“I intended her the highest honour I could show to a woman. To make her your property by legal process and the sanction of custom seems to me like sacrilege. But, however—One day she told me that a former lover of hers wanted to marry her, and left it for me to judge. She wouldn't say whether she wished it herself or not; but I knew that she did, for when I advised her to accept him she got up and put her arms round my neck and kissed both my cheeks. I was her elder brother, I perceived, and said so. She laughed, and owned to it. And yet she had loved me, you know. She had refused that same man for me. She was afraid of him, and gave me her hand before his face.”
“That to me,” Glyde said, “is proof positive that she loved him. Of course she feared him. It is obvious. My poor master!”
Senhouse serenely replied, “She's happy, and I've done her no harm at all. But it's impossible for me to treat any living creature otherwise than as my better.”
“I believe you,” said Glyde, “and so it may be in a rarer world than this. In this world, however, a man is the most cunning animal, and in that both are flesh he is the stronger of the sexes. In this world the law is that the woman follows the man.” He thought before he spoke, then added, “That applies all this world over. You will marry Sanchia.”
Senhouse would not look up. He sat, nursing one leg. He bent his brows, and a hot flush made his skin shine in the firelight.
IV
The poet and his disciple continued their partnership through the sogging rains of Christmas, well into the chill opening of the new year. Then came the snow to fill up the valley in which stood the hut, and blur the outlines of the folded hills. Poetry and Sanchia drew together a pair who could have little in common.
But Glyde became the slave of the strange man who blended austerity with charitable judgment, and appeased his passion by blood from his heart. He was not himself a mystic, but a sensitive youth whom the world's rubs had taught the uses of a thick hide. Either you have that by nature, or you earn it by practice. Glyde had found out that the less you say to your maltreaters the less, in time, you have to say about it to yourself. He was conscious of his parts and all too ready to be arrogant. Senhouse's goddess had been kind to him, and he had presumed upon that. Senhouse's own method was to alternate extreme friendliness with torrential contempt. He knocked Glyde down and picked him up again with the same hand. He treated him as his equal whenever he was not considering him a worm. There is no better way of gaining the confidence of a youth of his sort. At the end of a fortnight there was nothing Glyde would not have told him; at the end of six months he would have crossed Europe barefoot to serve him.