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The Prophet's Mantle
As the other turned at the sound of the opening door he gave a cry of horror at the sight of the wild, haggard figure springing at him—the white, angry, maddened face close to his own.
'Keep back!' he almost screamed, as Hatfield rushed upon him, but even as he spoke the man's hands fastened on his throat, and the two closed in a silent, deadly struggle. They had hardly grasped each other when both remembered the danger that lay behind them—that black gap in the floor—and each tried to edge away from it without loosening his hold. Too late, though. The strain of the strong men wrestling was too much for the splintered boards already rotted through by the rain and snow of the past months. Crash went the flooring beneath their feet, and as the two went through, fast locked in each other's arms, Hatfield, above his adversary, saw, in a flash of intensest horror, that the face below him was not that of Roland, but of Richard.
It was the last thing he ever saw in this world. In another moment he was lying, a dead man, at the bottom of the great tank. Again the stillness of the empty mill was undisturbed, and the only movement in it was that of the heavy-coloured water as it settled down again into stagnation over him.
Roland went to bed that night without troubling himself much about his brother. He had been deeply wronged, and he was a man who, not easily offended, was, when once alienated, implacable. He did not find it easy to forgive. Though he had shaken hands with his brother he had not forgiven him, and he came down to breakfast the next morning quite prepared to keep up his rôle of injured innocence, and to prevent his brother from experiencing much satisfaction in the reconciliation. Richard had always been an early riser, and Roland quite expected to find him in the dining-room waiting, but he was not there. He waited some little time, and then desired Mrs Brock to see if Mr Ferrier was in his room, and it was not till she returned with the intelligence that he was not and that his bed had not been slept in, that Roland began to wonder in anxious earnest where his brother could be.
A very short search showed that he was not in the house or grounds. Could he have gone to the churchyard? No, thought Roland; Dick wasn't that sort of fellow. Perhaps he had gone over to Gates, and had stayed all night. In a very short time Roland was at The Hollies questioning eagerly, and, with an inexplicable feeling of dread and anxiety growing stronger upon him with each moment, he learned that Dick had not been there. He would go down to the village, and Mr Gates volunteered to come with him, though he laughed cheerfully at the idea of there being anything to worry about in Dick's non-appearance. 'He's playing off some trick on you,' he said. 'However, come along, and we'll soon find him.' So they walked together towards the village.
'Hullo,' said Mr Gates, as they passed the mill, 'that door's no business open! Perhaps Dick's up to some games in there.'
The door he pointed at was one opening from the mill on to a flight of stone steps that ran sideways outside the building from the second storey to the ground.
'Whether he's there or not,' the lawyer went on, 'some one has been there, and we'd better see who it is.'
So they went down, and, crossing the courtyard, between whose stones the grass was springing already, ran up the steps and passed through the open door.
The whole place was flooded with the brilliant morning sunlight.
The two made a few steps forward. They saw the hole in the floor, and paused. Then Roland's heart seemed to stand still, for he saw on the board at the edge of the gap a hat, and his brother's silver-headed walking stick, and he knew what had happened. With an exceeding bitter cry he turned from Gates and sprang down an inner staircase, glancing at each floor as he passed it, and on the stones at the bottom he found what he sought—Dick. Or was it Dick? Could this mangled, twisted, bloody mass be his brother? The pitiless light came through the cobwebbed windows, and showed plainly enough that it was Dick, or Dick's body.
'Run for Bailey,' he shouted to Gates, who had followed him; and he went.
Then Roland lifted Richard's head. Was he alive? Yes. At the movement a spasm of agony contracted his face, and his eyes opened. A look of relief came into them when he saw his brother.
'Don't move me, old man,' he whispered; and the other knelt beside him, his arms under the poor head. He could not speak, for he saw that his brother was dying.
After a moment Richard spoke again, very faintly.
'I'm glad you've come.' He could only say a few words at a time, and between the sentences came long pauses, in each of which Roland fancied the last silence had come.
