“No, now don’t you go running away with any wrong ideas,” said Jack, suddenly reaching out his hand and laying it on Somers’ arm. “I’m not hinting at anything. If I was I’d ask you to kick me out of your house. I should deserve it. No, you’re an Englishman. You’re a European, perhaps I ought to say, for you’ve lived about all over that old continent, and you’ve studied it, and you’ve got tired of it. And you’ve come to Australia. Your instinct brought you here, however much you may rebel against rats and tin cans and a few other things like that. Your instinct brought you here—and brought you straight up against me. Now that I call fate.”
He looked at Somers with dark, burning questioning eyes.
“I suppose following one’s deepest instinct is one’s fate,” said Somers, rather flatly.
“There—you know what I mean, you see. Well then, instinct brings us together. I knew it the minute I set eyes on you when I saw you coming across from the Botanical Gardens, and you wanted a taxi. And then when I heard the address, 51 Murdoch Street, I said to myself, ‘That chap is coming into my life.’ And it is so. I’m a believer in fate, absolute.”
“Yes,” said Somers, non-committal.
“It’s fate that you left Europe and came to Australia, bit by bit, and unwilling to come, as you say yourself. It’s fate that brings you to Sydney, and makes me see you that dinner-hour coming from the Botanical Gardens. It’s fate that brings you to this house. And it’s fate that sets you and me here at this minute playing chess.”
“If you call it playing chess,” laughed Somers.
Jack looked down at the board.
“I’m blest if I know whose move it is,” he said. “But never mind. I say that fate meant you and Mrs Somers to come here: her as much as you. I say fate meant me and you and Victoria and her to mean a lot to one another. And when I feel my fate, I absolutely give myself up to it. That’s what I say. Do you think I’m right?”
His hand, which held Somers’ arm lightly, now gripped the biceps of that arm hard, while he looked into the other man’s face.