Of the narrative just placed before the reader, it is clear that Leonard could gather only desultory fragments. He could but see that his ill-fated mother had been united to a man she had loved with surpassing tenderness; had been led to suspect that the marriage was fraudulent; had gone abroad in despair; returned repentant and hopeful; had gleaned some intelligence that her lover was about to be married to another, and there the manuscript closed with the blisters left on the page by agonizing tears. The mournful end of Nora, her lonely return to die under the roof of her parents,—this he had learned before from the narrative of Dr. Morgan.
But even the name of her supposed husband was not revealed. Of him Leonard could form no conjecture, except that he was evidently of higher rank than Nora. Harley L’Estrange seemed clearly indicated in the early boy-lover. If so, Harley must know all that was left dark to Leonard, and to him Leonard resolved to confide the manuscripts. With this resolution he left the cottage, resolving to return and attend the funeral obsequies of his departed friend. Mrs. Goodyer willingly permitted him to take away the papers she had lent to him, and added to them the packet which had been addressed to Mrs. Bertram from the Continent.
Musing in anxious gloom over the record he had read, Leonard entered London on foot, and bent his way towards Harley’s hotel; when, just as he had crossed into Bond Street, a gentleman in company with Baron Levy, and who seemed, by the flush on his brow and the sullen tone of his voice, to have had rather an irritating colloquy with the fashionable usurer, suddenly caught sight of Leonard, and, abruptly quitting Levy, seized the young man by the arm.
“Excuse me, sir,” said the gentleman, looking hard into Leonard’s face, “but unless these sharp eyes of mine are mistaken, which they seldom are, I see a nephew whom, perhaps, I behaved to rather too harshly, but who still has no right to forget Richard Avenel.”
“My dear uncle,” exclaimed Leonard, “this is indeed a joyful surprise; at a time, too, when I needed joy! No; I have never forgotten your kindness, and always regretted our estrangement.”
“That is well said; give us your fist again. Let me look at you—quite the gentleman, I declare—still so good-looking too. We Avenels always were a handsome family.
“Good-by, Baron Levy. Need not wait for me; I am not going to run away. I shall see you again.”
“But,” whispered Levy, who had followed Avenel across the street, and eyed Leonard with a quick, curious, searching glance—“but it must be as I say with regard to the borough; or (to be plain) you must cash the bills on the day they are due.”
“Very well, sir, very well. So you think to put the screw upon me, as if I were a poor little householder. I understand,—my money or my borough?”
“Exactly so,” said the baron, with a soft smile.
“You shall hear from me.” (Aside, as Levy strolled away)—“D—-d tarnation rascal!”
Dick Avenel then linked his arm in his nephew’s, and strove for some minutes to forget his own troubles, in the indulgence of that curiosity in the affairs of another, which was natural to him, and in this instance increased by the real affection which he had felt for Leonard. But still his curiosity remained unsatisfied; for long before Leonard could overcome his habitual reluctance to speak of his success in literature, Dick’s mind wandered back to his rival at Screwstown, and the curse of “over-competition,”—to the bills which Levy had discounted, in order to enable Dick to meet the crushing force of a capitalist larger than himself, and the “tarnation rascal” who now wished to obtain two seats at Lansmere, one for Randal Leslie, one for a rich Nabob whom Levy had just caught as a client, and Dick, though willing to aid Leslie, had a mind to the other seat for himself. Therefore Dick soon broke in upon the hesitating confessions of Leonard, with exclamations far from pertinent to the subject, and rather for the sake of venting his own griefs and resentment than with any idea that the sympathy or advice of his nephew could serve him.
“Well, well,” said Dick, “another time for your history. I see you have thrived, and that is enough for the present. Very odd; but just now I can only think of myself. I’m in a regular fix, sir. Screwstown is not the respectable Screwstown that you remember it—all demoralized and turned topsy-turvy by a demoniacal monster capitalist, with steam-engines that might bring the falls of Niagara into your back parlour, sir! And as if that was not enough to destroy and drive into almighty shivers a decent fair-play Britisher like myself, I hear he is just in treaty for some patent infernal invention that will make his engines do twice as much work with half as many hands! That’s the way those unfeeling ruffians increase our poor-rates! But I ‘ll get up a riot against him, I will! Don’t talk to me of the law! What the devil is the good of the law if it don’t protect a man’s industry,—a liberal man, too, like me!” Here Dick burst into a storm of vituperation against the rotten old country in general, and Mr. Dyce, the monster capitalist of Screwstown, in particular.
Leonard started; for Dick now named, in that monster capitalist, the very person who was in treaty for Leonard’s own mechanical improvement on the steam-engine.
“Stop, uncle, stop! Why, then, if this man were to buy the contrivance you speak of, it would injure you?”
“Injure me, sir! I should be a bankrupt,—that is, if it succeeded; but I dare say it is all a humbug.”
“No, it will succeed,—I ‘ll answer for that!”
“You! You have seen it?”
“Why, I invented it!”
Dick hastily withdrew his arm from Leonard’s.
“Serpent’s tooth!” he said falteringly, “so it is you, whom I warmed at my hearth, who are to ruin Richard Avenel?”
“No; but to save him! Come into the City and look at my model. If you like it, the patent shall be yours!”
“Cab, cab, cab,” cried Dick Avenel, stopping a ‘Ransom;’ “jump in, Leonard,—jump in. I’ll buy your patent,—that is, if it be worth a straw; and as for payment—”
“Payment! Don’t talk of that!”
“Well, I won’t,” said Dick, mildly; “for ‘t is not the topic of conversation I should choose myself, just at present. And as for that black-whiskered alligator, the baron, let me first get out of those rambustious, unchristian, filbert-shaped claws of his, and then—but jump in! jump in! and tell the man where to drive!”
A very brief inspection of Leonard’s invention sufficed to show Richard Avenel how invaluable it would be to him. Armed with a patent, of which the certain effects in the increase of power and diminution of labour were obvious to any practical man, Avenel felt that he should have no difficulty in obtaining such advances of money as he required, whether to alter his engines, meet the bills discounted by Levy, or carry on the war with the monster capitalist. It might be necessary to admit into partnership some other monster capitalist—What then? Any partner better than Levy. A bright idea struck him.
“If I can just terrify and whop that infernal intruder on my own ground for a few months, he may offer, himself, to enter into partnership,—make the two concerns a joint-stock friendly combination, and then we shall flog the world.”
His gratitude to Leonard became so lively that Dick offered to bring his nephew in for Lansmere instead of himself; and when Leonard declined the offer, exclaimed, “Well, then, any friend of yours; I’m all for reform against those high and mighty right honourable borough-mongers; and what with loans and mortgages on the small householders, and a long course of ‘Free and Easies’ with the independent freemen, I carry one—seat certain, perhaps both seats of the town of Lansmere, in my breeches pocket.” Dick then, appointing an interview with Leonard at his lawyer’s, to settle the transfer of the invention, upon terms which he declared “should be honourable to both parties,” hurried off, to search amongst his friends in the City for some monster capitalist, who alight be induced to extricate him from the jaws of Levy and the engines of his rival at Screwstown. “Mullins is the man, if I can but catch him,” said Dick. “You have heard of Mullins?—a wonderful great man; you should see his nails; he never cuts them! Three millions, at least, he has scraped together with those nails of his, sir. And in this rotten old country, a man must have nails a yard long to fight with a devil like Levy! Good-by, good-by,—Goon-by, MY DEAR, nephew!”
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