"Dunsany, Lord - collection - Tales of Three Hemispheres" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

the value of so much as a thousand pounds, he saw far more than that in the
man's eager need for it. An afternoon of brooding over lost opportunities
led to a night of remorse, and scarcely had day dawned when he ran to his
sitting-room to see if he still had safe the card of Santiago. And there was
the neat and perfumed carte de visite with Santiago's Parisian address in
the corner.
That morning he sought him out, and found Santiago seated at a table with
chemicals and magnifying glasses beside him examining, as it lay spread wide
before him, the old brown coat. And Peters fancied he wore a puzzled air.
They came at once to business. Peters was rich and asked Santiago to name
his price, and that small dark man admitted financial straits, and so was
willing to sell for thirty thousand pounds. A little bargaining followed,
the price came down and the old brown coat changed hands once more, for
twenty thousand pounds.
Let any who may be inclined to doubt my story understand that in the City,
as any respectable company promoter will tell them, twenty thousand pounds
is invested almost daily with less return for it than an old tail coat. And,
whatever doubts Mr. Peters felt that day about the wisdom of his investment,
there before him lay that tangible return, that something that may be
actually fingered and seen, which is so often denied to the investor in gold
mines and other Selected Investments. Yet as the days wore on and the old
coat grew no younger, nor any more wonderful, nor the least useful, but more
and more like an ordinary old coat, Peters began once more to doubt his
astuteness. Before the week was out his doubts had grown acute. And then one
morning, Santiago returned. A man, he said, had just arrived from Spain, a
friend unexpected all of a sudden in Paris, from whom he might borrow money:
and would Peters resell the coat for thirty thousand pounds?
It was then that Peters, seeing his opportunity, cast aside the pretence
that he had maintained for so long of knowing something about the mysterious
coat, and demanded to know its properties. Santiago swore that he knew not,
and repeatedly swore the same by many sacred names; but when Peters as often
threatened not to sell, Santiago at last drew out a thin cigar and, lighting
it and settling himself in a chair, told all he knew of the coat.
He had been on its tracks for weeks with suspicions growing all the time
that it was no ordinary coat, and at last he had run it to earth in that
auction room but would not bid for it more than twenty pounds for fear of
letting every one into the secret. What the secret was he swore he did not
know, but this much he knew all along, that the weight of the coat was
absolutely nothing; and he had discovered by testing it with acids that the
brown stuff of which the coat was made was neither cloth nor silk nor any
known material, and would neither burn nor tear. He believed it to be some
undiscovered element. And the properties of the coat which he was convinced
were marvellous he felt sure of discovering within another week by means of
experiments with his chemicals. Again he offered thirty thousand pounds, to
be paid within two or three days if all went well. And then they started
haggling together as business men will.
And all the morning went by over the gardens of the Tuileries and the
afternoons came on, and only by two o'clock they arrived at an
understanding, on a basis, as they called it, of thirty thousand guineas.
And the old tail coat was brought out and spread on the table, and they