He got home, however, at his usual luncheon hour to find a telegram
waiting for him on the Heppelwhite table in the hall. There had been a
continued buying of copper shares, and the feature was a sensational rise
in Bostons, which during the morning had gone up a clear point.
Mr. Taynton had no need to make calculations; he knew, as a man knows the
multiplication table of two, what every fraction of a rise in Bostons
meant to him, and this, provided only he had time to sell at once, meant
the complete recovery of the losses he had suffered. With those active
markets it was still easily possible though it was Saturday, to effect
his sale, since there was sure to be long continued business in the
Street and he had but to be able to exercise his option at that price, to
be quit of that dreadful incubus of anxiety which for the last two years
had been a millstone round his neck that had grown mushroom like. The
telephone to town, of course, was far the quickest mode of communication,
and having given his order he waited ten minutes till the tube babbled
and croaked to him again.
There is a saying that things are "too good to be true," but when Mr.
Taynton sat down to his lunch that day, he felt that the converse of the
proverb was the correcter epigram. Things could be so good that they
must be true, and here, still ringing in his ears was one of
them--Morris--it was thus he phrased it to himself--was "paid off," or,
in more business-like language, the fortune of which Mr. Taynton was
trustee was intact again, and, like a tit-bit for a good child, there was
an additional five or six hundred pounds for him who had managed the
trust so well. Mr. Taynton could not help feeling somehow that he
deserved it; he had increased Morris's fortune since he had charge of it
by £10,000. And what a lesson, too, he had had, so gently and painlessly
taught him! No one knew better than he how grievously wrong he had got,
in gambling with trust money. Yet now it had come right: he had repaired
the original wrong; on Monday he would reinvest this capital in those
holdings which he had sold, and Morris's £40,000 (so largely the result
of careful and judicious investment) would certainly stand the scrutiny
of any who could possibly have any cause to examine his ledgers. Indeed
there would be nothing to see. Two years ago Mr. Morris Assheton's
fortune was invested in certain railway debentures and Government stock.
It would in a few days' time be invested there again, precisely as it had
been. Mr. Taynton had not been dealing in gilt-edged securities lately,
and could not absolutely trust his memory, but he rather thought that the
repurchase could be made at a somewhat smaller sum than had been realised
by their various sales dating from two years ago. In that case there was
a little more _sub rosa_ reward for this well-inspired justice, weighed
but featherwise against the overwhelming relief of the knowledge he could
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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