“Had you died, as seemed for some weeks likely for all my skill, I should have smoothed the way for the stupid Englishman; but finding that you would live, I thought to bind you to me by keeping your way open. In a few days you will be well, and must tread your own path, to triumph or disaster as your own star shall decree. In either case, I know you will stand by me when my need comes!” “You know the merest truth,” said I. Chapter XXI Beauséjour, and After Now, while I was arranging in my mind a fresh and voluminous series of interrogations, my singular host arose abruptly and went off without a word, leaving me to rebuild a new image of him out of the shattered fragments of the old. I saw that he was not mad, but possessed. One intolerably dominant purpose of revenge making all else little in his eyes, he was mad but in relation to a world of complex impulses; in relation to his great aim, sane, and ultimately effective, I could not doubt. But the mad grotesquerie of the part he had assumed had come to cling to him as another self, no longer to be quite sloughed off at will. To play his part well he had resolved to be it; and he was it, with reservation. Just now, Acadie fallen and his enemy for the time in eclipse, I concluded that he found his occupation gone. Therefore, after solitary and tongue-tied years, his speech flowed freely to me, as a stream broken loose. That he had a purpose with me, I divined, would excuse him in his own sight for descending to the long unwonted relief of direct and simple utterance. I expected to find out from him many things of grave import during the few days of inaction that yet lay ahead of me. Then I would be able to act—without, perhaps, the follies of the past. Meanwhile this tender, icy, extravagant, colossal, all but omniscient character had bound me to him with the irrefragable bonds of mystery, gratitude, and trust. I was Yvonne’s first, but next I felt myself fast in leash to the posturing madman Grûl. Returning soon to my couch, I dozed and mused away the morning. At noon came no sign of my host, so I went to the niche in the wall, found food, and made my meal alone, feeling myself hourly growing in strength. Toward sunset Grûl strode in, wafted, as my convalescent nostrils averred, upon a most savoury smell. It proved to be a still steaming collop of roast venison, and after that feast I know the blood ran redder and swifter in my pulses. “O best physician!” said I, leaning back. “And now, I beg you, assuage a little the itching of my ears.” He sat, his mantle and wizard wand flung by, upon a billet of wood against the wall, and looked not all unlike familiar mortals of the finest. Leaning his chin in his long, clutching hands, as if to make gesture impossible, he leaped straight into the story: