We have now to watch another aspect of the great struggle which for so many years had been maturing in secrecy and darkness, and the true nature of which was hidden from all save one man.

It was seven o’clock in the morning, and in a vast bedroom of a house in Manchester Square a man lay with closed eyes. The house was one of those excessively plain dwellings of the very rich which are characteristic of the streets and squares of the West End of London. Its faÇade was relieved by no ornament. You saw merely a flat face of brick, with four rows of windows, getting smaller towards the roof, and a sombre green front-door in the middle of the lowest row. The house did not even seem large, but it was, in fact, extremely spacious, as anyone could see who put foot into the hall, where two footmen lounged from morn till night. The bedroom to which we have referred was on the first-floor. It occupied half the width of the house, and looked out on the square. Its three windows were made double, so that no sound from outside could penetrate that sacred apartment. Ventilation was contrived by means of two electric fans. The furniture consisted of the articles usual in an English bedroom, for the man in bed prided himself on being an Englishman who did not ape foreign ways. The said articles were, however, extraordinarily large, massive, and ornate. The pile of the immense carpet probably could not have been surpassed by any carpet in London. Across the foot of the carved oak bedstead was a broad sofa upholstered in softest silk.

An English bracket-clock on the mantelshelf intoned the hour of seven with English solemnity, and instantly afterwards an electric bell rang about six inches over the head of the occupant of the bed.

He opened his eyes wearily. He had not been asleep; indeed, he had spent most of the night in a futile wakefulness, which was a bad sign with a man who boasted that as a rule he could sleep at will, like Napoleon. Here was one detail out of many in which this man considered that he resembled Napoleon.

He groaned, pulled his gray moustache, stroked his chin, which bristled with the night’s growth of beard, and ran his fingers through his gray hair. Then he touched an electric button. Within ten seconds a valet entered, bearing the morning papers—not merely a judicious selection of morning papers, but every morning paper published in London.

‘Put them on the sofa, Jack.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The man rose out of bed with a sudden jerk. At the same moment the valet, with a movement which would have done credit to a juggler, placed a pair of bath slippers on his master’s feet, and with another movement of equal swiftness deposited a pair of six-pound dumbbells in his hands. The man performed six distinct exercises twelve times each, and then dropped the lumps of iron on the bed, whence the valet removed them.

‘Seven-thirty,’ said the man.

‘Yes, sir,’ said the valet, and disappeared.

The man sank languidly on to the sofa, and began, with the efficiency of a highly-practised reader, to skim the papers one after the other. He led off with the Financial, proceeded to the Times, and took the rest anyhow. When he had finished, the papers lay in a tangled heap on the thick carpet. This man was pre-eminently tidy and orderly, yet few things delighted him more than, at intervals, to achieve a gigantic disorder. It was a little affectation which he permitted himself. Another little affectation was his manner of appearing always to be busy from the hour of opening his eyes to the hour of closing them. He was, in truth, a very busy man indeed; but it pleased him to seem more deeply employed than he actually was. He had a telephone affixed to his bed-head, by means of which he could communicate with his private secretary’s bedroom in the house, and also with his office in Cannon Street. This telephone tickled his fancy. He used it for the sake of using it; he enjoyed using it in the middle of the night. He went to it now, and rang imperiously. He did everything imperiously. There was a tinkling reply on the bell.

‘Are you up, Oakley? Well, get up then. Go to Cannon Street, and bring the important letters. And tell——’ He went off into a series of detailed instructions. ‘And be back here at half-past eight.’

The clock struck half-past seven. The valet entered as silently as a nun, and the modern Napoleon passed into his marble bath-room. By this time everyone in the household—that household which revolved round the autocrat as the solar system revolves round the sun—knew that the master had awakened in a somewhat dangerous mood, and that squally weather might be expected. And they all, from the page-boy to the great Mr. Oakley, the private secretary, accepted this fact as further evidence that the master’s career of prosperity had received a check.

