Baron Levy smiled, and put up his pocket-book. He saw from that moment that the victory was gained.

"My dear boy," said he, with the most agreeable bonhommie, "it is very natural that you should think a man would have a personal interest in whatever he does for another. I believe that view of human nature is called utilitarian philosophy, and is much in fashion at present. Let me try and explain to you. In this affair I sha'n't injure myself. True, you will say, if I settle claims which amount to L20,000 for L10,000, I might put the surplus into my own pocket instead of yours. Agreed. But I shall not get the L20,000, nor repay myself Madame di Negra's debts (whatever I may do as to Hazeldean's), unless the count gets this heiress. You can help in this. I want you; and I don't think I could get you by a less offer than I make. I shall soon pay myself back the L10,000 if the count get hold of the lady and her fortune. Brief, I see my way here to my own interests. Do you want more reasons,--you shall have them. I am now a very rich man. How have I become so? Through attaching myself from the first to persons of expectations, whether from fortune or talent. I have made connections in society, and society has enriched me. I have still a pa.s.sion for making money. 'Que voulez-vous?'

It is my profession, my hobby. It will be useful to me in a thousand ways to secure as a friend a young man who will have influence with other young men, heirs to something better than Rood Hall. You may succeed in public life. A man in public life may attain to the knowledge of State secrets that are very profitable to one who dabbles a little in the Funds. We can perhaps hereafter do business together that may put yourself in a way of clearing off all mortgages on these estates,--on the enc.u.mbered possession of which I shall soon congratulate you. You see I am frank; 't is the only way of coming to the point with so clever a fellow as you. And now, since the less we rake up the mud in a pond from which we have resolved to drink the better, let us dismiss all other thoughts but that of securing our end. Will you tell Peschiera where the young lady is, or shall I? Better do it yourself; reason enough for it, that he has confided to you his hope, and asked you to help him; why should not you? Not a word to him about our little arrangement; he need never know it. You need never be troubled." Levy rang the bell: "Order my carriage round."

Randal made no objection. He was deathlike pale, but there was a sinister expression of firmness on his thin, bloodless lips.

"The next point," Levy resumed, "is to hasten the match between Frank and the fair widow. How does that stand?"

"She will not see me, nor receive him."

"Oh, learn why! And if you find on either side there is a hitch, just let me know; I will soon remove it."

"Has Hazeldean consented to the post-obit?"

"Not yet; I have not pressed it; I wait the right moment, if necessary."

"It will be necessary."

"Ah, you wish it. It shall be so."

Randal Leslie again paced the room, and after a silent self-commune came up close to the baron, and said,

"Look you, sir, I am poor and ambitious; you have tempted me at the right moment, and with the right inducement. I succ.u.mb. But what guarantee have I that this money will be paid, these estates made mine upon the conditions stipulated?"

"Before anything is settled," replied the baron, "go and ask my character of any of our young friends, Borrowell, Spendquick--whom you please; you will hear me abused, of course; but they will all say this of me, that when I pa.s.s my word, I keep it. If I say, 'Mon cher, you shall have the money,' a man has it; if I say, 'I renew your bill for six months,' it is renewed. 'T, is my way of doing business. In all cases any word is my bond. In this case, where no writing can pa.s.s between us, my only bond must be my word. Go, then, make your mind clear as to your security, and come here and dine at eight. We will call on Peschiera afterwards."

"Yes," said Randal, "I will at all events take the day to consider.

Meanwhile, I say this, I do not disguise from myself the nature of the proposed transaction, but what I have once resolved I go through with.

My sole vindication to myself is, that if I play here with a false die, it will be for a stake so grand, as once won, the magnitude of the prize will cancel the ignominy of the play. It is not this sum of money for which I sell myself,--it is for what that sum will aid me to achieve.

And in the marriage of young Hazeldean with the Italian woman, I have another, and it may be a larger interest. I have slept on it lately,--I wake to it now. Insure that marriage, obtain the post-obit. from Hazeldean, and whatever the issue of the more direct scheme for which you seek my services, rely on my grat.i.tude, and believe that you will have put me in the way to render grat.i.tude of avail. At eight I will be with you."

Randal left the room.

The baron sat thoughtful. "It is true," said he to himself, "this young man is the next of kin to the Hazeldean estate, if Frank displease his father sufficiently to lose his inheritance; that must be the clever boy's design. Well, in the long-run, I should make as much, or more, out of him than out of the spendthrift Frank. Frank's faults are those of youth. He will reform and retrench. But this man! No, I shall have him for life. And should he fail in this project, and have but this enc.u.mbered property--a landed proprietor mortgaged up to his ears--why, he is my slave, and I can foreclose when I wish, or if he prove useless;--no, I risk nothing. And if I did--if I lost L10,000--what then? I can afford it for revenge!--afford it for the luxury of leaving Audley Egerton alone with penury and ruin, deserted, in his hour of need, by the pensioner of his bounty, as he will be by the last friend of his youth, when it so pleases me,--me whom he has called 'scoundrel'!

and whom he--" Levy's soliloquy halted there, for the servant entered to announce the carriage. And the baron hurried his band over his features, as if to sweep away all trace of the pa.s.sions that distorted their smiling effrontery. And so, as he took up his cane and gloves, and glanced at the gla.s.s, the face of the fashionable usurer was once more as varnished as his boots.

