‘Do you mean to say,’ began the Prince with tense calmness, ‘that you are not in a position to let me have that million?’
‘I could let your Highness have a million in a couple of years’ time.’
The Prince made a gesture of annoyance. ‘Mr Levi,’ he said, ‘if you do not place the money in my hands to-morrow you will ruin one of the oldest of reigning families, and, incidentally, you will alter the map of Europe. You are not keeping faith, and I had relied on you.’
‘Pardon me, your Highness,’ said little Levi, rising in resentment, ‘it is not I who have not kept faith. I beg to repeat that the money is no longer at my disposal, and to bid your Highness good morning.’
And Mr Sampson Levi left the audience chamber with an awkward, aggrieved bow. It was a scene characteristic of the end of the nineteenth century—an overfed, commonplace, pursy little man who had been born in a Brixton semi-detached villa, and whose highest idea of pleasure was a Sunday up the river in an expensive electric launch, confronting and utterly routing, in a hotel belonging to an American millionaire, the representative of a race of men who had fingered every page of European history for centuries, and who still, in their native castles, were surrounded with every outward circumstance of pomp and power.
‘Aribert,’ said Prince Eugen, a little later, ‘you were right. It is all over. I have only one refuge—’
‘You don’t mean—’ Aribert stopped, dumbfounded.
‘Yes, I do,’ he said quickly. ‘I can manage it so that it will look like an accident.’