“Oh, no. I am powerless to work real harm, you know, being but an inferior power. Let him but pray to God Almighty and he’s pretty safe.”
“Yet to-night I am gloomy and ill at ease.”
Hereat Plucritus burst out laughing.
“You’re a fool,” he said. “Why don’t you go away and leave them? Tawdry, poor and plebeian—what are you dreaming about? Go away now and you are doing the greatest kindness; stay, and you will only create misery and death. You can go to hundreds who will repay and appreciate your presence—whilst where you are you will never be understood. The sight of that child’s puny face and figure sickens me. You are going the right way to make yourself the laughing-stock of all.
“These people are going from here to the town, to live a very humdrum, miserable, ground-down sort of life. There will be nothing elevating, nothing intellectual—nothing in the least refined about it. There will be a great deal of nonsense talked about refinement, the sort of thing you abhor, but no true refinement in itself.”
“All the more reason then why I should stay to make up the deficit.” But a shadow crossed the face of Genius.
“Will you stay, or will you go?” Plucritus had reached across the wooden seat, and as he whispered the words his hot breath blew upon the cheek of Genius like some unwholesome fever-blight in a pestilential marshland.
“I will stay.”
“Fool, fool that you are, and rightly mated with a fool. Stay then and become a kind of circus-clown, a kind of Punchinello with a hump—not meeting with applause like him though, but with jeers and scorn, the only thing you’re fit for.”
And away he went, and the blood-red rays from the blood-red ring flashed round about him like a blood-red sulphur cloud.