"Le vrai moyen d'être trompé c'est de se croire plus fin que les autres."
I stole out of the house before daybreak the next morning, and riding to Yarmouth, took a very early and (with perhaps a subtle appropriateness) a very fishy train to London.
So ill equipped was I to contend with a financier of Miste's force that I did not even know the hour at which the London banks opened for business. A general idea, however, that half-past ten would make quite a long enough day for such work made me hope to be in time to frustrate or perchance to catch red-handed this clever miscreant.
The train was due to arrive at Liverpool Street station at ten o'clock, and ten minutes after that hour I stepped from a cab at the door of the great bank in Lombard Street.
"The manager," I said, hurriedly, to an individual in brass buttons and greased hair, whose presence in the building was evidently for a purely ornamental purpose. I was shown into a small glass room like a green-house, where sat two managers, as under a microscope—a living example of frock-coated respectability and industry to half a hundred clerks who were ever peeping that way as they turned the pages of their ledgers and circulated in an undertone the latest chop-house tale.
"Mr. Howard," said the manager, with his watch in his hand. "I was waiting for you."
"Have you cashed the draft?"
"Yes—at ten o'clock. The payee was waiting on the doorstep for us to open. The clerk delayed as long as possible, but we could not refuse payment. Hundred-pound notes as usual. Never trust a man who takes it in hundred-pound notes. Here are the numbers. As hard as you can to the Bank of England and stop them! You may catch him there."
He pushed me out of the room, sending with me the impression that inside the frock-coat, behind the bland gold-rimmed spectacles, there was yet something left of manhood and that vague quality called fight, which is surely hard put to live long between four glass walls.
The cabman, who perhaps scented sport, was waiting for me though I had paid him, and as I drove along Lombard Street I thought affectionately of Miste's long thin neck, and wondered whether there would be room for the two of us in the Bank of England.