"My Novel" — Volume 12

"Certainly,—and Baron Levy knows it." The baron bowed assent. "Permit me to add—for it is due to a lady nearly related to myself—that it was, as I have since learned, certain erroneous representations made to her by Mr. Leslie which alone induced that lady, after my own arguments had failed, to lend her aid to a project which otherwise she would have condemned as strongly as, Duke di Serrano, I now with unfeigned sincerity do myself condemn it."

There was about the count, as he thus spoke, so much of that personal dignity which, whether natural or artificial, imposes for the moment upon human judgment,—a dignity so supported by the singular advantages of his superb stature, his handsome countenance, his patrician air,—that the duke, moved by his good heart, extended his hand to the perfidious kinsman, and forgot all the Machiavellian wisdom which should have told him how little a man of the count's hardened profligacy was likely to be influenced by any purer motives, whether to frank confession or to manly repentance. The count took the hand thus extended to him, and bowed his face, perhaps to conceal the smile which would have betrayed his secret soul. Randal still remained mute, and pale as death. His tongue clove to his mouth. He felt that all present were shrinking from his side. At last, with a violent effort, he faltered out, in broken sentences,

"A charge so sudden may well—may well confound me. But—but—who can credit it? Both the law and commonsense pre-suppose some motive for a criminal action; what could be my motive here? I—myself the suitor for the hand of the duke's daughter—I betray her! Absurd—absurd! Duke, Duke, I put it to your own knowledge of mankind whoever goes thus against his own interest—and—and his own heart?"

This appeal, however feebly made, was not without effect on the philosopher. "That is true," said the duke, dropping his kinsman's hand; "I see no motive."

"Perhaps," said Harley, "Baron Levy may here enlighten us. Do you know of any motive of self-interest that could have actuated Mr. Leslie in assisting the count's schemes?"

Levy hesitated. The count took up the word. "Pardieu!" said he, in his clear tone of determination and will—"pardieu! I can have no doubt thrown on my assertion, least of all by those who know of its truth; and I call upon you, Baron Levy, to state whether, in case of my marriage with the duke's daughter, I had not agreed to present my sister with a sum, to which she alleged some ancient claim, and which would have passed through your hands?"

"Certainly, that is true," said the baron.

"And would Mr. Leslie have benefited by any portion of that sum?"

Levy paused again.

"Speak, sir," said the count, frowning.

"The fact is," said the baron, "that Mr. Leslie was anxious to complete a purchase of certain estates that had once belonged to his family, and that the count's marriage with the signora, and his sister's marriage with Mr. Hazeldean, would have enabled me to accommodate Mr. Leslie with a loan to effect that purchase."

"What! what!" exclaimed the squire, hastily buttoning his breast-pocket with one hand, while he seized Randal's arm with the other—"my son's marriage! You lent yourself to that, too? Don't look so like a lashed hound! Speak out like a man, if man you be!"

"Lent himself to that, my good sir!" said the count. "Do you suppose that the Marchesa di Negra could have condescended to an alliance with a Mr. Hazeldean—"

"Condescended! a Hazeldean of Hazeldean!" exclaimed the squire, turning fiercely, and half choked with indignation. "Unless," continued the count, imperturbably, "she had been compelled by circumstances to do that said Mr. Hazeldean the honour to accept a pecuniary accommodation, which she had no other mode to discharge? And here, sir, the family of Hazeldean, I am bound to say, owe a great debt of gratitude to Mr. Leslie; for it was he who most forcibly represented to her the necessity for this misalliance; and it was he, I believe, who suggested to my friend the baron the mode by which Mr. Hazeldean was best enabled to afford the accommodation my sister deigned to accept."

"Mode! the post-obit!" ejaculated the squire, relinquishing his hold of Randal to lay his gripe upon Levy.

The baron shrugged his shoulders. "Any friend of Mr. Frank Hazeldean's would have recommended the same, as the most economical mode of raising money."

Parson Dale, who had at first been more shocked than any one present at these gradual revelations of Randal's treachery, now turning his eyes towards the young man, was so seized with commiseration at the sight of Randal's face, that he laid his hand on Harley's arm, and whispered him, "Look, look at that countenance!—-and one so young! Spare him, spare him!"

"Mr. Leslie," said Harley, in softened tones, "believe me that nothing short of justice to the Duke di Serrano—justice even to my young friend Mr. Hazeldean—has compelled me to this painful duty. Here let all inquiry terminate."

"And," said the count, with exquisite blandness, "since I have been informed by my Lord L'Estrange that Mr. Leslie has represented as a serious act on his part that personal challenge to myself, which I understood was but a pleasant and amicable arrangement in our baffled scheme, let me assure Mr. Leslie that if he be not satisfied with the regret that I now express for the leading share I have taken in these disclosures, I am wholly at Mr. Leslie's service."

"Peace, homicide," cried the parson, shuddering; and he glided to the side of the detected sinner, from whom all else had recoiled in loathing.

Craft against craft, talent against talent, treason against treason—in all this Randal Leslie would have risen superior to Giulio di Peschiera. But what now crushed him was not the superior intellect,—it was the sheer brute power of audacity and nerve. Here stood the careless, unblushing villain, making light of his guilt, carrying it away from disgust itself, with resolute look and front erect. There stood the abler, subtler, profounder criminal, cowering, abject, pitiful; the power of mere intellectual knowledge shivered into pieces against the brazen metal with which the accident of constitution often arms some ignobler nature.

