The Usurer.
At a desk in the office we observe a lowsized, whiskered man.
Intelligence beams from a lofty brow; sharp features an aquiline nose
tell of Jewish character; his eye glistens and dulls as the heaving
heart throbs with its tides of joy and sorrow. Speculation, that
glides at times into golden dreams, brightens his whole features with
a sunbeam of joy; but suddenly it is clouded. Some unseen intruder
casts a baneful shadow on the ungrasped prize; the features of the
usurer contract, the hand is clenched, the brow is wrinkled, and woe
betide the luckless debtor whose misfortunes would lead him to the
banker's bureau during the eclipse of his good-humor!
Cassier was a banker by name, but in reality dealt in usurious loans,
Shylock-like wringing the pound of flesh from the victims of his
avarice. He was known and dreaded by all the honest tradesmen of the
city; the curse of the orphan and the widow, whom he unfeelingly drove
into the streets, followed in his path; the children stopped their
games and hid until he passed. That repulsive character which haunts
the evil-doers of society marked the aged banker as an object of dread
and scorn to his immediate neighbors.
In religion Cassier at first strongly advocated the principles of
Lutheranism; but, as is ever the case with those set adrift on the sea
of doubt, freed from the anchor of faith, the definite character of
his belief was shipwrecked in a confusion of ideas. At length he
lapsed into the negative deism of the French infidels, just then
commencing to gain ground in France. He joined them, too, in open
blasphemies against God and plotting against the stability of the
Government. The blood chills at reading some of the awful oaths
administered to the partisans of those secret societies. They proposed
to war against God, to sweep away all salutary checks against the
indulgence of passion, to level the alter and the throne, and advocated
the claims of those impious theories that in modern times have found
their fullest development in Mormonism and Communism.
Further on we shall find this noxious weed, that flourishes in the
vineyards whose hedges are broken down, producing its poisonous fruit.
But it was at this period of our history that he became a frequent
attendant at their reunions, returning at midnight, half intoxicated,
to pour into the horrified ears of his wife and children the issue of
the last blasphemous and revolutionary debate that marked the progress
and development of their impious tendencies.
No wonder Heaven sent on the Cassier family the curse that forms the
thrill of our tragic memoir.