Kitabı oku: «The Prophet's Mantle», sayfa 5

Litvinoff rose at once.

'I had no idea,' he said, 'that the little brochure would ever be heard of outside the country for whose children it was written; but since the question is asked me so frankly to-night, I will answer as frankly—Yes, I wrote it.'

An approving murmur ran through the room, and the foreigner rose again. He was sorry again to trouble Citizen Litvinoff, but was he right in supposing (it had been so reported) that the discovery of this pamphlet by the Russian Government had occasioned Count Litvinoff's exile?

Litvinoff was very pale as he answered,—

'Yes; it was that unhappy pamphlet which deprived me of the chance of serving my country on the scene of action, and which lost me a life I valued above my own—that of a fellow-countryman of the audience which I have the pleasure of addressing to-night—my secretary and friend, whom I loved more than a brother.' His voice trembled as he ended.

There was another round of applause, and, no more questions being forthcoming, the meeting broke up, and people stood talking together in little groups. Richard was discussing a knotty economic point with a sturdy carpenter and trades unionist, and Roland, close by, was earnestly questioning a French Communist to whom Litvinoff had introduced him, and was receiving an account of the so-called murder of the hostages very different from any which had appeared in the daily papers of the period, when the Count came up to them.

'Excuse me,' he said, 'I am désolé; but I shall be unable to stay longer. You will be able, doubtless, to pilot yourselves back to civilisation, and will pardon my abrupt departure. I have just seen someone going out of the door whom I've been trying to catch for the last three months, and I'm off in pursuit.'

And he was off. As he passed a small knot of youths outside the door they looked after him, and one of them said with a laugh, 'Blest if I don't believe he's after that handsome gal. What chaps these foreigners are for the ladies.'

The discerning youth was right. He was after that girl—but though he followed her and watched her into the house where she lived, he did not speak to her.

'Think twice before you speak once is a good rule,' he said to himself, as he turned westwards, 'and I know where she lives, at any rate.'

Even discussions on political economy, and historical revelations by those who helped to make the history, must come to an end at last, and the Ferriers came away, after Dick had received a pressing invitation from the chairman to address the club, and to choose his own subject, and Roland, who had suddenly conceived a passion for foreigners of a revolutionary character, had made an appointment with his Communist acquaintance for an evening in the week.

As they passed down the street, two men standing under a lamp looked at them with interest. One was the man who had put the questions regarding the pamphlet. The other was a foreigner too, though he was clean in his attire and had not a scrubby chin, but a long, light silky beard. He wore the slouch hat so much affected by the High Church Clergy, and which is popularly supposed to mark any non-clerical wearer as a man of revolutionary views. He was tall, and pale, and thin, and had very deeply-set hollow eyes, which he kept fixed on the retreating millowners till they turned the corner and went out of sight. Then he said, in a Hungarian dialect,—

'Our pamphlet-writing friend doesn't seem to choose his friends solely among the poor and needy; and that is politic to say the least of it.'

'Money seeks money,' growled the other, 'and he has plenty.'

'Not so much as you'd suppose. The greater part of the Litvinoff property is quite out of his reach. Our "little father" takes good care of that.'

'That which he has he takes care to keep,' said the other.

'I'm not so sure; at anyrate, he uses his tongue, which is a good one, in our cause. Speeches like that are good. A man who can speak so is not to be sneered at, and I'm certain he could not speak like that unless he felt some of it at least. He has done us good service before, and he will again. The Mantle of the Prophet fits him uncommonly well.'

CHAPTER VIII.
'YOU LIE!'

'Morley's Hotel, Sunday Evening.

EAR MR FERRIER,—You were so full of Russia yesterday afternoon that you made me forget to say to you what might have saved you the trouble of answering this by post. Will you and your brother dine with us (papa says) to-morrow evening at seven? I hope you enjoyed yourselves last night. I am sure I should have done if I had been there. With papa's and my kind regards to you and Mr Roland,—I am, dear Mr Ferrier, yours very truly,

'Clare Stanley.

'P.S.—Count Litvinoff, your interesting Russian friend, will be here.'

Miss Stanley smiled to herself rather wickedly as she folded this note. She had noticed that her interest in the Russian acquaintance did not seem to enhance theirs, and she thought to herself that whatever the dinner might be at which those three assisted, it certainly would not be dull for her.

