“You talk of self-preservation,” he said, with a dulled effort at reasoning, for the word seemed to mock him; “as though you were convinced I had some design against you. I have none; you might know it.”
Gastineau’s laugh showed him that the protest carried no weight with him. “My good fellow,” he returned patronizingly, “you scarcely comprehend my position. It is, perhaps, a trifle beyond your grasp. Putting aside for the moment the fact that you have done me the ill-turn which no man forgives, and which was in your case, I suppose, as glaring an instance of ingratitude as any on record, let me put the situation before you from my point of view.”
“Yes; let me hear it.”
Herriard felt his only chance lay in prolonging the preliminaries of the act that was surely meditated.
Gastineau was lighting a cigarette. “The immense successes the world has wondered at have been gained through foresight,” he said, almost meditatively; “the great failures have been courted by want of it. The man who cannot see beyond his nose, who takes things as they are, and not as they will be, can never have a great career in front of him. Consequently, my good Herriard,” he blew out a long streak of smoke, “I am obliged, unpleasant as it may be, to deal with you not as you are to-day, a comparatively harmless turtle-dove, but as my prescience tells me you will be in the future, an active, threatening danger.”
There was death, Herriard saw, in the eyes that had marked, in the mind that had tracked him down; no suggestion of relenting, no room for pity, only the steely look of doom.
“No; never now a danger to you, Gastineau,” he said with dry lips.
The other smiled. “I can read your future better than you,” he returned equivocally. “And your character. My four years’ study of that has scarcely gone for nothing. You are, perhaps, not exactly, an absorbing danger at the present moment, in the present year, if you like. I would not care to say as much with respect to a few years hence.”
The man was clearly, grimly settled in his purpose; it was with him manifestly an affair of calculation rather than of passion. Despite the deep purple glory of the flaming sunset, the night seemed already enveloping Herriard, as he stood there facing his doom. To him the warm, scented air was chill and heavy; the gorgeous flood of sunlight that bathed the tower was lurid and murky as a torch of the Inquisition. But he kept down the betrayal of the sickening despair at his heart, answering his master quietly.
“If you really read my character, Gastineau, you must know that it is far from being restless and aggressive like your own. With me it is live and let live.”