Front matter (continued 6)

His tone was so icily cold that the other found it hard to go on as he had intended. He did his best, however.

'I am very sorry for all that happened in the autumn. I was quite deceived and misled, and I beg your pardon. I can't say more, and I hope you'll let bygones be bygones.'

He held out his hand. At this point in the scene Dick had fancied that his brother would clasp his hand with reciprocating affection, and all would be forgiven and forgotten. But the other actor evidently intended a different 'reading' of the part assigned him. He made no movement to meet the outstretched hand. On the contrary, he put his hands in his pockets with a too expressive gesture, and was silent.

'Come, Roland,' said Dick, who, knowing himself to have been in the wrong, displayed a patience which surprised himself; 'make it up, old man.'

'I am not sure,' said the other slowly, 'that I care to make it up, as you call it. No "making-up" can alter all that has gone wrong through your foolishness. I've gone through the worst of the trouble now, and, to tell you the truth, I'm not inclined to lay myself open to any more experiences of this kind. You might be "deceived and misled" again.'

Richard, who had remained standing, gave the slightest possible stamp of impatience, which his brother did not observe.

'And as for the money,' he went on, 'I dare say I can do as well without it as with it.'

'Look here,' said Dick, his face flushing hotly; 'if you suppose I care a straw about the dirty money, you're mistaken; only one of us can't have any without the other now. Come, Roland, be friends, if it's only for the old dad's sake.'

Roland seemed to have what the children call the 'black dog on his shoulder,' but this appeal was not lost. He made an effort to overcome the resentment and bitterness that filled him, and after a moment held out his hand, saying,—

'Very well, I'll shake hands. I suppose we shall manage to scrape along together as well as a good many brothers.'

And this was the reconciliation that Richard had had his heart full of for the last three or four days. It was piteously unlike his dreams of it.

When they had shaken hands, Dick sat down. There was a silence—a very awkward silence. Roland passed the whisky along the table, and the other mechanically helped himself.

'I think,' Roland said presently, 'that you owe me an explanation of all this.'

'Of course I do,' assented Richard eagerly; 'but you are so—well, unapproachable; but I'll tell you every word about it,' which he did, omitting no particulars which bore on the case.

'So he called her Mrs Litvinoff, did he?' was Roland's comment on the Petrovitch-Ferrier episode at London Bridge. 'I should think she had just taken the name by chance, but for one thing.'

'And that is?'

'You say she lived in that house I saw Litvinoff go into the day we split. It must have been Litvinoff, and he must have been going to her; but it's very strange how he ever knew her. And was this really all the ground you had for doing what you did?' There was contempt in his tone.

'No,' said Richard. 'You went away on a "mysterious holiday" just when she disappeared, and that set all the village tongues wagging, and first made me wonder and suspect. Now I know I was wrong; but if you don't mind, Roland, I wish you'd tell me why you went just then. I've told you everything.'

'The whole thing is over and done with now,' he answered; 'and after to-night I don't want to ever speak about it; but I will tell you if you like. I went away because I saw you were beginning to care for Clare Stanley, and I was beginning to care too, and I thought that if I went away I could pull through it, and that you would make the running and be happy with her, but I found I couldn't do it, and I came back and did my best to cut you out, as you did by me.'

'Oh, Roland, what a good fellow you were to think of such a thing!' said Dick, to whom a generous action like this, even though only attempted, could not fail to appeal most strongly. 'But how is it now?' he went on, stung by a host of conflicting feelings. 'Have you made the running? Have you won her?'

'No!' he answered bitterly. 'The closing of the mill settled that for me as well as for you. Some one else has had as good a chance as ours, though, and has made a better use of it. Count Litvinoff is a constant visitor at the house where she is, and I don't doubt she will marry him; unless, indeed, he is married already. I think we ought to try and find that out.'

'Married or not, he is a damned scoundrel!' cried Richard; 'and he shall not marry her. She would never look at me again, I know; but I hope you may win her yet, Roland.'

'My chance is gone for ever. I wish I'd never had that Litvinoff down here. But who could have foreseen this?'

'We've both been fools.'

Roland did not seem to relish this broad statement.

'I can't think how,' he was beginning, when Mrs Brock came in with coals, and almost purred with pleasure at seeing the two amicably drinking their whisky at the same hearth. When she had left the room Richard rose.

'Look here, old man,' he said; 'I'm as sorry as a fellow can be about all this, and I can't think how I could have been such a fool. That's what you were going to say, wasn't it? But since we're agreed on that, don't let's say any more about it. Forgive and forget, and I hope you will be happy yet—with Miss Stanley. Let's agree to let this subject alone for a bit. I think I'll have a run round the garden before I turn in. Good-night.'

'Good-night,' Roland answered, but in a manner whose evident effort after cordiality made the failure of that effort the more painful. 'I shall go to bed; I'm dead beat—been knocking about all day.' Then they shook hands again, and Richard went out.

He had thought that Roland would have met his apologies with ready acceptance—his revived brotherly love with equal enthusiasm—and the nature of the reconciliation jarred upon him. And yet, as he told himself, he thoroughly deserved it all. No doubt time would soften his brother's sense of injury, and some day they might be as good friends again as they had been before Clare Stanley's prettiness had come, like a will-o'-the-wisp, to lead them into all sorts of follies. He tried to think he would be glad if she married Roland. Anything, he thought, rather than that she should marry Litvinoff. He passed the limits of the garden and strolled down the road, deep in thought. It was only when he had nearly reached the mill that he remembered with a start that he had told his brother nothing about John Hatfield and his revengeful projects. However, Roland could come to no harm now—he was probably safe in bed—and he could tell him in the morning. So he strolled on, smoking reflectively, and with a heart not light.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

VENGEANCE ASTRAY.

