CHAPTER VII—THE COUNSEL OP WISDOM
The Marchesa Soderrelli and Cyrus Childers remained on the yacht. When the small boat came alongside the Duke asked to be allowed to take the oars, and so the two had gone alone to see the regattas.
The bay was full of crafts. The crews of rival yachts crowded along the course. Small boats were packed together in an almost unbroken line; one coming late could find no place.
Everywhere awnings, flags, gay parasols shut out the view of the regattas. The Duke pulled out into the bay and north toward Loch Lynne. He was rather glad of the pressing crowd. This young girl held his interest; the enigma of her puzzled him; she was like no other woman. Somehow this dark-eyed, dark-haired girl seemed to present to him the alluring aspect of something newly come into the world; something which he himself had found.
There seemed to lie about her, like a vague perfume, something of the compelling lure of fairy women, called up by the fancy; of women dreamed of; of women created by the mind to satisfy every hunger of the senses. The Duke of Dorset could not regard this girl without this vague illusion entering his body like the first faint subtle odors of a garden. The illusion seemed constantly to attend her. The presence of others, commonplace surroundings, did not remove it. Her conversation, no matter how it ran, did not remove it. He seemed unable by any act of his will to dispel it.
There seemed, somehow, from the first moment, a certain intimate relation existing between himself and this girl whom he had found; as though she had appeared, obedient to some call issuing unconsciously from the mysterious instincts of his nature. The sense of it had entered the man at once when he came before her, as the subtle, compelling influence of some pictures enter and seize our attention when we approach them. And he had wished to stop and receive it. He had gone about under the vague spell of it. When he had been shown over the yacht, he had felt a certain difficulty in giving the attention to the details of that exquisite craft which a proper courtesy required. Afterwards on the deck he had hardly followed the conversation. He had wished to be left alone, to be undisturbed, as one wishes to be undisturbed before the picture that moves him.
He pulled the little boat out into the sea. He drew beyond the yachts, beyond the warship, off the great rock that rises out of the green water north of the bay. He wished to be alone with this girl. He wished to inquire of her, as one would inquire of a fairy woman found in some sunlit hollow; to ask her intimate and personal questions. Without being conscious of it, his conversation entered this avenue of inquiry. He seized upon the Marchesa Soderrelli as one who might lead the way.
"I wonder," he said, "why it is that the Marchesa Soderrelli bears so great a distrust of the Oriental?"
"Perhaps from her experiences of life," replied the girl.
"Is she an old friend, then?" said the Duke.
"I have known her only for a month at Biarritz. But long ago, when she was a little girl, my uncle knew her. She was born in a southern city of the United States. She was very beautiful, my uncle says. I think he must have been in love with her then, but he was a man of middle life, and she was a mere girl. I think he loved her because he always talks of her when one discusses women with him, and he never married. I only know the shadow of the story. Her family wished her to make an amazing marriage. My uncle was then only on his way up, so her family married her to an Italian Marquis in the diplomatic service. I think he was in some way near the reigning house, and if certain possible things were to happen, he would go very high. The things never happened, and I think the indolent Marquis merely dragged her about the world. But you ought to know her better than I."
"I have occasionally seen her," replied the Duke. "Her husband was always somewhere in the diplomatic service, usually in the East. He was rarely anywhere for long. But I judge the position of his family always found a place for him."
"Was he a very bad man, this Marquis?"
The Duke did not make a direct reply. He would have wished to evade this question, but there seemed no way.
"He was a person one usually avoided," he said.
"One begins to understand," continued the girl, "why the Marchesa spoke just now with so much heat. She has always met with these other races. She has been behind the scenes with them. In the South, where she was born, there was always the negro; and moving about the East, there was always the Oriental, and, besides this, her husband was of another race, not so widely different from ourselves as these, but still distinct from us. She had a look in at the door."
"But we cannot take the Marchesa for a prophet."
"Why not? She is a woman."
