His reflections ran somewhat thus: “The day may come—is, perhaps, even now nigh—when Cashel shall reject my influence and ascendency. There never has been anything which could even counterfeit friendship between us,—close intimacy has been all. To maintain that hold over him so necessary to my fortunes, I must be in a position to menace. Roland himself has opened the way to this by his own reserve. The very concealment he has practised implies fear;—otherwise, why, in all the openness of our familiar intercourse, never have mentioned Enrique's name; still more, never once alluded to this Maritaña? It is clear enough with what shame he looks back on the past. Let mine be the task to increase that feeling, and build up the fear of the world's ridicule, till he shall be the slave of every whisper that syllables his name! The higher his path in society, the greater the depth to which disclosures may consign him; and what disclosures so certainly ruinous as to connect him with the lawless marauders of the Spanish main,—the slaver and the pirate? His dear friend, a felon, taken in open fight by a British cruiser! Maritaña, too, may serve us; her name as mistress—or, if need be, as wife—will effectually oppose any matrimonial speculations here. So far this letter has been a rare piece of fortune!”
For some moments he walked the room with excited and animated looks, the alternating shades of pleasure and its opposite flitting rapidly across his strong features. At last he broke out in words: “Ay, Cashel, I am as suddenly enriched as yourself,—but with a different heritage. Yours was Gold; mine, Revenge! And there are many to whom I could pay the old debt home. There's Forster, with his story of Ascot, and his black-ball at Graham's!—a double debt, with years of heavy interest upon it; there's Howard, too, that closed his book at Tattersall's, after tearing out the leaf that had my name! Frobisher himself daring his petty insolence at every turn!—all these cry for acquittance, and shall have it There are few men of my own standing, that with moneyed means at my command, I could not ruin! and, ungallant as the boast may be, some fair ladies, too! How I have longed for the day, how I have schemed and plotted for it! and now it comes almost unlooked for.
“Another month or two of this wasteful extravagance, and Cashel will be deeply, seriously embarrassed. Kennyfeck will suggest retrenchment and economy; that shall be met with an insidious doubt of the good man's honesty. And how easy to impeach it! The schemes of his wife and daughter will aid the accusation. Roland shall, meanwhile, learn the discomfort of being 'hard up.' The importunity—nay, the insolence—of duns shall assail him at every post and every hour. From this there is but one bold, short step,—and take it he must,—make me his agent. That done, all the rest is easy. Embarrassment and injurious reports will soon drive him from the country, and from an estate he shall never revisit as his own! So far,—the first act of the drama! The second discovers Tom Linton the owner of Tubbermore, and the host of Lord and Lady Kilgoff, who have condescendingly agreed to pass the Easter recess with him. Mr. Linton has made a very splendid maiden speech, which, however, puzzles the ministers and the 'Times;' and, if he were not a man perfectly indifferent to place, would expose him to the imputation of courting it.
“And Laura all this while!” said he, in a voice whose accents trembled with intense feeling, “can she forgive the past? Will old memories revive old affections, or will they rot into hatred? Well,” cried he, sternly, “whichever way they turn, I 'm prepared.”
There was a tone of triumphant meaning in his last words that seemed to thrill through his frame, and as he threw himself back upon his seat, and gazed out upon the starry sky, his features wore the look of proud and insolent defiance. “So is it,” said he, after a pause; “one must be alone—friendless, and alone—in life, to dare the world so fearlessly.” He filled a goblet of sherry, and as he drank it off, cried, “Courage! Tom Linton against 'the field!'”
CHAPTER XXI. THE CONSPIRATORS DISTURBED
Eternal friendship let us swear,
In fraud at least—“nous serons frères.”
Robert Macaire.
Cashel passed a night of feverish anxiety. Enrique's uncertain fate was never out of his thoughts; and if for a moment he dropped off to sleep, he immediately awoke with a sudden start,—some fancied cry for help, some heart-uttered appeal to him for assistance breaking in upon his weary slumber.
How ardently did he wish for some one friend to whom he might confide his difficulty, and from whom receive advice and counsel. Linton's shrewdness and knowledge of life pointed him out as the fittest; but how to reveal to his fashionable friend the secrets of that buccaneering life he had himself so lately quitted? How expose himself to the dreaded depreciation a “fine gentleman” might visit on a career passed amid slavers and pirates? A month or two previous, he could not have understood such scruples; but already the frivolities and excesses of daily habit had thrown an air of savage rudeness over the memory of his Western existence, and he had not the courage to brave the comments it might suggest To this false shame had Linton brought him, acting on a naturally sensitive nature, by those insidious and imperceptible counsels which represent the world—meaning, thereby, that portion of it who are in the purple and fine linen category—as the last appeal in all cases, not alone of a man's breeding and pretensions, but of his honor and independence.