CHAPTER XIX.

When a clever man resolves on a villanous action, he hastens, by the exercise of his cleverness, to get rid of the sense of his villany. With more than his usual alertness, Randal employed the next hour or two in ascertaining how far Baron Levy merited the character he boasted, and how far his word might be his bond. He repaired to young men whom he esteemed better judges on these points than Spendquick and Borrowell,--young men who resembled the Merry Monarch, inasmuch as--

"They never said a foolish thing, And never did a wise one."

There are many such young men about town,--sharp and able in all affairs except their own. No one knows the world better, nor judges of character more truly, than your half-beggared roue. From all these Baron Levy obtained much the same testimonials: he was ridiculed as a would-be dandy, but respected as a very responsible man of business, and rather liked as a friendly, accommodating species of the Sir Epicure Mammon, who very often did what were thought handsome, liberal things; and, "in short," said one of these experienced referees, "he is the best fellow going--for a money-lender! You may always rely on what he promises, and he is generally very forbearing and indulgent to us of good society; perhaps for the same reason that our tailors are,--to send one of us to prison would hurt his custom. His foible is to be thought a gentleman.

I believe, much as I suppose he loves money, he would give up half his fortune rather than do anything for which we could cut him. He allows a pension of three hundred a year to Lord S-----. True; he was his man of business for twenty years, and before then S----- was rather a prudent fellow, and had fifteen thousand a year. He has helped on, too, many a clever young man,--the best borough-monger you ever knew. He likes having friends in parliament. In fact, of course he is a rogue; but if one wants a rogue, one can't find a pleasanter. I should like to see him on the French stage,--a prosperous Macaire; Le Maitre could hit him off to the life."

From information in these more fashionable quarters, gleaned with his usual tact, Randal turned to a source less elevated, but to which he attached more importance. d.i.c.k Avenel a.s.sociated with the baron,--d.i.c.k Avenel must be in his clutches. Now Randal did justice to that gentleman's practical shrewdness. Moreover, Avenel was by profession a man of business. He must know more of Levy than these men of pleasure could; and as he was a plain-spoken person, and evidently honest, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, Randal did not doubt that out of d.i.c.k Avenel he should get the truth.

On arriving in Eaton Square, and asking for Mr. Avenel, Randal was at once ushered into the drawing-room. The apartment was not in such good, solid, mercantile taste as had characterized Avenel's more humble bachelor's residence at Screwstown. The taste now was the Honourable Mrs. Avenel's; and, truth to say, no taste could be worse. Furniture of all epochs heterogeneously clumped together,--here a sofa a la renaissance in Gobelin; there a rosewood Console from Gillow; a tall mock-Elizabethan chair in black oak, by the side of a modern Florentine table of Mosaic marbles; all kinds of colours in the room, and all at war with each other; very bad copies of the best-known pictures in the world in the most gaudy frames, and impudently labelled by the names of their murdered originals,--"Raphael," "Corregio," "t.i.tian," "Sebastian del Piombo." Nevertheless, there had been plenty of money spent, and there was plenty to show for it. Mrs. Avenel was seated on her sofa a la renaissance, with one of her children at her feet, who was employed in reading a new Annual in crimson silk binding. Mrs. Avenel was in an att.i.tude as if sitting for her portrait.

Polite society is most capricious in its adoptions or rejections. You see many a very vulgar person firmly established in the beau monde; others, with very good pretensions as to birth, fortune, etc., either rigorously excluded, or only permitted a peep over the pales. The Honourable Mrs. Avenel belonged to families unquestionably n.o.ble, both by her own descent and by her first marriage; and if poverty had kept her down in her earlier career, she now, at least, did not want wealth to back her pretensions. Nevertheless, all the dispensers of fashion concurred in refusing their support to the Honourable Mrs. Avenel. One might suppose it was solely on account of her plebeian husband; but indeed it was not so. Many a woman of high family can marry a low-born man not so presentable as Avenel, and, by the help of his money, get the fine world at her feet. But Mrs. Avenel had not that art. She was still a very handsome, showy woman; and as for dress, no d.u.c.h.ess could be more extravagant. Yet these very circ.u.mstances had perhaps gone against her ambition; for your quiet little plain woman, provoking no envy, slips into coteries, when a handsome, flaunting lady--whom, once seen in your drawing-room, can be no more over-looked than a scarlet poppy amidst a violet bed--is pretty sure to be weeded out as ruthlessly as a poppy would be in a similar position.

