The one defect of the dinner was that the men were not in evening dress.

(Denry registered a new rule of life: Never travel without your evening dress, because you never know what may turn up.) The girls were radiantly white. And after all there is nothing like white. Mrs.

Cotterill was in black silk and silence. And after all there is nothing like black silk. There was champagne. There were ices. Nellie, not being permitted champagne, took her revenge in ice. Denry had found an opportunity to relate to her the history of the Chocolate Remedy. She said, "How wonderful you are!" And he said it was she who was wonderful. Denry gave no information about the Chocolate Remedy to her father. Neither did she. As for Ruth, indubitably she was responsible for the social success of the dinner. She seemed to have the habit of these affairs. She it was who loosed tongues. Nevertheless, Denry saw her now with different eyes and it appeared incredible to him that he had once mistaken her for the jewel of the world.

At the end of the dinner Councillor Rhys-Jones produced a sensation by rising to propose the health of their host. He referred to the superb heroism of England's lifeboatmen, and in the name of the Inst.i.tution thanked Denry for the fifty-three pounds which Denry's public had contributed to the funds. He said it was a n.o.ble contribution and that Denry was a philanthropist. And he called on Councillor Cotterill to second the toast. Which Councillor Cotterill did, in good set terms the result of long habit. And Denry stammered that he was much obliged, and that really it was nothing.

But when the toasting was finished Councillor Cotterill lapsed somewhat into a patronising irony, as if he were jealous of a youthful success.

And he did not stop at "young man." He addressed Denry grandiosely as "my boy."

"This lifeboat-it was just an idea, my boy, just an idea!" he said.

"Yes," said Denry; "but I thought of it."

"The question is," said the Councillor pompously, "can you think of any more ideas as good?"

"Well," said Denry, "can _you_?"

With reluctance they left the luxury of the private dining-room, and Denry surrept.i.tiously paid the bill with a pile of sovereigns, and Councillor Rhys-Jones parted from them with lively grief. The other five walked in a row along the Parade in the moonlight. And when they arrived in front of Craig-y-don, and the Cotterills were entering, Ruth, who loitered behind, said to Denry in a liquid voice:

"I don't feel a bit like going to sleep. I suppose you would n't care for a stroll?"

"Well--"

"I dare say you 're very tired," she said.

"No," he replied; "it's this moonlight I 'm afraid of."

And their eyes met under the door-lamp, and Ruth wished him pleasant dreams and vanished. It was exceedingly subtle.

VII

The next afternoon the Cotterills and Ruth Earp went home, and Denry with them. Llandudno was just settling into its winter sleep, and Denry's rather complex affairs had all been put in order. Though the others showed a certain la.s.situde, he himself was hilarious. Among his insignificant luggage was a new hat-box, which proved to be the origin of much gaiety.

"Just take this, will you?" he said to a porter on the platform at Llandudno Station, and held out the new hat-box with an air of calm.

The porter innocently took it, and then, as the hat-box nearly jerked his arm out of the socket, gave vent to his astonishment after the manner of porters.

"By gum, mister!" said he. "That's heavy!"

It, in fact, weighed nearly two stone.

"Yes," said Denry; "it's full of sovereigns, of course."

And everybody laughed.

At Crewe, where they had to change, and again at Knype and at Bursley, he produced astonishment in porters by concealing the effort with which he handed them the hat-box as though its weight was ten ounces. And each time he made the same witticism about sovereigns.

"What _have_ you got in that hat-box?" Ruth asked.

"Don't I tell you?" said Denry, laughing. "Sovereigns!"

Lastly he performed the same trick on his mother. Mrs. Machin was working, as usual, in the cottage in Brougham Street. Perhaps the notion of going to Llandudno for a change had not occurred to her. In any case, her presence had been necessary in Bursley, for she had frequently collected Denry's rents for him, and collected them very well. Denry was glad to see her again, and she was glad to see him, but they concealed their feelings as much as possible. When he basely handed her the hat-box she dropped it, and roundly informed him that she was not going to have any of his pranks.

After tea, whose savouriness he enjoyed quite as much as his own state dinner, he gave her a key and asked her to open the hat-box, which he had placed on a chair.

"What is there in it?"

"A lot of jolly fine pebbles that I 've been collecting on the beach,"

he said.

She got the hat-box on to her knee, and unlocked it, and came to a thick cloth, which she partly withdrew, and then there was a scream from Mrs.

Machin, and the hat-box rolled with a terrific crash to the tiled floor, and she was ankle-deep in sovereigns. She could see sovereigns running about all over the parlour. Gradually even the most active sovereigns decided to lie down and be quiet, and a great silence ensued. Denry's heart was beating.

Mrs. Machin merely shook her head. Not often did her son deprive her of words, but this theatrical culmination of his home-coming really did leave her speechless.