"And how may a woman be better able to divine events?"
"She feels."
"Do not men also feel?"
"But feeling is the way a woman gets at the truth. Men go by another road."
"But is not the other road a safer one?"
The girl laughed. "The English think it is. We are not so certain. I see you trudge along it, and I know that you are safe—ever so safe—but, are you happy?"
She put out her hands toward the land. "You have made everything in this great, solid island safe. Even one's marriage is a thing to be managed by the chief justice. Do you think one ought to go to the altar by this other road?"
"But why should one follow one's reason in every other thing and abandon it in this?"
The girl's face became thoughtful.
"I do not know," she said. "I wish I did." She trailed her fingers in the water. "Perhaps it is a choice between being safe and being happy. Perhaps, after all, older persons know best. Do you think they do?"
The Duke of Dorset was interested in the woman rather than these speeches. The conversation was after a certain manner a thing apart. He did not attach it to this exquisite girl. It seemed rather a portion of some elaborate rite by which she was made to appear, to be, to remain. He continued it as one new at magic continues his formula, in order to hold in the world the vision he has called up. But the formula was not of the essence of this vision. It was words following after a certain fashion. He did not, then, go within for his replies, but without, to the custom of his country, to the established belief rather than his own. It was a moving of the man's mind along the lines of least resistance; as though the magician made up his formula from anything that he remembered, while the deeps of consciousness in him were enjoying the appearance that he held by it.
"Older persons," he said, "are possessed of a greater experience of life. They have gone a journey that youth is setting out on. They ought to know."
"How to be safe? Yes, I believe that," she replied. "I believe they know that. But how to be happy? I am not so certain. We have instincts that we feel are superior to any reason, instincts that seem to warn us—I mean a woman has. She has a sort of sense of happiness. I cannot make it plain. It is like the sense of direction that leads an animal home through an unfamiliar country. Put it down in a place it does not know, and it will presently set out in the right direction. We are like that. We feel that right direction. Older persons may insist that we take another path, but we feel it wrong. We feel that our happiness does not lie that way. Ought we to go against that instinct?"
The charm of the girl deepened as she spoke. She became more vital, more serious, more moved. And the attention of the man drew nearer to her and farther from what he said. He began to repeat arguments that he had heard when families had gone about the making of a marriage.
It was too important a matter to be governed by a whim, an inclination, a personal attachment. It was a great complex undertaking. Obligations lapped over into it from both the past and the future. The rights of one's people touched it. All the practical affairs of life touched it. The standards of one's ancestors must not be lowered. The thing was a human chain; every man must put in his link. The obligation on him was to make that link as good as his fathers had made it. He must not debase the metal, he must not alloy it. This was the great moving duty; against this no personal inclination ought to stand. Moreover, who would leave the sale of an estate or the investing of revenues to one having no experience of life; and yet, the making of a marriage was more important than the sale of any estate, or the placing of any revenues. It was the administration for life of a great trust in perpetuity.
The man was merely reciting. He was like that one playing at magic, merely feeding words into his formula one after another, as he could find them, because thereby the appearance that he was drawing out of the shadow was becoming more distinct.
The girl, leaning forward, was following every word with the greatest interest; her eyes wide, her lips parted. She was like some kelpie woman presented with the gift of life, inquiring of its conditions.
"You make me feel how great you English are," she said, "how big, and sane, and practical. No wonder you go about setting the world in order; but where does the poor little individual come in?"
"The house is greater than any member of it," replied the Duke.
"I see that," she said. "I see the big purpose. But must one give up all one's little chance of happiness? Suppose one's feelings were against the judgment of one's family?"
"We must believe," he said, "that many persons are wiser than one."
"But does one's instinct, one's personal inclination never count?"
"It often counts," he said. "It often wrecks in a generation all that one's people have done."
