“That’s all right, Mr. Schwartzbrod. Words break no bones, unless they cause the recipient to fling the dealer in them down a steep stairway. The automobile is waiting for you at the door. The chauffeur thinks the metal under the seat is copper. Your banker will tell you it is gold, so keep an eye on it till it is safely in his possession. There, there, do not thank me, I beg of you. I assure you I am not seeking for gratitude, but I am a little short of time to-day. In half an hour I am to meet the governor of the Bank of England, so I must bid you farewell.”
“Will you not come with me, then, in your own automobile, my lord?”
“Thank you, no. I think it best that you should be seen alone in the automobile if there have been rumors regarding your position down in the city. If anyone asks you what the machine cost, you can tell them its price is a net two thousand pounds. You will journey in that, and I shall take the twopenny tube, being a democratic sort of person. Good morning, Mr. Schwartz-brod, good morning.”
So Lord Stranleigh went down the huge lift at the twopenny tube, and in due time emerged to daylight at the Bank of England. He arrived in the anteroom a few minutes before the time of his appointment, and exactly at the arranged moment was called for, and ushered into the presence, for punctuality is the politeness of kings, and—governors of the Bank of England.
The stern, almost commanding attitude of this monarch of finance abashed the young man, and made him feel the useless worm of the dust Schwartzbrod had indicated he was. Stranleigh, who was always more scrupulously polite to a beggar than was his custom with the king, resented the sensation of inferiority which came upon him when confronted with the forbidding ruler of the bank. He said to himself:
“Good Heavens, is it possible that if I meet a man who is big enough, I shall actually cringe in my soul as Schwartzbrod does with his body?”
Nevertheless, that slight hesitation in speech which was apt to incommode him at critical moments overpowered him now, and his dislike of any attempt to win the respect of the iron man before him sent him in the other direction, and he knew that for the next ten minutes he was going to be regarded as the most hopeless fool in London. Yet he did not consider himself a fool, and his latent sense of humor prevented him from making any attempt at endowing his conversation with that wisdom which seemed so suitable to this somber room.
When the governor’s secretary had presented Lord Stranleigh’s letter to him, the head of the bank had peremptorily refused to waste time with a member of the aristocracy of whom he knew nothing, but the secretary, whose business it was to know everything, dropped one word in a short phrase that arrested the governor’s attention.
“It’s the rich Lord Stranleigh, sir.”
The word “rich” was the straw at which the drowning man clutched. So here was Stranleigh, the living contradiction of that phrase “The last of the Dandies.” Here was the embodiment of the spirit of Piccadilly and Bond Street confronted with the rugged, carelessly dressed dictator of Threadneedle Street, a frown on the beetling brow of one man, an inane, silly smile on the lips of the other. At the sight of this smile the governor saw at once that his first thought had been right. He should not have wasted a moment on this nonentity, yet he had before him the herculean task of providing the institute over which he presided with seventy millions of pounds worth of gold within five days, or stand discredited before the world. Despair was strangling expiring hope as he realized that this simpering noodle could not be the god in the machine; godlike in stalwart form, perhaps, but that simpering smile would have discredited Jove himself.