For a moment Saul paused, as though such an idea had never entered his head before, as indeed it never had done. He had heard very little of his young mother’s mournful tale, but he had always believed that she left her parents for the protection of one of the Duke’s fine popinjay friends.
“I don’t know,” he answered sullenly, “but they all said it was a certain gentleman. She broke her father’s heart, and killed her mother, and came back at the end of a year to die herself. She could never tell her story—or would not—whether or not she had been betrayed. That we shall never know; but she left me behind her to my grandfather’s care, and I have grown up knowing all. I never would enter the castle as servant. I never would, and I never will. I will carry my enmity to your class, sir, to my life’s end, and I will fight against it with might and main, and with all the powers that I have. I have taken your hand in friendship, because I see you mean well by us, and because I cannot help it; but I will never do so a second time. I will not make a second friend of one above me in rank. I will keep the right to fight against them and to hate—hate—HATE them—and not all your honeyed pleadings can change that. Now I have told you all, and you can choose whether you will have me or not; for it will be war to the death when I fight, and you may as well know it first as last!”
Eustace smiled at the vehemence of his disciple as he said quietly—
“We will have you, Saul, hatred and all. You are too useful a tool to be spared because your edge is over sharp.”
And thus the compact was sealed between them.
CHAPTER VII
THE KINDLED SPARK
“I DON’T approve of it,” said the Duke, bringing his hand down upon the table with an emphasis that made all the glasses on it ring. “You may talk as you will, Eustace; you may mix argument with sophistry as much as you like, but you’ll never make black white by all the rhetoric of the world. I don’t like it. I don’t like the whole movement, and I don’t believe that good will ever come of it; but leaving alone that point, on which we shall never agree, I hold that your methods are vile and hateful. You are setting class against class; you are rousing ill-will and stirring up hatred and enmity; you are teaching men to be discontented with their position in life——”