In Derbyshire, where her amusements were very limited, she would have thought twice before permitting herself to risk offending the masters of Thornsett, but here that risk only seemed to offer a new form of amusement. But experimenting on the feelings of these gentlemen was an entertainment which was somehow not quite so enthralling as it had been, and she now longed, not for a fresh world to conquer—here was one ready to her hand—but for the power to conquer it. She would have given something to be able to believe that she had anything like the same power over this hero of romance, whom fate had thrown in her way, as she had over the excellent but commonplace admirers with whom she had amused herself for the last year.

Litvinoff had distinctly told her that the goddess of his idolatry, the one mistress of his heart, was Liberty, and though this statement was modified in her mind by her recollection of certain glances cast at herself, she yet believed in it enough to feel a not unnatural desire to enter into competition with that goddess. Her classical studies taught her that women had competed successfully with such rivals, and she was not morbidly self-distrustful, especially when a looking-glass was near her.

With the letter in her hand she glanced at the mirror over the mantelpiece, and the fair vision of dark-brown lashes, gold-brown waving hair, delicate oval face, and well-shaped if rather large mouth, might have reassured her had she felt any doubts of her own attractions. But the glance she cast at herself over her shoulder was one of saucy triumph, and the smile with which she sealed her letter one of conscious power.

Would she have been gratified if she could have seen the effect of her note? It was not at all with the sort of expression you would expect to see on the face of a man who had just received a dinner invitation transmitted through the lady of his heart from that lady's papa, that Richard Ferrier passed the note over to his brother next morning.

'Here you are,' he said. 'Bouquet de Nihilist, trebly distilled.'

'Well, don't let's go, then.'

'Why, I thought you were so fond of the Count. I wonder you don't jump at it. I thought it would please you.'

'So I do like him—he's a splendid speaker; but I didn't come to London to spend all my days and nights with him, any more than you did. Besides, I'm engaged for to-night.'

'Oh, are you? Well, I think I shall go.'

'You'd better leave it alone. You won't stand much chance beside a man with such a moustache as that. Besides, he sings, don't you know? and with all your solid and admirable qualities, Richard, you're not a nightingale.'

'Nor yet a runaway rebel.'

'I say, you'd better look a little bit after your epithets. Litvinoff doesn't look much of the running-away sort. According to what I heard last night, he can use a revolver with effect on occasion. By the way, Richard,' he went on, more seriously, 'I believe I saw a face at that club I knew, but it was only for a minute, and I lost sight of it, and I couldn't be sure.'

'Who did you think it was?'

'Little Alice.'

'Think—you think!' said his brother, turning fiercely on him. 'Do you mean to say you didn't know?'

'Know? Of course not, or I should say so. What the deuce do you mean?'

'I should like to ask you what the deuce you mean by even debating whether or no to accept that invitation when you know you've no earthly right to go near Miss Stanley—'

'You'd better mention your ideas to Mr Stanley. I don't in the least know what you're driving at—and I don't care; but since you choose to bring her name in, I shall throw over my other engagement and go to Morley's to-night.'

'You can go to the devil if you choose!' said Dick, who seemed to have entirely lost his self-control, and he flung out, slamming the door behind him.

Clare's note was bearing more fruit than she desired or anticipated in setting the brothers not so much against Litvinoff as against each other, for what but her letter could have stirred Dick's temper to this sudden and unpremeditated outbreak? What but her note and Dick's comments thereon could have ruffled Roland's ordinarily even nature in this way? It is always a mistake to play with fire; but people, girls especially, will not believe this until they have burned their own fingers, and, en passant, more of other people's valuables than they can ever estimate.

'I wish I had spoken to that girl yesterday,' said Count Litvinoff to himself; 'it would have saved my turning out this vile afternoon. If fate has given England freedom, she has taken care to accompany the gift with a fair share of fog. I wish I could help worrying about other people's troubles. It is very absurd, but I can't get on with my work for thinking of that poor tired little face. Hard up, she looked, too. Ah, well! so shall I be very soon, unless something very unexpected turns up. I'll go now, and earn an easy conscience for this evening.'