OHN HATFIELD had left Dartford, his wife, and his work, driven by an impulse as vague as it was irresistible. He did not know what he meant to do; his one idea was that he must face his daughter's betrayer, and tax him with his crime. He did not very much care what came after. But the long tramp through England, broken though it was by many a lift from good-natured waggoners, had given him time for thinking. Reflection did not soften his resentment. On the contrary, the more he thought, the harder his heart felt, and each new hour of solitary musing left him more bitter, more vindictive, more angered than he had been the hour before. His wife's story convicted him of the one fault from which he had always believed himself to be free—blind stupidity. The loss of his daughter had never been out of his mind for half an hour at a time since she had gone away, and he had thought and thought, till his brain had seemed to spin round, over every least detail of her flight, and of the time just before it, in the hope of finding out who was her betrayer. And yet in all his thinking he had never come anywhere near the truth. Other people had, though; he knew that, as he remembered hints he had sneered at from some of the least brilliant of the hands—fools he had often called them. Yet, fools as they were, they had been able to see more clearly than he, the father, whose brain sharpest love and sorrow ought surely to have had power to quicken.

Added to all this, the thought that he had gone on working for, taking the money of, and, to a certain extent, living in a condition of dependence on, the man who had wronged him, and then had turned him out on to the world, stung his spirit almost to madness.

The spring woke early that year, and the weather was bright and glad, the air clear and sweet and joyous with a thousand bird-voices. The Midland woods and hedges that he passed were beginning to deck themselves in the fresh greenness of their new spring garments. Their beauty brought no peace to him. He but noticed them to curse their monotony and apparent endlessness. The only things he did notice with anything like satisfaction were the milestones and fingerposts, which told him that so much more ground had been got over. He put up at night at the cheapest and poorest-looking inns he could find. They were good enough to lie awake in, for his feverish longing and impatience to reach his end almost consumed him and made sleep an impossibility. Eager as he was to get on, he had self-restraint enough to spend none of his store of money—such a little store as it was—on travelling. Roland Ferrier might not be at Thornsett after all, and he might have to follow him, or mayhap return to Dartford and bide his time; and so, though his progress was straight and steady it was slow, and he did not reach Thornsett until the night that had witnessed the explanations between the brothers.

He had done more than twenty-five miles that day, and he was footsore and tired out when, as night was falling, he reached the top of the hill at whose foot lay the village which had been his home for thirty years. All along he had been determined to make straight for Thornsett Edge, and to confront Roland at once. He felt that the young man might be surprised into more admissions than he would choose to make if he were prepared. But physical fatigue is wonderfully effective in upsetting mental decision. Hatfield felt that neither in body nor in mind was he fit to go through at once with the part he had chosen. He must rest—sleep, if possible. He threw himself down on the heather by the pathside, and leaned his head on his arm, while he debated what to do. Nature decided for him, and he fell asleep.

When he woke, a young moon was shining coldly down upon him. He felt stiff, and not rested. The heather was wet with night-dew. How late was it? He thought by the moon about eight o'clock.

He would go down to the village and see who was left in the old place; perhaps he might get a lodging there. The Spotted Cow was closed, he had heard. He limped down the steep stony street. There were no lights to be seen. As he reached the house that had been his, he saw that it was empty, and a longing came over him to get inside it. Why not sleep there? So, turning aside, he went up the three stone steps and along the narrow paved pathway that ran under the windows separating the house from the tiny front garden. His hand fell on the latch of the door quite naturally, and it never occurred to him that it would not yield to his touch as it had been wont to do. But it did not yield. He was in that frame of mind when any resistance is intolerable. He drew back and then threw himself against the door with all his weight. It gave way noisily and he went in. He passed round the wooden screen, and stood in the middle of the flagged floor.

To return to a house where we have been happy, even if we have left it for greater happiness, is always sad if not painful; but to go back to a house that seems to hold within its desolate walls, not only all our memories but all our possibilities of happiness—when we have left it in sorrow, to take back to it an added load of new, unexpected, intolerable trouble—this, let us be thankful, is not given to many of us.

John Hatfield could not bear it. He cast one look round at the dark, fireless hearth, the uncurtained window, turned, and came out. Sleep there? He would rather sleep on the bare hillside, or in the churchyard itself, for that matter.

The rush of memories drove him before it. He could not stay in the village. Every other house in it had been a home too, and was crowded with recollections almost as maddening as those that peopled his own home, in which—bitterest thought of all—Roland Ferrier had lisped out childish prattle, and climbed on his knee to share his caresses with baby Alice. And at the remembrance his resolution came back. He would go to Thornsett Edge then and there, let come what might. Weak as he was, he was strong enough to make his tired feet carry him so far, and once there his passion could be trusted to give him strength to say and do all that needed to be said and done. He clenched his nerves, as though the pain of his bruised feet would grow less by being despised, and he walked on. But when he reached the turn in the road that brought the mill in sight his mood altered again, and almost before he knew that his intention had changed he found himself limping painfully down the stone steps into the little hollow. As he caught sight of the door where Litvinoff had stood on the night of the fire he muttered a curse on the man who had stood between the 'hands' and their purpose that night. He felt faint and giddy. The many square windows of the mill seemed to look on him like eyes, and the broken panes in them lent them a sinister expression. The few past months had changed the face of the mill wonderfully. No one had repaired the damage done by the rioters, and the wind and rain had had their will of the place. It looked now, Hatfield thought, as though it had been deserted for years instead of months.

