“Why, you great fool!” cried MacIan, rising
to the top of his tremendous stature, “did you
think I would have doubted only for that rap with
a sword? I know that noble orders have bad knights,
that good knights have bad tempers, that the Church
has rough priests and coarse cardinals; I have known
it ever since I was born. You fool! you had
only to say, ‘Yes, it is rather a shame,’
and I should have forgotten the affair. But I
saw on your mouth the twitch of your infernal sophistry;
I knew that something was wrong with you and your
cathedrals. Something is wrong; everything is
wrong. You are not an angel. That is not
a church. It is not the rightful king who has
come home.”
“That is unfortunate,” said the other,
in a quiet but hard voice, “because you are
going to see his Majesty.”
“No,” said MacIan, “I am going to
jump over the side.”
“Do you desire death?”
“No,” said Evan, quite composedly, “I
desire a miracle.”
“From whom do you ask it? To whom do you
appeal?” said his companion, sternly.
“You have betrayed the king, renounced his cross
on the cathedral, and insulted an archangel.”
“I appeal to God,” said Evan, and sprang
up and stood upon the edge of the swaying ship.
The being in the prow turned slowly round; he looked
at Evan with eyes which were like two suns, and put
his hand to his mouth just too late to hide an awful
smile.
“And how do you know,” he said, “how
do you know that I am not God?”
MacIan screamed. “Ah!” he cried.
“Now I know who you really are. You are
not God. You are not one of God’s angels.
But you were once.”
The being’s hand dropped from his mouth and
Evan dropped out of the car.
Turnbull was walking rather rampantly up and down
the garden on a gusty evening chewing his cigar and
in that mood when every man suppresses an instinct
to spit. He was not, as a rule, a man much acquainted
with moods; and the storms and sunbursts of MacIan’s
soul passed before him as an impressive but unmeaning
panorama, like the anarchy of Highland scenery.
Turnbull was one of those men in whom a continuous
appetite and industry of the intellect leave the emotions
very simple and steady. His heart was in the
right place; but he was quite content to leave it there.
It was his head that was his hobby. His mornings
and evenings were marked not by impulses or thirsty
desires, not by hope or by heart-break; they were
filled with the fallacies he had detected, the problems
he had made plain, the adverse theories he had wrestled
with and thrown, the grand generalizations he had
justified. But even the cheerful inner life of
a logician may be upset by a lunatic asylum, to say
nothing of whiffs of memory from a lady in Jersey,
and the little red-bearded man on this windy evening
was in a dangerous frame of mind.
