“One might easily be convinced that the fellow is in earnest,” Rochester whispered.
The judge laid his hand upon his host’s shoulder. There was a curious gleam in those deep-set eyes.
“Let him go on,” he said. “This is interesting. I begin to remember.”
“We all have a hobby, I suppose,” Saton continued. “Mine has always been the study of the least understood of the sciences—I mean occultism. I, too, was prejudiced at first. I saw wonderful things in India, and my British instincts rose up like a wall. I did not believe. I refused to believe my eyes. In Egypt, and on the west coast of Africa, I had the chance of learning new things, and again I refused. But there came a time when even I was impressed. Then I began to study. I began to see that some of those things which we accept as being wonderful, and from which we turn away with a shrug of the shoulders, are capable of explanation—are submissive, in fact, to natural laws. There is not a doubt that in the generations to come, people will smile upon us, and pity us for our colossal stupidity.”
“No wise person, my dear Mr. Saton,” Mrs. Hinckley remarked, “would deny that there is yet a great deal to learn in life. But tell us exactly to what you refer?”
Saton raised his dark eyes and looked steadfastly at her.
“I mean, madam,” he said, “the apprehension of things happening in the present in other parts, the apprehension of things about to happen in the future. Our brain we realize, and our muscles, but there is a subtler part of ourselves, of which we are as ignorant to-day as our forefathers were of electricity.”
Lady Mary drew a little sigh.
“This is so fascinating,” she said. “Do you really believe, then, that it is possible to foretell the future?”
“Why not?” Saton answered quietly. “The world is governed by laws just as inevitable as the physical laws which govern the seasons. It is only a matter of apprehension, a deliberate schooling of ourselves into the necessary temperament.”