The Moving Finger Part 19

Saton made his way to the cafe at the end of Regent Street. This time he had to wait a little longer, but in the end the man who had met him there before appeared. He came in smoking a huge cigar, and with his silk hat a little on one side.

"A splendid day!" he declared. "Nearly double yesterday's receipts.

The papers are all here."

Saton nodded, taking them up and glancing them rapidly through.

"Do you know where I can find Dorrington?" he said. "I want that letter--the Peyton letter, you know."

Huntley nodded.

"I've got it in my pocket," he said. "I was keeping it until to-morrow."

Saton held out his hand.

"I'll take it," he said. "I can arrange terms for this matter myself."

Huntley looked at him in surprise.

"It isn't often," he remarked, "that you care to interfere with this side of the game. Sure you're not running any risk? We can't do without our professor, you know."

Saton s.h.i.+vered a little.

"No! I am running no risk," he said. "It happens that I have a chance of settling this fairly well."

He had a few more instructions to give. Afterwards he left the place.

The night outside was close, and he was conscious of a certain breathlessness, a certain impatient desire for air. He turned down toward the Embankment, and sat on one of the seats, looking out at the sky signs and colored advertis.e.m.e.nts on the other side of the river, and down lower, where the tall black buildings lost their outline in the growing dusk.

His thoughts travelled backwards. It seemed to him that once more he sat upon the hillside and built for himself dream houses, saw himself fighting a splendid battle, gathering into his life all the great joys, the mysterious emotions which one may wrest from fate. Once more he thrilled with the subtle pleasure of imagined triumphs. Then the note of reality had come. Rochester's voice sounded in his ears. His dreams were to become true. The sword was to be put into his hand. The strength was to be given him. The treasure-houses of the world were to fly open at his touch. And then once more he seemed to hear Rochester's voice, cold and penetrating. "_Anything but failure! If you fail, swim out on a sunny day, and wait until the waves creep over your neck, over your head, and you sink! The men who fail are the creatures of the gutter!_"

Saton gripped the sides of his seat. He felt himself suddenly choking.

He rose and turned away.

"It would have been better! It would have been better!" he muttered to himself.

CHAPTER XIV

PETTY WORRIES

Saton threw down the letter which he had been reading, with a little exclamation of impatience. It was from a man whom, on the strength of an acquaintance which had certainly bordered upon friends.h.i.+p, he had asked to propose him at a certain well-known club.

_"My dear Mr. Saton," it ran, "I was sent for to-day by the Committee here upon the question of your candidature for the club. They asked me a good many questions, which I answered to the best of my ability, but you know they are a very old-fas.h.i.+oned lot, and I think it would perhaps be wisest if I were to withdraw your name for the present. This I propose to do unless I hear from you to the contrary._

"_Sincerely yours,_ "_Gordon Chambers."_

Saton felt his cheeks flush as he thrust the letter to the bottom of the little pile which stood in front of him. It was one more of the little annoyances to which somehow or other he seemed at regular intervals to be subjected. Latterly, things had begun to expand with him. He had persuaded Madame to give up the old-fas.h.i.+oned house in Regent's Park, and they had moved into a maisonette in Mayfair--a little white-fronted house, with boxes full of scarlet geraniums, a second man-servant to open the door, and an electric brougham in place of the somewhat antiquated carriage, which the Countess had brought with her from abroad. His banking account was entirely satisfactory.

There were many men and women who were only too pleased to welcome him at their houses. And yet he was at all times subject to such an occurrence as this.

His lips were twisted in an unpleasant smile as he frowned down upon the tablecloth.

"It is always like it!" he muttered. "One climbs a little, and then the stings come."

Madame entered the room, and took her place at the other end of the breakfast table. She leaned upon her stick as she walked, and her face seemed more than ever lined in the early morning sunlight. She wore a dress of some soft black material, unrelieved by any patch of color, against which her cheeks were almost ghastly in their pallor.

"The stings, Bertrand? What are they?" she asked, pouring herself out some coffee.

Saton shrugged his shoulders.

"Nothing that you would understand," he answered coldly. "I mean that you would not understand its significance. Nothing, perhaps, that I ought not to be prepared for."

She looked across the table at him with cold expressionless eyes. To see these two together in their moments of intimacy, no one would ever imagine that her love for this boy--he was nothing more when chance had thrown him in her way--had been the only real pa.s.sion of her later days.

"You do not know," she said, "what I understand or what I do not understand. Tell me what it is that worries you in that letter."

He pushed it away from him impatiently.

"I asked a friend--a man named Chambers--to put me up for a club I wanted to join," he said. "He promised to do his best. I have just received a letter advising me to withdraw. The committee would not elect me."

"What club is it?" she asked.

"The 'Wanderers'," he answered. "The social qualification is not very stringent. I imagined that they would elect me."

The woman looked at him as one seeking to understand some creature of an alien world.

"You attach importance," she asked, "to such an incident as this?

You?"

"Not real importance, perhaps," he answered, "only you must remember that these are the small things that annoy. They amount to nothing really. I know that. And yet they sting!"

"Do not dwell upon the small things, then," she said coldly. "It is well, for all our sakes, that you should occupy some position in the social world, but it is also well that you should remember that your position there is not worth a snap of the fingers as against the great things which you and I know of. What do these people matter, with their strange ideas of birth and position, their little social distinctions, which remind one of nothing so much as Swift's famous satire? You are losing your sense of proportion, my dear Bertrand. Go into your study for an hour this morning, and think. Listen to the voices of the greater life. Remember that all these small happenings are of less account than the flight of a bird on a summer's day."

"You are right," he answered, with a little sigh, "and yet you must remember that you and I can scarcely look at things from the same standpoint. They do not affect you in the slightest. They cannot fail to remind me that I am after all an outcast, rescued from s.h.i.+pwreck by one strange turn in the wheel of chance."

She looked at him with penetrating eyes.

"Something is happening to you, Bertrand," she said. "It may be that it is your sense of proportion which is at fault. It may be that your head is a little turned by the greatness of the task which it has fallen to your lot to carry out. It is true that you are a young man, and that I am an old woman. And yet, remember! We are both of us little live atoms in the great world. The only things which can appeal to us in a different manner are the everyday things which should not count, which should not count for a single moment," she added, with a sudden tremor in her tone.

"You are right, of course," he answered, "and yet, Rachael, you must remember this. You have finished with the world. I am compelled to live in it."

"If you are," she rejoined, "is that any reason, Bertrand, why you should pause to listen to the voices whose cry is meaningless? Think!

Remember the blind folly of it all. A decade, a cycle of years, and the men who pa.s.s you in Pall Mall, and the women who smile at you from their carriages, will be dead and gone. You--you may become the Emperor of Time itself. Remember that!"

"And in the meantime, one has to live."

"Keep your head in the clouds," she said. "Make use of these people, but always remember that in the light of what may come, they are only the dirt beneath your feet. Remember that you may be the first of all the ages to solve the great secret--the secret of carrying your consciousness beyond the grave."