The Marchesa went up to the deck of the yacht. She had dressed early
and there was yet an hour to wait. A deep topaz twilight lay on the
world. There was no darkness. It was as though all the light remained,
but it came now through a colored window. At the door she stopped. Out
beyond her Cyrus Childers was walking backward and forward along the
deck. His step was quick and elastic; his back straight. Age sat lightly
on him. She watched him for a moment, and then she went over to him.
"Ah, Marchesa," he said, in his big voice; "what do you think of this
night?"
The Marchesa looked out at the bay flooded with its soft topaz color.
"It is wonderful," she said. "It makes me believe that somehow,
somewhere, our dreams shall come true by the will of God."
The old man's jaw tightened on his answer.
"Who makes the will of God?"
"It is the great moving impulse at the heart of things," said the
Marchesa.
"Nonsense," said the old man. "One makes the will of God for himself.
The moving impulse is here," and he struck his chest with his clenched
hand. "What we dream comes true if we make it come true. But it does not
if we sit on our doorstep or shut ourselves up to await a visitation."
He made a great sweeping gesture. "How can these elements that are dead
and an appearance resist the human mind that is alive and real?"
"But providence," said the Marchesa, "chance, luck, fortune,
circumstance, do these words mean nothing?"
The old man laughed.
"Marchesa," he said, "if a man had a double equipment of skull space he
could sweep these words out of the language."
"Then you do not believe they stand for anything?"
"They stand for ignorance."
"We are taught from the cradle," continued the Marchesa, "that there is
in the universe a guiding destiny that moves the lives of each one of us
to a certain fortune."
"It is the wildest fancy," replied the old man, "that the human mind
ever got hold of. The fact is, that man has hardly ceased to be an
animal, that he has just discovered his intelligence, and that the great
majority of the race have no more skill of it than an infant of its
hands. Anyone with a modicum of foresight can do anything he likes. If a
visitor from an older and more luminous planet were to observe how whole
nations of men are made to do precisely what a few slightly superior
persons wish, he would never cease to laugh. And all the time these
nations of men think they are doing what they please. They think they
are directing their own destinies. They think they are free."
The Marchesa came a little closer to him. "Have you made your destiny
what you wish it to be?" she said.
He raised his arms and spread out his fingers with a curious hovering
gesture. Then he answered.
"Yes," he said, "at last."
"Have you made every dream that you have dreamed come true?"
"Every dream," he said, "but one, and it is coming true."
"How do you know that?" she said.
"Because," he said, "I have the instinct of conquest. Don't you remember
what I told you when you were a little girl?"
"I remember," replied the Marchesa slowly, "but I was very young and I
did not understand."
"I was past fifty then," said the man. He put out his arms with his
hovering gesture. "I am eighty now, but I have done it all."
The purple light fell on his jaw like a plowshare, on his bony nose,
on his hard gray eyes, bringing them into relief against the lines and
furrows of his face.
"I have drawn the resources of a nation under me; I have got it in my
hand; it obeys me"; he laughed, "but I respect its illusions; I do not
offend its eye. I do not wear gewgaws and tinsel and I have hidden my
Versailles in a forest. Nations see no farther than the form of things.
A republic is as easy to govern as an empire if one only keeps his
gilded chair in the garret."
"And, tell me, have you gotten any pleasure out of life?"
The old man made a contemptuous gesture.
"Pleasure," he said, "is the happiness of little men; big men are after
something more than that. They are after the satisfaction that comes
from directing events. This is the only happiness; to refuse to
recognize any directing power in the universe but oneself; to crush
out every other authority; to be the one dominating authority; to make
events take the avenue one likes. That is the happiness of the god
of the universe, if there is any god of the universe. For my part I
recognize no authority higher than myself."
He moved about the deck, his arms out, his fingers extended, his face
lifted.
"I am willing for men to go about with their string of playthings and
to imagine they are getting pleasure out of life; but for my part, if I
could be the master behind the moving of events, I would not be content
to sit like a village idiot and watch a spinning top. I am willing for
little men, lacking courage, to endure life as they find it, and to
say it is the will of God; but as for me I will not be cowed into
submission. I will not be held back from laying hold of the lever of the
great engine merely because the rumble of the machinery fills other men
with terror. The fearful may obey all the vague deities they like, but
as for me, I wear no god's collar."
"Then," said the Marchesa, "you do not believe that we have any immortal
destiny?"
The old man raised his arms with that sudden swift upward sweep of a
vulture, seeking to rise from the ground.
"I am not concerned with vague imaginings," he replied. "I do not know
whether man is a spirit or a fungus. I only know that the human will is
the one power in the universe, so far as we can find out, that is able
to direct the moving of events. Nothing else that exists can make the
most trivial thing happen or cease to happen. No imagined god or demon,
in all the history of the race has ever influenced the order of events
as much as the feeblest human creature in an hour of life. Is it not,
then, the height of folly for the human mind, that exists and is
potent, to yield the direction of events to gods, that are fabled and
powerless?"
His arms were extended and he moved them with a powerful threshing
motion, like that vulture, now arisen, beating the air with its wings.
"The last clutch of the animal clinging to the intelligence of man,
as it emerges from the instinct of the beast, is fear. The first man
thought the monsters about him were gods. Our fathers thought the
elements were gods. We think that the impulse moving the machinery of
the world is the will of some divine authority. And always the only
thing in the universe that was superior to these things has been afraid
to assert itself. The human mind that can change things, that can do as
it likes, has been afraid of phantasms that never yet met with anything
that they could turn aside." The old man clenched his hands, contracted
his elbows, and brought them down with an abrupt decisive gesture.
