“It was the manager?” he repeated.
“Yes, they say so,” she answered. “He speculated with bank money.”
“In what?”
“In your railways,” she answered hesitatingly. “Curious—I dreamed that,” Ingolby remarked quietly, and leaned down and stroked the dog lying at his feet. It had been with him through all his sickness. “It must have been part of my delirium, because, now that I’ve got my senses back, it’s as though someone had told me about it. Speculated in my railways, eh? Chickens come home to roost, don’t they? I suppose I ought to be excited over it all,” he continued. “I suppose I ought. But the fact is, you only have just the one long, big moment of excitement when great trouble and tragedy come, or else it’s all excitement, all the time, and then you go mad. That’s the test, I think. When you’re struck by Fate, as a hideous war-machine might strike you, and the whole terror of loss and ruin bears down on you, you’re either swept away in an excitement that hasn’t any end, or you brace yourself, and become master of the shattering thing.”
“You are a master,” she interposed. “You are the Master Man,” she repeated admiringly.
He waved a hand deprecatingly. “Do you know, when we talked together in the woods soon after you ran the Rapids—you remember the day—if you had said that to me then, I’d have cocked my head and thought I was a jim-dandy, as they say. A Master Man was what I wanted to be. But it’s a pretty barren thing to think, or to feel, that you’re a Master Man; because, if you are—if you’ve had a ‘scoop’ all the way, as Jowett calls it, you can be as sure as anything that no one cares a rap farthing what happens to you. There are plenty who pretend they care, but it’s only because they’re sailing with the wind, and with your even keel. It’s only the Master Man himself that doesn’t know in the least he’s that who gets anything out of it all.”
“Aren’t you getting anything out of it?” she asked softly. “Aren’t you—Chief?”
At the familiar word—Jowett always called him Chief—a smile slowly stole across his face. “I really believe I am, thanks to you,” he said nodding.
He was going to say, “Thanks to you, Fleda,” but he restrained himself. He had no right to be familiar, to give an intimate turn to things. His game was over; his journey of ambition was done. He saw this girl with his mind’s eye—how much he longed to see her with the eyes of the body—in all her strange beauty; and he knew that even if she cared for him, such a sacrifice as linking her life with his was impossible. Yet her very presence there was like a garden of bloom to him: a garden full of the odour of life, of vital things, of sweet energy and happy being. Somehow, he and she were strangely alike. He knew it. From the time he held her in his arms at Carillon, he knew it. The great adventurous spirit which was in him belonged also to her. That was as sure as light and darkness.
“No, there’s no master man in me, but I think I know what one could be like,” he remarked at last. He straightened himself against the pillows. The old look of power came to a face hardly strong enough to bear it. It was so fine and thin now, and the spirit in him was so prodigious.