Late that night rows of piles of sovereigns decorated the oval table in the parlour.

"A thousand and eleven," said Denry at length, beneath the lamp.

"There's fifteen missing yet. We 'll look for 'em to-morrow."

For several days afterwards Mrs. Machin was still picking up sovereigns.

Two had even gone outside the parlour, and down the two steps into the backyard, and, finding themselves unable to get back, had remained there.

And all the town knew that the unique Denry had thought of the idea of returning home to his mother with a hat-box crammed with sovereigns.

This was Denry's "latest," and it employed the conversation of the borough for I don't know how long.

CHAPTER VI. HIS BURGLARY

I

The fact that Denry Machin decided not to drive behind his mule to Sneyd Hall showed in itself that the enterprise of interviewing the Countess of Ch.e.l.l was not quite the simple daily trifling matter that he strove to pretend it was.

The mule was a part of his more recent splendour. It was aged seven, and it had cost Denry ten pounds. He had bought it off a farmer whose wife "stood" St. Luke's Market. His excuse was that he needed help in getting about the Five Towns in pursuit of cottage rents, for his business of a rent collector had grown. But for this purpose a bicycle would have served equally well, and would not have cost a shilling a day to feed, as the mule did, nor have shied at policemen, as the mule nearly always did. Denry had bought the mule simply because he had been struck all of a sudden with the idea of buying the mule. Some time previously Jos Curtenty (the Deputy Mayor, who became Mayor of Bursley on the Earl of Ch.e.l.l being called away to govern an Australian Colony) had made an enormous sensation by buying a flock of geese and driving them home himself. Denry did not like this. He was, indeed, jealous, if a large mind can be jealous. Jos Curtenty was old enough to be his grandfather, and had been a recognised "card" and "character" since before Denry's birth. But Denry, though so young, had made immense progress as a card, and had, perhaps justifiably, come to consider himself as the premier card, the very ace, of the town. He felt that some reply was needed to Curtenty's geese, and the mule was his reply.

It served excellently. People were soon asking each other whether they had heard that Denry Machin's "latest" was to buy a mule. He obtained a little old victoria for another ten pounds, and a good set of harness for three guineas. The carriage was low which enabled him, as he said, to nip in and out much more easily than in and out of a trap. In his business you did almost nothing but nip in and out. On the front seat he caused to be fitted a narrow box of j.a.panned tin with a formidable lock and slits on the top. This box was understood to receive the rents, as he collected them. It was always guarded on journeys by a cross between a mastiff and something unknown, whose growl would have terrorised a lion-tamer. Denry himself was afraid of Rajah, the dog, but he would not admit it. Rajah slept in the stable behind Mrs.

Machin's cottage, for which Denry paid a shilling a week. In the stable there was precisely room for Rajah, the mule, and the carriage, and when Denry entered to groom or to harness, something had to go out.

The equipage quickly grew into a familiar sight of the streets of the district. Denry said that it was funny without being vulgar. Certainly it amounted to a continual advertis.e.m.e.nt for him; an infinitely more effective advertis.e.m.e.nt than, for instance, a sandwich-man at eighteen-pence a day, and costing no more, even with the license and the shoeing. Moreover a sandwich-man has this inferiority to a turnout: when you have done with him you cannot put him up to auction and sell him. Further, there are no sandwich-men in the Five Towns; in that democratic and independent neighbourhood n.o.body would deign to be a sandwich-man.

The mulish vehicular display does not end the tale of Denry's splendour.

He had an office in St. Luke's Square, and in the office was an office-boy, small but genuine, and a real copying-press, and outside it was the little square signboard which in the day of his simplicity used to be screwed on to his mother's door. His mother's steely firmness of character had driven him into the extravagance of an office. Even after he had made over a thousand pounds out of the Llandudno lifeboat in less than three months, she would not listen to a proposal for going into a slightly larger house, of which one room might serve as an office. Nor would she abandon her own labours as a sempstress. She said that since her marriage she had always lived in that cottage and had always worked, and that she meant to die there, working; and that Denry could do what he chose. He was a bold youth, but not bold enough to dream of quitting his mother; besides, his share of household expenses in the cottage was only ten shillings a week. So he rented the office; and he hired an office-boy, partly to convey to his mother that he should do what he chose, and partly for his own private amus.e.m.e.nt.

He was thus, at an age when fellows without imagination are fraying their cuffs for the enrichment of their elders and glad if they can afford a cigar once a month, in possession of a business, business premises, a clerical staff, and a private carriage drawn by an animal unique in the Five Towns. He was living on less than his income; and in the course of about two years, to a very small extent by economies and to a very large extent by injudicious but happy investments, he had doubled the Llandudno thousand and won the deference of the manager of the bank at the top of St. Luke's Square-one of the most unsentimental men that ever wrote "refer to drawer" on a cheque.