"I do not understand," he said, "but I am not afraid. I will not
be beaten into submission by vague inherited terrors. I will not be
subservient to things that have a lesser power than I have. I will not
yield the control of events to elements that are dead, to laws that are
unthinking, or to an influence that cannot change. Not all the gods that
man has ever worshiped can make things happen to-morrow, but I can make
them happen. Therefore, I am a god above them. And how shall a god that
is greater than these gods give over the dominion of events into their
hands?"
He dropped his arms and with them his big dominant manner. He came over
to the rail of the yacht and leaned against it beside the Mar-chesa
Soderrelli.
"Marchesa," he said, "this is the only thing that I know better than
other men. It is the only advantage I have. It is the one thing that I
know which they do not seem to know. I have made good use of it. What
they have called unforeseen, I have tried to foresee. What they have
left to chance, I have tried to direct. And while they have been afraid
of the great engine and huddled before it, worshiping the steam, the
fire, the grinding of the wheels, imagining that some god sat within at
the levers, I have entered and, finding the place empty, have taken hold
of the levers for myself."
A certain vague fear possessed the Mar-chesa Soderrelli. The presumption
of this old man seemed to invite some awful judgment of God. Would
He permit this open, flaunting treason, this defiant swaggering _lèse
majesté?_ Surely He permitted it to flourish thus for a season that He
might all the more ruthlessly destroy it. The wan, eerie light lying
on the world, shadowing about this strange, defiant old man, seemed
in itself a sinister premonition. She felt afraid without knowing why,
afraid lest she be included in this impending visitation of God's wrath.
The old man, leaning against the rail, continued speaking softly: "Do
you think that I will get the other thing that I want?"
The Marchesa turned away her face and looked down into the sea to avoid
the man's direct dominating manner.
"I do not know," she murmured.
Already she was beginning to waver. She had come ashore from what she
considered the wreckage of her life. She had formed then at Biarritz a
resolution and a decided plan. She would take what this old man had to
offer, that would give her unlimited money. She would bring together
this new Duke of Dorset and this girl, and if that alliance could be
made, she would have through it, then, a position commensurate to the
wealth behind her. She had begun with courage to carry out this plan.
She had gone to Doune with a double object, to borrow money to pay debts
she must be rid of, and to bring about a meeting between the Duke of
Dorset and Caroline Childers. And these two things she had accomplished.
Until now the heart in her had been hardened. Until now she had been
cold, calculating and determined. Now, somehow, under this mood, a doubt
oppressed her.
The sudden, big, dominating laugh of the old man beside her aroused her
like a blow.
"I know," he said, "we are all of us alike. Once past the blossom of
youth, we, all of us, men and women alike, are after the same thing.
Until then we pursue illusions, will-o'-the-wisps, shining destinies
that do not, and cannot arrive; but when we have hardened into life
we understand that power is the only source of happiness. We desire
to rule, to dominate, to control. We wish to lay hold of the baton of
authority; and, look, I have it ready to your hand. I have everything
that the Fourteenth Louis had at Versailles, except the name, and
what woman past the foolish springtime of life would deny herself such
authority as that?"
The Marchesa drew herself up. The muscles in her body stiffened. Her
fingers tightened on the rail. With a stroke he had laid her ulterior
motives open to the bone. He had made plain what she was endeavoring to
conceal, and the bald frankness shocked her. He had stripped the thing
naked and it shamed her. But there it was, though naked, the greatest
shining lure in the world. Wealth past any European conception, outside
the revenues of a state, with the power that attended it. And how
poor she was! She had been forced to borrow five hundred pounds to pay
tradesmen at her heels. She had sent the money back this very morning in
order to loosen their fingers on her skirts that she might go forward
to this last adventure. What had she out of all the promise of her life?
What had she got ashore with from her sinking galleon but her naked
body? How could she, stripped, bruised, empty handed, stand out against
the offer of a kingdom?
For a little while the old man watched the tense figure of the woman,
then he added: "Do you think that I did not know how your life was
running? That I was overlooking this thing while I was getting the other
things that I was wanting? Do you think I came to Biarritz, over the
sea, here, merely to please Caroline? Look, how I came within the very
hour--on the tick of the clock!"
Again the Marchesa Soderrelli was astonished. She had believed herself
like one who sat in darkness, on the deck of a ship that drifted, and
now, as by the flash of a lantern, she saw another toiling at the
helm. She had believed this meeting at Biarritz to be the work of fate,
chance, fortune, and instead it was the hand of this old man, moving
what he called the levers of the great engine. The fear of him deepened.
"Look, Marchesa," he was saying, "I do not ask you to decide. Come first
and see the garden that I have made in a wilderness--the Versailles that
I have concealed in a forest."
He began once more to move, to extend his arms, to spread his hands.
"Remember, Marchesa, you decide nothing; you only say 'I will come,' and
when you say that, I will prove on the instant that my coming here was
for no whim of Caroline, for within the hour, day or night, that you say
it, this yacht will go to sea."
The Marchesa, disturbed, caught at the name and repeated it. "But what
of Caroline?" she said.
She pronounced the question without regarding the answer to it. Perhaps
it was because the old man did not reply directly and to the point.
Perhaps because another and more obtruding idea occupied her mind. At
any rate his words did not remain in her memory. From what he said, out
of the labyrinth of his indirections, the man's plan emerged--the plan
of Tiberius withdrawing to Capri, but holding to the empire through the
hand of another, a creature to be bound to him with the white body of
this girl.
The Marchesa Soderrelli, amazed, began to stammer. "But Caroline," she
said, "suppose, suppose, she does not will to obey you?"
The old man laughed. Again, by a tightening of the muscles, his
plowshare jaw protruded.
"A child's will," he said; "it is nothing."