Page:What will he do with it.djvu/504

494 besides, you promised that you would leave me in peace as soon as I had got Darrell to provide for you."

"So I will. Zounds, Sir, do you doubt my word? So I will. But I don't call exile 'a provision'—Basta! I understand from you that Colonel Morley offers to restore the niggardly £200 a-year Darrell formerly allowed to me, to be paid monthly or weekly, through some agent in Van Diemen's Land, or some such uncomfortable halfway house to Eternity, that was not even in the Atlas when I studied geography at school. But £200 a-year is exactly my income in England, paid weekly too, by your agreeable self, with whom it is a pleasure to talk over old times. Therefore that proposal is out of the question. Tell Colonel Morley, with my compliments, that if he will double the sum, and leave me to spend it where I please, I scorn haggling, and say 'done.' And as to the girl, since I cannot find her (which, on penalty of being thrashed to a mummy, you will take care not to let out), I would agree to leave Mr. Darrell free to disown her. But are you such a dolt as not to see that I put the ace of trumps on my adversary's pitiful deuce, if I depose that my own child is not my own child, when all I get for it is what I equally get out of you, with my ace of trumps still in my hands? Basta!—I say again Basta! It is evidently an object to Darrell to get rid of all fear that Sophy should ever pounce upon him tooth and claw; if he be so convinced that she is not his daughter's child, why make a point of my saying that I told him a fib when I said she was? Evidently, too, he is afraid of my power to harass and annoy him; or why make it a point that I shall only nibble his cheese in a trap at the world's end, stared at by bushmen, and wombats, and rattlesnakes, and alligators, and other American citizens or British settlers? £200 a-year, and my own wife's father a millionaire! The offer is an insult. Ponder this; put on the screw; make them come to terms which I can do them the honor to accept; meanwhile, I will trouble you for my four sovereigns!"

Poole had the chagrin to report to the Colonel Jasper's refusal of the terms proposed, and to state the counter-proposition he was commissioned to make. Alban was at first surprised, not conjecturing the means of supply, in his native land, which Jasper had secured in the coffers of Poole himself. On sounding the unhappy negotiator as to Jasper's reasons, he surmised, however, one part of the truth—viz., that Jasper built hopes of better terms precisely on the fact that terms had been offered to him at all; and this induced Alban almost to regret that he had made any such overtures, and to believe that Darrell's re-