Swirling Waters | Page 2

contempt in her voice.
"A very important business engagement for this evening. Will you excuse me? I can follow to-morrow."
"Can't it wait?"
"It's highly important."
"There's the 'phone to speak over."
"I have to come face to face with my man. Surely, Olive, you can spare me for a day? Have you everything you want for the journey?"
"Who is the man?"
"Lars Larssen," answered Matheson. He lowered his voice slightly, though on the bustling railway platform there was no likelihood of anyone listening to the conversation.
Sir Francis nodded his head. He was heavily interested in company-promoting himself, as a means of swelling an inadequate property income, and Lars Larssen was a magic name.
"Hudson Bay scheme?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Well, business before pleasure," he remarked sententiously.
Olive cut in with a question. "Have you finished your experiments with your brother?"
"No," answered Matheson evenly.
"When will they be finished?"
"I can't say. There's a great deal to be discussed and planned."
"Then bring him with you to-morrow. You can plan together whatever it is you have to plan at Monte. Besides, I want to see him."
"John is a busy man," protested Matheson. "I don't think he can leave his laboratory."
"Give him my invitation, and make it a pressing one," pursued Olive, careless of anything but her own whim. "Tell him--tell him I particularly want him to explain his experiments to me himself."
At this moment the little horn of departure sounded its quaint note from the end of the platform, and a porter hurried to lock the door of the wagon-lit.
"Have you everything you want for the journey?" asked Matheson.
"I have everything I want," replied his wife coldly. "My father has seen to that.... Good-bye."
She did not offer to kiss him, and he for his part drew back into a shell of reserve. Many thoughts were buzzing through his mind as they exchanged the commonplaces of a railway station good-bye from either side of a compartment window.
Olive's last words were: "Remember, I'm expecting you to bring your brother with you to-morrow."
A very tired look was in Matheson's eyes, and a weary droop on his shoulders, as the train pulled out and he was left alone on the platform.
Two Frenchmen whispered to one another about him. "The milord Matheson, see you! The very rich milord Matheson."
"Ah, if I were only a rich man too!"
"What would you do?"
"I should spend. How I should spend!" He licked his lips at the thought of the pleasures of body that money could buy him.
"I should save," said the other. "I should make myself the richest man in the world. That would be glorious!"
These last words reached the ears of Matheson, and set up a curious train of thought as he drove in his cab to his office in the Rue Laffitte. The words carried him back to a forest-clearing in the backwoods of Ontario, where he and his half-brother had made holiday camp some eighteen years before. They were comparing ambitions--two young men unusually alike in features but very different in temperament and will-power. John Rivi��re, the elder of the two, was dreaming of fame in the paths of science--he had worked his way through M'Gill University and was hoping for a demonstratorship to keep him in living expenses. Clifford Matheson, a clerk in a broker's office, planned his life in terms of cities and money. "To make big money--that's what I call success."
In the rapids of the stream by their feet was a swirl of waters covering a sunken rock, and Rivi��re had thrown on to it a chip of wood. The chip was whirled round and round, nearer and nearer to the centre, until finally it was sucked under with a sudden extinguishment.
"There's the life you plan," he had said to Clifford....
CHAPTER II
A ��5,000,000 DEAL
When Matheson reached his office, he was told by a clerk that Mr Lars Larssen was already waiting to see him. He threw off his gloves and fur-lined coat and adjusted the lights before he answered that his visitor could be shown in. He added that the clerk could lock up his own rooms and leave, as he would not be wanted any longer that evening.
There was a quiet simplicity in Matheson's office that one would scarcely associate with the operations of high finance. One might have looked for costly furnishings and an atmosphere redolent of big money. Yet here was a simple rosewood desk with a bowl of mimosa on it, and around the walls were a few simple landscapes from recent salons.
If Lars Larssen were a magic name to Sir Francis Letchmere, it was a magic name also to many other men of affairs. From cabin-boy to millionaire shipowner was his story in brief. But that does not tell one quarter. The son of Scandinavian immigrants to the States, factory-workers, he had run away to sea at the age of fourteen,