"You make me afraid," said the girl. "Suppose in your big, sane island a woman felt that she ought not to do as her people told her. Suppose she felt it to be wrong. I do not mean that she loved some other man, because if she did, I think she could not be made to obey. But suppose she loved no one; suppose she only felt that this was not the thing to do. Ought she to give up that poor little instinct?"
The Duke of Dorset recited the stock answer to that query: Suppose a prince, called to rule for life a hereditary kingdom, were about to select a minister, would he go into the street and pick a man by instinct, or would he hear his parliament?
The girl made a helpless gesture.
"You convince me," she said, "and yet, one would like to believe that one's instinct can be trusted, that it is somehow above everything else, eternally right. One would like to believe that some little romance remained in the world; that some place, somewhere, the one, the real one, would find us if we only waited—if we only trusted to this feeling—if we only held fast to it in a sort of blind, persisting faith. But I suppose older people know."
The sun, slanting eastward, rippled on the sea. The boat lifted and fell. The Duke pulled back to the yacht. Swarms of boats were detaching themselves from the packed lines of the regattas. He took a sweep out in the bay to escape this moving hive. A furrow of shining water followed the boat. It widened and spread into a gilded track leading out into the sea.
The girl no longer spoke. The atmosphere, as of something vague, unreal, deepened around her. Again to the man there returned the impulse to know things intimate and personal about this woman whom he had found. Was she alone in the world with this curious old man? Had she no one nearer than this uncle? He remembered in one of the salons of the yacht, on the old man's table, a photograph in a big silver frame—the picture of a young man. He remembered the vivid impression that this picture had given him, an impression of a certain aggressive alertness that struck him as almost insolent—as though the person bearing this face were accustomed to thrust along toward what he wanted. He began to compare the face with the girl before him. There ought to be some feature, some mark of blood, some trick of expression common to the two of them, but he could not find it. His mind was laboring with it when they reached the yacht, and the old man came down the gangway to receive them.
The young girl stepped out of the boat. Her gay, sunny air returned.
"I have been taking a lesson in obedience, Uncle," she said. "The Duke of Dorset has made me see how wise older people are, and how we ought to follow the plan of life they make for us, and how we ought not to set our whims against their reason."
A smile flitted over the old man's face like sunlight over gun metal.
"I am very much obliged to the Duke of Dorset," he said.
CHAPTER VIII—THE WOMAN ON THE WALL
Caroline was dressing. The Marchesa sat with her elbows on the Buhl table; her chin in her palm; her eyes following the young girl, being prepared, under the maid's hands, for the Oban ballroom. Evening had descended. The curtains were drawn. The salon was softly lighted. The Marchesa was seeking for the girl's impression of the Duke of Dorset.
"You are disappointed, then," said the Marchesa.
The girl laughed, her soft voice rippling like a brook.
"He is so unlike, so wholly unlike, everything I fancied him to be."
"And what did you fancy him?" said the Marchesa.
The girl sprang up, swept the long hair back from her face and took a pose before the table.
"Like this," she said, "with big, dreamy eyes, a sad mouth, long delicate hands, and lots of lace on his coat."
The naïve, mischievous, jesting air of the girl was adorable; but more adorable was that slender figure, posing for the Marchesa Soder-relli in the dishabille of her toilet with its white stuffs and lace. Her slender, beautiful body was not unlike that of some perfect, immortal youth, transported from sacred groves; some exquisite Adonis coming from a classic myth; except for certain delicate contours that marked a woman emerging from these slender outlines. Even to the Marchesa, seated with her chin in her hands, there was, over the beautiful body of the girl, a charm that thrilled her; the charm of something soft and white and warm and caressing.
"But he isn't the least like this, Marchesa," she ran on. "Don't you remember what everybody said of him at Biarritz—a sort of Prince Charlie? And here he is, so big, and brown, and strong that I simply cannot fix a single fancy to him."
Her eyes danced and her voice laughed.
"He hasn't a sad mouth at all. He has a big, firm mouth, and there isn't the wisp of a shadow in his eyes. They are steady, like this—and level, like this—and he looks at you—so."
