"I know it, your ladyship," the man answered, "but this gentleman has called every day for a week, and I have refused even to bring his name in. To-day he was so very persistent that I thought perhaps it would be better to bring his card."
Pauline was lying upon a couch. She had been unwell for the last two or three weeks. Nothing serious--nerves, she called it. A doctor would probably have prescribed for her with a smile. Pauline knew better than to send for one. She knew very well what was the matter. She was afraid! Fear had come upon her like a disease. The memory of that one night racked her still--the memory of that, and other things.
Meanwhile, the servant stood before her in an att.i.tude of respectful attention.
"I will see Mr. Saton," she decided at last. "You can show him in here, and remember that until he has gone, no one else is to be allowed to enter. Come yourself only if I ring the bell, or when you serve tea."
The man bowed, and went back to where Saton was waiting in the hall.
"Her ladyship is at home, sir," he announced. "Will you come this way?"
A certain drawn expression seemed suddenly to vanish from the young man"s face. He followed the servant almost blithely. In a few seconds he was alone with her in the firelit drawing-room. The door was closed behind him.
Pauline was sitting up on the couch. For a moment they neither of them spoke. She, too, had been suffering, then, he thought, recognising the signs of ill-health in her colorless cheeks and languid pose.
He came slowly across the room and held out his hand. She hesitated, and shook her head.
"No!" she said. "I do not think that I wish to shake hands with you, Mr. Saton. I do not understand why you have come here. I thought it best to see you, and hear what you have to say, once and for all."
"Once and for all?" he repeated.
"Certainly," she answered. "It does not interest me to fence with words. Between us I think that it is not necessary. What do you want with me?"
"You know," he answered calmly.
She paused for a moment or two. She told herself that this was the most transcendental of follies. Yet it seemed as though there were something electrical in the atmosphere, as though something had come into the room unaccountable, stimulating, terrifying. All the languor of the last few days was gone.
"Am I to understand, then?" she said at last, speaking in a low tone, and with her face averted from him, "that you have come to offer me some explanation of the events of that night?"
"No!" he answered.
The seconds ticked on. She found his taciturnity maddening.
"Your visit had some purpose?" she asked.
"I came to see you," he answered.
"I am not well," she said, hurriedly. "I am not fit to see people or to talk at all. I thought that you must have some special purpose in coming, or I should not have received you."
"You wish to talk then, about that night?" he asked.
"No!" she answered--"and yet, yes!"
She sat upright. She looked him in the eyes.
"I have not dared to ask even myself this," she said, "but since you are here, since you have forced it upon me, I shall ask you and you will tell me. That night I had--what shall I call it?--a vision. I saw you shoot Henry Rochester. Now you are here you shall tell me if what I saw was the truth?"
"It was," he answered.
She drew back, shuddering.
"But why?" she asked. "He has never done you any harm."
"On the contrary," Saton answered, "he is my enemy. With all my heart and soul I wish him dead!"
"It is terrible!" she murmured.
"It is the truth," he answered. "The truth sometimes is terrible. That is why people so often evade it. Listen. I was only a boy, a sentimental boy, when I first knew Rochester. Perhaps he has posed to you as my benefactor. Certainly he lent me money. I tell you now, though, that upon every penny of that money was a curse. Whatever I did went wrong. However hard I fought, I was worsted. If I gambled, I lost. If I played for safety, something--even though it might be as unexpected as an earthquake--came to wreck my plans. It was like playing cards with the Devil himself. One by one I lost the tricks.
When I was penniless, I had nothing left to think of but the only piece of advice your friend Henry Rochester gave me when he sent me out into the world. The sting of his voice was like a lash. Creatures of the gutter he called those who had failed, and who dared to live on. I tell you that until the time came when I looked down into the Thames, and hesitated whether or no I should take his cynical advice and make an end of myself, every action, every endeavor, and every effort I had made, had been honest. It was his words, and his words entirely, which drove me into the other paths."
"You admit, then--" she began.
"I admit nothing," he answered. "Yet I will tell you this. There are things in my life which I loathe, and they are there because of Rochester"s words. Yet bad though I am," he continued, bitterly, "that man"s contempt is like a whip to me whenever I see him. What, in G.o.d"s name, is he? Because he has ancestors behind him, good blood in his veins, the tricks of a man of breeding, the carriage and voice of a gentleman, why, in Heaven"s name for these things should he look upon me as something crawling upon the face of the earth--something to be spurned aside whenever it should cross his path? I have lived and spoken falsehoods. The greatest men in the world have lived and spoken falsehoods. But I am not a charlatan. I have mastered the rudiments of a great and mighty new science. I am not a trickster. I have a claim to live, as he has. There is a place in the world for me, too, as well as for him. You know what he has told me? You know with what he has threatened me? He has told me that if he even sees you and me together, that if I even dare to find my way into your presence, that he will horse-whip me. This because he has muscles and I have none.