'I wanted you, old fellow. It's nearly over now. It's been like hell lying here. I know he's somewhere near, and I couldn't help him. It was Hatfield, and he mistook me for you. It was through me he believed you had wronged Alice. He was hiding here, and attacked me. We struggled and fell. I'm afraid he's dead. You'll see presently.'
Then came a longer pause than any that had gone before, and still Roland could not speak.
Gates had sent down a man from the cottage above, but when he came Richard made impatient signs, and he went and stood outside.
'You didn't care about making it up, Rowley; but it's all right between us now, isn't it?'
Roland's tears were falling over his brother's face.
'Oh, Dick, Dick, Dick!' He could say nothing else.
'It's hard lines,' Richard said; 'but it's all my own fault. Never mind, old chap. Water!'
Roland called to the labourer, and when the water had been brought Dick seemed to gather his strength together.
'Since I've been lying here, I've wished I could believe I was going to see father again, and I half believe it's possible. I shouldn't care if I was going to the old dad again.'
'Oh, Dick! Can I do nothing for you?'
'No, old chap; only tell her I sent her my love. She has it, and she won't mind now.'
Then he lay silent, with closed eyes. Presently he made a movement. Roland interpreted it, and kissed his face.
'I'm going, old man!' he said. 'Good-bye. Clare! Clare! Clare!' He murmured her name over and over again, more and more faintly.
Roland put the water to his lips again, but it was too late. He had drunk of the Nepenthe of Death.
CHAPTER XXIX.
BACK FROM THE DEAD
THE Clare Stanley who studied Bakounin and quoted Matthew Arnold was a very different girl from the Clare Stanley who had in the autumn entertained the reprehensible idea of bringing to her feet the interesting stranger at Morley's Hotel. In looking back on that time, which she did with hot cheeks and uncomfortable self-condemnation, it really seemed to her that she had changed into another being—development, when it is rapid, being always bewildering. It would be interesting to know with what emotions the rose remembers being a green bud. Pleasanter ones perhaps than those of the woman whose new earnest sense of the intense seriousness of life leads her to look back—not with indulgent eyes—on the follies of her unawakened girlhood. The story of the sleeping beauty is an allegory with a very real meaning. Every woman's mind has its time of slumber, when the creed of the day is truth and the convention of the day is morality. The fairy prince's awakening kiss may come in the pages of a book, in the words of a speaker, through love, through suffering, through sorrow, through a thousand things glad or sad, and to some it never comes, and that is the saddest thing of all. Clare had slept, and now was well awake, and it was no word of Count Litvinoff's that had broken the slumbrous spell.
Sometimes she almost wished it had been, for she could not conceal from herself the fact that she had succeeded in doing what she had desired to do, and that Count Litvinoff was at her feet. The position became him, certainly, but she felt a perverse objection to being placed on a pedestal, and a new conviction that she would rather look up to a lover than down at one. And yet why should she look down on him? He was cleverer than she, with a larger knowledge of life—had done incomparably more for the cause she had espoused. He was brave, handsome, and, to some extent, a martyr, and he loved her, or she thought so, which came to the same thing. Verily, a man with all these qualifications was hardly the sort of lover for a girl under the twenties to look down upon. But could she help looking down on him, for was he not at her feet? And that was not the place, she thought, for a man who had drawn the sword in such a war as she and he had entered upon. What right had a man who had taken up arms in that cause to lay them down, even at her feet? No, no. Her lover, if she had one, must be at her side—not there.
This reaction to the Count's detriment had set in on New Year's Day, when he had told her that he held no cause sacred enough to give her even inconvenience for the sake of it, and the tide was still ebbing. Litvinoff appeared quite unconscious of that fact though, for he continued to call on Mrs Quaid with a persistence which quite justified all Cora's animadversions. Miss Quaid's penetration was at fault, but the Count's was not. He was perfectly conscious of the change in her state of mind, and knew that his chance of being master of the Stanley money-bags was far less than he had thought shortly after their late master's death.
