"By your leave, Mr. Windsor, I shall go to my own room to arrange my toilet, and then I must see about the disposition of the furniture, bibelots and pictures, and attend to the preparations for the reception of the guests. You need not meet them until just before dinner, when I shall be on hand to present them to you. I cannot be here after to-night. I must start to-morrow morning for Hampshire, where Prince Petroloff demands my services. You see, I am a hard-worked man, Mr. Windsor."
"So you are for an Englishman, Mr. Jawkins. Then I suppose that it is necessary that you should attend to all the details of your profession personally. By the way, my daughter tells me that she has asked young Geoffrey Ripon, who used to be on the British Legation at Paris, where we were two summers ago. You must arrange for him at the dinner-table."
"Ah, the Earl of Brompton! He is not a client of mine, but I have my eye on him. His earthly possessions consist of about five acres of land, a tumble-down hut near by, and a double-barrelled shotgun, and he lost his secretaryship when the new administration made its clean sweep of the offices. They said he was going to marry a rich girl once, I believe."
"It seems that he did not," said Mr. Windsor, rising from his seat.
Mr. Jawkins bowed and bustled from the room, and Mr. Windsor soon heard his sharp voice ordering the army of workmen in the adjacent rooms with the precision and authority of a field-marshal.
The situation amused and at the same time disconcerted the humorous American, as he settled back in a chair before the great wood fire which crackled in the chimney. Though the chair was soft and yielding he did not look comfortable, for men with long, bony, angular figures never seem to look at their ease.
Abraham Windsor's name twenty years before the date of this story would not have added to the marketable value of the most modest promissory note in the money markets of Chicago, to which city he had come fresh from his father's farm in upper Illinois; but at this time it was a tower of strength in financial quarters, and men counted his wealth by tens of millions.
He was the Jupiter of the financial world, and men said that when his iron-gray locks fell over each other, as he nodded, Wall Street trembled and Lombard Street crashed; so that it seemed only from forbearance that he did not sweep all the chips upon the great gaming-table of the world into his deep pockets. His sudden trip to Europe had caused much discussion. Some knowing ones whispered that he had bought a controlling interest in the Bank of England from the assignees in bankruptcy of the Brothkinders, with the object of making a panic in trade by a sudden raise of the rate of discount to six per cent; others, that he had come over to unload upon the British public his shares in the Hudson Bay and Cape Horn Railroad Company.
He was amused by the wild rumors, for he had, in truth, come to England with no deep-laid scheme or motive, but simply because his daughter had ordered his doing so; for while Abraham Windsor ruled the shares market and the world of speculation, a certain young woman ruled him, and the hard-headed man of affairs, who could outwit an Israelite banker, was as wax under her dainty fingers. At the close of the last season at Newport, Miss Margaret had ordered her father, as she poured out his coffee at breakfast, to engage a country house in England for the winter. Mr. Windsor looked up from the New York Herald, which likened him to his Satanic Majesty in one column and described his new steam yacht in another, and he said, "Aye, aye, miss," to her order.
And straightway after breakfast he went to the Casino Club and telephoned to Jarley Jawkins for his list of estates to rent in England, for he knew full well that whether Wall Street or the heavens crashed Miss Maggie's orders were to be obeyed. She selected Ripon House from Jawkins's list, and her father hired it, although he had a leaning toward Windsor Castle, which the Republic wished to lease for a term of years, or to sell upon easy terms.