Randal Leslie again paced the room, and after a silent self-commune came up close to the baron, and said,
“Look you, sir, I am poor and ambitious; you have tempted me at the right moment, and with the right inducement. I succumb. But what guarantee have I that this money will be paid, these estates made mine upon the conditions stipulated?”
“Before anything is settled,” replied the baron, “go and ask my character of any of our young friends, Borrowell, Spendquick—whom you please; you will hear me abused, of course; but they will all say this of me, that when I pass my word, I keep it. If I say, ‘Mon cher, you shall have the money,’ a man has it; if I say, ‘I renew your bill for six months,’ it is renewed. ‘T, is my way of doing business. In all cases any word is my bond. In this case, where no writing can pass between us, my only bond must be my word. Go, then, make your mind clear as to your security, and come here and dine at eight. We will call on Peschiera afterwards.”
“Yes,” said Randal, “I will at all events take the day to consider. Meanwhile, I say this, I do not disguise from myself the nature of the proposed transaction, but what I have once resolved I go through with. My sole vindication to myself is, that if I play here with a false die, it will be for a stake so grand, as once won, the magnitude of the prize will cancel the ignominy of the play. It is not this sum of money for which I sell myself,—it is for what that sum will aid me to achieve. And in the marriage of young Hazeldean with the Italian woman, I have another, and it may be a larger interest. I have slept on it lately,—I wake to it now. Insure that marriage, obtain the post-obit. from Hazeldean, and whatever the issue of the more direct scheme for which you seek my services, rely on my gratitude, and believe that you will have put me in the way to render gratitude of avail. At eight I will be with you.”
Randal left the room.
The baron sat thoughtful. “It is true,” said he to himself, “this young man is the next of kin to the Hazeldean estate, if Frank displease his father sufficiently to lose his inheritance; that must be the clever boy’s design. Well, in the long-run, I should make as much, or more, out of him than out of the spendthrift Frank. Frank’s faults are those of youth. He will reform and retrench. But this man! No, I shall have him for life. And should he fail in this project, and have but this encumbered property—a landed proprietor mortgaged up to his ears—why, he is my slave, and I can foreclose when I wish, or if he prove useless;—no, I risk nothing. And if I did—if I lost L10,000—what then? I can afford it for revenge!—afford it for the luxury of leaving Audley Egerton alone with penury and ruin, deserted, in his hour of need, by the pensioner of his bounty, as he will be by the last friend of his youth, when it so pleases me,—me whom he has called ‘scoundrel’! and whom he—” Levy’s soliloquy halted there, for the servant entered to announce the carriage. And the baron hurried his band over his features, as if to sweep away all trace of the passions that distorted their smiling effrontery. And so, as he took up his cane and gloves, and glanced at the glass, the face of the fashionable usurer was once more as varnished as his boots.
CHAPTER XIX.
When a clever man resolves on a villanous action, he hastens, by the exercise of his cleverness, to get rid of the sense of his villany. With more than his usual alertness, Randal employed the next hour or two in ascertaining how far Baron Levy merited the character he boasted, and how far his word might be his bond. He repaired to young men whom he esteemed better judges on these points than Spendquick and Borrowell,—young men who resembled the Merry Monarch, inasmuch as—
“They never said a foolish thing,
And never did a wise one.”