Everything was deadly still. The only sounds were the trickling of the stream as it flowed past, and his own heavy breathing. He was becoming unaccountably sleepy. Why should he not sleep here? He would go on to Thornsett in the morning. He stumbled downward till he reached the wall of the mill. He soon found a window that could be unfastened by passing his hand through one of its broken panes and turning round the primitive hasp. It was rusty, and moved, as it were, reluctantly. Still, it did move, and he opened the window and crept through it. He found himself on the edge of a huge stone tank, or vat. One more forward movement and he would have been plunged in the dark-looking water that half filled it. He shuddered. How could he have been such a fool as to forget the position of that tank? He crept round the edge of it, and reached the stone-paved floor of the basement. There lay a mass of something dark. It was the great stone that had thundered through the roof of the mill just after young Roland Ferrier had given the deputation their answer. Hatfield looked up at the ugly hole in the ceiling, a hole that repeated itself in the two upper floors and the roof, through which he could see the sky. The moon was shining brightly by this time, and the many-windowed building was lighted well enough for the man to find his way about. Had it been dark, he thought he should not have had much difficulty. He went up the stairs, and made his way to a room on the second storey, where he fancied there would be some soft rubbish he could lie down on. He was not disappointed, and, yielding to the utter weariness that had come to him, he lay down, and in a moment slept.

He had not been asleep three minutes when he awoke with a start to find himself sitting up and listening. What had he heard? The click of a door and a footstep. He was widely, nervously, intensely awake now. Had it been fancy, born of the utter desolation and loneliness of the place where he was? He listened strainedly. No. This at least was no fancy. There was a footstep resounding hollowly through the great empty rooms.

Some watcher, perhaps, from whom he ought to keep himself hidden if he did not want to be handed over to the constable as a vagrant. What an ending, that, to his journey! Yes, he must lie quiet, and yet, how could he? Suppose—and at the thought his blood ran coldly through his veins—suppose old Richard Ferrier had got up from under that white stone in Thornsett churchyard, and had come down to keep watch over what his sons had so little regarded. The footsteps came nearer, and Hatfield sprang to his feet and walked not away from, but towards, the sound. The impulse of a naturally brave man when he is frightened is to face the fearsome thing as speedily as may be. Hatfield opened the door. Then he sprang forward, for he saw no ghost, but, as it seemed to him, the object of his search—not old Richard, but young Roland, standing with his back to him. The bright moonlight lighting up the figure left no room in his mind for a doubt. At the sight, all his ideas of asking for explanation vanished in an instant, and left him with no impulse but to catch the young man by the throat and to squeeze the life out of him.

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.

HE 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.

CHAPTER XXX.

TALKING THINGS OVER.

EFORE the echo of that cry had died away, the man who had uttered it swayed sideways, his face grew deadly white, the clasp of his arms loosened, and only the sudden firm grip of the other saved him from falling. Petrovitch laid him on the sofa. Then he passed into the adjoining bedroom, and came back with a wet sponge.

'What a fellow it is,' he said to himself, as he applied it to the hands and face of the insensible man. 'As brave as a lion, and as hysterical as a schoolgirl.' But he looked very kindly on the pale face as he administered his remedies.

In a little while the eyes opened, and the younger man struggled into a sitting position, and looked into the face that bent over him.

'Litvinoff, it is you, then?' he said in a low voice, and covered his face with his hands. The joy of seeing once more the man he had loved seemed to be swallowed up in the shame of meeting the man he had wronged.

'Yes, Percival, it is I,' said Petrovitch; 'but let this be the last time you call me Litvinoff, and I must not call you Percival either. I think I have a right to ask that. You have chosen to put on the Prophet's Mantle, and for all our sakes you must wear it a little longer.'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean simply that you must still be Count Litvinoff, and I must still be Petrovitch.'

'Then you are Petrovitch! Why did you take a false name to mislead me?' he groaned. 'Why did you let me go on wearing your name, and spending your money? Why not have let me know at once, when every day made things worse? I would have gone out of life long ago rather than face this meeting.'

'And yet you seemed glad to see me, too?' said Petrovitch, looking at him curiously. 'But I took no false name; my name is really Petrovitch. My father's name was Peter, you know. You ought to remember that. You have heard me called by it often enough.'

'I never thought of you by it, though; and besides, I thought you were dead. You know that I thought you were dead?' with a sudden, quick doubt in his voice.

'Of course!'

'You know, don't you,' he went on eagerly, 'that I would gladly have given my life for yours, and that I never hoped for anything so good in this world as to see you alive? Yes, in spite of everything, though I can't expect you to believe it,' he ended bitterly.

'I have never doubted it,' Petrovitch answered; and with a sudden thrill of pity for the despair, the remorse, the longing, and the wretchedness in the other's face, he added, 'Come, old friend, don't take this so much to heart. It is nothing that cannot be put right. You will see when we come to talk it over quietly. Can't we have some tea?'

Petrovitch knew well enough that when the heart's cords are stretched almost unbearably by the strain of an intense emotion, it sometimes stems as though they could only be saved from giving way altogether by the direction of the mind to some utterly trivial detail of everyday life. Many a woman's heart has been saved from breaking by the necessity of getting the children's dinner, and many a tragedy has been averted by the chief actor's having to take in the afternoon's milk.

Petrovitch repeated the question, 'Can't we have some tea?'

The other rose mechanically, went to a cupboard, and brought out a plated kettle and spirit-lamp, a small china tea set, and a plate of lemons, with a silver knife. He put these appliances on the table in an unmethodical, untidy sort of way, and was proceeding to light the spirit-lamp, when Petrovitch, who had been watching him with a smile, took the match-box out of his hand.

'Here, let me make tea. I see you are just as unsystematic as ever.' He lighted the lamp, and with a few deft touches put the rest of the tea-things in order, as the other, leaving the matter in his hands, strode up and down the room.

'Oh, what is to be the end of all this?' he said at length; 'how long am I to go on bearing your name?'

'All this will soon be at an end, as far as I am concerned. I have nearly completed my arrangements for getting back to Russia, and when I'm there you may guess it won't matter to me who bears my name. I shall not wish to use it. But while I am here I wish to be Petrovitch. Indeed, you can serve me best by letting it be as widely known as possible that Count Litvinoff is—well, where you are and not where I am, and after all it's nobody's business but yours and mine.'

'Does no one else know of it at all?'

