Major White rose and laid aside his paper. Mr. Wade was coming down the iron steps that led from the verandah to the garden. The banker was cutting a cigar, and wore a placid, comfortable look, as if he had breakfasted well. Even as regards kidneys and bacon in a foreign hotel, where there is a will there is a way, and Marguerite possessed tongues. “I'll turn this place inside out,” she had said, “to get the old thing what he wants.” Then she attacked the waiter in fluent German.
Marguerite noted his approach with a protecting eye. “It's all solid common sense,” she said in an undertone to Joan, referring, it would appear, to his bulk.
In only one respect was she misinformed as to the arrangements for the morning. Tony Cornish was not coming to the hotel to fetch Mr. Wade and White, but was to meet them in the shadiest of all thoroughfares and green canals, the Koninginne Gracht, where at midday the shadows cast by the great trees are so deep that daylight scarcely penetrates, and the boats creep to and fro like shadows. This amendment had been made in view of the fact that Lord Ferriby was in the hotel, and was, indeed, at this moment partaking of a solemn breakfast in his private sitting-room overlooking the Toornoifeld.
His lordship did not, therefore, see these two solid pillars of the British constitution walk across the corner of the Korte Voorhout, cigar in lip, in a placid silence begotten, perhaps, of the knowledge that, should an emergency arise, they were of a material that would arise to meet it.
Cornish was awaiting them by the bank of the canal. He was watching a boat slowly work its way past him. It was one of the large boats built for traffic on the greater canals and the open waters of the Scheldt estuary. It was laden from end to end with little square boxes bearing only a number and a port mark in black stencil. A pleasant odor of sealing-wax dominated the weedy smell of the canal.
“Wherever you turn you meet the stuff,” was Cornish's greeting to the two Englishmen.
Major White, with his delicate sense of smell, sniffed the breeze. Mr. Wade looked at the canal-boat with a nod. Commercial enterprise, and, above all, commercial success, commanded his honest respect.