The contrast was striking, and implied that truth so universally felt, yet so little acknowledged in actual life, that men with audacity and force of character can subdue and paralyze those far superior to themselves in ability and intelligence. It was these qualities which made Peschiera Randal's master; nay, the very physical attributes of the count, his very voice and form, his bold front and unshrinking eye, overpowered the acuter mind of the refining schemer, as in a popular assembly some burly Cleon cows into timorous silence every dissentient sage. But Randal turned in sullen impatience from the parson's whisper, that breathed comfort or urged repentance; and at length said, with clearer tones than he had yet mustered,

"It is not a personal conflict with the Count di Peschiera that can vindicate my honour; and I disdain to defend myself against the accusations of a usurer, and of a mam who—"

"Monsieur!" said the count, drawing himself up.

"A man who," persisted Randal, though he trembled visibly, "by his own confession, was himself guilty of all the schemes in which he would represent me as his accomplice, and who now, not clearing himself, would yet convict another—"

"/Cher petit monsieur!/" said the count, with his grand air of disdain, "when men like me make use of men like you, we reward them for a service if rendered, or discard them if the service be not done; and if I condescend to confess and apologize for any act I have committed, surely Mr. Randal Leslie might do the same without disparagement to his dignity. But I should never, sir, have taken the trouble to appear against you, had you not, as I learn, pretended to the hand of the lady whom I had hoped, with less presumption, to call my bride; and in this, how can I tell that you have not tricked and betrayed me? Is there anything in our past acquaintance that warrants me to believe that, instead of serving me, you sought but to serve yourself? Be that as it may, I had but one mode of repairing to the head of my house the wrongs I have done him, and that was by saving his daughter from a derogatory alliance with an impostor who had abetted my schemes for hire, and who now would filch for himself their fruit."

"Duke!" exclaimed Randal.

The duke turned his back. Randal extended his hands to the squire. "Mr. Hazeldean—what? you, too, condemn me, and unheard?"

"Unheard!—zounds, no! If you have anything to say, speak truth, and shame the devil."

"I abet Frank's marriage! I sanction the post-obit! Oh!" cried Randal, clinging to a straw, "if Frank himself were but here!"

Harley's compassion vanished before this sustained hypocrisy.

"You wish for the presence of Frank Hazeldean? It is just." Harley opened the door of the inner room, and Frank appeared at the entrance.

"My son! my son!" cried the squire, rushing forward, and clasping Frank to his broad, fatherly breast.

This affecting incident gave a sudden change to the feelings of the audience, and for a moment Randal himself was forgotten. The young man seized that moment. Reprieved, as it were, from the glare of contemptuous, accusing eyes, slowly he crept to the door, slowly and noiselessly, as the viper, when it is wounded, drops its crest and glides writhing through the grass. Levy followed him to the threshold, and whispered in his ear,

"I could not help it,—you would have done the same by me. You see you have failed in everything; and when a man fails completely, we both agreed that we must give him up altogether."

Randal said not a word, and the baron marked his shadow fall on the broad stairs, stealing down, down, step after step, till it faded from the stones.

"But he was of some use," muttered Levy. "His treachery and his exposure will gall the childless Egerton. Some little revenge still!"

The count touched the arm of the musing usurer,

"J'ai bien joue mon role, n'est ce pas?"—(I have well played my part, have I not?)

"Your part! Ah, but, my dear count, I do not quite understand it."

"Ma foi, you are passably dull. I had just been landed in France, when a letter from L'Estrange reached me. It was couched as an invitation, which I interpreted to—the duello. Such invitations I never refuse. I replied: I came hither, took my lodgings at an inn. My Lord seeks me last night.

"I begin in the tone you may suppose. Pardieu! he is clever, milord! He shows me a letter from the Prince Von ——— , Alphonse's recall, my own banishment. He places before me, but with admirable suavity, the option of beggary and ruin, or an honourable claim on Alphonso's gratitude. And as for that /petit monsieur/, do you think I could quietly contemplate my own tool's enjoyment of all I had lost myself? Nay, more, if that young Harpagon were Alphonso's son-inlaw, could the duke have a whisperer at his ear more fatal to my own interests? To be brief, I saw at a glance my best course. I have adopted it. The difficulty was to extricate myself as became a man /de sang et de jeu/. If I have done so, congratulate me. Alphonso has taken my hand, and I now leave it to him to attend to my fortunes, and clear up my repute."

"If you are going to London," said Levy, "my carriage, ere this, must be at the door, and I shall be proud to offer you a seat, and converse with you on your prospects. But, /peste, mon cher/, your fall has been from a great height, and any other man would have broken his bones."

"Strength is ever light," said the count, smiling; "and it does not fall; it leaps down and rebounds."

Levy looked at the count, and blamed himself for having disparaged Peschiera and overrated Randal.

While this conference went on, Harley was by Violante's side.

"I have kept my promise to you," said he, with a kind of tender humility. "Are you still so severe on me?"

"Ah," answered Violante, gazing on his noble brow, with all a woman's pride in her eloquent, admiring eyes, "I have heard from Mr. Dale that you have achieved a conquest over yourself, which makes me ashamed to think that I presumed to doubt how your heart would speak when a moment of wrath (though of wrath so just) had passed away."

"No, Violante, do not acquit me yet; witness my revenge (for I have not foregone it), and then let my heart speak, and breathe its prayer that the angel voice, which it now beats to hear, may still be its guardian monitor."

"What is this?" cried an amazed voice; and Harley, turning round, saw that the duke was by his side; and, glancing with ludicrous surprise, now to Harley, now to Violante, "Am I to understand that you—"