'Only two men in St Petersburg, and one in London.'

'And he is?'

'Hirsch, whom you've seen, I think.'

'Why the devil didn't he tell every one then?'

'Because I asked him not to, and he considers himself under some sort of obligation to me.'

'Like everyone else you come across. But how came he to know it?'

'He had to be told when I came here. There was certain work I had to do; I can tell you about it another time, and he was the only man who could put me in the way of it. Now Count Litvinoff, the tea is ready.'

The other stopped in his walk.

'Curse it!' he said passionately. 'Call me a villain or a forger, or any other pretty name you like; I can stand that, but not your lips calling me by your name. It's a cruel revenge.'

'Ah, we owe too much to our enemies for there to be any thought of revenge between friends, and I must teach myself to call you that. Besides, what is there to revenge? You have only used the name I did not need.'

'No, I forged your name as well as stole it. You don't know all.'

'Yes, I do, or pretty nearly all. As far as your taking my name goes, that has done no harm; rather good; and as for the money, that would have gone to you. You know, if I had had the giving of it, it would have gone to you. And I know you would never have touched it if you had not thought I was dead.'

'I wish I had never left you, though I did think it, and at the mercy of those curs. If only I had died by you!'

'You know well enough our rule is that none should be sacrificed without reason. Why should you have given those hounds two lives instead of one?'

'I wish I had died that night under the orange trees at Monte Carlo. You did yourself a bad turn when you saved my life. I have done no good with it. I have only weighted myself with unpardonable sins.'

'As far as I am concerned,' Petrovitch said, 'if there is anything to forgive, it is freely forgiven—freely and fully; and now let us shake hands after your English fashion, and of forgiveness let us talk no more. We are friends, and between such it is no question of pardon. And there are many other things we must speak of.'

He held his hand out, and the younger man grasped it. There was a moment's pause. Then,—

'Let me give you some fresh tea—that is cold,' said Petrovitch cheerfully, pouring out another cup; 'don't you want to hear what happened to me after I was killed?'

'I can hardly realise yet that you are not killed.'

'Well, I'll tell you about it. The officer of that troop added medicine to his other accomplishments, besides which he was a distant relation of my mother's, and he insisted on seeing whether I could not be conjured back to life. I believe I gave them a good deal of trouble, but I seem to be a die-hard. My capture was kept very quiet, thanks to my family name, for the Government didn't care about having it known that the head of the Litvinoffs had tried to atone for the crimes of his family by taking the side of the people. My wound was a bad one, and even now troubles me sometimes. I used sometimes almost to wish it had settled me. Fancy being in prison, and a Russian prison, with a wound like that.'

'But how did you get away?'

For answer Petrovitch told him the story of his escape as he had told it to Hirsch and to his other friends, intentionally making the recital a long one, so that his companion might have time to get used to the new situation before they began to talk of the future.

'And now,' he said, when he had ended, 'tell me how it fared with the Secretary.'

'I hate to think of it,' said the man who had borne the Litvinoff name for three years, and who, it seemed, was to bear it a little while longer. 'Whenever I think of that night, I see nothing but your face—dead, as I thought—turned up from the snow in the hateful dawn. Oh, my friend!' his voice faltered, and he held his hand out to Petrovitch again. After a pause, he resumed, 'I tried all I knew to revive you, but you were as cold as ice, and your heart did not beat. I stayed by you a long, long time. It did not occur to me to leave you, but at last, in a flash, I realised that you were gone—that I was there in the snow alone. And then I thought of escape. I said good-bye to your body. I felt as if your self was far away somewhere, and then I sprang up and dashed off in the direction we had been taking. It was broad daylight then, but I saw nothing of the soldiers, though I knew afterwards they must have found you, because when we sent, your body was gone. I must have kept pretty straight, for I came to a house at last, and I went straight up to it. I thought it must be Teliaboff's, and if it wasn't I felt I didn't much care. I went right in, asked for the master of the house, and when he came to me I told him all. It was Teliaboff. He was very good to me, and kept me there nearly a fortnight. We could hear nothing of you—nothing at all. By the way, it was he who first, unconsciously, gave me the idea of personating you, for when I entered his house on that horrible morning he greeted me by your name. I undeceived him at once, but the idea took root and bore fruit later. He was kindness itself, and his little daughter—she was only twelve, I think—took a fancy to me. I believe that child's companionship saved me from going mad.

'Then he got me a passport, and gave me money enough to get to Vienna. When I got there I was penniless, and I knew you had had money there. I did not feel somehow that I was robbing you when I forged your name—Heaven knows that was easily done, I knew your signature so well—and went on to Paris with your money as Count Michael Litvinoff. When I took your money I meant honestly to spend it all in the cause you had worked for, and for a time I did. But—I don't know how to explain it—I suppose the Revolution had not really taken hold of me. It was you I had cared for, and your creed I had held, not for itself, but because it was yours. And when your personal influence was not near me I grew careless and idle, and worked for Liberty only by fits and starts. It used to seem too much trouble to do things for the cause. It had been your approval I cared for, I think. You are so strong, I can't expect you to understand the imbecilities of such a weak fool as I am. From the moment when I ceased to spend all my time and all your money on your work, I seemed utterly degraded in my own eyes, and it did not seem to matter what I did, so I have gone on from bad to worse, and the principles you would die for, have only been will-o'-the-wisp lights to lead me into direr troubles than I should ever have known without them. I have not kept Michael Litvinoff's name clean. And the evil I have done is nothing to what I have tried to do. I sent Teliaboff his money back, but I have never heard from him. Have you? Do you know whether he is all right?'

'Haven't you heard?' Petrovitch asked gravely.

'Heard? No! What? Anything wrong?'

'Hanged,' was the brief reply.

'Hanged!'

'Yes, and his little daughter—she was fourteen, then, I think—was hanged with him.'

'For—for helping me?' gasped Litvinoff.