Mr. Avenel was sitting by the fire, rather moodily, his hands in his pockets, and whistling to himself. To say truth, that active mind of his was very much bored in London, at least during the fore part of the day. He hailed Randal's entrance with a smile of relief, and rising and posting himself before the fire--a coat tail under each arm--he scarcely allowed Randal to shake hands with Mrs. Avenel, and pat the child on the head, murmuring, "Beautiful creature!" (Randal was ever civil to children,--that sort of wolf in sheep's clothing always is; don't be taken in, O you foolish young mothers!)--d.i.c.k, I say, scarcely allowed his visitor these preliminary courtesies, before he plunged far beyond depth of wife and child into the political ocean. "Things now were coming right,--a vile oligarchy was to be destroyed. British respectability and British talent were to have fair play." To have heard him you would have thought the day fixed for the millennium! "And what is more," said Avenel, bringing down the fist of his right hand upon the palm of his left, "if there is to be a new parliament, we must have new men; not worn-out old brooms that never sweep clean, but men who understand how to govern the country, Sir. I INTEND TO COME IN MYSELF!"

"Yes," said Mrs. Avenel, hooking in a word at last, "I am sure, Mr.

Leslie, you will think I did right. I persuaded Mr. Avenel that, with his talents and property, he ought, for the sake of his country, to make a sacrifice; and then you know his opinions now are all the fashion, Mr.

Leslie; formerly they would have been called shocking and vulgar!"

Thus saying, she looked with fond pride at d.i.c.k's comely face, which at that moment, however, was all scowl and frown. I must do justice to Mrs.

Avenel; she was a weak woman, silly in some things, and a cunning one in others, but she was a good wife as wives go. Scotch women generally are.

"Bother!" said d.i.c.k. "What do women know about politics? I wish you'd mind the child,--it is crumpling up and playing almighty smash with that flim-flam book, which cost me one pound one."

Mrs. Avenel submissively bowed her head, and removed the Annual from the hands of the young destructive; the destructive set up a squall, as destructives usually do when they don't have their own way. d.i.c.k clapped his hand to his ears. "Whe-e-ew, I can't stand this; come and take a walk, Leslie: I want stretching!" He stretched himself as he spoke, first half-way up to the ceiling, and then fairly out of the room.

Randal, with his May Fair manner, turned towards Mrs. Avenel as if to apologize for her husband and himself.

"Poor Richard!" said she, "he is in one of his humours,--all men have them. Come and see me again soon. When does Almack's open?"

"Nay, I ought to ask you that question,--you who know everything that goes on in our set," said the young serpent. Any tree planted in "our set," if it had been but a crab-tree, would have tempted Mr. Avenel's Eve to jump at its boughs.

"Are you coming, there?" cried d.i.c.k, from the foot of the stairs.

CHAPTER XX.

"I have just been at our friend Levy's," said Randal, when he and d.i.c.k were outside the street door. "He, like you, is full of politics; pleasant man,--for the business he is said to do."

"Well," said d.i.c.k, slowly, "I suppose he is pleasant, but make the best of it--and still--"

"Still what, my dear Avenel?" (Randal here for the first time discarded the formal Mister.)

MR. AVENEL.--"Still the thing itself is not pleasant."

RANDAL (with his soft hollow laugh).--"You mean borrowing money upon more than five per cent?"

"Oh, curse the percentage. I agree with Bentham on the Usury Laws,--no shackles in trade for me, whether in money or anything else. That's not it. But when one owes a fellow money even at two per cent, and 't is not convenient to pay him, why, somehow or other, it makes one feel small; it takes the British Liberty out of a man!"

"I should have thought you more likely to lend money than to borrow it."

"Well, I guess you are right there, as a general rule. But I tell you what it is, sir; there is too great a mania for compet.i.tion getting up in this rotten old country of ours. I am as liberal as most men. I like compet.i.tion to a certain extent, but there is too much of it, sir,--too much of it." Randal looked sad and convinced. But if Leonard had heard d.i.c.k Avenel, what would have been his amaze? d.i.c.k Avenel rail against compet.i.tion! Think there could be too much of it! "Of course heaven and earth are coming together," said the spider, when the housemaid's broom invaded its cobweb. d.i.c.k was all for sweeping away other cobwebs; but he certainly thought heaven and earth coming together when he saw a great Turk's-head besom poked up at his own.

Mr. Avenel, in his genius for speculation and improvement, had established a factory at Screwstown, the first which had ever eclipsed the church spire with its t.i.tanic chimney. It succeeded well at first.

Mr. Avenel transferred to this speculation nearly all his capital.

"Nothing," quoth he, "paid such an interest. Manchester was getting worn out,--time to show what Screwstown could do. Nothing like compet.i.tion."