“I admit that,” Saton answered. “Yet I will remind you of your own words—five hundred pounds were no more to you than a crown piece to me. You gave me the money. You gave me little else. You gave me no encouragement, no word of kindly advice. Go back that seven years, and remember what you said to me when you stood by my side, toying with your gun, and looking at me superciliously, as though I were some sort of curiosity which it amused you to turn inside out.—The one unforgivable thing in life, you said, was failure. Do you remember telling me that if I failed I was to swim out on a sunny day—to swim and swim until the end came? Do you remember telling me that death was sometimes a pleasant thing, but that life after failure was Hell itself?”
Rochester nodded.
“I always had such a clear insight into life,” he murmured. “I was perfectly right.”
“From your point of view you doubtless were,” Saton answered. “You were a cynic and a pessimist, and I find you now unchanged. I went away with your words ringing in my brain. It was the first poisonous thought which had ever entered there, and I never lost it. I said to myself that whatever price I paid for success, success of some sort I would gain. When things went against me, I seemed to hear always those bitter, supercilious words. I could even see the curl of your lips as you looked down upon me, and figured to yourself the only possible result of trusting me, an unfledged, imaginative boy, with the means to carve his way a little further into the world. Failure! I wrote the word out of the dictionary of my life. Sin, crime, ill-doing of any sort if they became necessary—I kept them there. But failure—no! And this was your doing. Now you come to ask me questions. You want to know if I am a fit and proper person to receive in your house. Perhaps I have sinned. Perhaps I have robbed. Perhaps I have proved myself a master in every form of ill-doing. But I have not failed! I have paid you back your five hundred pounds.”
“The question of ethics,” Rochester remarked, “interests me very little if at all. The only point is that whereas on the hillside you were simply a stray unit of humanity, and the things which we said to one another concerned ourselves only, here matters are a little different. In a thoughtless moment, I asked you to become a guest under my roof. It was, I frankly admit, a mistake. I trust that I need not say more.”
“If you will have my things removed to the Inn,” Saton said slowly—
“No such extreme measures are necessary,” Rochester answered. “You will stay with us until to-morrow morning. After luncheon you will probably find it convenient to terminate your visit as soon as possible.”
“I shall be gone,” Saton answered, “before any of your guests are up. In case I do not see you again alone, let me ask you a question, or rather a favor.”
Rochester bowed slightly.
“There is a house below the Convalescent Home—Blackbird’s Nest, they call it,” Saton said. “It is empty now—too large for your keepers, too small for a country seat. Will you let it to me?”