From the depths of her chair, Rachael for several moments sat and subjected her visitor to a close and merciless scrutiny.
“So you,” she said at last, “were the fairy godfather. You were the man who trusted a nameless boy with five hundred pounds, because his vaporings amused you. You pushed him out into the world, you bade him go and seek his fortune.”
“I was that infernal fool!” Rochester muttered.
The woman nodded.
“Yes, a fool!” she said. “No one but a fool would do such a thing. And yet great things have come of it.”
Rochester shrugged his shoulders. He was not prepared to admit that Bertrand Saton was in any sense great.
“My adopted son,” she continued, “is very wonderful. Egypt had its soothsayers thousands of years ago. This century, too, may have its prophet. Bertrand gains power every day. He is beginning to understand.”
“You, too,” Rochester asked politely, “are perhaps a student of the occult?”
“Whatever I am,” she answered scornfully, “I am not one of those who because their two feet are planted upon the earth, and their head reaches six feet towards the sky, are prepared to declare that there is no universe save the earth upon which they stand, no sky save the sky toward which they look—nothing in life which their eyes will not show them, or which their hands may not touch.”
Rochester smiled faintly.