On Something | Page 9

if the thing were restored, and pretty well
hinting that no questions would be asked, but nothing came.
Meanwhile the burglars, whose names were Charles and Lothair
Femeral, foreigners but English-speaking, had found some of their
ill-acquired goods saleable, others unsaleable. They wanted a pound for
the little picture in the frame, and this they could not get, and it was a
bother haggling it about. Lothair Femeral thought of a good plan: he
stopped at an inn on the third day of their peregrinations, had a good
dinner with his brother, told the innkeeper that he could not pay the bill,
and offered to leave the Old Master in exchange. When people do this
it very often comes off, for the alternative is only the pleasure of seeing
the man in gaol, whereas a picture is always a picture, and there is a
gambler's chance of its turning up trumps. So the man grumbled and
took the little thing. He hung it up in the best room of the inn, where he

gave his richer customers food.
Thus it was that a young gentleman who had come down to ride in that
neighbourhood, although he did not know any of the rich people round
about, saw it one day, and on seeing it exclaimed loudly in an unknown
tongue; but he very rapidly repressed his emotion and simply told the
innkeeper that he had taken a fancy to the daub and would give him
thirty shillings for it.
The innkeeper, who had read in the newspapers of how pictures of the
utmost value are sold by fools for a few pence, said boldly that his
price was twenty pounds; whereupon the young gentleman went out
gloomily, and the innkeeper thought that he must have made a mistake,
and was for three hours depressed. But in the fourth hour again he was
elated, for the young gentleman came back with twenty pounds, not
even in notes but in gold, paid it down, and took away the picture. Then
again, in the fifth hour was the innkeeper a little depressed, but not as
much as before, for it struck him that the young gentleman must have
been very eager to act in such a fashion, and that perhaps he could have
got as much as twenty-one pounds by holding out and calling it
guineas.
The young gentleman telegraphed to his father (who lived in
Wimbledon but who did business in Bond Street) saying that he had got
hold of a Van Tromp which looked like a study for the big "Eversley"
Van Tromp in the Gallery, and he wanted to know what his father
would give for it. His father telegraphed back inviting him to spend one
whole night under the family roof. This the young man did, and, though
it wrung the old father's heart to have to do it, by the time he had seen
the young gentleman's find (or trouvaille as he called it) he had given
his offspring a cheque for five hundred pounds. Whereupon the young
gentleman left and went back to do some more riding, an exercise of
which he was passionately fond, and to which he had trained several
quiet horses.
The father wrote to a certain lord of his acquaintance who was very
fond of Van Tromps, and offered him this replica or study, in some
ways finer than the original, but he said it must be a matter for private
negotiation; so he asked for an appointment, and the lord, who was a
tall, red-faced man with a bluff manner, made an appointment for nine
o'clock next morning, which was rather early for Bond Street. But

money talks, and they met. The lord was very well dressed, and when
he talked he folded his hands (which had gloves on them) over the
knob of his stick and pressed his stick firmly upon the ground. It was a
way he had. But it did not frighten the old gentleman who did business
in Bond Street, and the long and short of it was that the lord did not get
the picture until he had paid three thousand guineas--not pounds, mind
you. For this sum the picture was to be sent round to the lord's house,
and so it was, and there it would have stayed but for a very curious
accident. The lord had put the greater part of his money into a company
which was developing the resources of the South Shetland Islands, and
by some miscalculation or other the expense of this experiment proved
larger than the revenues obtainable from it. His policy, as I need hardly
tell you, was to hang on, and so he did, because in the long run the
property must pay. And so it would if they could