'No, for having "The Prophetic Vision" in her room.'

'My God!' cried Litvinoff, springing up. 'How long will men bear it? Let us go back this very day, and kill and kill and kill these fiends as long as we have an arm to strike or a finger to pull a trigger.'

'We are going back,' Petrovitch said quietly. 'As for that deed, it is avenged. The man who was responsible for that murder got his sentence of death and his notice of it two days later. He lived through three months of terror, and then shot himself, to escape execution at the hands of some of us. Don't talk more of him.'

The two men sat silent for a little while, but Litvinoff's eyes still blazed with excitement. Petrovitch smoked quietly.

'How was it,' Litvinoff asked presently, turning from the other subject with evident effort, 'that you did not let me know directly you came over?'

'I did not see any good to be gained by it,' answered Petrovitch, who did not choose to tell his friend that he had waited to see with what grace the Prophet's Mantle was worn. 'I heard you speak at the Agora. I read your writings. You seemed to be doing good. Besides, it made concealment of my purposes more easy not to be known as Litvinoff.'

'Then what made you decide to tell me now?' was the very natural question.

Petrovitch hesitated, but only for a moment. Then he said,—

'Frankly, because I thought you were meditating an action that would afterwards cause you more regret than anything else you have done, and I wished to prevent it.'

'And that action was?'

'Taking another wife while your first wife still lived and still loved you.'

Petrovitch spoke slowly and distinctly.

Litvinoff leaned forward in his chair and looked at him amazedly.

'By Heaven!' he said, leaning back with a sort of sigh, 'you seem to know everything.'

'I have made it my business to know.'

'Not quite everything in this case, though,' Litvinoff added, correcting himself, 'for I have no wife.'

Petrovitch's eyes flashed angrily.

'I was not speaking in the phrase of your London society. I did not suppose that you were going to commit an illegal act. I merely imagined that you had intended to commit a crime. I am not mistaken in supposing that you always led the woman in question to believe that you looked upon her as your wife?'

'You are not mistaken—you are right. I did contemplate a crime,' he said, walking over to the bookcase, and standing so that his face was not to be seen. 'I have no defence to offer; but at the time I first contemplated it I deceived myself with the idea that I had. But my wife left me. I did not leave her. I never could have left her; and if she had not left me that vile idea of marrying another woman would never have entered my head. However, that's all at an end now, I'm thankful to say, and I mean to find my wife'—there was no hesitation in his voice this time—'and legalise her position with bell, book, and candle, and any other rites that may seem to her desirable.'

'Regardless of principles?' said Petrovitch, with the faintest possible sneer.

'Damn principles!' Litvinoff cried, turning round, stung by the tone. 'I would have sacrificed them for a woman I merely admired, and they sha'n't stand between me and the woman I love.'

'How do you propose to find her?'

'I haven't the slightest idea. Do you know where she is?' he added sharply.

'Do you remember giving £10 to a man named Hirsch in the autumn?' was the counter-question.

'I do?' with an inquiring look.

'That was for your wife!'

Litvinoff drew a long breath. 'Go on!' he said, simply.

Then Petrovitch told him all that he knew of Alice, and Litvinoff listened intently. When Petrovitch spoke of the night on Blackfriars' Bridge, he leaned forward breathing heavily, then rose suddenly, and, crossing to a couch, flung himself, face downwards, on it. Petrovitch paused.

'Go on! Go on! Go on!' said an impatient, stifled voice from the couch.

So Petrovitch resumed.

When the tale was told, Litvinoff rose. He was very pale, his lips trembled a little, and his dark eyes were shining and wet.

'When can I see you to-morrow? I am going to Chislehurst now. I don't thank you; it would be absurd. Thanks are idiotic under some circumstances. You saved my life—which I didn't care about—and now it seems you've saved what I do care for, as much as such a scamp as I can care for anything. But you don't need my words. I believe you understand me—if any one does.'

Petrovitch rose and laid his hand on his shoulder.

'Do not go to-night,' he said. 'She is not strong yet, and you are too excited to meet her calmly. Wait till to-morrow. You may trust her safely where she is for another night. Besides, there is very, very much to be said between us—both of the past and future.'

'Well, you have a right to command me,' Litvinoff answered, frowning and a little stiffly, and then was silent a moment. Then he said suddenly, flinging himself into his chair with the frown quite gone, 'You're right—you always are, and there is much to be said. I wish to God there could be some way of wiping out the past, or rather of atoning for it. Do you know, it seems to me that I shall have a chance of seeing my way to doing something worth doing now you have come back. I could almost swear at this moment that I believed as heartily as ever in liberty, humanity, progress, and all the other things you taught me to swear by, but in my soul I know it is you I believe in—always have believed in— I've never believed in anything but you for more than three months at a time. Peculiar, isn't it?'

'You haven't altered in the least,' said Petrovitch smiling. 'You were never sure of your beliefs except when you were fighting for them. You should be back in Russia. Persecution is a splendid antidote to religious doubt. Men like you ought not to live in England. There is too much freedom in the air and it doesn't agree with you. You get to think there is nothing worth fighting for here. There is, though, and some Englishmen are beginning to find it out.'

'You are going back to Russia?' Litvinoff said, interrogatively.

'Yes.'

'Let me come with you,' he cried, impulsively. 'Give your Secretary another chance.'

'Ah, my days of quiet writing are over now. The battle grows hot. I don't want a Secretary, I want a comrade in arms. Will you go to Servia for me?'

'I'll go to hell, if you like,' was the direct reply.

'The two will soon be synonymous, if all I hear is correct. But what about your wife?'

'It used to be one of your principles,' Litvinoff said, using the word, as it were, reluctantly, 'that if a man believes in anything enough to place himself in danger for it, he should not hesitate to risk all he holds precious for the same end; and my wife is not a coward, she would go with me.'

