Chapter XXIII: The Unforeseen

Paul rested his gloved hand upon the doors of his cab; he smoked contentedly. For the first time since he had set foot in London the streets and the people were without interest to him. A boyish readiness to accept the possible for the actual had already carried him in his mind to the realisation of fine schemes. He was sure that fate would work some miracle of surprise for his particular benefit.

“I shall tell the truth; it is no good to conceal anything,” he thought. “Feodor will write to the Prince at Petersburg and say that I am here in London protecting the secrets of my city. If they had kept Marian at Alexander, there would have been trouble with the English Government; possibly, they would have been compelled to release her, and then she would have returned here with all those plans in her head. I do not see why it should be so great an affair. I have done them a service, and they know that I am not a traitor. Granted that they will not restore me to my regiment, there is other work for a clever man to do. I might even go to the Balkans and serve Ferdinand or the Austrians. When they learn how small my offence is, they will not be too hard upon me. And I shall marry the little girl I love, and take her where these English fellows will not trouble her. Ma foi! what crowds, and not a soldier among them all!”

He was passing the Criterion at the moment. The crowd of idlers, the youth of bars and stage-doors, the sleek dandy, the hastening clerk, moved him to a fine contempt for their stooping bodies and undrilled gait. A soldier’s blood had run in his veins from his birth. To wear gold lace and to carry a sword, to strut in the market-place, to serve the Czar--what other career was open to an honest man? Merchants and traders--he regarded them as so many licensed thieves. Priests were necessary to minister to the superstitions of the people and to pray for the sins of the army. Professions were all very well for little men and knaves; but they were not a career. As for himself, he had inherited wits above the ordinary; but it never dawned on him that they could be used to other ends than those of his regiment. There was no better scholar in Kronstadt, no more promising officer of artillery, but that, he said, was his good fortune. His wits would never have been awakened but for the music of the great guns and the clash of steel. Whatever lay before him, he determined to work to one end--the right to carry a sword once more, once more to be the master of the guns.

The cab, bumping roughly against the kerb, brought him back from the success of thought to the broken baskets of reality. He saw that they were in a narrow street before the doors of a large but ugly house, which had no ornaments for its windows and little paint for its railings. He paid the cabman the money which Marian had put into his hand, and rang the bell of the house timidly. A moment later he stood in a hall furnished with such exquisite taste, and so richly, that he could hardly believe it to be the hall of the house before which the cabman had set him down. But the man who opened the door was a Russian, and that reassured him.

“Count Feodor--is he at home?”

“He expects you. He is waiting.”

Paul entered the house confidently. The magnificence of the ante-chamber astonished him, for he had lived his life in barracks; and such splendour of habitation as he had known was the splendour of palaces at Petersburg or of hotels at Paris. When he followed the footman up a broad flight of stairs and through a conservatory upon the first floor, the same richness of decoration and of ornament testified to the luxury with which Feodor Talvi had surrounded himself. The apartment into which he was shown at last, though of limited extent, was draped with exceeding taste. Dainty watercolour sketches gave brightness to the silk-panelled walls; lounges cunningly contrived were the emblems of ample leisure; flowers stood upon many little tables; a stained glass window hid from the eyes the ugly stone wall which bounded the garden of the mansion. Paul put his hat upon a sofa and sat down with a great air of content.

“These diplomatists,” he said to himself, “they talk all day and dance all night. They are paid twenty thousand roubles a year for telling their neighbours that black is white. When there is any work to be done, they go home. Fichtre! it should be easy to tell lies for twenty thousand roubles a year. And Feodor has no need of them; he was rich always. He must be very rich now.”

The footman left him when he had given his name, saying that the Count would be disengaged presently. Paul took up a Russian paper and read it through. It was a pleasure to be carried in spirit back to Petersburg and his home. He found himself thinking about his friends of yesterday--old Stefanovitch who had loved him, and Bonzo whom he had feared and never understood. Karl, too, and Sergius and the others--had one among them taken pity upon him and remembered that he had been a friend of the old time? The pathos of memory was very bitter. He was as a child shut out from his old home. Imagination kindled for him a fire burning redly upon the hearth; the rays shone upon the unpitying faces of those who had been brothers to him.