Yet you ask me why I desire to kill him! I have had only one desire in my life stronger than that, one thing in my life more intense than my hatred of this man."
"You are both in the wrong," she said. "Henry Rochester is a straight-living, G.o.d-fearing man, a little narrow in his views, and a little violent in his prejudices. You are a person such as he would not understand, such as he never could understand. You and he could never possibly come into sympathy. He is wrong when he utters such threats. Yet you must remember that there is Lois. He has the right there to say what he will."
"There is Lois, yes!" Saton repeated.
"You wish to marry her, don"t you?" she asked.
The question seemed to madden him. Suddenly he threw aside the almost unnatural restraint with which he had spoken and acted since his entrance into the room. He rose to his feet. He stood before her couch with clenched hands, with features working spasmodically as the words poured from his lips.
"Listen," he said. "I have no money. I have lived partly upon the woman who adopted me, and partly by nefarious means. Science is great, it is fascinating, it is the joy of my life, but one must live. I have tasted luxury. I cannot live as a workingman. The woman who adopted me is all the time at my elbow, telling me that I must marry Lois because of her money. The child is willing. I have been willing."
"To marry her for her money--for her money only!" Pauline exclaimed, with scorn trembling in her tone.
"Absolutely for her money only!" Saton answered. "Now you know how poor a thing I am. Yet I tell you that all men have a bad spot in them. I tell you that I am dependent upon that woman for every penny I spend, and for the clothes I wear. When I tell her that I will not marry Lois Champneyes, she will very likely throw me into the street.
What is there left for me to do? I have tried everything, and failed.
I have no strength, I have a cursed taste for the easy ways of life.
Yet this has come to me. I will not marry Lois Champneyes. I will break with this woman, notwithstanding all I owe to her, and I will go away and work once more, wherever I can earn enough to keep me. And I will tell you why. I haven"t a good quality that I know of. I am as selfish as a man can be. I am a murderer at heart, an actor most of the time, but in one thing I am honest. I love you, Pauline Marrabel!
I can"t help it. It is the curse of my life, if you will, but it is the joy of it. Rochester knows it, and he hates me. I know that Rochester loves you, and I hate him. Listen. There is a man who believes in me--a great man. I"ll go to him. I"ll work, I"ll study, I"ll write. I"ll live the thoughts I want to live. I"ll shape my life along the firm straight lines. I"ll make a better thing of myself, if you"ll wait. Mind, I don"t ask you to touch me now. If you offered me your hands, I wouldn"t take them. I"m not fit. But there is just this one thing in me. I know myself and I know you. Give me the chance to climb!"
Time seemed to stand still while she looked at him. Yes, he had been honest! She saw him stripped of all the glamour of his unusual learning. She saw him as he was--small, false, a poor creature, who having failed on the mountains, had been content to crawl through the marshes. He seemed in those few moments to be stripped bare to her. He was not even a gentleman. He wore his manners as he wore his clothes.
He belonged to her world no more than the servant who had announced him. She clenched her fingers. It was ign.o.ble that her heart should be beating, that the breath should come sobbing through her parted lips.
He was a creature to be despised!
She raised her head and told him so, fighting all the while with something greater and stronger which seemed to be tearing at her heart strings.
"If that is what you came here to say," she said, "please go."
He rose at once. She saw the anxious light with which his eyes had been filled, fade away. He turned almost humbly toward the door.
"You are quite right," he said. "I should not have come. I do not often have impulses. It is a mistake to listen to them. Yet I came because it was the one honest desire which I have had since I looked down into the water and turned away."
He walked toward the door. She stood with her finger pressing the bell. He seemed somehow to have lost what little presence he had ever possessed. His head was bowed; he walked as one feeling for his way in the dark. Never once did he look round. As he stood before the door, her lips were suddenly parted. A great wave of pity rose up from amongst those other things in her heart. She would have called out to him, but her butler was already there. The door had been opened.
She clenched her teeth, and resumed her place upon the sofa. She heard the front door closed, and she found herself watching him through the blind. She saw him cross the road very much as he had crossed the room--unseeing, stricken. She watched him until he crossed the corner of the square. Her eyes were misty with tears!