Well, in a way he was a monarch himself—one of the half-dozen undisputed kings of finance, who are the power behind titular potentates and taken into their counsels before they resolve upon decided action.
There was no other guest. Salmoros wished to talk to this young man alone. Nothing appealed to the Baron like success. He was prepared to admit that luck was a frequent element in success, and Corsini had undoubtedly been lucky. A chance meeting with a discredited outlaw—so much he had gathered from Golitzine in a brief conversation to-day—had put the young Italian on the right track. All the same, luck had a knack of presenting itself to people born to achieve greatness. It presented itself to everybody, but the stupid people were too blind to see and take advantage of it.
He remembered a word of warning that his old friend and patron, that far-seeing statesman Lord Beaconsfield, had once addressed to him. “Never associate yourself with unlucky people, my dear Salmoros.” He had faithfully regarded that warning during his strenuous years of commercial and business intrigue.
The Baron had jestingly said yesterday that they would meet to-night if that devil of a Zouroff left anybody alive. Well, they were all alive, and the traitor Prince would soon be eating his heart out in Siberia. And yet it had been touch and go. It had been a thrilling day, and an ordinary man might have felt his nerves a little shaken when the strain was over.
But Salmoros was as calm as if the destinies of the Russian Empire, in which he took so keen an interest, had never hung for a moment in the balance. Perhaps he had experienced and survived too many catastrophes to feel very great emotion at another triumph, the last of a hundred or more.
Corsini, on his side, with the jangling nerves of youth, was very palpably agitated. His smile was forced, his face was twitching. He could not dismiss from his mind these great events that had so suddenly crowded into his life.
Nada, that peerless divinity whom he had adored from afar when there seemed no hope, who had suddenly descended, as it were, to earth and had promised to be his wife! Here was one intoxicating thought.
And then, last night the Emperor had called him into his private cabinet, invested him with the title of Count of the Russian Empire and promised him an even more substantial reward.
And yet he was the same man who, a short time ago, had been playing in the streets for coppers which his half-starved sister collected. But for the providential interference of dear old Papa Péron he might have been playing there still, or sought refuge in an untimely grave. Simply a turn of fortune’s wheel.