It explains his failure; and it explains—it almost excuses—in a sense it even almost justifies—the queerest of his actions. Other people did not exist for him; therefore other people had no feelings to be considered, no rights, no possessions, to be respected. They did not exist, therefore they were in no way to be reckoned with. Their observation was not to be avoided, their power was not to be feared. They could not do anything; they could not see what he did.
The queerest of his actions? You will suppose that I must have some very queer action still to record. Well, there was his action the other night at the Casino, for one thing; I haven’t yet done with that. But the queerest of all his actions, I think, was his treatment of Israela, his step-daughter Israela....
During the visit Mr. Ambrose paid us in Paris, when I was nineteen, he, whose early disciples had dropped away, made a new disciple: a Madame Fontanas, a Mexican woman—of Jewish extraction, I imagine—a widow, with a good deal of money. Israela, her daughter, was a fragile, pale-faced, dark-haired, great-eyed little girl, of twelve or thirteen. Madame Fontanas sat at Mr. Ambrose’s feet, and listened, and believed. Perhaps she conceived an affection for him; perhaps she only thought that here was a great philosopher, a great philanthropist, and that he ought to have some one to take permanent care of him, and reduce the material friction of his path to a minimum. Anyhow, when the spring came, she married him. I have no definite information on the subject, but I am sure in my own mind that it was she who took the initiative—that she offered, and he vaguely accepted, her hand. Anyhow, in the spring she married him, and carried him off to her Mexican estates.
Five or six years later (by the sheerest hazard) I found him living in London with Israela; in the dreariest of dreary lodgings, in a dreary street, in Pimlico. I met him one afternoon, by the sheerest hazard, in Piccadilly, and accompanied him home. (It was characteristic of him, by-the-bye, that, though we met face to face, and I stopped and exclaimed and held out my hand, he gazed at me with blank eyes, and I was obliged to repeat my name twice before he could recall me.) He was living in London, for the present, he told me, in order to see a work through the press. “A great work, the crown, the summary of all my work. The Final Extensions of Monopantology.
“It is in twelve volumes, with plates, coloured plates.”
“And Mrs. Ambrose is well?” I asked.
“Oh, my wife—my wife is dead. She died two or three years ago,” he answered, with the air of one dismissing an irrelevance.
“And Israela?” I pursued, by-and-by.
“Israela?” His brows knitted themselves perplexedly, then, in an instant, cleared. “Oh, Israela. Ah, yes. Israela is living with me.”
And upon my suggesting that I should like to call upon her, he replied that he was on his way home now, and, if I cared to do so, I might come with him.