PLAIN SPEAKING
From the depths of her chair, Rachael for several moments sat and
subjected her visitor to a close and merciless scrutiny.
"So you," she said at last, "were the fairy godfather. You were the
man who trusted a nameless boy with five hundred pounds, because his
vaporings amused you. You pushed him out into the world, you bade him
go and seek his fortune."
"I was that infernal fool!" Rochester muttered.
The woman nodded.
"Yes, a fool!" she said. "No one but a fool would do such a thing. And
yet great things have come of it."
Rochester shrugged his shoulders. He was not prepared to admit that
Bertrand Saton was in any sense great.
"My adopted son," she continued, "is very wonderful. Egypt had its
soothsayers thousands of years ago. This century, too, may have its
prophet. Bertrand gains power every day. He is beginning to
understand."
"You, too," Rochester asked politely, "are perhaps a student of the
occult?"
"Whatever I am," she answered scornfully, "I am not one of those who
because their two feet are planted upon the earth, and their head
reaches six feet towards the sky, are prepared to declare that there
is no universe save the earth upon which they stand, no sky save the
sky toward which they look--nothing in life which their eyes will not
show them, or which their hands may not touch."
Rochester smiled faintly.
"Materialism is an easy faith and a safe one," he said. "Imagination
is very distorting."
"For you who feel like that," she answered, "the way through life is
simple enough. We others can only pity."
"Comtesse," Rochester said, "such an attitude is perfectly reasonable.
It is only when you attempt to convert that we are obliged to fall
back upon our readiest weapons."
"You are one of those," she said, looking at him keenly, "who do not
wish to understand more than you understand at present, who have no
desire to gain the knowledge of hidden things."
"You are right, Comtesse," Rochester answered, with a smile. "I am one
of those pig-headed individuals."
"It is the Saxon race," she muttered, "who have kept back the progress
of the world for centuries."
"We have kept it backward, perhaps," he answered, "but wholesome."
"You think always of your bodies," she said.
"They were entrusted to us, madam, to look after," he answered.
She smiled grimly.
"You are not such a fool," she said, "as my adopted son would have me
believe. You have spared me at least that hideous Latin quotation
which has done so much harm to your race."
"Out of respect to you," he declared, "I avoided it. It was really a
little too obvious."
"Come," she said, "you are a type of man I have not met with for
years. You are strong and vigorous and healthy. You have color upon
your cheeks, and strength in your tone and movements. In any show of
your kind, you should certainly be entitled to a prize."
Rochester laughed, at first softly, and then heartily.
"My dear lady," he said, "forgive me. I can assure you that although
my inclinations do not prompt me to sit at your son's feet and accept
his mythical sayings as the words of a god, I am really not a fool. I
will even go so far as this. I will even admit the possibility that a
serious and religious study of occultism might result in benefit to
all of us. The chief point where you and I differ is with regard to
your adopted son. You believe in him, apparently. I don't!"
"Then why are you here?" she asked. "What do you want with him? Do you
come as an enemy?"
Rochester was spared the necessity of making any answer. He heard the
door open, and the woman's eyes glittered as they turned toward it.
"Bertrand is here himself," she said. "You can settle your business
with him."
Rochester rose to his feet. Saton had just entered, closing the door
behind him. Prepared for Rochester's presence by the servants, he
greeted him calmly enough.
"This is an unexpected honor," he said, bowing. "I did not imagine
that we should meet again so soon."
"Nor I," Rochester answered. "Where can we talk?"
"Here as well as anywhere," Saton answered, going up to Rachael, and
lifting her hand for a moment to his lips. "From this lady, whose
acquaintance I presume you have made, I have no secrets."
Rochester glanced from one to the other--the woman, sitting erect and
severe in her chair, the young man bending affectionately over her.
Yes, he was right! There was something about the two hard to explain,
yet apparent to him as he sat there, which seemed in some way to
remove them out of direct kinship with the ordinary people of the
world. Was it, he wondered, with a sudden swift intuition, a touch of
insularity, a sign of narrowness, that he should find himself so
utterly repelled by this foreign note in their temperaments? Was his
disapproval, after all, but a mark of snobbishness, the snobbishness
which, to use a mundane parallel, takes objection to the shape of an
unfashionable collar, or the cut of a country-made coat? There were
other races upon the world beside the race of aristocrats. There was
an aristocracy of brains, of genius, of character. Yet he reasoned
against his inspiration. Nothing could make him believe that the boy
who had held out his hands so eagerly toward the fire of life, had not
ended by gathering to himself experiences and a cult of living from
which any ordinary mortal would have shrunk.
"I am quite content," Rochester said, "to say what I have to say
before this lady, especially if she knows your history. I have come
here to tell you this. I have been your sponsor, perhaps your
unwilling sponsor, into the society and to the friends amongst whom
you spend your time. I am not satisfied with my sponsorship. That you
came of humble parentage, although you never allude to the fact, goes
for nothing. That you may be forgiven. But there are seven years of
your past the knowledge of which is a pledge to me. I have come to
insist upon your fulfilment of it. For seven years you disappeared.
