When the half-breeds, as Lord Amersham called them, jeered at Silver as the son of an agricultural labourer there was a modic.u.m of truth at the back of the lie.

The boy came of a long line of yeoman-farmers in Leicestershire, famous for generations for their stock and their integrity.

Jim Silver's grandfather was the last of that line. He was a big man and big farmer, husbanding his wide acres wisely and well, breeding good stock, enjoying his day's hunting, but not making too much of it, touching his hat to his landlord, a familiar and imposing figure at all the Agricultural Shows in the Midlands.

His only son George was in his father's opinion a sport. Certainly he was no true Silver: that was obvious from his earliest years. He cared nothing for a horse, was a shamefully bad judge of a beast, had no feeling for the fields, never knew the real poetic thrill at the sight and smell of a yard knee deep in muck, and hated mud and rain.

"More of a scholar," said his father regretfully. "All for books and studyin'."

Mr. Silver, wise as are those who come into contact with Nature at first hand, did not interfere with his son's queer predilections or attempt to stay his development on the lines of instinctive preference, aiding the boy indeed in every way to make the most of himself on the path he had chosen.

Thus he sent him to the Grammar School at Leicester. The boy went joyfully: for he was very modern. The town, the books, the people, the streets, the hum of business, the opening gates of knowledge, pleased and contented his insatiable young spirit. The father had the reward of his daring. George did famously and became in time Captain of the School. The farmer attended prize-giving, and watched his son march up to the table time after time amidst the cheers of his school-fellows.

"George has got the red rosette again, Mr. Silver," smiled the Headmaster.

"So I see," replied the farmer. "But the showring's one thing, work's another." And when pressed to send his son on to a University he refused.

"He'll get an exhibition," urged the Headmaster.

The father was not impressed.

"Moderation in all things," he said, shaking a shrewd head. "Edication as well. He's stood out long enough. Time he began to 'arn."

The Headmaster's arguments were of no avail.

"I'd got all the schooling I needed by then I was eleven. He's had till he's eighteen. If it's to be of any good to him it'll be good now," said Mr. Silver.

To his surprise and secret pleasure his son backed him. He didn't want to go to a University.

"It's not much use unless you're a cla.s.sic," the boy said. "And I'm a mathematician."

Besides he had his own clear-cut views of what he wished to do. And those views were very strange. He wanted to go into a Bank.

"Bank!" cried the amazed father. "Set at a counter all day and calcalate sums?"

The boy grinned behind his spectacles in his foolish way.

"That's about it," he said.

"Well, I never!" cried the father.

But true to his principles he let his son go his own way. Indeed, he helped him to a clerkship in the great Midland and Birmingham Joint Stock Bank, of which his landlord, Sir Evelyn Merry, was chairman.

"Glad to get him," said the old baronet. "If he's half as good a man as his father he'll do well."

The boy started at a local branch, and in a year was transferred to the central office at Birmingham.

There he spent his spare time attending evening cla.s.ses. At the end of a year he held a certificate, was ent.i.tled to put certain letters after his name, and had written an article on bullion which appeared in the _Banker's Magazine_ and was translated into German.

By the time he was thirty he was a manager, and ten years later he was one of the managing directors of the second biggest Joint Stock Bank in the richest country in the world.

And he did not stop there. George Silver was a financier in the great style, and a superlatively honest one. He had the initiative, the knowledge, and above all the judgment that made some men call him the Napoleon of Threadneedle Street. At forty-five he launched the Union Bank of Brazil and Uruguay; and to that colossal undertaking he devoted the last twenty-five years of his strenuous and successful life.

In the City he was known thereafter as Brazil Silver.

The Bank was his pa.s.sion and his life.

When at fifty, to the astonishment of many, he married, the City merely said:

"He must have an heir to carry on the Bank."

Mrs. Silver was a semi-aristocratic woman of limited intelligence, suppressed ambition, and sound limbs. It was the latter characteristic which won her a husband. He was not such a bad judge of make and shape as his father would have had the world believe; and as usual Brazil Silver's judgment proved good. In the appointed time his wife fulfilled her function, and gave him the son he asked of her.

CHAPTER XII

The Eton Man

Jim Silver grew up neither his father's son nor his mother's.

"He's a throw-back--to his grandfather," said old Sir Evelyn.

And in fact from the first the lad's soul hankered after the broad lands of Leicestershire rather than the counting-house in Threadneedle Street.

His happiest days were spent as a child on his grand-dad's farm, amid the great horses, and sweet-breathed kine, and golden stacks.

"Back to the land," as his grandfather was fond of saying, was the child's unspoken motto.

The old man and his st.u.r.dy grandchild were rare intimates, and never so happy as when wandering together about the yards and farm-buildings and pastures, the child, silent and absorbed, as he clutched his grand-dad's big brown finger.

The pair did not talk much: they were too content. But there was one often-repeated conversation which took place between them as they strolled.

"What goin' to be when you grows up, Jim?"

"Farmer."

"What shall ye breed?"

"Shire-'osses."

The child came back always from those prolonged visits with the sun on his cheeks, the strength in his limbs, and Leicestershire broad upon his tongue; and he never understood why his mother cut his visits short on every imaginable pretext.

At Eton the lad's friends were almost all drawn from the families in whose blood, after generations of possession, the land and its belongings had become a real if somewhat perverted pa.s.sion. They would sit on into the twilight in each other's studies and ramble on interminably and with the exaggerated wisdom of seventeen about the subject nearest to their youthful hearts.