Chapter XII: Controversy and Confidences

After this incident, the guests melted away, singly and by pairs and families, thanking Nitocris and her father with much empressement for “the delightful afternoon,” and “the extraordinary entertainment which they had so much enjoyed,” and many regrets that “the poor Adept, who really was so very clever and had mystified them all so delightfully,” had overdone himself and got ill, and so on, and so on, through the endless repetitions and variations usual on such occasions.

A small party, including the Hartleys, the Van Huysmans, Merrill, and Lord Leighton, had been asked to stay to dinner, but it happened that they had a conversazione already included in the day’s programme, and so they took their departure soon after the others, the Professor, it must be confessed, in a somewhat morose frame of mind. Like all men of similar mental constitution, he hated to be mystified, and now, for the first time in his long career of investigation into apparently abstruse phenomena, he had been absolutely stumped by this perfect-mannered, quiet-spoken gentleman from the East who performed wonders in broad daylight, on a plot of grass amidst a crowd of people, and did not deign to even touch the things he worked his miracles with. If he had only used some sort of apparatus, or condescended to some concealment, after the manner of others of this kind, there might have been a chance of finding a means of exposure; but the whole performance had been so transparently open and aboveboard that Professor Marcus Hartley, D.Sc., M.A., F.R.S., etc., etc., felt that, as a consistent materialist, he had not been given a fair chance. Still, he did not despair; and by the time he got back into his own den he had resolved that when it did come, as of course it must do sooner or later, the exposure of Phadrig the Adept and the vindication of Natural Law should be complete and final.

A discussion of the same marvels naturally bulked largely in the conversation during dinner at “The Wilderness.” Mrs van Huysman did not contribute much wisdom to it beyond the assertion of her conviction that such things were wicked and should be stopped by law, at which her daughter was sufficiently unfilial to draw a diverting picture of a stalwart policeman trying to arrest an elusive adept who could probably make himself invisible at will, or call to his aid fire-breathing dragons, just as easily as he could make a tennis ball evaporate into thin air, or grow lovely witch-roses and wither them to ashes with a breath.

“I do think it was a bit mean of him not to let that poor young man have one of them, if he was willing to take the risk. Especially as he just wanted to go on working for Science for ever. Fancy what a single man might do if he could just keep right on with his life-work for, say, a thousand years without having to stop it to die and be born again, according to Niti’s pet theory. What couldn’t a man like that do for human knowledge!”

“Would you have had one of those roses, Brenda, if the Prince’s miracle-worker had offered you one?” asked Nitocris, smiling, but still with a decided note of seriousness in her tone.

“I?” laughed Brenda, leaning back in her chair. “Sakes, no, child! I’ve had a pretty good time so far, and I hope it won’t be over just yet; but, after all, there must be a limit even to the combinations of human life, and a time would have to come when you’d just be doing the same old things over and over again. And, besides that, think of the horror of living on and on and seeing every one you loved--husband and wife, and children and grandchildren--grow old and die, and leave you alone in a world of strangers. No; life’s a good thing if you only have fair play in the world; but so is death when you’ve lived your life. It’s only like going to bed, after all. Eternal life would be like a day with no night to it, and that, I guess, would get a bit monotonous after a century or two. What do you think, Professor?”

“My dear Miss van Huysman,” replied her host with one of his rare but eloquent smiles, “since I began to study the question with anything like enlightenment, I have not been able to look upon what we call life, by which I mean existence in this or some other world, as anything but eternal. In its manifestations to our senses it is, I admit, merely transitory, a brief span of time between two other states which, for want of a better word, we may call two eternities; but I must confess that, to me, a human existence beginning with the cradle and ending with the grave is merely a more or less tragic riddle without an answer: in other words, a meaningless absurdity. I find it quite impossible to conceive any deity or presiding genius of the universe who could be guilty of such a colossally useless tragedy as human life would be under those circumstances.”

“I can’t see it, my dear Marmion,” said Brenda’s father a trifle gruffly, for he had not yet quite recovered from the disquieting experiences of the afternoon. “What does it matter whether we live again or not as long as we live cleanly and do our work honestly while we are alive? Surely if we leave this world a little bit better, a little bit richer in knowledge, than we find it, these poor little lives of ours, such as they are, and that’s not much--will not have been lived in vain. Of course, as you know, I’m just a common, low-down materialist who can’t rise to the poetry of things as you can with this gorgeous theory of re-incarnation of yours.

“I should very much like to believe it if I could, as I once said to an eminent revivalist on the war-path in the States; but the trouble with a man who is honest with himself is that he can no more make himself believe what doesn’t seem true to him than he can make himself hungry when he isn’t. All the horrible history of religious persecution is just the story of a lot of bigots in power trying to force helpless people to do what they couldn’t do honestly. The awful part of the business is that they were most likely all wrong, and didn’t know it.”

“But, at least, Professor, I hope you are able to give them credit for honest intentions, however mistaken they might have been?” interposed Merrill, who was the son of a country parson and had so far preserved his simple faith intact. It may be remarked here, that Nitocris was well aware of this, and loved her strong-souled sailor all the better for it. Franklin Marmion did not, but then he thought any creed good enough for “a mere fighting man.”

