‘Of course you cannot,’ had said the Baron, to whom the mere idea seemed like a preparation to blow up with dynamite all the mountains of Europe and of Asia. ‘Do you suppose you can efface such an institution as our financial existence? You might as well say that a sovereign, by dying, could will his country into non-existence.’
‘Then as I cannot touch the engagements of the past, however much I condemn them, I will at least keep pure the obligations of the future,’ Othmar had answered; and those transactions which his more delicate sense of honour did not allow him to approve he refused to permit to be undertaken.
Baron Fritz, who had the ordinary financier’s conscience, that is, who would have done nothing commercially dishonourable, but who cared not a straw how iniquitous might be the results of an operation, so long as it was legal, clever, and lucrative, was beyond measure irritated by this occasional interference of one who was too fine a gentleman, too indolent a dreamer, to bear any of the frets and burden of habitual attention to their gigantic operations. But there was no help for it; Otho Othmar was the head of the House, and, what was a greater grief still to his uncle, the only living one of the name besides himself. They, who could have given fortunes and position to a score of younger branches, who could have had their sons and brothers objects of power and worship in all the capitals of Europe, had been so visited by death and destiny that of them all there only remained the young man who was Othmar to all the world, and the old one who was Baron Fritz to his intimate associates, and Baron Friederich to all the Bourses.
‘You should marry, Otho,’ said the Baron to him now.
‘I have no inclination to do so,’ he answered, and thought of Nadine Napraxine.
‘Inclination!’ exclaimed the other irritably. ‘What has inclination to do with it? Is inclination considered or waited for in the marriages of princes? You are a prince in your own way. If you died to-morrow, your race would be extinct.’
‘That would not much matter,’ said Othmar. ‘We have never been conspicuous for anything except for amassing gold, as a ship’s keel collects barnacles. I suppose I had better make a will. You shall have everything for your lifetime, and then it shall all go to the French Republic, which is the only national institution I know of that is capable of muddling away two hundred milliards in a year, with nothing whatever to show for it afterwards.’
Baron Fritz made a gesture of irritated contempt.
‘You ought to have had legitimate heirs ten years ago. You do not belong to yourself. You have no right to live and die without raising up posterity.’
‘I do not see the obligation,’ said Othmar, ‘and I do not care enough about the name, which you think so very fine, to greatly grieve over its probable extinction.’