ded to
play had become thus high of its own accord. A man cannot always
restrain his own doings and keep them within the limits which he had
himself planned for them. They will very often fall short of the
magnitude to which his ambition has aspired. They will sometimes soar
higher than his own imagination. So it had now been with Mr Melmotte.
He had contemplated great things; but the things which he was
achieving were beyond his contemplation.

The reader will not have thought much of Fisker on his arrival in
England. Fisker was, perhaps, not a man worthy of much thought. He had
never read a book. He had never written a line worth reading. He had
never said a prayer. He cared nothing for humanity. He had sprung out
of some Californian gully, was perhaps ignorant of his own father and
mother, and had tumbled up in the world on the strength of his own
audacity. But, such as he was, he had sufficed to give the necessary
impetus for rolling Augustus Melmotte onwards into almost
unprecedented commercial greatness. When Mr Melmotte took his offices
in Abchurch Lane, he was undoubtedly a great man, but nothing so great
as when the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway had become not
only an established fact, but a fact established in Abchurch Lane. The
great company indeed had an office of its own, where the Board was
held; but everything was really managed in Mr Melmotte's own commercial
sanctum. Obeying, no doubt, some inscrutable law of commerce, the
grand enterprise,--'perhaps the grandest when you consider the amount
of territory manipulated, which has ever opened itself before the eyes
of a great commercial people,' as Mr Fisker with his peculiar
eloquence observed through his nose, about this time, to a meeting
of shareholders at San Francisco,--had swung itself across from
California to London, turning itself to the centre of the commercial
world as the needle turns to the pole, till Mr Fisker almost regretted
the deed which himself had done. And Melmotte was not only the head,
but the body also, and the feet of it all. The shares seemed to be all
in Melmotte's pocket, so that he could distribute them as he would;
and it seemed also that when distributed and sold, and when bought
again and sold again, they came back to Melmotte's pocket. Men were
contented to buy their shares and to pay their money, simply on
Melmotte's word. Sir Felix had realized a large portion of his
winnings at cards,--with commendable prude