CHAPTER XVI—THE LESSON IN MAGIC
At the door of the château the Duke found a Japanese servant. This servant led him into a court paved with mosaic, set with palms and marbles about a fountain in which nymphs, sporting in abandon, splashed a god with water. From this court they ascended a stairway, rising in the circular tower which the Duke of Dorset had already noticed. The baluster of the stair, under the rail was a bronze frieze winding upward, of naiads, fauns, satyrs, dancing in a wood, group following group, like pictures in some story.
They stopped at the first landing and crossed a second corridor to a suite of rooms, finished in the style of Louis Quinze. The servant inquired about the Duke's luggage, got his direction and went out. The Duke walked idly through the suite; he might have been, at this hour, in Versailles. Every article about him belonged there in France. The bed was surely that of some departed Louis, standing on a dais, brocade curtains, drawn together at the top under a gilt crown. In this bedchamber he crossed unconsciously to the window, and remained looking out at the park descending to the river, and the mountains dreamy and beautiful beyond.
He wondered vaguely what it was that had led him over four thousand miles of sea, across a continent to this place. Did he come following the will-o'-the-wisp of a fabled legend? Did he come obeying some prenatal instinct? Did he come moved by an impulse long ago predestined?
The query, now that he stood before it, was fantastic. These, surely, were not the things that moved him. They were things merely that clouded and obscured the real impulse hiding within him. Some huge controlling emotion, dominating him, moved behind the pretense of this extravaganza; an emotion primal and common to all men born since Adam; a thing skilled in disguises, taking on the form of other and lesser motives, so that men clearheaded and practical, men hardened with a certain age, men dealing only with the realities of life, sat down with it unaware, as the patriarch sat down with angels. The wisdom of Nature moving with every trick, every lure, every artifice, to the end that life may not perish from the earth!
The Duke of Dorset turned from the window. He did not realize what this emotion was, but he felt its presence, and for the first time in his life the man had a sense of panic, like one who suddenly finds his senses tricked and his judgment unreliable. He walked across the bedchamber into the dressing room.
He found his luggage already in the room. The servant asked for the keys, the Duke gave him all but the key to the box containing the rifle that he had now no need to open. To a query, the servant answered that Mr. Childers would receive him as soon as he was pleased to come down into the library. The Duke of Dorset bathed, changed his dress, and descended.
The library was octagon in shape, carpeted with an Eastern rug, set with a great table, lined with books, and lighted with long casement windows.
Cyrus Childers was standing at one of the windows. He came forward and welcomed the Duke of Dorset.
"I am sorry," he said, "that Caroline is not here. She and the Marchesa Soderrelli are in the East yet, but they will arrive in a day or two."