London - Edward Rutherfurd [501]
“You’ve met my daughter,” he remarked. Penny agreed that he had. “You’d better answer for yourself, then,” Forsyth declared, taking a pinch of snuff.
Penny felt rather as though he were a vessel being inspected to discover if it is seaworthy. Forsyth asked the questions. He answered. His family? He explained them. His religion? His ancestors were Huguenot. This drew a sniff, it seemed of approval. He himself, he admitted, was Church of England, but even this seemed to pass. “It’s respectable,” said Forsyth. His position? He explained he was a clerk at Meredith’s. Forsyth looked thoughtful, then, like the Presbyterian minister he might have been, announced: “A man who invests in Mexico may be saved. In Peru. . .” Sniff. “Never.”
Required to declare his own fortune, Penny told all, truthfully and, asked to do so, related his dealings in detail. This elicited a sigh. “This market is over-heating, young man. Get out or you’ll be burned.”
Eugene would have liked to argue, but was too wise. “When should I get out, sir?”
Forsyth gazed at him as he might at a man hanging by his fingers over a cliff, before he decided whether to tread on the fingers or help him up. “By Easter,” he said definitively. And then, quite suddenly, as if he considered he had been much too kind: “You wear spectacles, Mr Penny. The truth, man. How bad are your eyes?”
Eugene explained that his father and grandfather had been short-sighted too. “But it doesn’t seem to get any worse,” he added.
Whether this satisfied Forsyth, Eugene could not tell, but he soon found himself asked a series of questions about banking and finance which warned him that the Scotsman’s mind was very sharp indeed. Most he knew how to answer, but the final question made him pause.
“What, Mr Penny, do you think of the return to gold?”
Eugene remembered how he had answered the Earl when he had asked the same question, and he knew how most people in the City still felt, but he also reckoned, if he had judged his man correctly, that another answer was now required.
“I am in favour of the gold standard, sir,” he said.
“Ye are?” For once he had surprised the Scot. “And why, may I ask, would that be?”
“Because, sir,” Penny boldly replied, “I do not trust the Bank of England.”
“Well.” Even Forsyth, for a moment, was speechless. Penny kept a straight face. He had been right. “It is not often,” Forsyth finally confessed, “that a young man can be found in the City with such views.” Eugene had hit. Even the Bank of England, to Forsyth, was a weak and broken vessel. For a moment or two the older man sat thoughtfully, before recovering himself sufficiently to take another pinch of snuff. “So,” he returned to the attack, “you care for Mary? You must admit though, she’s no beauty.”
Mary Forsyth had a slim figure, and a head which some might have thought a little large. Her brown hair was parted in the middle, and she had a somewhat studious look. There was nothing fashionable or coquettish about her. Her beauty lay in her kindly nature and her high intelligence. Eugene sincerely loved her.
“I beg to differ, sir.”
Sniff. A pause. “So then,” Forsyth blandly remarked, “it’s her money you’re after, I dare say.” He watched Penny, almost amiably.
Eugene considered. Though not known as a rich man like some of the bankers, there was no doubt that Forsyth had a very solid fortune, and Mary was his only child. To pretend he had no interest in this fact would be absurd and disingenuous. He took stock of his man. “I should never seek to marry a woman,” he began carefully, “whom I did not love and respect, sir. As to her fortune,” he continued, “it’s not so much money I look for. But I desire to marry into a family,” he paused for just an instant, “that is sound.”
“Sound, do you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sound? I am sound, sir. You may be sure of that. I am very sound indeed!”
Penny inclined his head and said nothing. Forsyth also