He threw down his pen and rose. The article on the Ethics of Revolution on which he was engaged had made but small progress that afternoon. He had felt ever since lunch that go out he must sooner or later, and the prospect was dispiriting. He glanced out of his window as he put on his fur-lined coat. From the windows of Morley's Hotel the view on a fine day is about as cheerful as any that London can present—though one may have one's private sentiments respecting the pepper-boxes which emphasise the bald ugliness of the National Gallery, and though one may sometimes wish that the slave of the lamp would bring St George's Hall from Liverpool and drop it on that splendid site. But this was not a fine day. It was a gloomy, damp, foggy, depressing, suicidal day. The fog had, with its usual adroitness, managed to hide the beauties of everything, and to magnify the uglinesses. Nelson was absolutely invisible, and the lions looked like half-drowned cats. Litvinoff shuddered as he lighted a large cigar and pulled his gloves on.

'This is a detestable climate,' he said, as he drew the first whiffs; 'but London is about the only place I know where good cigars can be had at a price to fit the pocket of an exile. I suppose I shall soon have to leave this palatial residence, and become one of the out-at-elbows gentlemen who make life hideous in Leicester Square and Soho.'

Like many men who have lived lonely lives, Michael Litvinoff had an inveterate habit of soliloquy. It had been strengthened by his life at the ancestral mansion on the Litvinoff estate, and had not grown less in his years of solitary wanderings.

His walk to-day was not a pleasant one, and more than once he felt inclined to turn back. But he persevered, and when he reached the house which he had seen her enter he asked a woman on the ground floor if Miss Hatfield lived there.

'There's a young person named Hatfield in the front attic,' was the reply, as the informant stared with all her eyes at the Count, who was certainly an unusual sort of apparition in Spray's Buildings.

As he strode up the dirty, rotten stairs, stumbling more than once, he thought to himself, as Dick had done, that Alice did not make her new life profitable, whatever it was.

'Poor girl!' he thought; 'if she's of the same mind now as she was when I saw her last, I suppose I must find an opportunity of doing good by stealth.'

The house, though poor enough, did not seem to be one of those overcrowded dens of which we have heard so much lately, and which a Royal Commission is to set right, as a Royal Commission always does set everything right. Or perhaps the lodgers were birds of prey, who only came home to roost at uncertain hours; or beasts of burden, who were only stabled at midnight to be harnessed again at sunrise. At anyrate, the Count saw no one on the stairs, and he saw no one in the front attic either. Not only no one, but no thing. The door and window were both open. The room appeared to have been swept and garnished, but was absolutely empty of everything but fog. There was another door opposite, but it was closed and locked.

'She's evidently not here. We'll try lower down.' But before he had time to turn he heard a foot on the stairs, coming up with the light and springy tread which is the result of good and well-fitting boots, and which does not mark those who walk through life, from the cradle to the grave, shod in boots several sizes too large and several pounds too heavy.

He glanced over the broken banisters, and recoiled hastily.

'The gentle Roland, by all that's mysterious!' he said, 'Now, what on earth can he want here? At anyrate, he'd better not see me.'

The landing on which he stood was very dark, and there was a heap of lumber, old boxes, a hopelessly broken chair, a tub, and some boards. Litvinoff crept behind them, and in his black coat and the obscurity of the dusky landing and the dark afternoon he felt himself secure. He had hardly taken up this position when Roland Ferrier's head appeared above the top stair, to be followed cautiously by the rest of him. He cast a puzzled look round the empty attic, tried the closed door, and, turning, went downstairs again.

Litvinoff was just coming out of his not over savoury lurking-place when he heard a voice on the landing below, which was not Roland's.

'Parbleu!' he said to himself; 'it rains Ferriers here this afternoon. Here's the engaging Richard, and evidently not in the best of tempers.'

He evidently was not—if one might judge by his voice, which was icy with contempt as he said sneeringly, 'So this was the engagement you were going to put off, was it?'

'Yes, it was. At least I am here to put off an engagement; but I don't know what you know about it,' said Roland, 'and I don't know what you mean by following me about like this. What business have you here? This isn't Aspinshaw, that you need dog my footsteps.'

'I came here to try and find out whether my father's son was a scoundrel or not, and you've answered the question for me by being here.'

'Upon my word,' said Roland's voice, 'I think you must be out of your mind.'

