The Duke of Dorset came on this evening to his house, with the problem still turning in his mind. The mystery lying about the Marchesa Soderrelli when she appeared at Old Newton was now clear enough. To give herself a certain importance at Biarritz, she had boasted an acquaintance with him. She had promised to produce him at Oban. She had sought thus to attach herself to these wealthy Americans. It was a bit of feminine strategy, but could he condemn it? An atmosphere of pity lay about the Marchesa Soderrelli. The Marquis of Soderrelli, earning his damnation, had been paid off at God's window—he was dead now—and she was free. And she had come forth, like that Florentine, from hell, her beauty fading, her youth required of her. She was no lay figure of drama, plotting behind a domino. She was only a tired woman, whose youth a profligate had squandered, making what she could, with courage, of the fragments. Was it any wonder, then, that she kept fast hold of this new hand, that she sought, with every little artifice, to bind this girl to her?
In his heart he could find no criticism for her. He found rather a certain admiration for this woman, who swam with such courage after her galleon was sunk; who presented herself, not as wetting the ashes of her life with tears, but as blowing on the embers of her courage.
When the Duke of Dorset reached his house every physical thing there seemed to present an unfamiliar aspect. The form of nothing had changed, but the essence of everything had changed. He seemed to arrive, awakened, in a place which he had hitherto inhabited in a sort of somnambulism. There lay about the house an atmosphere of loneliness—of desolation. There was no physical reason for this change; it was as though the peace of his house had been removed by some angered prophet's curse. He seemed, somehow, to have come within the circle of an invisible magic, wherein old, hidden, mysterious influences labored at some great work. He had stepped out of the world into this circle at Oban. What was there about this dark-haired, slender girl that effected this sorcery? On the instant, as at a signal, he felt the pull of some influence as old and resistless as that drawing the earth in its orbit.
He stood that night at the window looking out at the white fairy village beyond the Ardoch, and suddenly he realized that all of his life he had been comparing other women with this girl. He had not understood this. He had not understood that he was comparing them with anyone, but he was. When he had gauged the charming qualities of a woman, he had gauged them against a standard. And now, he saw what that standard was.
But before he had seen, wherefrom had he the knowledge of this standard? Wherefrom, indeed! For a moment the idea seemed like some new and overpowering conception, then he remembered, that from this thing—this very thing—the ancients had drawn the conclusion that the soul of man had existed before he was born. And he recalled fragments of the argument.
"A man sees something and thinks to himself, 'This thing that I see aims at being like some other thing, but it comes short, and cannot be like that other thing; it is inferior'; must not the man who thinks that have known, at some previous time, that other thing, which he says that it resembles and to which it is inferior?"
And the memory of that old legend, which had come so strikingly into his mind, in the moment, with the girl before the sea, returned to him. Was there truth shadowing in this fable? And there attended it the recollection of that insolent, aggressive face which he had seen on the yacht, and the girl's words as they returned along the deserted street. But with it came the feeling that this man was in himself nothing, he was only the creature, the receptive creature of that strange, powerful old man's design. And he seemed to know an ancient enemy in this old man, and to move again in some dim, forgotten struggle.
He determined to set out at once for Canada. A big, open, primeval land, with its bright rivers, its mountains, its deserts, would cleanse him of these fancies.