Suspense was the one thing Count Litvinoff could not bear—at least, he could bear it when the balance of probabilities was in his favour; but when the chances did not seem to be on his side—no. He knew perfectly well that it is hardly 'correct' to ask a girl to marry one three months after her father's death; but he was not an enthusiastic devotee of 'correctness.' He habitually posed as a despiser of conventions, and this attitude very often stood him in good stead, even with people who preferred the stereotyped rôles of life for themselves. Avowed unconventionality serves as a splendid excuse for doing all sorts of pleasant things which conventional people daren't do; hence perhaps its growing popularity.
'He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch,
To gain or lose it all.'
The lines ran in Count Litvinoff's head persistently one spring morning while he sat at his late breakfast. As he despatched his last mouthful of grilled sardine and looked round for the marmalade, the servant came in with a letter.
'It really is time I struck for fortune. I do hope this is not a bill,' he said to himself as he took it. 'I retrench and retrench, and still they come.'
He tore it open. It was not a bill. It ran thus:—
'I shall call upon you between four and five this afternoon; I wish to see you on an important matter.—Petrovitch.'
'The mysterious stranger doesn't waste his words. He's almost as careful of them as the fellow with the dirty collar—Bursch, or Kirsch, or Hirsch, or whatever it was. The best of being mixed up with the revolutionary party is that such beautifully unexpected things are always befalling one. I wonder why he couldn't have waited till to-morrow night. It lends a spice to an important matter to discuss it at forbidden times and in a secret manner at the houses of friends. That's another of our characteristics—to plot when we're supposed to be talking frivol only, and to play cards or go to sleep when we're supposed to be plotting. Wonder what the important matter is. The distressed lady friend again, perhaps. Well, before I commit myself on that matter, I'd better settle things one way or the other with la belle Clare. Upon my soul, I don't much care which way they are settled. If I'm not to shine as the county magnate and the married man at Aspinshaw, by Heaven, I'll find out my own little girl, and go in for virtuous retirement in the Quartier Latin. When I do swallow my principles they go down whole, like oysters; and if Miss Stanley doesn't care to add the title of "countess" to her other endowments, some one will be glad to take that and me, even with nothing a year to keep state upon.'
He pushed his chair back, and sat biting his moustache irresolutely, and frowning heavily at the breakfast-table.
'Yes,' he said at last, rising; 'I'll have a shot for it now, as I've gone so far, and I'll shoot as straight and as steady as I can. As for the other matter—well, Aspinshaw and the fruits thereof would not be a bad drug for inconvenient memories. I wonder if this is one of my good-looking days?' he added, moving towards the looking-glass, and scrutinising his reflection therein. He seemed satisfied, lighted the inevitable cigarette, and half an hour after noon was in Mrs Quaid's library, alone with Clare Stanley.
Mrs Quaid, he had known, would be absent on some educational errand, and Cora would be at the National Gallery. He knew that Miss Stanley was not averse to a quiet morning spent in uninterrupted reading and copying, and he had rightly thought that he should have a very fair chance of finding her alone. The resolution of his, which had faltered before the remembrance of that other face, grew strong again as he saw her, for she looked charming, and it was not in his nature to be indifferent to the charms of any woman, even if she were not the woman.
Miss Stanley had been making notes in a MS. book, and Litvinoff noticed with a feeling not altogether pleasurable that 'The Prophetic Vision' and the 'Ethics of Revolution' both lay open on the writing-table, and that she seemed to have been comparing them one with the other.
'I am afraid you will hate me for interrupting your studies,' he began, apparently ignorant of the direction those studies had been taking, 'but when the servant told me you were alone in the library, I could not resist the temptation of coming in.'
'I don't at all mind being interrupted,' she answered, when he had settled himself down in a chair opposite to her with the air of a man who, having come in, meant to stay. 'I was just looking through two of your books. One of them, indeed, I almost know by heart.'
'And that is?'—carelessly, as one who is sure of the answer—
'"The Prophetic Vision."'
Somehow Count Litvinoff did not look delighted. Perhaps he wanted to talk about something else.
'But, oh,' she went on, 'what a long way off it all seems!'