It isn't often that the thought which would restrain comes into one's mind at the moment when restraint is most needed; but just then Dick did think of his father and his dying wishes, and the remembrance helped him to speak more calmly than he would otherwise have done.

'Once for all, then, will you tell me why you are here, Roland?'

'Yes, I will, though I don't acknowledge your right to question me. I had an appointment, with that Frenchman we met last night, for this evening, but I've lost his address. I knew it was in this court, and I was walking about on the chance of finding him, when I'm almost sure I saw Litvinoff come in here. I made after him, feeling sure he was going to the same place as I was.'

'And where is Litvinoff?'

'He seems to have disappeared, or else I was mistaken. Now, what have you got to say?'

'This. You lie!'

It sounded hardly like Richard's voice, so hoarse and choked with passion was it; and so full of insult and scorn that Roland at last lost control of himself.

'Stand back, you raving maniac,' he said, 'and let me pass! The same roof mustn't cover us two any longer, and don't speak again to me this side of the grave.'

The listener, leaning forward eagerly to catch every word, heard Roland's foot dash down the staircase. There was a moment of perfect silence, and then came a long-drawn sigh from Richard Ferrier.

'Now then, young man, what's all this to-do about? I should like to know what you mean by quarrelling in places that don't belong to you, and terrifying respectable married women out of their seven senses.' It was a shrill woman's voice that spoke, and a door opened on the landing where young Ferrier stood.

'I'm very sorry, madam,' said Richard, in tones calm enough now. 'I didn't intend to disturb anyone. Will you kindly tell me if anyone lives here named Hatfield?'

'There was a young woman of that name in the front attic, but she left sudden this morning.'

'Do you know where she's gone?'

'No, I don't.'

'Does anyone in the house know?'

'No. I'm the landlady, and she'd have told me if she told anyone.'

'Thank you,' he said, and turned to pass down the staircase.

'Stay, though,' he said; 'have you any Frenchmen lodging here?'

'I don't want no dratted furriners here, and I haven't got none, thank God!'

'Of course not,' said Ferrier to himself, and strode downstairs.

'No foreigners here? Don't be too sure, my good woman,' Litvinoff muttered to himself, as he heard the landlady's door close to a continued accompaniment of reiterated objections in that lady's shrill treble. 'I'd better get out of this house of mystery at once. I trust that the outraged female proprietor of this staircase will not demand my blood. Well, whatever happens, I suppose we shall not see the amiable brothers to-night, and that will mean a tête-à-tête,' he added, as he came out from his dusty retirement, and carefully removed all traces of the same from his clothes. When he found himself once more in the chill, foggy, outside air, he looked up and down the court, and smiled.

'The situation becomes interesting,' he said to himself, 'and demands another of these very excellent cigars.'

CHAPTER IX.
AT SPRAY'S BUILDINGS

IT seemed a very long walk home to Alice Hatfield, after that Sunday evening lecture. She felt almost as though she could never reach her lodging. It was such weary work to keep putting one tired foot before the other. And somehow she was so much more easily tired now than she used to be in her Derbyshire home, where she had been used to breast the steepest hills without even a quickened breath. She wished she had not gone; she had derived no pleasure from the evening, and had only gained a sharper heartache from the sight of a certain face, which had been, and was still for that matter, the dearest face in the world to her. She felt re-awakened too in her a liking for a different life among different surroundings; the life she had given up of her own free will three months ago. She had been much alone in that other life, it is true, and her thoughts had not made solitude sweet; but she had seen him sometimes, and now she was quite alone—always—save for the few slight acquaintances she had made in the house where she lived. In that other life, which now looked brighter than it had ever done when it was hers, she had been racked and tortured by her conscience, which had at last forced her to try and silence it by renouncing what she had sacrificed everything to gain, and by voluntarily adopting this strange, hard way of living. But now that that gloomy monitor was on her side, it failed to give that comfort and support which one is taught to expect from it.

'Be virtuous and you will be happy,' say the copy-books. A somewhat higher authority (Professor Huxley) thinks otherwise. 'Virtue is undoubtedly beneficent,' he says, 'but the man is to be envied to whom her ways seem in any wise playful; and though she may not talk much about suffering and self-denial, her silence on that topic may be accounted for on the principle ça va sans dire. She is an awful goddess, whose ministers are the furies, and whose highest reward is peace.'

