CHAPTER XIV.
Egerton had thrown himself at full length on the sofa, a position exceedingly rare with him; and about his whole air and manner, as Levy entered, there was something singularly different from that stateliness of port common to the austere legislator. The very tone of his voice was different. It was as if the statesman, the man of business, had vanished; it was rather the man of fashion and the idler who, nodding languidly to his visitor, said, “Levy, what money can I have for a year?”
“The estate will bear very little more. My dear fellow, that last election was the very devil. You cannot go on thus much longer.”
“My dear fellow!” Baron Levy hailed Audley Egerton as “my dear fellow”! And Audley Egerton, perhaps, saw nothing strange in the words, though his lip curled.
“I shall not want to go on thus much longer,” answered Egerton, as the curl on his lip changed to a gloomy smile. “The estate must, meanwhile, bear L5,000 more.”
“A hard pull on it. You had really better sell.”
“I cannot afford to sell at present. I cannot afford men to say, ‘Audley Egerton is done up,—his property is for sale.’”
“It is very sad when one thinks what a rich man you have been—and may be yet!”
“Be yet! How?”
Baron Levy glanced towards the thick mahogany doors,—thick and impervious, as should be the doors of statesmen. “Why, you know that, with three words from you, I could produce an effect upon the stocks of three nations, that might give us each a hundred thousand pounds. We would go shares.”