“There were schemers and scoundrels among them on both sides, sir,” replied the American quietly. “The temptation was too big; but I am quite willing to allow that the majority of them, even the Inquisitors, were honest zealots who really did think it right to produce any amount of suffering and misery here on earth in order to get matters straightened out, as they thought, hereafter. Charles V. was the most enlightened monarch of his age and the worst persecutor, and Torquemada, away from his religion, was as kind-hearted a man as ever lived. Calvin was a good man, but he watched Servetus burn, and our own Pilgrim Fathers on the other side were just about as hard men as any when it came to arguing out a religious question with whips and pillories and thumbscrews, and the like. I don’t want to offend any one’s sentiment or question any one’s faith. To each man the belief that satisfies him, but personally I have no use for a religion that can’t get itself believed without persecution.”

“I quite agree with you there, Professor,” replied Merrill, who felt a little chilled by the perfect aloofness with which the other spoke, and was wondering what his dear old father, living his quiet, saintly life among the Derbyshire dales, would have thought of such cold-blooded heresy. “I have always looked upon that sort of brutal intolerance as a form of religious mania--sincere, but still mania, and the story of it is the most awful chapter in human history----”

“Except, perhaps, the story of war,” interrupted Professor Marmion, with a snap in his voice. Monomania, more or less harmless, is a not infrequent affliction of very high intelligences, and a quite unreasoning hatred of war was his, although within the last few days he had come to suspect disquieting misgivings on the subject, possibly in consequence of the higher knowledge to which he was attaining.

“My dear sir,” replied Merrill quite good-humouredly, and not at all sorry for the diversion, “I am glad to say that I agree with you also. No man who has not actually fought can have any just idea of the appalling abominations of war, and I am sure that no men hate it more devotedly than those who have to fight. But we have to take the world as it is, and not as we would like it to be; and as long as we have people in it who want to set it on fire for their own brutally selfish purposes, we shall have to keep the fire-extinguishers in good order.”

In obedience to an appealing glance from his daughter, the Professor did not reply. His opponent in the bloodless arena of Science saved him by interrupting:

“Yes, sir. I differ from my friend Marmion on a good many points, and that’s one of them. You have the honour to serve in the biggest fire-extinguishing institution on earth. It was the British Navy that put out Napoleon’s bonfire that he was making of the world: you kept the ring round us and Spain, and round Russia and Japan, and you’ve saved more conflagrations than half a dozen Noah’s floods would put out. That’s why the Kaiser and his tin-hatted firebrands have such a healthy dislike for you. They’d have had the world on fire years ago if they hadn’t had to worry about you.”

“I think you must admit, Professor Marmion,” said Lord Leighton, who had so far been busy with his own new thoughts and the contemplation of the inspirer of them, “that it is people like these on whom the real guilt of the crime of war rests. Now that the pressure of the bear’s paw is removed, Germany is the danger-spot of the world. The Maroocan business proved that pretty clearly; and nothing but our friendship with America and France and Japan, and the ability to strike hard and instantly at sea, saved Europe, and perhaps the world, from something like a repetition of the Napoleonic wars.”

“With Mister William Hohenzollern a Napoleon,” added Professor van Huysman, with a half-suppressed snort. “It seems to me as though that gentleman had been spreading himself round Europe as German War-Lord so long that he’s getting tired of playing at it, and ‘s just spoiling for a real fight.”

“That is very possible,” said Merrill; “but happily he has responsibilities, and even the German war party would not follow him as far as he would like to go, to say nothing of the Liberals and the Socialists. Personally, I must say that I think we have had a much more dangerous person, as far as the peace of the world is concerned, on the lawn of ‘The Wilderness’ this afternoon.”

“Of course you mean that hateful Russian Prince who brought that equally hateful Adept, as he calls himself, with him,” said Nitocris, with an unwonted harshness that made every one look up.

“Oh, Niti,” exclaimed Brenda, “and I asked you to let me bring him!”

“I’m very sorry, dear,” she replied quietly, but with a smile of reassurance. “It was not your fault, of course. He may have been very nice to you, but I am obliged to say that the first moment I looked at him I was possessed by some inexplicable feeling of dislike, and even fear, although I certainly never hated or feared any one before. If I had met him before I got your note, I really think I should have asked you to spare us the honour. It seemed to me as though there was something uncanny about the man. It was very curious.”

Her father looked up at her for a moment, wondering what would happen if he were to explain the mysterious antipathy there and then. The little theological discussion would look very small after such a revelation as that. But he, too, had had a revelation which the somewhat desultory conversation had done something to press home upon him. He had seen the advent of the Queen, and heard what she had said to Phadrig with other eyes and ears than his guests had done, for to them it had only been Nitocris who had gone to him and said a few inaudible words, which they had taken as a request for the conclusion of his “performance.”

He had seen back through the mists of many centuries and recognised them as they had been, and he had learned that Oscarovitch the Russian had now entered the circle of the Queen’s, and therefore his own, influence. A sudden anxiety for the safety of his darling Niti had awakened in his heart. He had seen the lust for possession flame in the man’s eyes, and now that he knew who he was--and had been--he determined that whatever other adventurer might set the world aflame, the Modern Skobeleff should not do it if he and his Royal ally on the Higher Plane could prevent it. His coming had been a curious coincidence, possibly a consequence of obscure causes; but, for some reason or other, he felt himself beginning to look with a more favourable eye on Commander Mark Merrill--perhaps because he was the impersonation of uncompromising hostility to everything that Oscarovitch represented.

Dinner had come to an end now, and so Nitocris took advantage of ending a conversation which bade fair to become somewhat awkward. She glanced round the table and rose, saying: