"Is generalisation everything?" asked Mr. Bellingham sharply, still looking at the young man. "Is experience to be dismissed as empiricism, with a sneer, because the wider rule is lacking?"
"No. But so long as only a few occupy themselves in reducing empiric knowledge to a scientific shape they will not succeed, at least in this department. To begin with, they have not enough experience among them to make rules from."
"But they contribute. One man will come who will find the rule. Was Tycho Brahé a nonentity because he was not Kepler? Was Van Helmont nothing because he was not Lavoisier? Yet Tycho Brahé was an empiric—he was the last of the observers of the concrete, if you will allow me the phrase. He was scientifically the father of Kepler."
"That is very well put," said Claudius. "But we were talking of destiny. You are an observer."
"I have very fine senses," replied Mr. Bellingham. "I always know when anybody I meet is going to do something out of the common run. You are."
"I hope so," said Claudius, laughing. "Indeed I think I am beginning already."
"Well, good luck to you," said Mr. Bellingham, remembering that he had missed one engagement, and was on the point of missing another. He suddenly felt that he must send Claudius away, and he held out his hand. There was nothing rough in his abruptness. He would have liked to talk with Claudius for an hour longer had his time permitted. Claudius understood perfectly. He put the letters in his pocket, and with a parting shake of the hand he bade Mr. Horace Bellingham good-morning, and good-bye; he would not trouble him again, he said, before sailing. But Mr. Bellingham went to the door with him.
"Come and see me before you go—Wednesday morning; I am up at six, you know. I shall be very glad to see you. I am like the Mexican donkey that died of congojas ajenas—died of other people's troubles. People always come to me when they are in difficulties." The old gentleman stood looking after Claudius as he strode away. Then he screwed up his eyes at the sun, sneezed with evident satisfaction, and disappeared within, closing the street door behind him.
"Some day I will write my memoirs," he said to himself, as he sat down.
Claudius was in a frame of mind which he would have found it hard to describe. The long conversation with Mr. Bellingham had been the first intimation he had received of Margaret's disaster, and the same interview had decided him to act at once in her behalf—in other words, to return to Europe immediately, after a week's stay in New York, leaving behind all that was most dear to him. This resolution had formed itself instantaneously in his mind, and it never occurred to him, either then or later, that he could have done anything else in the world. It certainly did not occur to him that he was doing anything especially praiseworthy in sacrificing his love to its object, in leaving Margaret for a couple of months, and enduring all that such a separation meant, in order to serve her interests more effectually. He knew well enough what he was undertaking—the sleepless nights, the endless days, the soul-compelling heaviness of solitude, and the deadly sinking at the heart, all which he should endure daily for sixty days—he could not be back before that. He knew it all, for he had suffered it all, during those four and twenty hours on the yacht that followed his first wild speech of love. But Claudius's was a knightly soul, and when he served he served wholly, without reservation. Had the dark-browed Countess guessed half the nobleness of purpose her tall lover carried in his breast, who knows but she might have been sooner moved herself. But how could she know? She suspected, indeed, that he was above his fellows, and she never attributed bad motives to his actions, as she would unhesitatingly have done with most men; for she had learned lessons of caution in her life. Who steals hearts steals souls, wherefore it behoves woman to look that the lock be strong and the key hung high. Claudius thought so too, and he showed it in every action, though unconsciously enough, for it was a knowledge natural and not acquired, an instinctive determination to honour where honour was due. Call it Quixotism if need be. There is nothing ridiculous in the word, for there breathes no truer knight or gentler soul than Cervantes's hero in all the pages of history or romance. Why cannot all men see it? Why must an infamous world be ever sneering at the sight, and smacking its filthy lips over some fresh gorge of martyrs? Society has non-suited hell to-day, lest peradventure it should not sleep o' nights.