Otho Othmar was one of the richest men in Europe; he was often disposed to regret it, as many persons regret that to which they have been born. He did not think it a thing to be vain of; he was even occasionally ashamed of it. It seemed to him that when you were so much richer than most of your fellows you were required to be very much better than they; and it is not always agreeable, nor often easy, to be so. When he signed 'Othmar' it was as when an emperor signs his name, and with a stroke of the pen he could give away millions with as much ease as lesser mortals can scatter pence. This facility was no pleasure to him. Though he was well aware that riches are the one ruling power of the modern world, and comprise in themselves the wishing cap and the magician's wand, Excalibur and Holy Grail, he did not greatly prize his possession of them; perhaps because they had been always before him and about him in profusion from his birth.
The Othmar fortune had been steadily growing for a century and a half. At the commencement Marc Othmar, a Croat, native of Agram, had been a poor man enough--a horse dealer, some said a horse stealer--what precisely never was known. Agram is not a very greatly frequented place, and records get easily mildewed and dim in it. Whether he began life as pedlar, or peasant, or, as some affirmed, as a robber of wild colts, Marc Othmar at forty years old was a money-lender, commission agent, and banker, and at sixty had become a millionaire, known of far beyond Croatia, and had laid the foundations of one of the great financial houses of Eastern Europe.
His son quadrupled his possessions and extended his operations westward and northward. His grandson fell upon the hard times of the Napoleonic wars as on a bed of roses; and from the misfortunes of Austria and Prussia, and the necessities of Pitt's England, made gold as rapidly as though he had had the philosopher's stone in a crucible. He grew into a very colossus of riches, and his houses did their business in Vienna, Paris, London, and Frankfort. He married the daughter of a French duke, and made his central house of business in Paris.
His eldest son Stefan, who inherited all his astuteness, succeeded him in due course in the direction of affairs, ably seconded by his brother Friederich, and in his turn married the daughter of an English nobleman, by whom he had one son, Otho, who was chiefly educated in England, and who had little or nothing of the Othmar type in feature or in character.