'Poor little woman,' said Petrovitch; 'but that was and is one of my principles. If you go to Servia under my name I shall have a far better chance of getting back to St Petersburg under someone else's. And the risk to your wife is of the slightest, for it is a peaceful errand I will send you on.'

'I hate peaceful errands.'

'I dare say there'll be a little excitement thrown in—but don't rush into danger. There is no need there, and it can do no good. I know hard fighting is the easiest; but our business is to do the thing which has to be done, be it peace or be it war.'

'Ah!' said Litvinoff, with enthusiasm; 'to act up to that ideal is easy enough for men like you, but you must remember that such men as you are as far above the rest of us as the Christian martyrs are above the average church-goer. You are the Saints of the New Religion.'

'Don't you think we'd better go and have some dinner?' said Petrovitch, drily.

CHAPTER XXXI.

'MY LITTLE GIRL.'

HE suggestion was a good one, and the dinner to which the two sat down had a steadying effect on the nerves of the younger man. He became calmer, and when they returned to his rooms he was able to bear his part in a long, earnest, quiet talk over events past and to come.

The talk lasted far into the night, and before they parted it was settled that Litvinoff should leave for Servia in two days, taking with him certain important papers from Petrovitch to another of the Nihilist leaders. That he should there wait instructions, and should enter Russia by the southern frontier, and rejoin the circle at St Petersburg, leaving his assumed name at Belgrade. That the following imaginative announcement should be inserted in as many English papers as possible for the special edification of the Russian Embassy.

'Count Michael Litvinoff left London for Dover this morning, en route for Belgrade. He was accompanied by Countess Litvinoff, an English lady to whom he was secretly married some time ago. Count Litvinoff, so well known to many of our readers through his "Social Enigma," his "Hopes and Fears for Liberty," and his many revolutionary brochures, has never been a familiar figure in London society, his literary labours having compelled him to live in strict retirement. It will be remembered that he was the hero of an adventure on the Russian frontier some years ago, was wounded, captured, and sent to a Russian prison, from which he escaped to England.'

It was also settled that the money for the journey should be taken from the remainder of the Litvinoff capital.

When Litvinoff began to speak of the money he had spent and the debts he had incurred, Petrovitch stopped him with,—

'I'll see to your debts—and what is gone is gone. Don't let us waste words over that.'

It was arranged that Petrovitch should seek out John Hatfield and his wife, and should let them know that their daughter was happily married. They judged it best not to subject Alice to an interview which could not but involve most painful explanations, and they agreed that it would be cruel both to her and to her parents to let them meet, merely to part again at once. Of Clare Stanley neither of them spoke one word.

A new day was some way into its small hours when they said good-bye.

'We meet in St Petersburg, then, as soon as may be,' Petrovitch said. 'I shall not see you again till then.'

'I hope by that time I shall have done something to prove to you that you have indeed brought me back to the ranks of duty and the Revolution.'

'I don't need proof,' said the other with one last hand-pressure. And so they parted.

Next morning early, Litvinoff went down into the City, where he paid a disproportionate sum of money for a paper which empowered him to marry his wife at once, instead of waiting three weeks for that privilege. Then he went down to Chislehurst. The sky was clear and pale and blue, and the sun shone divinely. The trees that had been brown seemed at a little distance to be wrapped in a grey gauze veil, as they always do when the green buds first break out to new life.

As Litvinoff walked up the hill to Chislehurst Common, he tried to think what he should say to Alice, how she would look, how she would speak to him. With a touch of ingrained cynicism, he laughed at himself to find that his heart was beating tumultuously, and that his hands were trembling.

'And this is the man,' he said contemptuously to himself, 'who walked behind her for half-an-hour last autumn, and never spoke to her! No, not the same man,' he added, after a pause, 'I am purged of a crime since then.'

The house where he was to seek Alice was a little yellow-brick building near the church.

He looked at the pretty old-fashioned churchyard as he passed, and then at the building itself.

'I suppose,' he said to it, 'you will be the balm the child will choose to ease her sorrow—and you will bring comfort to her, as you have to thousands of others. I don't grudge them their comfort, but I do grudge you your influence. However, you won't keep it much longer. Tant mieux.'

His hand was on the garden gate—he unlatched it, and walked up to the smallest detached house he had ever beheld. He raised the diminutive knocker, and assaulted therewith the tiny brown door. Would she open it? She did not. It opened—and Litvinoff at first really thought it opened of its own accord. At anyrate it opened by some agency invisible to him. He stood and looked; but when the door slowly began to close again, he thought it was time for action. He came a step forward, and addressing nothing, said,—

'Is Mrs Litvinoff in?'

Then a very small girl in a yellow pinafore and a lilac frock showed herself from behind the door; but shyness and an incomplete knowledge of her native tongue combined to render her speechless. Litvinoff, with an impatient but perfectly gentle movement, lifted her bodily from her position as guard, and placed her outside the door.

'The air will brighten your wits, mon petit chou,' he said.

Then he walked straight into the house, and looked round the two rooms on the ground floor. Empty. He passed through the kitchen, whose proportions would have served for those of the corresponding apartment in a good-sized doll's house, and found himself in a brick-paved back yard, where there were a water-butt, a basket of wet linen, some clothes-lines, and the lady of the house. Regardless of her astonishment, he addressed himself to her.

'Oh, Mrs Litvinoff?' she answered curiously, 'she is out; she has gone to Orpington for some butter for me, sir, and she won't be long.'

'How long?'

'Perhaps an hour.'

'Is she alone?'

'Yes, sir.'

'If you'll be kind enough to tell me the way, I think I'll go and meet her.'

'And who shall I say called if you should miss her, and she comes back first?'

'Say her husband,' answered Litvinoff.

The woman gave him profuse directions, for which he thanked her with his usual empressement, and turned at the gate to raise his hat in farewell.

