Peter listened intently. “I don’t hear anything!” he said. “It must be in your head. I sometimes get a noise in mine.” He listened intently. “No, there’s nothing. It’s all so deadly still.”
They sat silent for a while.
“Peter Simon Halket,” said the stranger suddenly—Peter started; he had not told him his second name—“if it should come to pass that you should obtain those lands you have desired, and you should obtain black men to labour on them and make to yourself great wealth; or should you create that company”—Peter started—“and fools should buy from you, so that you became the richest man in the land; and if you should take to yourself wide lands, and raise to yourself great palaces, so that princes and great men of earth crept up to you and laid their hands against yours, so that you might slip gold into them—what would it profit you?”
“Profit!” Peter Halket stared: “Why, it would profit everything. What makes Beit and Rhodes and Barnato so great? If you’ve got eight millions—”
“Peter Simon Halket, which of those souls you have seen on earth is to you greatest?” said the stranger, “Which soul is to you fairest?”
“Ah,” said Peter, “but we weren’t talking of souls at all; we were talking of money. Of course if it comes to souls, my mother’s the best person I’ve ever seen. But what does it help her? She’s got to stand washing clothes for those stuck-up nincompoops of fine ladies! Wait till I’ve got money! It’ll be somebody else then, who—”
“Peter Halket,” said the stranger, “who is the greatest; he who serves or he who is served?” Peter looked at the stranger: then it flashed on him that he was mad.
“Oh,” he said, “if it comes to that, what’s anything! You might as well say, sitting there in your old linen shirt, that you were as great as Rhodes or Beit or Barnato, or a king. Of course a man’s just the same whatever he’s got on or whatever he has; but he isn’t the same to other people.”
“There have kings been born in stables,” said the stranger.
Then Peter saw that he was joking, and laughed. “It must have been a long time ago; they don’t get born there now,” he said. “Why, if God Almighty came to this country, and hadn’t half-a-million in shares, they wouldn’t think much of Him.”