The ineffable insolence of her manner as she uttered this taunt, far from rousing the old man's anger, seemed only to awe and subdue him.
“Yes,” continued she, “I am only a woman, and, as a woman, debarred from all those resorts where information is rife and knowledge attainable; but even working darkly, blindly, as I must, I have more reliance and courage than some men that I wot of!”
He seemed for a moment to struggle hard with himself to summon the spirit to reply to her; for an instant he raised his head haughtily, but as his eyes met hers they fell suddenly, and he muttered in a half-broken voice, “I meant all for the best!”
“Well,” cried she, after a brief pause, “it is no time for regrets, or recriminations either. It is surely neither your fault nor mine that the cotton crop is a failure, or that discounts are high in Broadway. When May comes in, you must explain to her what has happened, and ask her leave to sell out her Sardinian stock. It is a small sum, to be sure, but it will give us a respite for a day or two, and then we shall think of our next move.”
She left the room as she said this, and anything more utterly hopeless than the old Baronet it would be difficult to imagine. Bewildered and almost stunned by the difficulties around him, a sort of vague sense of reliance upon her sustained him so long as she was there. No sooner, however, had she gone, than this support seemed withdrawn, and he sat, the very picture of dismay and discomfiture.
The project by which the artful Mrs. Morris had originally seduced him into speculation was no other than to employ Miss Leslie's fortune as the means of making advantageous purchases of land in the States, and of discounting at the high rate of interest so freely given in times of pressure in the cities of the Union. To suffer a considerable sum to lie unprofitably yielding three per cent at home, when it might render thirty by means of a little energy and a little skill, seemed actually absurd; and not a day used to go over, in which she would not compute, from the recorded rates of the exchanges, the large gains that might have been realized, without, as she would say, “the shadow of a shade of risk.” Sir William had once gambled on 'Change and in railroad speculations the whole of a considerable estate; and the old leaven of speculation still worked within him. If there be a spirit which no length of years can efface, no changes of time eradicate, it is the gamester's reliance upon fortune. Estranged for a long period as he had lived from all the exciting incidents of enterprise, no sooner was the picture of gain once more displayed before him than he eagerly embraced it.
“Ah!” he would say to himself, “if I had but had the advantage of her clear head and shrewd power of calculation long ago, what a man I might be to-day! That woman's wit of hers puts all mere men's acuteness to the blush.” It is not necessary to say that the softest of blue eyes and the silkiest of brown hair did not detract very largely from the influences of her mental superiority; and Sir William was arrived at that precise lustre in which such fascinations obtain their most undisputed triumphs.
Poets talk of youth as the impressionable age; they rave about its ardor, its impetuous, uncalculating generosity, and so forth; but for an act of downright self-forgetting devotion, for that impulsive spirit that takes no counsel from calm reason, give us an elderly gentleman,—anything from sixty-four to fourscore. These are the really ardent and tender lovers,—easy victims, too, of all the wiles that beset them.
Had any grave notary, or deep plotting man upon 'Change suggested to Sir William the project of employing his ward's fortune with any view to his own profit, the chances are that the hint would have been rejected as an outrage, and the suggester insulted; but the plan came from rosy lips, whispered by the softest of voices; and even the arithmetic was jotted down by fingers so taper and so white that he lost sight of the multiples in his admiration of the calculator. His first experiences, besides, were all great successes. Kansas scrip went up to a fabulous premium. When he sold out his Salt Lake Fives, he realized cent per cent. These led him on. That “ardor nummi” which was not new in the days of the Latin poet, is as rife in our time as it was centuries ago.
Let us also bear in mind that there is something very fascinating to a man of a naturally active temperament to be recalled, after years of inglorious leisure, to subjects of deep and stirring interest; he likes the self-flattery of being equal to such themes, that his judgment should be as sound, his memory as clear, and his apprehension as ready as it used to be. Proud man is the old fox-hunter that can charge his “quickset” at fourscore; but infinitely prouder the old country gentleman who, at the same age, fancies himself deep in all the mysteries of finance, and skilled in the crafty lore of the share-market.