'My stars!' said Mrs Bowen, as she watched him out of sight, 'he's a real gentleman, and no mistake. Poor little Mrs Litvinoff,' she added, with a woman's instinctive interest in a romance, 'I hope they'll make it up and live happy ever after, that I do!'

Litvinoff walked along. His heart was lighter than it had been for many a long day. On these delicious fresh spring mornings—

When March makes sweet the weather With daffodil, and starling, And hours of fruitful breath,

just to be alive is a rapture. Of course it may be cancelled by care like any other joy. But Litvinoff felt as if he had no cares. He was going to meet the woman he loved, and the nearer he got to her the more he loved her. In love, as in friendship, nearness was everything to him.

Every figure in the distance he thought was her figure. If you have ever gone to meet a person whom you very intensely wished to meet, you will remember how constantly recurring is that illusion. You will remember the spasm of vindictive hate which seizes on you when the figure in the distance is neared, and dispels your illusion by being itself and not the one you wanted it to be.

Paul's Cray Common seemed a paradise to him. It does make a fairly good one under favourable circumstances, with its heather, and gorse, and larch, and oak saplings, and, fairest of all, its graceful swaying silver birches. The birds were singing madly, and as he felt the springy turf under his feet, and the warm spring sun on his shoulders, he began to sing, too, a tender little French song, all about green woodland paths, and youth, and love, and happiness.

Alice Hatfield's heart was very sad, but it was a quiet sadness, that did not shut out the charm of the spring. Under the influence of the young life blood of the year that seemed to be throbbing through that perfect day, she had felt strong, and had walked with more swiftness than usual, and now, as she was returning with a basket, in which her butter lay, under cool green leaves, she began to walk more slowly and to consider two pounds of butter heavier than she had thought it before. She had been revelling among the primroses and dog violets, and had filled up her basket with the pale, yellow primrose stars and the delicate pink and white wind-flowers. She was tired, certainly, and she turned aside and sat down on a felled tree, in a certain little pine copse that runs along by the road-side. The pine needles lay brown, and soft, and thick under her feet. A little bright-eyed, red-brown squirrel came half-way down one of the trees to look at her, but seemed to find her not quite as nice as he had expected, for he whisked his tail with undisguised contempt, and went back to his home with a lightning-like spiral scramble. He must have been a squirrel hard to please, for it is a fact that, in spite of illness and trouble, Alice was far prettier now than when her sweet face had first caught Count Litvinoff's eyes on the Birkenhead Ferry.

She sat quietly gazing through the pine trees, with her head turned from the road. Presently she stooped to attempt the capture of a very young and very yellow frog which had hopped close to her feet, regardless of the pine needles. As she did so her heart stood still, for her ears caught the tramp, tramp of a man's footstep, and the ringing sound of a man's voice, a voice she knew,—

'Viens, suivons les sentiers ombreux, Ou s'égarent les amoureux Le printemps nous appelle, Viens! Soyons heureux!'

She rose to her feet, and involuntarily uttered a low cry. She dared not turn her head. The singing stopped abruptly, there was a crash through the brambles, and in a moment a pair of strong arms were round her, and lips close to her ear murmured,—

'My little girl!'

She rested on his arm for one moment Then she said, in a choked sort of voice, as she tried to release herself,—

'It's no use, I cannot come back. You have not come here to ask me back. Do, do leave me alone!'

He held her fast.

'My darling,' he whispered, 'do you think I could leave you now I have found you? I have come to ask you to come back to me. I have come to ask you to marry me. You will not send me away. I cannot do without my little one any longer. You love me still?' he added, a sudden doubt striking him at her continued silence, and he raised her chin with his hand till he could look in her face. She shrank from his hand, and hid her face against his neck.

'You know,' she answered, 'you know.'

So it came about that Alice married her love who had not been true, and forgave him with all her heart; when she was leaving the church, leaning on her husband's arm, with a new world of love and joy opening before her, and Litvinoff was looking down at her with eyes in which love deepened every moment, her father lay dead at the bottom of the tank in Thornsett Mill. The Litvinoffs left England at once, and to this day Alice does not know of her father's death, and her husband does not know of the dire disaster that followed on his double dealing. I doubt if they will ever learn it now. There is a good deal more that Alice does not know. It is perhaps as well. Wives are none the happier for knowing too much of their husbands' past. As it is, Alice will follow him to the world's end, believing in him unquestioningly.

CHAPTER XXXII.

'HAND IN HAND.'

'Cannon Street Hotel, 9.30 p.m.

EAR MR PETROVITCH,—We were married this morning at St Nicholas Cole Abbey, and we are leaving London by the night mail. I cannot go without thanking you with my whole heart for all you have done for me—for both of us. No words can ever tell you how much I feel what we owe to you. My husband says he owes more to you than I do, but I cannot think that. Good-bye until we see you in Russia. Oh! Heaven bless you, Mr Petrovitch, for all you have done for us.—Yours always gratefully,

Alice Litvinoff.'

In the same envelope was a letter from Alice's husband, and it did not begin in the same way as hers. It ran thus,—

'My dear Litvinoff,—I can't write to you under any but your own name, nor can I sign any other than my own. I kept yours as you wished, and Alice believes herself to be Countess Litvinoff. I shall tell her all that part of my story later, but I shall never tell her of my villainous and insensate desire for a rich wife, and for a life of ease which would have driven me mad in three months. Alice and a life of adventure are worth all the broad acres in creation. Nor shall I tell her that I knew her father. One thing more I must ask you to do for me. Write to Richard Ferrier and let him know that we are married. I think I've used him rather badly. Alice wishes you to say good-bye for her to her good friends Mr and Mrs Toomey. Some kind fate certainly kept watch over my wife while I was playing the fool and dangling after another woman. And Fate has been a thousand times better to me than I deserve. With my dear wife, and the prospect of meeting you soon in Russia, I feel all the old enthusiasm re-awakening. Vive la Révolution!—Your old secretary and friend,

Armand Percival.

