Ezra Baroni smiled, where he leaned against the table, looking over some papers.

“Dis is a delicate matter; don’t you come putting your big paw in it—­you’ll spoil it all.”

Ben Davis growled afresh: 

“No, I ain’t a-going.  You know as well as me I can’t show in the thing.  Hanged if I wouldn’t almost lief risk a lifer out at Botany Bay for the sake o’ wringing my fine-feathered bird myself, but I daren’t.  If he was to see me in it, all ’ud be up.  You must do it.  Get along; you look uncommon respectable.  If your coat-tails was a little longer, you might right and away be took for a parson.”

The Jew laughed softly, the welsher grimly, at the compliment they paid the Church; Baroni put up his papers into a neat Russia letter book.  Excellently dressed, without a touch of flashiness, he did look eminently respectable—­and lingered a moment.

“I say, dear child; vat if de Marquis vant to buy off and hush up?  Ten to von he vill; he care no more for monish than for dem macaroons, and he love his friend, dey say.”

Ben Davis took his legs off the table with a crash, and stood up, flushed, thirstily eager, almost aggressive in his peremptory excitement.

“Without wringing my dainty bird’s neck?  Not for a million paid out o’ hand!  Without crushing my fine gentleman down into powder?  Not for all the blunt of every one o’ the Rothschilds!  Curse his woman’s face!  I’ve got to keep dark now; but when he’s crushed, and smashed, and ruined, and pilloried, and drove out of this fine world, and warned off of all his aristocratic race-courses, then I’ll come in and take a look at him; then I’ll see my brilliant gentleman a worn-out, broken-down swindler, a dying in the bargain!”

The intense malignity, the brutal hungry lust for vengeance that inspired the words, lent their coarse vulgarity something that was for the moment almost tragical in its strength; almost horrible in its passion.  Ezra Baroni looked at him quietly, then without another word went out—­to a congenial task.

“Dat big child is a fool,” mused the subtler and gentler Jew.  “Vengeance is but de breath of de vind; it blow for you one day, it blow against you de next; de only real good is monish.”

The Seraph had ridden back from Iffesheim to the Bad in company with some Austrian officers, and one or two of his own comrades.  He had left the Course late, staying to exhaust every possible means of inquiry as to the failure of Forest King, and to discuss with other members of the Newmarket and foreign jockey clubs the best methods—­if method there were—­of discovering what foul play had been on foot with the horse.  That there was some, and very foul too, the testimony of men and angels would not have dissuaded the Seraph; and the event had left him most unusually grave and regretful.

The amount he had lost himself, in consequence, was of not the slightest moment to him, although he was extravagant enough to run almost to the end even of his own princely tether in money matters; but that “Beauty” should be cut down was more vexatious to him than any evil accident that could have befallen himself, and he guessed pretty nearly the terrible influence the dead failure would have on his friend’s position.