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Updated: June 10, 2025
It isn't I who wish it. It is Pauline." Saton looked at her wonderingly. "She doesn't care," he said. "She knows now that I am really a charlatan. And I needn't have been," he added, with a sudden fury. "It was only that cursed taste for luxury which seemed somehow or other to creep into my blood, which made me so dependent upon money. Naudheim was right! Naudheim was right!
"Go on," Saton said, his face growing a little pale. "Oh, you know it!" Naudheim declared. "You feel it in your blood. You know it in your heart. You truckle to these people, you play at living their life, and you forget, if ever you knew, that our great mistress has never yet opened her arms save to those who have sought her single-hearted and with a single purpose.
"I'm convinced of it, and I mean to expose him." She shook her head. "You can call him what you like," she said, "but there is Naudheim behind him. There is no one in Europe who would dare to call Naudheim a charlatan." "He is a wonderful man, but he is mad," Rochester said. "No, he is not mad," she said.
She will be of age in three weeks' time, and on her birthday I am going to take her away from Rochester, whatever means I have to use, and I am going to marry her at once. You think that I am reckless. Well, one must live. Remember that I am young and you are old. I have no place in the world except the place I make for myself. I cannot live in a pig-sty amongst the snows like Naudheim.
Naudheim was by his side, his arm resting gently upon the young man's shoulder. A fine snow was falling around them. The air was clean and pure the air of Heaven. There was no sound to break the deep stillness but the tinkle of the sleigh-bells, and behind, the rhythmic humming of the machinery, and the crashing of the falling trees. "Naudheim is a great master," Rochester said.
"Naudheim is impossible," Saton answered. "He came in here to work this morning, looked around the room, and began to storm. He objected to the flowers, to the writing-table, to me. He has shaken the dust of us off his feet, and gone back to his wretched cabin in Switzerland." She leaned on her sticks and looked at him.
"It is like Naudheim himself," she declared. "This is the land he spoke of. This is the place to which he climbed. It is wonderful!" "Come," Rochester said. "We must be up before the darkness." Slowly they made their way along the mountain road, which their guide in front was doing all he could to make smooth for them.
"Do you mind," Saton asked, "if I introduce some of these people to you? You know many of them by name." Naudheim shook his head. He was a tall man, with gray, unkempt hair, and long, wizened face. He wore a black suit of clothes, of ancient cut, and a stock which had literally belonged to his grandfather. "No!" he said vigorously. "I will be introduced to no one.
During the last few weeks or months, perhaps a touch of foppishness had crept into his dress a fondness for gray silk ties, a flower in his buttonhole, white linen gaiters drawn carefully over his patent boots. Certainly the contrast between this scrupulously dressed young man and Naudheim, bordered upon the absurd. Naudheim was shabby, unbrushed, unkempt. His collar was frayed, he wore no tie.
Silently, and without a glance on either side of him, Naudheim left the room, amidst a silence which was almost an instinctive thing the realization, perhaps, of the strange nature of this man, who from a stern sense of duty had left his hermit's life for a few days, to speak with his fellow-workers. It had been in some respects a very curious function, this. It was neither meeting nor reception.
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