At eight o’clock precisely the master took breakfast—an English breakfast: bacon, eggs, toast, coffee, marmalade—in the breakfast-room, a room of medium size opening off the library. He took it in solitude, for he could not tolerate the presence of servants so early in the morning, and he had neither wife nor family. He poured out his own coffee like one of his own clerks, and read his private letters propped up one by one against the coffee-pot, also like one of his own clerks. He looked at his watch as he drank the last drop of coffee. It was thirty-one minutes past eight. He walked quickly into the library. If Oakley had not been there Oakley would have caught it; but Oakley happened to be there, calmly opening envelopes with a small ivory paper-cutter. It was mainly in virtue of his faculty of always ‘being there’ that Oakley received a salary of six hundred a year.

‘Shall you go to Cannon Street this morning, sir?’ asked Oakley, a middle-aged man with the featureless face of a waiter in a large restaurant.

‘Why?’

‘Sir Arthur Custer has telegraphed to know.’

‘No.’

‘I thought not, and have told him.’

‘Umph!’ said the master, nettled, but not daring to say anything.

Like many a man equally powerful, this Napoleon was in some ways in awe of his unexceptionable clerk. Oakley might easily get another master, but it was doubtful whether his employer could get another clerk equal to Oakley.

‘A light post this morning, sir,’ said Oakley.

‘Umph!’ said the master again. ‘Take down this letter, and have it sent off instantly:

‘“Richard Redgrave, Esq., 4, Adelphi Terrace. Dear Sir,—I shall be obliged if you can make it convenient to call on me this morning as early as possible at the above address. The bearer can bring you here in his cab.—Yours truly.”’

The letter was written, signed, and despatched.

‘Anything from Gaunt and Griffiths?’ asked the Napoleon.

‘Yes, sir.’

Oakley turned to a letter on large, thick, quarto paper. The stationery of this famous firm of stock-brokers—perhaps the largest firm, and certainly the firm with the cleanest record, on the Exchange—was always of an impressive type.

‘They say, “We are obliged by your favour of to-day’s date. We can offer a limited number of La Princesse shares at twenty-five. We shall be glad to have your acceptance or refusal before noon to-morrow.—Your obedient servants, Gaunt and Griffiths.”’

‘Twenty-five!’ exclaimed the other. ‘They mean five. It’s a clerical error.’

‘The amount is written out in words.’

‘It’s a clerical error.’

‘Doubtless, sir.’

Even now the Napoleon would not believe that misfortune, perhaps ruin, was at his door. He doggedly refused to face the fact. It seemed incredible, unthinkable, that anything could happen to him. So we all think until the crash comes. He plunged into the mass of general correspondence with a fine appearance of perfect calmness. But he could not deceive Mr. Oakley.

At five minutes past nine there was a careful tap at the door. The messenger had returned from Adelphi Terrace. Mr. Redgrave was not at his rooms. He had gone out on the previous evening, and had not come in again. The landlady knew not where he was.

‘Send again at noon, Oakley,’ said the Napoleon.

In another minute there was another tap at the door.

‘Come in!’—angrily.

The footman announced that Sir Arthur Custer had called.

‘D——n Sir Arthur Custer!’ said the master of the house. ‘Here, Oakley, get out of this! I must see him.’

Oakley got out, and Sir Arthur was ushered in. Sir Arthur looked at his host queerly, and then with much care shut the door.

‘I say, Lock,’ he said, putting his silk hat on the table, ‘it seems to me we’re in a devil of a hole.’

‘Indeed!’ said Simon Lock cautiously.

‘Yes,’ Sir Arthur insisted. ‘Of course I’m sure that when you asked me to join you in this Princesse affair——’

‘You will pardon me, Sir Arthur,’ said Lock, stopping him very politely and formally, ‘I did not ask you to join me. It was yourself who suggested that.’

‘Ah, well!’ said Sir Arthur, with a little less assurance, ‘we won’t quarrel about that. At any rate, I understood from you that we were in for a deuced good thing.’

‘That is so,’ Lock returned. ‘By the way, sit down, Sir Arthur, and remain calm.’

‘Am I not calm?’ asked the member of Parliament, whose pomposity was unaccustomed to be trifled with.

‘Certainly you are calm. I merely ask you to remain so. Now to come to the business in hand. I said, you remind me, that we were in for a good thing. So we were. But some secret force has been working against us. If I could unmask that secret force all would be well, for I could then bring pressure to bear that would effectually—— You understand?’

