The Moving Finger Part 42

"It is not true, Henry. You cannot mean what you are saying. I have always been the same. I am the same now. What could alter me? You don't believe that anything could alter me?"

"Or any person?" he asked.

"Or any person," she repeated, hastily. "Go through the list of our acquaintances, if you will. Have I ever shown any partiality for anyone? You cannot honestly believe that I have not been faithful to our unwritten compact?"

"Sometimes," he said slowly, "I have had a horrible fear. Pauline, I want you to be kind to me. This has been a blow. I cannot easily get over it. Let me tell you this. One of the reasons--the great reason--why I fear and dread this coming change, is because it may leave you more susceptible to the influence of that person."

"You mean Mr. Saton?" she said.

"I do," Rochester answered. "Perhaps I ought not to have mentioned his name. Perhaps I ought not to have said anything about it. But there the whole thing is. If I thought that any part of your interest in the man's scientific attainments had become diverted to the man himself, I should feel inclined to take him by the neck and throw him into the Serpentine."

She said nothing. Her face had become very still, almost expressionless. Rochester felt his heart turn cold.

"Pauline," he said, "before I go you will have to tell me that what I fear could not come to pa.s.s. Perhaps you think that I insult you in suggesting it. This young man may be clever, but he is not of our world--yours and mine. He is a _poseur_ with borrowed manners, _flamboyant_, a quack medicine man of the market place. He isn't a gentleman, or anything like one. I am not really afraid, Pauline, and yet I need rea.s.surance."

"You have nothing to fear," she answered quietly. "I am sorry, Henry, but I cannot discuss Mr. Saton with you. Yet don't think I am blind. I know that there is truth in all you say. Sometimes little things about him set my very teeth on edge."

Rochester drew a sigh of relief.

"So long as you realize this," he said, "so long as you understand, I have no fear."

Pauline looked away, with a queer little smile upon her lips. How little a man understood even the woman whom he cared for!

"Henry," she said, "I can only do this. I can give you my hands, and I can wish you happiness. Go on with your experiment--I gather that for the moment it is only an experiment?"

"That is all," he answered.

"When it is decided one way or the other," she continued, "you must come and tell me. Please go away now. I want to be alone."

Rochester kissed her hands, and pa.s.sed out into the street. He had a curious and depressing conviction that he was about to commence a new chapter of his life.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

AT THE EDGE OF THE PRECIPICE

Naudheim's disapproval was very marked and evident. He scoffed at the great bowl of pink roses which stood upon the writing-table. He pushed scornfully on one side the elegantly shaped inkstand, with its burden of pens; the blotting-pad, with its silver edges; the piles of cream-laid foolscap. Most of all he looked with scornful disapprobation at his young host.

Saton was attired for his morning walk in the Park. During the last few weeks--or months, perhaps--a touch of foppishness had crept into his dress--a fondness for gray silk ties, a flower in his b.u.t.tonhole, white linen gaiters drawn carefully over his patent boots. Certainly the contrast between this scrupulously dressed young man and Naudheim, bordered upon the absurd. Naudheim was shabby, unbrushed, unkempt. His collar was frayed, he wore no tie. The seams of his long black frock-coat had been parted and inked over and parted again. He wore carpet slippers and untidy socks. There were stains upon his waistcoat.

From underneath his s.h.a.ggy gray eyebrows he shot a contemptuous glance at his host.

"My young friend," he said, "you are growing too fine. I cannot work here."

"Nonsense!" Saton answered, a little uneasily. "You can sweep all those things off the writing-table, if they seem too elaborate for you, and pitch the flowers out of the window if you like."

"Bah!" Naudheim answered. "It is the atmosphere. I smell it everywhere. This is not the house for thoughts. This is not the house wherein one can build. My young friend, you have fallen away. You are like all the others. You listen to the tin music."

"I think," Saton answered, "that the work which I have done should be my answer to you. We are not all made alike. If I find it easier to breathe in an atmosphere such as this, then that is the atmosphere which I should choose. We do our best work amidst congenial surroundings. You in your den, and I in my library, can give of our best."

Naudheim shook his head.

