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Updated: May 22, 2025
In Lorentz Uthoug's big house you had to pass through the hardware shop to get to his office, which lay behind. Peer knocked at the door, with a portfolio under his arm. Herr Uthoug had just lit the gas, and was on the point of sitting down at his American roll-top desk, when Peer entered.
Merle looked at her parents; she had sat through the meal anxious and troubled, and now the tears rose into her eyes. "Thanks," said Peer, lifting his glass and drinking to his host and hostess. "Thanks," he repeated, bowing to old Uthoug. The matter was arranged. Evidently the two old folks had talked it over together and come to an agreement.
Uthoug passed a restless and troubled night. The solid ground seemed to have failed him; his mind could find no firm foothold. His son-in-law must be a great man he should be the last to doubt it. But a hundred thousand to be ventured, not in landed property, or a big trade deal, but on the success of a piece of construction work. This was something new.
"Have you heard the latest news?" asked Lovli, the bank cashier, of his friend the telegraphist, who came up. "News? Do you tell me that there's ever any news in this accursed hole?" "Merle Uthoug has come back from the mountains engaged to be married." "The devil she is! What does the old man say to that?"
Merle, the children, Uthoug and his wife, the Bank Manager. And there were his competitors the world over. To-day he was a length ahead of them, but by to-morrow he might be left behind. Wait? Rest? No! It was autumn now, and sleepless nights drove him to a doctor, who prescribed cold baths, perfect quiet, sleeping draughts, iron and arsenic. Ah, yes.
"Why, yes I thought I'd like to see how you were getting on," said Uthoug, squaring his broad shoulders. "Quite well, thanks. Having no son-in-law, I'm not likely to go bankrupt, I daresay." "I'm not bankrupt, either," said old Uthoug, fixing his red eyes on her face. "Perhaps not. But what about him?" "Neither is he. He'll be a rich man before very long." "He! rich! Did you say rich?"
"She is not really so wild as she seems." Uthoug himself walked up and down the room, chatting to Peer and asking a great many questions about conditions in Egypt. He knew something about the Mahdi, and General Gordon, and Khartoum, and the strained relations between the Khedive and the Sultan.
But but I'm not worth as much as that altogether." "I can put in three hundred thousand of the four myself, in shares. And then, of course, I have the Loreng property, and the works. But put it at a round figure will you guarantee a hundred thousand?" There was another pause, and then the reply came from the far end of the room to which Uthoug had drifted: "Even that's a big sum."
Out in the field the machine stood ready, a slender, newly painted thing. A boy was harnessing the horses. Two men in soft hats and light overcoats came up; it was old Uthoug, and the Bank Manager. They stopped and looked round, leaning on their sticks; the results of the day were not a matter of entire indifference to these two gentlemen.
Their birthday gift to the young gentleman so lately christened Lorentz Uthoug stood in the drawing-room; it was a bust in red granite, the height of a man, of the Sun-god Re Hormachis, brought with them by the godfathers from Alexandria. And now it sat in the drawing-room between palms in pots, pressing its elbows against its sides and gazing with great dead eyes out into endless space.
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