tely miserable than Randal Leslie
the usher. For Levy is a man who has admitted the fiercer passions into
his philosophy of life; he has not the pale blood and torpid heart which
allow the scotched adder to dose away its sense of pain. Just as old age
began to creep upon the fashionable usurer, he fell in love with a young
opera-dancer, whose light heels had turned the lighter heads of half the
eligans of Paris and London. The craft of the dancer was proof against
all lesser bribes than that of marriage; and Levy married her. From
that moment his house, Louis Quinze, was more crowded than ever by the
high-born dandies whose society he had long so eagerly courted. That
society became his curse. The baroness was an accomplished coquette; and
Levy (with whom, as we have seen, jealousy was the predominant passion)
was stretched on an eternal rack. His low estimate of human nature, his
disbelief in the possibility of virtue, added strength to the agony
of his suspicions, and provoked the very dangers he dreaded. His
self-torturing task was that of the spy upon his own hearth. His
banquets were haunted by a spectre; the attributes of his wealth were as
the goad and the scourge of Nemesis. His gay cynic smile changed into
a sullen scowl, his hair blanched into white, his eyes were hollow with
one consuming care. Suddenly he left his costly house,--left London;
abjured all the society which it had been the joy of his wealth
to purchase; buried himself and his wife in a remote corner of the
provinces; and there he still lives. He seeks in vain to occupy his days
with rural pursuits,--he to whom the excitements of a metropolis, with
all its corruption and its vices, were the sole sources of the torpid
stream that he called "pleasure." There, too, the fiend of jealousy
still pursues him: he prowls round his demesnes with the haggard eye
and furtive step of a thief; he guards his wife as a prisoner, for she
threatens every day to escape. The life of the man who had opened the
prison to so many is the life of a jailer. His wife abhors him, and does
not conceal it; and still slavishly he dotes on her. Accustomed to the
freest liberty, demanding applause and admiration as her rights; wholly
uneducated, vulgar in mind, coarse in language, violent in temper, the
beautiful Fury he had brought to his home makes that home a hell. Thus,
what might seem to the superficial most enviable, is to their possessor
most hateful. He dares not ask a so