The Gilded Chair: A Novel

by Melville Davisson Post

His arms were extended and he moved them with a powerful threshing motion, like that vulture, now arisen, beating the air with its wings.

"The last clutch of the animal clinging to the intelligence of man, as it emerges from the instinct of the beast, is fear. The first man thought the monsters about him were gods. Our fathers thought the elements were gods. We think that the impulse moving the machinery of the world is the will of some divine authority. And always the only thing in the universe that was superior to these things has been afraid to assert itself. The human mind that can change things, that can do as it likes, has been afraid of phantasms that never yet met with anything that they could turn aside." The old man clenched his hands, contracted his elbows, and brought them down with an abrupt decisive gesture.

"I do not understand," he said, "but I am not afraid. I will not be beaten into submission by vague inherited terrors. I will not be subservient to things that have a lesser power than I have. I will not yield the control of events to elements that are dead, to laws that are unthinking, or to an influence that cannot change. Not all the gods that man has ever worshiped can make things happen to-morrow, but I can make them happen. Therefore, I am a god above them. And how shall a god that is greater than these gods give over the dominion of events into their hands?"

He dropped his arms and with them his big dominant manner. He came over to the rail of the yacht and leaned against it beside the Mar-chesa Soderrelli.

"Marchesa," he said, "this is the only thing that I know better than other men. It is the only advantage I have. It is the one thing that I know which they do not seem to know. I have made good use of it. What they have called unforeseen, I have tried to foresee. What they have left to chance, I have tried to direct. And while they have been afraid of the great engine and huddled before it, worshiping the steam, the fire, the grinding of the wheels, imagining that some god sat within at the levers, I have entered and, finding the place empty, have taken hold of the levers for myself."

A certain vague fear possessed the Mar-chesa Soderrelli. The presumption of this old man seemed to invite some awful judgment of God. Would He permit this open, flaunting treason, this defiant swaggering lèse majesté? Surely He permitted it to flourish thus for a season that He might all the more ruthlessly destroy it. The wan, eerie light lying on the world, shadowing about this strange, defiant old man, seemed in itself a sinister premonition. She felt afraid without knowing why, afraid lest she be included in this impending visitation of God's wrath.

The old man, leaning against the rail, continued speaking softly: "Do you think that I will get the other thing that I want?"

The Marchesa turned away her face and looked down into the sea to avoid the man's direct dominating manner.

"I do not know," she murmured.

Already she was beginning to waver. She had come ashore from what she considered the wreckage of her life. She had formed then at Biarritz a resolution and a decided plan. She would take what this old man had to offer, that would give her unlimited money. She would bring together this new Duke of Dorset and this girl, and if that alliance could be made, she would have through it, then, a position commensurate to the wealth behind her. She had begun with courage to carry out this plan. She had gone to Doune with a double object, to borrow money to pay debts she must be rid of, and to bring about a meeting between the Duke of Dorset and Caroline Childers. And these two things she had accomplished. Until now the heart in her had been hardened. Until now she had been cold, calculating and determined. Now, somehow, under this mood, a doubt oppressed her.