“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 God’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, God-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.