He did not care for the new Russian loan, for the new Turkish loan, for the great naval dockyards to be made by Germany on the Baltic, for the railway that was to be driven along the ancient bed of the Oxus, nor for the necessities of the empire of Brazil, nor for the development of Canadian forests. It did not interest him that such and such a sovereign would be a cripple without his help, or such and such a country as virtually in pawn to him as though it had been a pledged estate; that the assistance of his gold could enable a Ministry to keep its tenure of office, or the refusal of it could precipitate a State into revolution; to Baron Fritz it was like holding the reins of the universe, but to Othmar himself it was excessively dull work. The heir of four generations of money-lenders, he was absolutely indifferent to the immense power which lay in the stroke of his pen; the genius of finance was inherited by him, though dormant in him; even his uncle did justice to the accuracy of his vision, to the certainty of his instinct; but it was genius unused; he had no taste to employ its capacities. Europe was as indifferent to him as a mound of clay.
‘We only do mischief, unmitigated mischief,’ he asserted very often. ‘Look at the Canal of Suez; it has only bred wars and pretexts for wars, and will probably embroil England and France for the next century,—until indeed India shall have become Russian, or the African negro have avenged Abd-el-Kadir. Then again take the Panama project: it will set Great Britain and the United States at each other’s throats like two bull-dogs.’
‘You are enough to make your father rise from his grave,’ said Baron Fritz.
‘It is only aristocrats who do that,’ returned Othmar. ‘The financier sleeps sound on the remembrance of his own virtues—and loans.’
The memory of his father was bitter to him; he could not forget the injury done to him in his earliest youth by subjecting him to the charms and the corruptions of Sara Vernon.
‘You must marry, and then you will see things differently,’ his uncle insisted, reverting to the simplicity of reiteration.
What a cruel thing was destiny! Thousands of men who had not a crust of bread begat legitimate offsprings in the most reckless and profuse manner; and the one man for whom lawful heirs were an absolute necessity and duty obstinately neglected his obligations to family and to the world.
It was possible, even probable, that the last of the Othmars would remain the last of his race.
‘Marry for me,’ said Othmar. ‘I will give all we possess to any cousins you may give me, and keep only enough myself to live peaceably in Arabia Felix. I have always wished to live there; the climate is divine; and, after all, there is nothing that is of so much consequence as climate.’
‘You will always jest!’