'Yes, it does; I was an enthusiastic young rebel when I first put on the Prophet's Mantle.' Then, as a faint change in her face showed him that he had made a false move, he hastened to add, 'But it will all happen some day, you know. It is a true vision, but knocking about in the world has taught me that the immediately practicable is the thing to aim for.'
'Oh, no, no, no,' she said. 'Never let us lower our standard. We shall not do less noble work in the present for having the noblest of all goals before us.'
Then she looked at him, at his handsome, insouciant face, at the half-cynical droop of his mouth, at the look in his eyes—the sort of look an old cardinal who knew the Church and the world might turn on an enthusiastic young monk—and she felt a sudden regret for that heart-warm speech of hers. What had she in common with this perfectly-dressed, orchid-button-holed young man? Why should she expect him to understand her? And yet had he not written "The Prophetic Vision"? She went on, smiling a little,—
'You must make allowances for the hopeful faith of a new convert. Perhaps when I've held my new belief a little longer I shall be less en l'air. But I must say I hope not.'
'Your new beliefs make you very happy, then?'
'They make me want very much to live to see what will happen. It would be terrible to die now before anything is accomplished. You see, I can't help believing that we shall accomplish something, although I know you think me very high-flown and absurd.'
'You know I think you perfect,' he said, in a very low voice, and went on hurriedly: 'But, for Heaven's sake, don't talk about dying; the idea is too horrible. Can't you guess why I have seemed not sympathetic with your new religion? I have known what it is to believe strongly, to work unceasingly, never to leave off hoping, and trying to show others my hope. I have known what it is to have no life but the life of the cause; to go through year after year still hoping and striving. I have known all this, and more. I have known the heart-sickness of waiting for a dawn that never comes. I know how one may strain every nerve, tax every power, kill one's body, wear out one's brain, break one's heart against the iron of things as they are, and when all is sacrificed, all is gone, all is suffered, have achieved nothing. It is from this I would save you. That you should suffer is a worse evil than any your suffering could remedy. The cause will have martyrs enough without you.'
'Martyrs, yes; but how can it have too many workers?' she asked, not looking at him.
'To be a worker is to be a martyr,' he answered, rising and standing near her; 'and that is the reason why you are the only convert I have never rejoiced over.'
'I don't know,' she was beginning when he interrupted her.
'Don't say that,' he said. 'Don't say you don't know why I can't endure the thought of your ever knowing anything but peace and happiness. You know it is because I love you, and my love for you has eaten up all my other loves. Freedom, the Revolution, my country, my own ambition, are all nothing to me. But if you care for the cause I can still work in it, and with a thousand times more enthusiasm than it ever inspired me with before, for you. That can be your way of helping it. Use me as your instrument. Make any use you will of me, if only you are safe and happy, and mine.'
His voice was low with the passion which for the moment thrilling through him made him quite believe his own words.
Clare had listened silently, her eyes cast down, and her nervous fingers diligently tearing an envelope into little bits, and when he had ended she still did not speak, but her breath came and went quickly.
'You,' he was beginning again, when she stretched out her hand to silence him.
'No, no,' she said; 'don't say any more—I can't bear it.'
'Does that mean that you care?'
'It means that this seems the most terrible thing that could have happened to me. That it should be through me that you give up the right.'
'But through you, for you, I will become anything you choose.'
'And that is the worst of all,' she said, with very real distress. 'I can ask you to do nothing for my sake.'
'You cannot love me, then?' he asked, as earnestly as though his happiness hung on her answer.
'No,' she said steadily, 'I cannot love you. I am very, very sorry—'
'Spare me your pity, at least,' he said. 'But one thing I must ask. Why did you let me see you again after New Year's Day? For I told you the same thing then, and you knew then that I loved you.'
It was true—but Clare hated him for saying it.
'I have changed so much since then,' she said slowly.
