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Updated: June 28, 2025
It wouldn't be right of me to sell them to you under false pretences, however unwilling on my side. I couldn't do it." "Well, then," I said, going up a bit in my bids to meet him, "I'll put it like this. These gems are paste. But Lady Vandrift has an unconquerable and unaccountable desire to possess them. Money doesn't matter to her. She is a friend of your wife's.
But if you're Sir Charles Vandrift," he went on, examining his books, "how does it come you've registered as Mr. Peter Porter?" Charles grew red with embarrassment. The difficulty deepened. The dispatch-box, always covered with a leather case, bore on its inner lid the name "Sir Charles Vandrift, K.C.M.G.," distinctly painted in the orthodox white letters.
The Scotch lassie's eyes caught Amelia's at the same time, and she broke into a pretty smile of good-humoured amusement. "Taken in another person, Dick, dear!" she exclaimed, in her breezy way, turning to her husband. "Lady Vandrift is observing your diamond sleeve-links." "They're very fine gems," Amelia observed incautiously.
An impostor had written to them on Lebenstein paper from Meran to say that he was coming to London to negotiate the sale of the schloss and surrounding property with the famous millionaire, Sir Charles Vandrift; and Sir Charles had demonstratively recognised him at sight as the real Count von Lebenstein.
Indeed, seeing he had registered as Porter, and now "claimed" as Vandrift, the manager hinted in pretty plain language he very much doubted whether there had ever been a dispatch-box in the matter at all, or whether, if there were one, it had ever contained any valuable documents. We spent a wretched morning.
In the first place, the stones are large and valuable; in the second place, they're well known every dealer has heard of the Vandrift rivière, and seen pictures of the shape of them. They're marked gems, so to speak. No, he played a better game took a couple of them off, and offered them to the only one person on earth who was likely to buy them without suspicion.
He wrote me such a letter at the end of his last trick here, positively here, in America." And he proceeded to give his own version of the Quackenboss incident, enlivened with sundry imaginative bursts of pure Vandrift fancy. When Charles spoke of Mrs. Quackenboss the poet smiled.
They had done business for years for the late Count, who had inherited from his grandmother estates in Ireland; and they were glad to be honoured with the confidence of his successor. Glad, too, to make the acquaintance of a prince of finance like Sir Charles Vandrift. Sir Charles named a price, and referred them to his solicitors.
We were told before we came here and no doubt with truth that Sir Charles Vandrift was the most close-fisted and tyrannical old curmudgeon in Scotland. We've been writing to all our friends to say ecstatically that he was, on the contrary, a most hospitable, generous, and large-hearted gentleman.
Her ways were winsome. I couldn't hear what she said, but he seemed to give way at last. "I should love Lady Vandrift to have them," she murmured, turning to me. "She is such a dear!" And she took out the links from her husband's cuffs and handed them across to me. "How much?" I asked. "Two thousand?" she answered, interrogatively. It was a big rise, all at once; but such are the ways of women.
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