'In signing that name I feel as though I were writing with my left hand, it is so awkward to me after all these years.'

Petrovitch sighed as he replaced the letters in their envelope. He had given himself up wholly to the cause he served, and he had suffered for it, and was prepared to suffer more, and generally he was contented, even glad, that it should be so. But sometimes a sudden sense of the utter loneliness of his life came over him, saddening and oppressing him. Then he seemed to himself to be not a man with a life of his own to live and hopes of his own to cherish, but a power passing through the lives of others, helping, guiding, saving, and always after a while fading out of those lives. He had brought these two together, and they were all in all to each other, and he was much to them perhaps, but mainly because he had brought them together. Now he felt that they were lost to him, and he had loved them both—Alice with the love of a strong man for a child, and the other with a deep attachment which dated from the first moment of their meeting, and which had unaccountably withstood all the other's shortcomings. Unaccountably? No? the essence of love is its boundless capacity for pardon; the unaccountable part of it was that he should ever have loved him at all. And they were gone; and gone, as Petrovitch knew well enough, to begin a life whose end, sooner or later, must be the scaffold or the death-in-life of perpetual imprisonment. He had led many a man and many a woman into that path, knowing all that it meant, and he was not sorry. Was it not the path he had himself chosen as being the noblest that any man's feet could tread—the path of utter self-renunciation? But though he was never sorry he was often sad, and sadder than usual on the day when his two friends bade farewell to safety and English soil. He felt lonely and desolate. But Michael Petrovitch never felt his own moral pulse for more than half a minute at a time. He sighed, raised his hand to his chin, and smiled at finding himself reminded that the gesture of passing his hand over his beard, which had grown into a settled habit with him in moments of annoyance or excitement, was no longer possible.

He turned to his table and wrote half-a-dozen letters. There were many arrangements still to make for his journey. Then he rose, put on his hat, and started for Marlborough Villa.

He had not cared to face that dinner where he was to have met his fellow revolutionist. He had written a hasty note of excuse, and had spent the evening and the best part of the night in conference with his morose friend Hirsch, who was a little more morose even than usual on this occasion, owing to what he thought the absurd and unjust leniency with which the pseudo Litvinoff had been treated. He would have been much better satisfied had some sudden and awful judgment overtaken the adventurer who had dared to personate his hero—even had that judgment come in the form of a trial for forgery at the Old Bailey; which fact showed that he was but a weaker brother in the faith that teaches that crime is a disease to be cured, not an offence to be punished. In that conversation with Hirsch the date of Petrovitch's departure had been finally settled, and now he had a few farewell visits to pay. One must certainly be to Mrs Quaid—he had a fancy that he would try to make his parting with Miss Stanley something more than it could be in the presence of that estimable lady. He thought that Clare would not hesitate to say good-bye to him without her hostess's surveillance. At any rate, a chance of being alone with her to say his farewell was what he was bent on trying for. At Marlborough Villa he was shown into the morning-room. It was empty, but in a moment Clare came in.

He was standing with his back to the window. When she saw him she started visibly, and, with an unmistakable gesture of annoyance, was turning to leave the room, when he made a step forward, and she paused and looked at him, and, turning with a complete change of expression, held out her hand.

'How could I have been so absurd?' she said. 'Do you know for the moment I really thought it was Count Litvinoff.'

'I don't wonder at your not quite recognising me. You see I had to sacrifice my beard. I am going back to Russia next week. Disguise will be de rigeur, and beards and disguises are incompatible.'

'Going back to Russia next week?' she repeated slowly, 'and I had so much to say—to ask—'

'Do you still need advice?' he said, smiling.

'Yes,' she said, speaking quickly and eagerly, 'more than ever, for now I have made up my mind. I am quite certain that my money ought to go—not to simply alleviating the miseries that wring one's heart, but to helping to overthrow the system that causes them. I have felt it a strong temptation to help first the individual sorrows that I know of; but I know that the right thing to do is to help not those, but the revolution that will render them impossible. I am right, am I not?'

'Yes,' he answered. They were standing by the window. This was not the sort of thing that one settles comfortably into chairs to 'talk over.'

'But now you are going,' she said, with a saddened falling cadence in her voice, that made music for the man at her side, 'and I shall have no one to tell me what to do. Why need you go? Is there nothing for you to do here? Is Russia so dear that it pushes all other claims out of sight?'

'It is not that I am a patriot. I love Russia, I love my people, but I love England and her people too. But better than either do I love Liberty, and I must be where her enemies are strongest, where the battle is hottest.'

'If that is so,' she said, reflectively, with her eyes downcast, 'everyone who loves Liberty best should be in front of the battle too?'

'I think so; but each must think for himself,' he was beginning, when they both turned at the sudden opening of the door. Cora Quaid came in; her fresh face quite pale; a newspaper in her hands.

'Oh, how do you do, Mr Petrovitch. I did not know you were here. Clare, such a terrible thing has happened, dear; mamma has just seen it in the paper.' She held out the sheet and pointed to a paragraph headed, 'Shocking accident at Firth Vale.'

The paragraph told briefly of the death of Richard Ferrier, and of the discovery of Hatfield's body in the great tank, and concluded thus: 'The brother of the deceased, Mr Richard Ferrier, states that his brother went out for a stroll on the previous night in his usual spirits. There is no clue to any explanation of the catastrophe, save that the man Hatfield was formerly employed in this mill, and had been heard to say that he considered himself personally aggrieved at the closing of it. He was supposed to be in the south of England, and it is rumoured that he secretly returned to wreak vengeance on the young masters of the mill for the part they had taken in closing it.'

Clare read it through; her face grew white, and she passed it to Petrovitch. He read it silently, his brow contracting. When he laid the paper down he looked at Clare. She had sunk into a chair, her arms stretched out over her knees to their full length, and her hands clasped.