Several things both bitter and true rose to his lips. He did not give them voice, however. He had never in his life said an unkind thing to a woman. It occurred to him that he was accepting his defeat rather easily, and he looked at her to measure the chances for and against the possible success of another appeal. But in her face was a decision against which he knew there could be no appeal. He felt angry with her for refusing him—angry and unreasonably surprised; and then, in one of the flashes of light that made it so hard for him to understand himself, he saw that if she was to blame for refusing his love, he was ten thousand times more to blame for having sought hers, and this truth brought others with it. His real feeling, he knew, was not anger but relief. He made a step forward.
'You are right,' he said. 'I congratulate you on your decision. You were talking of dying just now. You will live long enough to know how much congratulation you merit for having to-day refused to give yourself to a traitor and a villain.'
'A traitor—no, no,' she said, holding out her hand.
'No,' he said, 'I am not worthy. Some day you will know that I ought never to have touched that hand of yours. Good-bye.'
And the door shut behind him, and Clare was left standing in the middle of the room with her eyes widely opened, and her hand still outstretched. She stood there till she heard the front door closed, and then sank into a chair. She didn't want to go on making notes about 'The Prophetic Vision' any more.
The interview had not been a pleasant one, and it was not pleasant to think over. One of the least pleasant things in this world is a granted wish, granted after it has ceased to be wished. And Clare could not forget that she had desired to win this man's admiration, at least. She could not forget that he had saved her father's life—that he had been the first to speak to her of many things once unknown or unconsidered, but now a part of her very life—and she could not forget that when she had first thought of the possibility of his asking her to marry him she had not meant to refuse him. There had been much about him to attract her, and if she had never met Petrovitch she might have given Litvinoff, even now, a different answer. But in Petrovitch she found all the qualities that had fascinated her in Litvinoff, and all on a larger scale, and with a finer development. Litvinoff now seemed to her like a dissolving view of Petrovitch seen through the wrong end of a telescope. He lacked the definiteness of outline, the depth of tone, the intense reality of the other man. Perhaps he seemed more brilliant and dashing; but Hirsch's story had shown what Petrovitch was. Added to all this was one significant fact. She had admired in Litvinoff one quality or another, and had desired to attract him. To Petrovitch she herself had been attracted, not by any specific quality or qualities, but by himself—by the man as he was—and this attraction grew stronger with each meeting.
A fortnight had now passed since the second time she had seen him, and somehow or other she had seen him very often in that time. She knew well enough that neither Litvinoff nor Petrovitch had come to Marlborough Villa to see its mistress. And she had been sufficiently certain about the Count's motives for his visit, but could she be certain about the motive which brought the elder man there so constantly? Of any effort to make him care for her she was not guilty. In her new frame of mind she would have felt any such attempt to be degrading, alike to herself and to him. And though she knew he came to see her, she could not be sure why he came. Was his evident interest in her only the interest of an apostle in a convert? A certain humility had sprung up in her, along with many other flowers of the heart, and she did not admit to herself that there was a chance of his interest being of another nature. Only, she thought, it would be the highest honour in the world and the deepest happiness to be the woman whom he loved. Not the less because she knew well enough that the woman he loved would hold the second place in his heart, and that he would not wish to hold the first place in hers. That, for both of them, must be filled by the goddess whom Litvinoff had once said he worshipped, and whom he had abjured and abandoned for her sake. She thought of this without a single thrill of gratified pride.
Miss Stanley sat silent for half an hour, and in that time got through more thinking than we could record if we wrote steadily for half a year. At the end of that time Miss Quaid came home.
'I hear Count Litvinoff has been here,' she said, when she entered the study. 'What is it to be? Am I to have a Countess Litvinoff for a friend?'
'No,' said Clare, rising and shaking off her reverie; I shall never be anything to Count Litvinoff.'
Which was, perhaps, a too hasty conclusion.