She narrowed her eyelids, lifted her chin, and reproduced that profound, detached expression with which the Duke of Dorset had continued to regard her on this afternoon.
"Why, I have been simply fluttering all day. He has stalked through all my little illusions of him and swept them away like cobwebs. There isn't a delicate, pale, 'bonnie Charlie' thing about him. He is a big, hard, ivory creature, colored with walnut stain. He looks like he could break horseshoes and things. He drove that little boat through the sea with a mere shrug of his elbows. If Prince Charlie had been like that the capitol of England would be now in Edinburgh. I wish you could have seen him out there in the hay."
The Marchesa had not removed her eyes from the girl.
"I wish rather," she said, "that he could see you now."
"Oh, Marchesa!" cried the girl, fleeing back to her chair and the protection of her dressing gown. She huddled in it and drew it about her. She looked around at the door, at the window, she caught her breath. "How you frightened me!" she said.
"Forgive me, my dear child," said the Marchesa. "I did not mean to speak that way. I meant only to regret that the Duke of Dorset can never know how wonderful you are."
"Perhaps he doesn't care a fig how wonderful I am," said the girl, now safely hidden in the exquisite silk gown.
The Marchesa did not reply. Instead she asked a question. "Tell me what he said."
"Oh, Marchesa, I led him into terribly deep water. I made him tell me how an English marriage is gone about. Dear me, what a fuss they make over it, and what a solemn, ponderous, life-and-death thing it becomes when the sturdy Briton gets at it."
She put out her hands with an immense gravity.
"'It is the administration for life of a great trust in perpetuity.'"
She rolled the words with a delicious intonation. "All the wiseacres in the family eat and smoke over it. They hold councils on it. They trudge around it, and they discuss it with a lawyer, just as one would do if one were making his will. They brush every little vestige of romance out of it. They make it safe."
For a moment her face became serious. "I wonder if they are right. I wonder if older persons know."
Then she clasped her hands with a burst of laughter. "Why, if I were English, I would be expected to huddle up against my Uncle's coat and say, 'Far be it from me to doubt the wisdom of your opinion, dear Uncle.' And I would be handed over, boots and baggage, to the fine young man in the silver frame on my Uncle's table." Again for a moment the laughter vanished and the grave air returned. "I wish I knew what the poor little mite of a girl thought about it. I wish I knew if in the end she was glad to have her life made so safe. I wish you could have heard all the excellent reasons the Duke of Dorset repeated. He made me afraid."
"I would rather have seen the Duke," said the Marchesa.
"You mean how he looked when he was talking?"
"Exactly that," replied the Marchesa.
"Well, he looked like a man who is thinking one thing and saying something else. He looked like this." And again she contracted her eyelids, and lifted her chin.
"Ah!" said the Marchesa.
The girl jerked her head, scattering the pins which the maid was putting into her hair.
"Why did you say 'Ah' like that?"
"Because," replied the Marchesa, "it helps to confirm a theory I have got."
"About the Duke's mind being far away?"
"Far away from what he has been saying all this afternoon," replied the Marchesa, "but not far away."
"But that is not a theory. A theory would explain this phenomenon."
"I know. It is only an evidence upon which I base my theory."
"And what is the theory?"
"That the Duke of Dorset has found something."
"How interesting! What has he found?"
"A thing he has been looking for."
"Something he had lost?"
"No, nothing that he had lost."
"But how could he have found something that he was looking for if he had not lost it?"
"He did not know that he was looking for it." The girl began to laugh.=
````"'Through a stone,
````Through a reel,
````Through a spinning wheel—'=
What is it that the Duke of Dorset found that he did not lose, while he was looking for it and did not know it? I can't answer that riddle."
"Unfortunately," said the Marchesa, "you are the only one who ever can answer it."
"Wise woman," said the girl, "you speak in parables."
