“There’s another thing I forgot to mention,” I said. “Miss Victor’s fiancé is over here, staying in Carlton House Terrace. He is old Turpin, who used to be with the division—the Marquis de la Tour du Pin.”
Sandy wrote the name down. “Her fiancé. He may come in useful. What sort of fellow?”
“Brave as a lion, but he’ll want watching, for he’s a bit of a Gascon.”
We went out after breakfast and sat in an arbour looking down a shallow side-valley to the upper streams of the Windrush. The sounds of morning were beginning to rise from the little village far away in the bottom, the jolt of a wagon, the “clink-clenk” from the smithy, the babble of children at play. In a fortnight the mayfly would be here, and every laburnum and guelder rose in bloom. Sandy, who had been away from England for years, did not speak for a long time, but drank in the sweet-scented peace of it. “Poor devil,” he said at last. “He has nothing like this to love. He can only hate.”
I asked whom he was talking about, and he said “Medina.”
“I’m trying to understand him. You can’t fight a man unless you understand him, and in a way sympathise with him.”
“Well, I can’t say I sympathise with him, and I most certainly don’t understand him.”
“Do you remember once telling me that he had no vanity? You were badly out there. He has a vanity which amounts to delirium.
“This is how I read him,” he went on. “To begin with, there’s a faraway streak of the Latin in him, but he is mainly Irish, and that never makes a good cross. He’s the déraciné Irish, such as you find in America. I take it that he imbibed from that terrible old woman—I’ve never met her, but I see her plainly and I know that she is terrible—he imbibed that venomous hatred of imaginary things—an imaginary England, an imaginary civilisation, which they call love of country. There is no love in it. They think there is, and sentimentalise about an old simplicity, and spinning wheels and turf fires and an uncouth language, but it’s all hollow. There’s plenty of decent plain folk in Ireland, but his kind of déraciné is a ghastly throwback to something you find in the dawn of history, hollow and cruel like the fantastic gods of their own myths. Well, you start with this ingrained hate.”
“I agree about the old lady. She looked like Lady Macbeth.”
“But hate soon becomes conceit. If you hate, you despise, and when you despise you esteem inordinately the self which despises. This is how I look at it, but remember, I’m still in the dark and only feeling my way to an understanding. I see Medina growing up—I don’t know in what environment—conscious of great talents and immense good looks, flattered by those around him till he thinks himself a god. His hatred does not die, but it is transformed into a colossal egotism and vanity, which, of course, is a form of hate. He discovers quite early that he has this remarkable hypnotic power—Oh, you may laugh at it, because you happen to be immune from it, but it is a big thing in the world for all that. He discovers another thing—that he has an extraordinary gift of attracting people and making them believe in him. Some of the worst scoundrels in history have had it. Now, remember his vanity. It makes him want to play the biggest game. He does not want to be a king among pariahs; he wants to be the ruler of what is most strange to him, what he hates and in an unwilling bitter way admires. So he aims at conquering the very heart, the very soundest part of our society. Above all he wants to be admired by men and admitted into the innermost circle.”
“He has succeeded all right,” I said.
“He has succeeded, and that is the greatest possible tribute to his huge cleverness. Everything about him is dead right—clothes, manner, modesty, accomplishments. He has made himself an excellent sportsman. Do you know why he shoots so well, Dick? By faith—or fatalism, if you like. His vanity doesn’t allow him to believe that he could miss. … But he governs himself strictly. In his life he is practically an ascetic, and though he is adored by women he doesn’t care a straw for them. There are no lusts of the flesh in that kind of character. He has one absorbing passion which subdues all others—what our friend Michael Scott called ‘hominum dominatus.’ ”
“I see that. But how do you explain the other side?”
“It is all the ancestral hate. First of all, of course, he has got to have money, so he gets it in the way Macgillivray knows about. Second, he wants to build up a regiment of faithful slaves. That’s where you come in, Dick. There is always that inhuman hate at the back of his egotism. He wants to conquer in order to destroy, for destruction is the finest meat for his vanity. You’ll find the same thing in the lives of Eastern tyrants, for when a man aspires to be like God he becomes an incarnate devil.”
“It is a tough proposition,” I observed dismally.
“It would be an impossible proposition, but for one thing. He is always in danger of giving himself away out of sheer arrogance. Did you ever read the old Irish folklore? Very beautiful it is, but
