Page:Bailey - Call Mr Fortune (Dutton, 1921).djvu/129

118 "It's murder, old man," Charlecote muttered.

"Everybody's doing it." Mr. Fortune frowned at him. "Who's slain now?"

"It's my father."

"My dear chap! Oh, my dear chap!" Mr. Fortune was startled into sympathy.

"I say Fortune—for God's sake" Charlecote gasped.

"Quite. Quite," said Mr. Fortune, linked arms with him, and marched him off.

When Reggie Fortune ambled through his four years at Oxford, Geoffrey Charlecote was one of the great men of his college, a cricket blue, socially magnificent, and even suspected of brains. The Charlecote family dated from the Victorian age. When the building of railways began, Geoffrey's grandfather was a navvy. He became a contractor, made half a million, and died. Shares of his practical ability, his originality, his driving power, and his disdain for the ten commandments (he was a mean old sinner) were inherited in different proportions by his three descendants. Stephenson Charlecote, his son, had one child, Geoffrey, and was also the guardian of an orphan nephew, Herbert. Stephenson Charlecote was a capable man of business. In his hands the family wealth increased. His only ambition was that the family should get on in the world. So it was Eton and Oxford for Geoffrey,