-shot had dribbled, instead of flown, because of the barrel's senile decay. After the funnel came a broken anvil, around the blockless and deposed body of which gathered-no doubt for the sake of old lang syne-two sledge-hammer heads, without handles, and the nozzle of a prodigious forge-bellows. Next appeared a heap of chunks of leaden pipe. Next, a patch of mutilated cylindrical half-hundred weights, like iron mushrooms growing up out of the ferruginous floor. The axle-tree and boxes of a cart stood against the wall, like the gingham umbrella of an antediluvian giant, and keeping them company the pillars and trough of a shower-bath, plainly the stand into which the umbrella ought to have been placed, if the dead Titan had had any notion of tidiness. Then appeared the cistern of the shower-bath, like the Roundhead iron cap of the cyclopean owner of the umbrella. Then spread what one might fancy to be the mouth of a mine of coffee mills, followed by a huge chaotic pile of rusty and broken guns and swords, and blunderbusses and pistols. Beyond this chaotic patch, a ton of nuts and screws and bolts; and, later, a bank of washers, a wire screen, five dejected chimney-jacks, the stock of an anchor, broken from the flukes, several hundred fathoms of short chains of assorted lengths, half a bundle of nailrod iron, three glassless ship's lamps, a pile of brazen miscellanies, a pile of iron miscellanies, a pile of copper miscellanies, and then the doorless opening into Tunbridge Street, and standing on the iron-grooved threshold, into which the shutters fitted at night, Mr. John Timmons in person, the owner of this flourishing establishment.