“In the circumstances—” he began, and taking a key from his pocket, unlocked the door which led to the collection, but before he let his visitor through he held out to him a little wooden box with a slit in the lid of it. “In the absence of the usual guide,” said he, “I’ll collect your shilling for him, Mr Harris.”
Five minutes later Harris was manifesting the most rapturous appreciation of Sir Gilbert’s miniatures, which in truth were nothing wonderful; but at every opportunity, when unobserved by his host, his eyes went ranging in search of the Tudor Cup. It was his host who finally called attention to it under glass in a corner cupboard.
“If you had been interested in old English silver, Mr Harris, this piece might have had some attraction,” said Sir Gilbert, drenching his flaring nostrils with a pinch of snuff from a tiny ivory spoon. “I’m no great judge myself, but my father highly prized it.”
The Bond Street dealer, with a thudding heart, peered through the glass at the very counterpart of that tarnished goblet which had fetched £7000 in Sotheby’s. He was wondering if the dry, old, shabby gentleman looking over his shoulder, and odorous with macconba, was aware that this was a Tudor Cup, or if he had read the newspapers carefully and knew what Tudor Cups were worth in Sotheby’s.
“But Himmel! did you not make him an offer?” demanded Hirsch next day in the Bond Street shop—they called it gallery—to which his partner had returned from Tweedside with the profound depression a man might have who had for a fleeting moment seen the only woman he could ever love and then had lost her in a panic.
“Offer, Joel!” he replied in accents of despair. “I offered him five thousand, and he only chuckled. He would not even take it from the cupboard. ‘No, no, Mr Harris,’ he said with his head to the side, flicking up his abominable snuff; ‘it is an heirloom older than any here, and I am not selling.’ And the galling thing is that he doesn’t even know he has a Tudor Cup, nor what a Tudor Cup can fetch in Sotheby’s.”
“Ah, you should have had the money with you, Harris,” said his partner. “Always show the money, I say; it talks for you through a speaking-trumpet. By heavens, I will go myself to Scotland and have that Tudor Cup, if I have to steal it!”