Where were you? How did you blossom into prosperity? How is it that
you, the professor of a new cult, whose first work is as yet
unpublished, find yourself enabled to live in luxury like this? You
had no godmother then. Who is this lady? Why do you call her your
godmother? She is nothing of the sort. You and I know that--you and I
and she. There are things about you, Saton, which I find it hard to
understand. I want to understand them for the sake of my friends."
"And if you do not?" Saton asked calmly.
"Well, it must be open war," Rochester declared.
"I should say that it amounted to that now," Saton answered.
"Scarcely," Rochester declared, "for if it had been open war I should
have asked you before now to tell me where it was that you and Lord
Guerdon had met. Remember I heard the words trembling upon his lips,
and I saw your face!"
Saton did not move, nor did he speak for a moment. His cheeks were a
little pale, but he gave no sign of being moved. The woman's face was
like the face of a sphinx, withered and emotionless. Her eyes were
fixed upon Saton's.
"You have spoken to me before somewhat in this strain, sir," Saton
said. "What I said to you then, I repeat. The account between us is
ruled out. You lent or gave me a sum of money, and I returned it. As
to gratitude," he went on, "that I may or may not feel. I leave you to
judge. You can ask yourself, if you will, whether that action of yours
came from an impulse of generosity, or was merely the gratification of
a cynical whim."
"My motives are beside the question," Rochester answered. "Do I
understand that you decline to give me any account of yourself?"
"I see no reason," Saton said coldly, "why I should gratify your
curiosity."
"There is no reason," Rochester admitted. "It is simply a matter of
policy. Frankly, I mistrust you. There are points about your
behaviour, ever since in a foolish moment I asked you to stay at
Beauleys, which I do not understand. I do not understand Lord
Guerdon's sudden recognition of you, and even suddener death. I do not
understand why it has amused you to fill the head of my young ward,
Lois Champneyes, with foolish thoughts. I do not understand why you
should stand between my wife and the writers of a blackmailing letter.
I do not ask you for any explanation. I simply tell you that these
things present themselves as enigmas to me. You have declared your
position. I declare mine. What you will not tell me I shall make it my
business to discover."
The Comtesse leaned a little forward. Her face was still unchanged,
her tone scornful.
"It is I who will answer you," she said. "My adopted son--for he is my
adopted son if I choose to make him so--will explain nothing. He has,
in fact, nothing more to say to you. You and he are quits so far as
regards obligations. Your paths in life lie apart. You are one of the
self-centred, sedentary loiterers by the way. For him," she added,
throwing out suddenly her brown, withered hand, aflame with jewels,
"there lie different things. Something he knows; something he has
learned; much there is yet for him to learn. He will go on his way,
undisturbed by you or any friends of yours. As for his means, your
question is an impertinence. Ask at Rothschilds concerning the
Comtesse de Vestignes, and remember that what belongs to me belongs to
him. Measure your wits against his, to-day, to-morrow, or any time you
choose, and the end is certain. Show your patron out, Bertrand. He has
amused me for a little time, but I am tired."
Rochester rose to his feet.
"Madam," he said, "I am sorry to have fatigued you. For the rest," he
added, with a note of irony in his tone, "I suppose I must accept your
challenge. I feel that I am measuring myself and my poor powers
against all sorts of nameless gifts. And yet," he added, as he
followed Saton towards the door, "the world goes round, and the things
which happened yesterday repeat themselves to-morrow. Your new science
should teach you, at least, not to gamble against certainties."
He passed out of the room, and Saton returned slowly to where Rachael
was sitting. Her eyes sought his inquiringly. They read the anguish in
his face.
"You are afraid," she muttered.
"I am afraid," he admitted. "Given an inversion of their relative
positions, I feel like Faust befriended by Mephistopheles. I felt it
when he stood by my side on the hilltop, seven years ago. I felt it
when he thrust that money into my hand, and bade me go and see what I
could make of life, bade me go, without a word of kindness, without a
touch of his fingers, without a sentence of encouragement, with no
admonitory words save that one single diatribe against failure. You
know what he told me? 'Go out,' he said,'and try your luck. Go out
along the road which your eyes have watched fading into the mists. But
remember this. For men there is no such thing as failure. One may swim
too far out to sea on a sunny day. One may trifle with a loaded
revolver, or drink in one's sleep the draught from which one does not
awake. But for men, there is no failure.'"
The woman nodded.
"Well," she said harshly, "you remembered that. You did not fail. Who
dares to say that you have failed!"
Saton threw himself into the easy-chair drawn apart from hers. His
head fell forward into his hands. The woman rested her head upon her
fingers, and watched him through the shadows.