Alistair shivered as he heard the ruthless sentence. A picture rose before him of a young man proud in his employer’s favour, and filled with ambitious dreams for the future, going home to an old mother, or perhaps a newly-married bride, in some pleasant little suburban home, and breaking the news that he was ruined. It was in this way that money-bags were guarded.
Mendes sat considering for a moment.
“You don’t know why Rothschilds refused them, I suppose?” he threw out.
“I didn’t know they had applied to Rothschilds!” exclaimed Alistair in astonishment.
“All these people do, as a rule. Rothschilds have the name, you know. Every financial scheme that gets floated in London goes there first. We smaller men have to subsist on their leavings.”
He sat up to his desk, and wrote a short note, which he sealed up and addressed himself. Then he touched the bell again, and handed it to the doomed young man, whom Alistair gazed on with a fascinated interest.
“Take it yourself. They may see you. Now,” he said, turning to Stuart, “come and have lunch.”
Mendes conducted his guest to a big club-house behind the church at the corner of Lombard Street. In the hall he stopped and wrote down Lord Alistair’s name in the visitors’ book with satisfaction. Regard for race is a sentiment deeply rooted in the Semitic mind, and Mendes took a genuine pleasure in the thought that his companion was a descendant of Scottish Kings.
They took their seats at a small table in the midst of a vast room filled with similar ones, nearly all of them inconveniently crowded. The lunchers were mostly middle-aged men of prosperous appearance, and their talk seemed to run chiefly on gambling as it is carried on at the legalized Monte Carlo in Chapel Court. They all spoke to each other without formality, and a man who came and sat down at the same table as Mendes and Stuart at once plunged into a story of some speculator who had been gambling in copper, and owing to an unexpected desertion of the market by other speculators found himself suddenly left with some hundreds of tons of ore on his hands, which were actually brought in waggons to his office in Billiter Buildings, where he had one small room and a boy. The idea that a buyer and seller of anything should be called upon actually to handle it evidently appealed to the narrator as a superb joke.
Generally speaking the lunches were of a very substantial description, and champagne seemed to be the only wine in much demand. Mendes catered liberally for his guest, and over their coffee offered him a cigar which the Duke of Trent and Colonsay could not have afforded to smoke. But most of the men round them were smoking similar cigars. It was impossible to think that everyone in that crowd was as rich as Mendes. Alistair could only suppose that they represented the winners of the moment, who were spending their gains with a gambler’s recklessness in the belief that their luck would never turn.