‘No matter from what direction the force came?’

‘No matter from what direction. And, Sir Arthur,’ said Simon Lock impressively, ‘I shall find it out.’ He repeated the phrase still more impressively, ‘I shall find it out. Simon Lock has never yet been defeated, and he will not be defeated now. I began life, Sir Arthur, on half-a-crown a week. There were conspiracies against me then, but I upset them. At the age of fifty-five, on a slightly larger scale ‘—he smiled—‘I shall repeat the operations of my early youth.’

Simon Lock, like many self-made men, was extremely fond of referring to his early youth and the humbleness of his beginnings. He thought that it proved an absence of snobbery in his individuality.

‘And in the meantime?’

‘In the meantime, I frankly confess, Sir Arthur, we have sold more La Princesse shares than we can deliver. Nay, further, we have sold, I fear, more La Princesse shares than actually exist. We sold freely for the fall. I knew that the shares would fall soon after the flotation, and they did. But they have mysteriously risen again.’

‘And are still rising,’ Sir Arthur put in, nervously stroking his long thin beard.

‘Yes. We sold, I find, over two hundred thousand shares at three. They then fell, as you know, to about twenty-five shillings. Then they began to go up like a balloon. The market tightened like a drawn string. Sir Arthur, we were led into a trap. For once in a way some fellow has got the better of Simon Lock—temporarily, only temporarily. My brokers thought they were selling shares to the public in general, but they were selling to the agents of a single buyer. That is evident.’

‘How do we stand now?’

‘We have to deliver our shares in a week’s time. We have some eighty thousand shares in hand, bought at various prices up to five pounds. On those eighty thousand we shall just about clear ourselves. That leaves us over a hundred and twenty thousand yet to buy.’

‘At the best price we can obtain?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what is the best price to-day?’

‘Well,’ said Lock, looking Sir Arthur straight in the face, ‘I have had shares offered to me this morning at twenty-five.’

Sir Arthur’s reply was to rush to the sideboard and help himself to a glass of brandy. He was a timid creature, despite his appearance.

‘And that figure means that we should lose the sum of twenty-two pounds on each share. Twenty-two times one hundred and twenty thousand, Sir Arthur, is two millions six hundred and forty thousand pounds. That would be the amount of our loss on the transaction.’

‘But this is child’s play, Lock.’

‘Excuse me, it isn’t,’ said Simon Lock. ‘It is men’s play, and desperately serious.’

‘I don’t understand the methods of the Stock Exchange—never did,’ said Sir Arthur Custer, M.P. ‘I only came into the City because a lot of fellows like yourself asked me to. But it seems to me the only thing to do is to cry off.’

‘Cry off?’

‘Yes. Tell all these people to whom we have contracted to sell Princesse shares that we simply can’t supply ’em, and tell ’em to do their worst. Their worst won’t be worse than a dead loss of over two and a half millions.’

‘My dear Sir Arthur,’ said Simon Lock, ‘there is no crying off in the City. We have contracted to deliver those shares, and we must deliver them, or pay the price—commercial ruin.’

‘The Stock Exchange,’ Sir Arthur blustered, ‘is one of the most infamous institutions——’

‘Yes,’ Simon Lock cut him short, ‘we know all about that. The Stock Exchange is quite right as long as we are making money; but when we begin to lose it immediately becomes infamous.’

Sir Arthur made an obvious effort to pull himself together.

‘What is your plan of campaign, Lock?’ he asked. ‘You must have some scheme in your head. What is it? Don’t trifle with me.’

‘Well,’ said Simon Lock, ‘we have a week.

That is our principal asset. Seven precious days in which to turn round. A hundred and sixty hours. In that time——’

There was a knock at the door, and a page entered with a telegram.

Simon Lock opened it hurriedly. The message ran:

‘Sorry must withdraw offer contained in our letter yesterday. Princesse shares now thirty-five.—Gaunt and Griffiths.’

The erstwhile Napoleon passed the orange-coloured paper to Sir Arthur Custer.

‘No answer,’ he said calmly to the page.