He
loved to enter their houses with his glittering eye and face radiant
with innocence, and, when things were at the very worst and they
remorseless, to succeed in circumventing them. In a certain sense, and
to a certain degree, they were all his victims. True, they had gorged
upon his rents and menaced his domains; but they had also advanced large
sums, and he had so involved one with another in their eager appetite to
prey upon his youth, and had so complicated the financial relations of
the Syrian coast in his own respect, that sometimes they tremblingly
calculated that the crash of Fakredeen must inevitably be the signal of
a general catastrophe.
Even usurers have their weak side; some are vain, some envious;
Fakredeen knew how to titillate their self-love, or when to give them
the opportunity of immolating a rival. Then it was, when he had baffled
and deluded them, or, with that fatal frankness of which he sometimes
blushingly boasted, had betrayed some sacred confidence that shook
the credit of the whole coast from Scanderoon to Gaza, and embroiled
individuals whose existence depended on their mutual goodwill, that,
laughing like one of the blue-eyed hyenas of his forests, he galloped
away to Canobia, and, calling for his nargileh, mused in chuckling
calculation over the prodigious sums he owed to them, formed whimsical
and airy projects for his quittance, or delighted himself by brooding
over the memory of some happy expedient or some daring feat of finance.
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