"You are a fool," he said. "As for your work, it is clever, fatally clever. When I read what you sent me last month, and saw how clever it was, I knew that you were falling away. That is why I came. Now I have come, I understand. Listen! The secrets of science are won only by those who seek them, like children who in the time of trouble flee to their mother's arms. Never a mistress in the world's history has asked more from man than she has asked or has had more to give. She asks your life, your thoughts, your pa.s.sions--every breath of your body must be a breath of desire for her and her alone. You think that you can strut about the world, a talking doll, pay court to women, listen to the voices that praise you, smirk your way through the days, and all the time climb. My young friend, no! I tell you no! Don't interrupt me. I am going to speak my say and go."

"Go?" Saton repeated. "Impossible! I am willing to work. I will work now. I simply thought that as the morning was so fine we might walk for a little time in the suns.h.i.+ne. But that is nothing."

Naudheim shook his head.

"Not one word do I speak of those things that are precious to me, in this house," he declared. "I tell you that its atmosphere would choke the life out of every thought that was ever conceived. You may blind others, even yourself, young man," he went on, "but I know. You are a renegade. You would serve two mistresses. I am going."

"You shall not," Saton declared. "This is absurd. Come," he added, trying to draw his arm through his visitor's, "we will go into another room if this one annoys you."

Naudheim stepped back. He thrust Saton away contemptuously. He was the taller of the two by some inches, and his eyes flashed with scorn as he turned toward the door.

"I leave this house at once," he said. "I was a fool to come, but I am not such a fool as you, Bertrand Saton. Don't write or come near me again until your sham house and your sham life are in ruins, and you yourself in the wilderness. I may take you to my heart again then. I cannot tell. But to-day I loathe you. You are a creature of no account--a foolish, dazzled moth. Don't dare to ring your bells. I need no flunkeys to show me the way to the door."

Naudheim strode out, as a prophet of sterner days might have cast the dust of a pagan dancing hall from his feet. Saton for a moment was staggered. His composure left him. He walked aimlessly up and down the room, swinging his gloves in his hand, and muttering to himself.

Then Rachael came in. She walked with the help of two sticks. She seemed gaunter and thinner than ever, yet her eyes had lost little of their fire, although they seemed set deeper in the caverns of her face.

"Naudheim has gone," she said. "What is wrong, Bertrand?"

"Naudheim is impossible," Saton answered. "He came in here to work this morning, looked around the room, and began to storm. He objected to the flowers, to the writing-table, to me. He has shaken the dust of us off his feet, and gone back to his wretched cabin in Switzerland."

She leaned on her sticks and looked at him.

"On the face of the earth," she said, "there does not breathe a fool like you."

Saton's expression hardened.

"You, too!" he exclaimed. "Well, go on."

"Can't you understand," the woman exclaimed, her voice shaking, "that we are on the verge of a precipice? Do you read the papers? There were questions asked last night in the House about what they called these fortune-telling establishments. Yet everything goes on without a change--by your orders, I am told. Oh, you fool! Huntley knows that he is being spied upon. In Bond Street, yesterday alone, three detectives called at different times. The thing can't go on. The money that we should save ready to escape at the end, you spend, living like this.

And the girl Lois--you are letting her slip out of your fingers."

"My dear Rachael," he answered, "in the first place, there is not a thread of evidence to connect you or me with any one of these places, or with Huntley's office. In the second place, I am not letting Lois slip out of my fingers. She will be of age in three weeks' time, and on her birthday I am going to take her away from Rochester, whatever means I have to use, and I am going to marry her at once. You think that I am reckless. Well, one must live. Remember that I am young and you are old. I have no place in the world except the place I make for myself. I cannot live in a pig-sty amongst the snows like Naudheim. I cannot find the whole elixir of life in thoughts and solitude as he does. There are other things--other things for men of my age."

"You sail too near the wind. You are reckless."

"Perhaps I am," he answered. "Life in ten years' time may very well become a stranger place to those who are alive and who have been taught the truth. But life, even as we know it to-day, is strange enough. Rachael, have you ever loved anyone?"

The woman seemed to become nerveless. She sank into a chair.

"Of the past I do not speak," she said--"I choose never to speak."