"I am going to speak in a parable now," replied the Marchesa. "Listen. One day a woman on her way to the city of Dreams arrived before the city of the Awakened, which is also called the city of Zeus, and there came out to her the people of that city, and they said, 'Enter and dwell with us, for there is no city of Dreams, and you go on a fool's errand.' And one persuaded her, and she entered with him, and when the gates were closed, they took her and bound her, and cut out her tongue, for they said among themselves, 'She will perceive that we are liars, and she will call down from the house top to others whom we go out to seek. Moreover, if she be maimed, she cannot escape from us and flee away to the city of Dreams, for one may in no wise enter that city who hath a blemish.' And they put burdens upon her and she went about that city of wrath and labor and bitterness, dumb. And years fled. And on a certain day, when she was old, as she walked on the wall in the cool of the evening, she saw another drawing near to the city of the Awakened, which is also called the city of Zeus. And the other was young and fair as she had been when she set out to go to the city of Dreams. And while she looked, the people of the city went out to this traveler to beguile her and to persuade her. And the woman walking on the wall would have called down to warn her, but she could not, for she was dumb."
The girl leaned forward in her chair. Her voice was low and soft.
"Dear Marchesa," she said, "what do you mean?"
The Marchesa Soderrelli looked down at the table. She put up her hand and flecked away particles of invisible dust.
"I do not mean anything," she answered. "I am merely a foolish old woman."
But the girl went on speaking low and softly. "Do you mean that we ought not to believe what older persons say? That one ought to follow what one feels? That all the excellent reasons which the Duke of Dorset repeated are to persuade us to accept the commonplace—to be contented with the reality, to abandon our hopes, our aspirations, our dreams? Do you mean to show me how it fares with the poor little mite of a girl, when she is persuaded that happiness is an illusion, and is made to give up the dream of it? How it would have gone with little Cinderella if she had been persuaded to believe there was no fairy godmother, and no prince coming to make her queen. And how, if she had believed it and married the chimney sweep she would have missed it all?" Her voice sank. "My dear Marchesa, is this the warning of the woman on the wall?"
"You forget the parable," replied the Marchesa. "The woman on the wall was dumb." The girl arose, went over to the Marchesa and put her hand on her shoulder.
"If I had been that other traveler," she said, "I would have gone into the city of Zeus, I would have found the woman who was dumb, and I would have taken her with me to the city of Dreams."
"My dear," replied the Marchesa, "you will not remember the story. That other woman could never enter the blessed city; she was maimed."
"Then, Marchesa," said the girl, "do you think the traveler should have gone on alone?"
The Marchesa took both of the girl's hands, and looked up into her face.
"I will tell you something else," she said. "In the city of the Awakened, there was a maker of images, old and wise; and sometimes the woman went into his shop, and because she was dumb she wrote in the dust on the floor, with her finger, and she asked him about the city of Dreams, and how one reached it. And he said: 'Not the travelers only who pass by the city of Zeus win their way to the city of Dreams; our fathers have gone there also, but not often, and very long ago, and the direction and the distance and the landmarks of the way our fathers have forgot, but this thing our fathers have remembered, that no man ever found his way to the city of Dreams who set out on that quest alone.'"
"But if one could not go alone, how could one go at all?"
"He said there was always another chosen to go with us."
"And where is the other?"
"He said, 'In the world somewhere.'"
"And must one seek him?"
"He said that one was always seeking him, from the day that one was born, only one knew it not."
"And what is there to lead us, did he say that?"
"The woman asked him that," replied the Marchesa, "and he said: 'What is there to lead the little people of the sea when they travel with the tides?'"
Caroline stooped over and put her arm close around the Marchesa Soderrelli.
"No matter," she said, "I would stay with the poor dumb woman."
The Marchesa arose. She lifted the girl's chin and kissed her.
"No, dear," she said, "you must go on to the city of Dreams."
CHAPTER IX—THE USURPER
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."