"Well, sir, that is your business, not mine. I am a table-maker; I don't profess to make staves. If you wish to make a present of a beggar's staff, I can recommend you to a turner who lives hard by."
"Master Boltay, don't be so impatient. The staff I spoke of is only an emblem. I have a plan, I say, which you must know of. It would be better if you came and sat down by me and heard me out. Look now! I want Abellino to wait in vain for the hour of my death. I want my estates not to go to him, but to another. Do you understand?"
"Of course! You would cut him off with a shilling."
"Why, man, you understand nothing. My estates are hereditary; I cannot leave them to whom I will—that depends on the law of succession, and the law of succession is eternal. And a nice little inheritance it is too. It deserves to be talked about, I assure you. My annual income exceeds a million and a half!"
"A million and a half!" cried the artisan, in consternation; and he gazed wonderingly at the magnate, as if he scarce believed that any man in the world could be worth a million and a half a year.
"Yes, a million and a half awaits my successor, and even under the sod I should be tortured by the thought that my ancestral estates, for which far better men than I shed their blood, were being scattered to the winds by a worthless descendant, were dribbling away piecemeal and passing into the hands of usurers, shopkeepers, and aliens, and all through the very man who, so far from weeping at my death, will be ready to dance for joy at it. I mean to deprive him of that satisfaction."
"May I give you a piece of advice, sir?"
"There's no need of that. You've only got to listen to me." Then, seizing the hand of the artisan, to rivet his attention the better, he thus proceeded: "There is one way of drawing a blood-red cross through all Abellino's calculations—for I want to draw blood, I want to wound him to the very heart, because he has insulted me—and that one way is for me to marry."
Here Kárpáthy stopped, and threw himself back in his chair, as if waiting to see what the artisan would say to that. But he only nodded his head, as if he understood the matter completely.