Alice Hatfield hadn't read Huxley, but if she had she would have agreed with him in this; and now it seemed as though the furies were driving her along the streets towards that miserable home of hers, where, so far, no dove of peace had folded its wings.

It is given to all of us, at one time or another, to repent—more or less—of the evil; but many of us also know what it is to look back, with something like remorse, on what we believe to have been the good. And good and evil, get so mixed up sometimes, when we have often heard the world's 'right' skilfully controverted and made to seem wrong, by the tongue whose eloquence once made wrong seem to us right.

Alice had to collect all her energies to enable her to climb the steep dark stairs which led to her room, and when she had gained it at last, and had lighted her little benzoline lamp, she sank down on her chair bedstead, exhausted and breathless. What a hateful room it was; how cold, and cheerless, and wretched. The few poor articles of furniture did not relieve its bareness in the least. There was no fire, of course, and her little lamp quite failed to light up the dark corners. There must be something wrong with that lamp—it was going out surely—the room was growing so dark; or was it her eyes from which the power of seeing was going? The room seemed to swim before her sight, and a feeling of deadly faintness came over her, a horrible sensation of going through the floor. She staggered to her feet and drank some water, which gave her strength to go unsteadily down to the floor below, and to knock at the landlady's door.

'Oh, I am so ill—so ill! I think I'm dying,' she said, holding out both hands as the woman appeared; 'help me.'

Then she knew no more. Her troubles, her tiredness, her regrets, her very self, all were swallowed up in the horror of great darkness that overwhelmed her.

'Here's a nice set out,' grumbled Mrs Fludger, as her lodger fell at her feet; 'as if one hadn't enough troubles o' one's own—what with Jenny being out o' work, and the master on the booze since Friday. Jenny!'

'Here I am.'

Miss Jenny Fludger, a muscular young woman, with her hair in a long beaded net, responded to the call, and lent her help in carrying Alice back to her room. Then the unsympathetic hands of the two women undressed the girl and laid her in her bed. Then they looked meaningly at each other.

'If she don't soon come round I'll send Joe for the doctor,' said the mother. 'You never knows what may happen.'

Then Mrs Fludger dashed cold water in the patient's face, slapped her hands with a vigour that would have brought tears to her eyes had she been conscious, and made a horrible smell with the benzoline lamp and a pigeon's feather hastily begged from a lodger who had leanings ornithological. Alice showing no signs of being affected by the application of these generally efficacious remedies, Mrs Fludger decided that this was a case of 'going off' quite beyond her experience, and feeling the responsibility too much to be borne alone, she despatched her third son in quest of a doctor, regardless of Miss Jenny's opinion that the lodger was 'shamming.' Joe Fludger was not particularly pleased at being sent. He was busy just then shaking up a mangy kitten and a recently-acquired guinea-pig in a box, with a view of getting them to fight, which they showed no signs of doing, and he did not care to relinquish this enthralling pastime until he had compassed his end. He put his two 'pets' into one pocket, hoping that that position would urge them to fulfil their destiny and have it out, and as he met several friends, and felt it incumbent on him to exhibit his treasures to each of them, it was some time before he carried out his instructions, and brought medical science, as represented by Dr Moore, to 15 Spray's Buildings. But even when the doctor did at last stand by her bedside, Alice was still insensible.

He raised her eyelids, felt her pulse, asked one or two brief questions, and then stood holding her hand till she sighed, and moved slightly.

'She's coming round,' he said. 'Not married, I see,' he added, glancing at the hand he held, on which shone no golden circle, not even the brass substitute which takes its place occasionally, when times are very hard.

'Not as I ever heard of,' said Miss Jenny with a toss of the net, which drew down upon her a glance of disapproval from the old doctor, and a sharp recommendation from her mother to go downstairs. 'Give the girl air; there's too many of us here a'ready.'

Miss Fludger withdrew with a gesture expressive of a sovereign contempt for faints in general, and this collapse in particular.

'How does this poor thing get her living?' asked the doctor; 'she looks as if she got it honestly.' He, being an observant man, glanced as he spoke at the roughened forefinger of her left hand, and then round the bare, dreary attic.

