He said suddenly, “It’s a cruel trick of fate, nephew, brings you to this house!”
“How?” I asked. “I’m not here by any wish of mine.”
“Or by any wish of mine,” he said, with a bitter laugh. “Fate, in the form of Bradbury! Odd, kinsman, that my father should be so near to death, and I who have endured him all these years bid fair to lose in these last days of his my profit on it. I’ve a notion, nephew, that in the few weeks you will remain here you’ll benefit by all I looked for. Estimate my sentiment towards you!”
“The hate that looked from your eyes a moment since.”
“A poor expression of it, nephew,” he said. “There is no look, or word spoken or written, shall reveal a man’s soul. The fellow Rousseau has essayed to reveal his soul, to be sure, and has revealed but the body of an ape. I have a philosophy of my own, John Craike,—that my soul is not my body’s own; that aught I do, while my soul is in my body, counts nothing in the score against me. If I do aught—pride myself on it or am ashamed—I need not plume myself, or fret me. For it is not my deed.”
“A comfortable creed,” said I. “It would absolve you from aught that you have done or plan to do against your brother or your brother’s son.”
“I take it so,” he answered, coolly. “Nephew, this will of mine—I name it ‘will’—is no more mine, no more controllable by me than that wind blowing from the sea, and crying out about this dreary house. The actions of our lives are inevitable as storm or summer sun. My very promise to my father to do no hurt to you, while you are in this house, is no more mine than the injury I have essayed and failed to do you. We are predestined, nephew, as surely as any hapless wretch who walked the plank, or drowned in scuttled ship, or burned with its burning—at my father’s hands.”
“I did not know,” I whispered, “the manner of his past. And do you tell me?”
“I tell you nothing that you must not know,” he said indifferently. “Rogues’ Haven—this house is but a haven for old rogues,—rogues who were young and lusty with him once, and sinned at his command. Sinned! Nay, there is no sin; there is no virtue that is a man’s own. Predestined!”—his laughter rang out over the winds that beat against the shutters—“Will you tell all this to my father, nephew? Will you seek to blacken me to him that you may profit by it? It will not change a whit his disposition to me. He is not wholly past all love or hate, though he is near to death. And lacking my philosophy, he is not past all terror. He fears death; he fears dead men who, living, troubled him not at all. He is afraid to go down to their company—their company—the maw of the worm or the fish, the decay of all who go down into the ground or sink in the sea. His soul—it never was his soul! He loved your father; he ever hated me. Till he grew old, his will was stronger than my will. My will grows stronger, nephew; I warn you my will may yet prevail over his old affection for your father, on which your hope with him rests wholly.”
“Will!” I repeated. “It accords ill with your creed, my uncle.”