To the reader who has followed the fortunes of Count Litvinoff so far we need hardly mention the fact that as soon as he was clear of Marlborough Villa he pulled out his cigar-case. It had always been a favourite theory of his that a cigar and not a mill-pond was the appropriate sequel to an unsuccessful love affair. Not that it had ever occurred to him as even remotely possible that such an experience could ever be his. Here it was, however, and he had one of those opportunities which always charm the thinker—that of being able to apply to his own case a theory invented for other people. He took a meditative turn round Regent's Park. It is a strange fact which we do not remember to have seen commented on by any other writer—that when a man comes away from an interview with a girl to whom he has been making love he is inevitably driven to think, not of her alone, but also of one, two, three or more of the other girls to whom he has from time to time made love in the remote or recent past. Such is the depravity of the 'natural man' that these thoughts are not generally sad ones. But Litvinoff's thoughts were genuinely sad. He had said to Miss Stanley that he was a traitor and a villain, and it had not been said for dramatic effect. He meant it. He would have given a good many years of any life that might lie before him to undo a few of the years that lay behind.
'I am not consistent enough for a villain,' he said to himself. 'I have failed in that part, and now I will go in for my natural rôle of a fool, and I've a sort of idea that I shall get on better. And the first thing to be done is to find my little one. Fool as I am, I've generally been able to do anything I've really set my mind on. The reason I've failed in my "deep-laid schemes" has been that I didn't always care whether I won or not. I can be in the same mind about this matter, however, for a long enough time to achieve what I want. As for principles, they bore me. If it hadn't been for my principles I shouldn't have got into half this trouble. What shall I do with myself till my mysterious friend turns up?'
After a minute's hesitation he turned into the Zoological Gardens, where he spent some thought on the wasting of an hour or so among the beasts, incurred the undying hatred of an alligator by stirring him up with the ferule of his stick, irritated the llama to the point of expectoration, and grossly insulted the oldest inhabitant of the monkey-house.
His luncheon was a bath bun and a glass of milk.
'A fourpenny luncheon,' he said to himself, 'is the first step in the path of virtue.'
At half-past three he got back to his lodgings, and sat down with the resolution of going thoroughly into his financial affairs. To that he thought he would devote an hour or two, and in the evening he would try to find the lost clue in Spray's Buildings. This looking into his finances struck him as being a business-like sort of thing to do, and quite in harmony with his present frame of mind.
He was soon busy at his light writing-table. Presently he drew from a drawer his banker's pass-book, made bulky with cancelled cheques. He groaned earnestly.
'Alas!' he said to himself, 'how sadly simple and easy it is to sign one's name on this nice smooth coloured paper. I suppose it's best to check these off—bankers' clerks are so dreadfully careless.'
A most unfounded statement, born of ignorance of business, and a desire to seem to himself as one who understood it. Suddenly he started, and singled out the cheque he had given to Hirsch in the autumn. It bore on it, as endorsement, in a bold, free handwriting, the name, 'Michael Petrovitch.'
'Hola!' he said; 'a namesake of mine. Stay, though. This apostle of our cause does not keep to one handwriting.'
He walked to the mantelpiece, and taking thence the letter he had received in the morning, he compared the writing.
'H'm—wonder what this means?' he said, returning to his seat. 'The two writings are not the same, and yet there is something in this writing on the cheque which I seem to have seen before. We'll try for an explanation before he leaves this room.'
He went on steadily with his self-imposed task of comparing each cheque with the entry in the book. He had half done them when a ring at the front door bell made him look up.
'Aha! the mysterious Petrovitch is punctual,' he said to himself.
It was Petrovitch, though perhaps those who had seen most of him in the last few months would have failed to recognise him. He looked at least ten years younger. The handsome long light beard was gone, and he was close shaved save for a heavy drooping blond moustache.
As Count Litvinoff heard his visitor's steps upon the stairs he settled himself back in his chair, with an assumption of a business air, much like that of a very young lawyer about to receive a new client.
There was a sharp rap at the room door.
'Come in,' he said.
The door opened. He sprang to his feet, stood one moment clutching at the table before him, his eyes wide with something that seemed almost terror, and his whole frame rigid with astonishment. Then his expression changed to one of deepest love and delight. There was a crash of furniture, as he flung the little writing-table from him, and it fell shattered against the opposite wall. With a hysterical cry of 'Ah, ah, ah, Litvinoff! back from the dead!' he sprang across the room, threw his arms round the other's neck, and fell sobbing on his breast.