'Lord! doctor, how should I know? Do you think I puts all my lodgers through their cataclysm before I takes 'em in?' said Mrs Fludger, with some general recollection of the days when she went to Sunday school. Mrs Fludger did not always manage to hit on the right word to express the meaning she intended to convey, but she always found a word something like the right one, and a word which really had a place in the English dictionary; she had a rare dexterity in the finding of such words, and a fine confidence in the use of them, which made them answer her purpose admirably.

'You're better now, aren't you?' said the doctor, as Alice opened her eyes. 'Here's a shilling, ma'am: can you send for some brandy?'

Mrs Fludger would go herself. Such an admirable opportunity for having 'two penn'orth' at the 'Hope' was not to be let slip.

'Don't be frightened,' he said, as the landlady left the room. 'It's only the doctor. You've been overdoing it—working too hard, and eating too little.'

'But I never felt like that before,' said Alice slowly and faintly. 'I thought I was going to die.'

'Haven't you anyone belonging to you? You ought to be with friends just now.'

'No. I'm quite alone, quite alone. Why just now?'

'My dear child, don't you know why?'

She did not answer, but looked at him with large, frightened, questioning eyes; and before Mrs Fludger returned with a shrunken shilling's-worth in a ginger-beer bottle, Alice had learned that that which she had feared, till a sort of hope had grown out of the very intensity of her fear—that which had seemed almost too terrible to be possible—was to be. She now had that certainty which is a spring of secret happiness to so many women, to some only a fresh care and anxiety, and to some, alas! the sign and token of social banishment—the warrant of disgrace and despair.

Doctor Moore spoke kindly, and with no note of censure in his voice. He had a naturally tender heart, and long years of practice in a poor neighbourhood had developed his sympathies, instead of blunting them, as, unfortunately, happens in too many cases. He was an old man now, and this was an old story to him; but his eyes were still sharp enough to see that the girl before him did not belong to that class of patients to whom such an announcement would have meant little more than a temporary inconvenience and a trifling subsequent expense. He thought to himself that he would look in in the morning and see the girl again. There had been a look in her eyes as she listened to him that made him feel that she wanted looking after.

'Give her some hot brandy-and-water, and let her go to sleep—that's the best thing for her,' he said to Mrs Fludger as he came away. The landlady accompanied him downstairs in a halo of apology for having 'such like' in her house, and when she had lighted him out she climbed once more, protesting, to the attic, and having administered the brandy as prescribed, came away, after bidding the girl 'good-night' not unkindly.

But, all the same, she made up her mind that Alice must go. If the girl had come there as 'Mrs' Anybody—and worn a ring, no questions would have been asked by Mrs Fludger. There would then have been the alternative of supposing that the Mr in the case was in the seafaring way, or was enjoying a holiday upon the breezy slopes of Dartmoor. But as she had chosen to neglect the payment of that slight tribute to the proprieties which even this neighbourhood demanded, there was no help for it—she must go. Besides, there might be difficulties about rent, and even a want of money for the necessaries of life—and Mrs Fludger was afraid to trust her tender heart. Even forty years of being pinched and 'druv' had not quite dried up the milk of human kindness in her bosom, and she felt that she would rather not have a lodger who would excite her sympathy and possibly make demands upon her pocket. This habit of 'not trusting our tender hearts' is not confined to the class to which Mrs Fludger belonged. Others who have larger means of meeting probable drafts on their 'tenderness' have also a way of pushing misery out of sight, or handing it over to the emollient remedies of a Royal Commission, which, of course, goes thoroughly into the matter. Does it? The Royal Commissioners do not find their shoulders any easier under the burden we have shifted on to them than we found ours, and not being able to shift the weight again, they skilfully dissolve it, and give it us back in the solution of a wordy report. And for Mrs Fludger, who had to look sharp after every halfpenny, and who knew no higher morality than that taught in the precept, 'Take care of number one,' which to her meant the number nine, of whom Miss Jenny was the eldest, there was more excuse than there is for the theoretical philanthropists who wear purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day.

But the landlady was not required to make the announcement which she had proposed to herself, for when she went up to Alice's room the next morning, to say that she wished to have a few words with her (and when people say that, you may be sure the words are not going to be pleasant ones), she found the girl already dressed—with her little belongings arranged as for an immediate departure. So she changed her mind, and instead of that speech about the few words, she said simply,—