“So,” thought the Count, “woman is not his weak side. What is?”
“Morbleu! my dear Mr. Leslie—had I thought as you do some years since, I had saved myself from many a trouble. After all, Ambition is the best mistress to woo; for with her there is always the hope, and never the possession.”
“Ambition, Count,” replied Randal, still guarding himself in dry sententiousness, “is the luxury of the rich, and the necessity of the poor.”
“Aha,” thought the Count, “it comes, as I anticipated from the first—comes to the bribe.” He passed the wine to Randal, filling his own glass, and draining it carelessly: “Sur mon âme, mon cher,” said the Count, “luxury is ever pleasanter than necessity; and I am resolved at least to give ambition a trial—je vais me réfugier dans le sein du bonheur domestique—a married life and a settled home. Peste! If it were not for ambition, one would die of ennui. Apropos, my dear sir, I have to thank you for promising my sister your aid in finding a near and dear kinsman of mine, who has taken refuge in your country, and hides himself even from me.”
“I should be most happy to assist in your search. As yet, however, I have only to regret that all my good wishes are fruitless. I should have thought, however, that a man of such rank had been easily found, even through the medium of your own embassador.”
“Our own embassador is no very warm friend of mine; and the rank would be no clew, for it is clear that my kinsman has never assumed it since he quitted his country.”
“He quitted it, I understand, not exactly from choice,” said Randal, smiling. “Pardon my freedom and curiosity, but will you explain to me a little more than I learn from English rumor (which never accurately reports upon foreign matters still more notorious), how a person who had so much to lose, and so little to win, by revolution, could put himself into the same crazy boat with a crew of hare-brained adventurers and visionary professors.”
“Professors!” repeated the Count; “I think you have hit on the very answer to your question; not but what men of high birth were as mad as the canaille. I am the more willing to [pg 376] gratify your curiosity, since it will perhaps serve to guide your kind search in my favor. You must know, then, that my kinsman was not born the heir to the rank he obtained. He was but a distant relation to the head of the house which he afterward represented. Brought up in an Italian university, he was distinguished for his learning and his eccentricities. There, too, I suppose, brooding over old wives' tales about freedom, and so forth, he contracted his carbonaro, chimerical notions for the independence of Italy. Suddenly, by three deaths, he was elevated, while yet young, to a station and honors which might have satisfied any man in his senses. Que diable! what could the independence of Italy do for him! He and I were cousins; we had played together as boys; but our lives had been separated till his succession to rank brought us necessarily together. We became exceedingly intimate. And you may judge how I loved him,” said the Count, averting his eyes slightly from Randal's quiet, watchful gaze, “when I add, that I forgave him for enjoying a heritage that, but for him, had been mine.”
“Ah, you were next heir?”
“And it is a hard trial to be very near a great fortune, and yet just to miss it.”