Marese’s one absorbing idea was power. To be a ruler, a statesman, a leader, was his one consuming desire. As a ruler he thought, as a member of the Cabinet, it would be easy for him to affect the market in his favour, for Marese was a gambler already upon a gigantic scale. The Stock Exchange and the Bourse were his arena.
The intense vanity of the man, which led him to seriously hope even for the English Premiership, was, doubtless, a trait derived from his mother. “If I had my rights,” he was accustomed to say to Theodore, “I should be not only the wealthiest man in England, but in Europe and America. My father’s property has more than doubled in value. In England the wealthiest man at once takes a position above crowds of clever people who have nothing but their talents. Without any conceit, I can safely say that I am clever. A clever, wealthy man is so great a rarity that my elevation is a certainty. But nothing can be done without money. At present my wealth is a shadow only. The one thing, Theodore, is money. Our Stock Exchange labour is, in a sense, wasted; our operations are not large enough. What we make is barely sufficient to provide us with common luxuries (he did not pretend to say necessities) and to keep our creditors quiet. Nothing remains for bolder actions. I am thirty, and I have not yet entered the House.”
This last remark was always the conclusion of his reflections. In a sense, it was like Caesar lamenting upon seeing a statue of Alexander—that he had done nothing at an age when Alexander had conquered the world. He had not even the means to fight the enemies who withheld his birthright from him. The bitterness engendered of these wrongs, the constant brooding over the career that was lost to him, obscured what little moral sense had been left in him after the course of life he had been through; and the once gentle boy was now ripe for any guilt. The verse so often upon the lips of the tyrant was for ever in his mind, and perpetually escaped him unconsciously—
Be just, unless a kingdom tempt to break the laws,
For sovereign power alone can justify the cause.
Like his father Sternhold, he looked upon the undisputed possession of such an estate as conferring powers and position nothing inferior to that of a monarch. His dislike to all things American—in consequence of the claims, now more loudly proclaimed than ever, of the Baskettes from the States—grew to be almost a monomania. He wished that the United States people had but one neck, that he might destroy them all at once—applying the Roman emperor’s saying to his own affairs.
His especially favourite study was “The Prince” of Machiavelli, which he always carried with him. His copy was annotated with a scheme for applying the instructions therein given to modern times—the outline of the original requiring much modification to suit the changes in the constitution of society. Some day he hoped to utilise the labours of the man whose name has become the familiar soubriquet of the Devil.
Theodore, whom Aurelian had made qualify as a surgeon, was imbued with an inherited taste for recondite research. He would return from a wild scene of debauchery at early dawn, and drawing the curtains and lighting his lamp to exclude daylight, plunge into the devious paths of forbidden science. Keen and shrewd as he was, he did not disdain even alchemy, bringing to the crude ideas of the ancients all the knowledge of the moderns. Cruel by nature, he excelled in the manipulation of the dissecting knife, and in the cities upon the Continent where their wanderings led them, lost no opportunity of practising with the resident medical men, or of studying those wonderful museums which are concealed in certain places abroad. Marese was the fiery charger, ready to dash at every obstacle Theodore was the charioteer—the head which guided and suggested. Yet all their concentrated thought could not devise a method by which Marese might obtain the full enjoyment of his estate. Briefly, this was the condition of Marese’s mind and his position, when the death of Aurelian took place, and a letter reached them written by him in his last hours, entreating their return to Stirmingham for reasons connected with the estate. They went, and a woman went with them as far as London—a woman whom we must meet hereafter, but who shall be avoided as much as possible.
They arrived at Stirmingham unannounced, and examined the papers which the deceased had particularly recommended to their study. Aurelian, as has been said, was baffled but not beaten. The fascination of the vast estate held his mind, as it held so many others, in an iron vice. The whole of his life was devoted to it. He had searched and searched back into the past, groping from point to point, and he had accumulated such a mass of evidence as had never been suspected.
He knew far more even than poor Sternhold, who had occupied himself exclusively with the future.
Marese and Theodore, living quietly in the residence attached to the asylum for the insane, which Aurelian had continued to keep, carefully studied these papers by the light of the lucid commentary the dead man had left. It is needless to recount the whole of the contents—most of them are known already to the reader. But the substance of it all was that three great dangers menaced the estate. The first was the claims of the Baskettes from America.