Beaucourt was not unworthy of the friendship he had inspired. “I should be ungrateful indeed,” he said, “if I didn’t tell you what my object is. You know that I am poor?”
“The only poor friend of mine,” Dick remarked, “who has never borrowed money of me.”
Beaucourt went on without noticing this. “I have three expensive tastes,” he said. “I want to get into Parliament; I want to have a yacht; I want to collect pictures. Add, if you like, the selfish luxury of helping poverty and wretchedness, and hearing my conscience tell me what an excellent man I am. I can’t do all this on five hundred a year—but I can do it on forty times five hundred a year. Moral: marry Miss Dulane.”
Listening attentively until the other had done, Dick showed a sardonic side to his character never yet discovered in Beaucourt’s experience of him.
“I suppose you have made the necessary arrangements,” he said. “When the old lady releases you, she will leave consolation behind her in her will.”
“That’s the first ill-natured thing I ever heard you say, Dick. When the old lady dies, my sense of honor takes fright, and turns its back on her will. It’s a condition on my side, that every farthing of her money shall be left to her relations.”
“Don’t you call yourself one of them?”
“What a question! Am I her relation because the laws of society force a mock marriage on us? How can I make use of her money unless I am her husband? and how can she make use of my title unless she is my wife? As long as she lives I stand honestly by my side of the bargain. But when she dies the transaction is at an end, and the surviving partner returns to his five hundred a year.”
Dick exhibited another surprising side to his character. The most compliant of men now became as obstinate as the proverbial mule.
“All very well,” he said, “but it doesn’t explain why—if you must sell yourself—you have sold yourself to an old lady. There are plenty of young ones and pretty ones with fortunes to tempt you. It seems odd that you haven’t tried your luck with one of them.”