LORD MALVIN
If Sir William Gouldesbrough represented all that was most brilliant, modern, and daring in the scientific world of Europe, Lord Malvin stood as its official figure-head. He was the "grand old man" of science, and was regarded by every one as a final court of appeal in all such matters.
He was of a great age, almost eighty, in fact, yet his health was perfect, his intellect unimpaired, and his interest in human events as keen and vigorous as that of a man but half his age and in the full prime and meridian of life.
In science, he represented what the President of the Royal Academy represents in art, or the Lord Chief Justice in the law, and although he had almost ceased independent investigations, he was always appealed to and consulted when anything new and revolutionary in science was discovered or promulgated by any of the younger men.
The younger men themselves, while allowing their chief's vast knowledge and experience, his real and undeniable eminence, were apt to call him conservative, and to hint that he was of an alien generation. They would say that his judgment was sometimes obscured by his veneration and love for the past, and because he found himself unable to leap so rapidly to conclusions as they did, they put him down as an old fogey who had done valuable and remarkable work in his time, but who ought to be content with his peerage and immense fortune and retire to the planting of cabbages or the growing of roses in the country.
In the public eye, nevertheless, Lord Malvin remained as familiar and necessary a part of the English landscape as St. Paul's; and, whenever a great man died and the newspapers enumerated the few remaining veterans of the Commonwealth, Lord Malvin was usually the first to be mentioned.
For many years there had been an antagonism between Lord Malvin and Sir William Gouldesbrough. It was not personal so much as scientific, an abstract and intellectual antagonism. When Sir William's star first began to rise above the horizon—he was only Mr. Gouldesbrough then—Lord Malvin had recognized his talent as an inventor, but deprecated many of his theories. These ideas, these possibilities for the future which Gouldesbrough was fond of giving to the world in lectures and reviews, seemed horribly dangerous, subversive, and fantastic to the older man.
He said so in no uncertain voice, and for some years, though he was always kind and civil to Gouldesbrough, he certainly did much to discount the rising star's power of illumination.
But as time went on, each daring theory put forth by Gouldesbrough passed into the realm of actual fact. Lord Malvin saw that Sir William had been almost invariably right. He saw that the new man not only told the world that some day this or that marvel would come to pass, but immediately afterwards set to work and himself made it come to pass!
Lord Malvin was a noble man as well as a nobleman—sometimes a rare combination to-day—and he confessed himself in the wrong. Directly he saw that he had been mistaken, and that Sir William was no charlatan, but one of the most daring and brilliant scientists the world had ever known, the peer gave the newer man all the weight of his support. Nevertheless, while forced by circumstance and Gouldesbrough's justification of his own ideas into a scientific brotherhood, Lord Malvin, who constantly met the other, found a new problem confronting him.