This occupation of regret carried him away from the house of Feodor Talvi, so that he forgot where he was and upon what errand he had come. When the little gilt clock upon the mantelshelf struck one, he put the paper down quickly and remembered with amazement that he had been an hour in the room. That rascal of a lackey must have forgotten to speak to the Count, he said. Impatiently he pressed the button of an electric bell, and it was answered immediately, not by the Russian who had brought him to the boudoir, but by an English servant, who seemed astounded to find a stranger in the place.

“You are waiting for the Count, sir?”

“If I am waiting!” exclaimed Paul, turning on the man as he would have turned upon a defaulting corporal, “I have been here an hour! Is your master out, then?”

“I don’t know, sir; I will ask, if you like--that is, if you wish it, sir.”

Paul stared at the man with astonishment. If he had been in Russia, he would have laid his cane sharply upon the shoulders of the rogue; but he was not in Russia, and the English barbarians did not permit a man to flog his servants. He was still seeking a word when the lackey shut the door and left him to reflect upon a state of civilisation so monstrous.

The little gilt clock struck a quarter past one; the man had not returned. There was no sign of Feodor. Paul went to the door of the room and threw it open. The house was silent as one of his own cells at Alexander. He could hear a great clock ticking in the hall below; there was a rumble of passing carts from the street without, but of human life within the house no evidence. He returned to the boudoir and rang the bell for the second time. To his amazement the Russian answered him, and began at once to apologise.

“We expect the Count every moment,” he said stolidly; “my master is sorry to keep you waiting. He has been called away. We are to offer you lunch, Excellency.”

Paul assented indifferently.

“It is a peep-show,” he said with scorn: “first the English rogue and then you. I shall speak to the Count, and tell him that he has made a mistake. You should both dance in a booth--to the music of the whip.”

The Russian listened without changing a muscle of his face--he was accustomed to a _rôle_ of servility. When Paul had finished, the man set to work to clear a little table and to get the lunch ready. Then he disappeared once more, and another quarter was struck upon the bell.

“Sacré nom!” said Paul, pacing the room angrily; “the servants lie better than the master! If this is the house of a diplomatist, to the devil with the twenty thousand roubles!”

“My dear fellow!” cried a voice at the door, “do you know that the chair you are kicking was once the property of Napoleon?”

He turned and stood face to face with the intruder. A spectator would have said that the two men resembled each other as brothers of a house. Both were tall and finely built; both had flaxen hair and blue eyes; both held themselves as those trained in the school of the world. If the newcomer was slightly shorter than the captain of artillery, if his face was less sunburnt and more furrowed, that was to be set down to the life of the city and the Court.

“Paul--it is you then?”

“Feodor--my friend!”

“You have been waiting here?”

“A century!”

“The devil! It is that rogue Demetrius again. You are hungry; _tais toi_, we shall lunch and talk afterwards. I have a thousand things to say; you have a thousand things to tell. I become a boy again at the sight of you!”

He talked, indeed, with a boy’s enthusiasm, but said nothing of that great and engrossing subject which Paul desired so earnestly to broach. For the moment they might have been students together--students enjoying such a rare day of fortune that they ate the dishes of princes and washed them down with the wine of kings. Paul wondered, in the moments of silence, if he had, in truth, branded himself as an outcast and a traitor. For if that charge were true, how came it that he ate and drank with Feodor Talvi and was called brother by him? He could not believe in such good fortune. “He does not know,” he thought; “he will not call me brother when I tell him.”

The dishes were many before luncheon was done; champagne foamed in long Venetian glasses; the dainty manner of the service was beyond question. When the cloth had been cleared, Demetrius carried cigars and liquors to a little bower of palms in the conservatory. Paul found himself reclining indolently upon a sofa, while the Count curled himself up in a basket armchair which Sleep herself might have designed. For the first time since they had met, an embarrassing interlude of silence gave the men opportunity for recollection. Paul made up his mind that this was the time to speak; but before he could open his lips Feodor asked him a question.

“The young English lady--is she well?”

The question was astonishing, bewildering. Paul opened his eyes very wide, for he thought it was a jest.

“Oh, she is very well,” he stammered; “that is to say--you know about her?”

The Count answered sympathetically--

“I know your story, Paul, my friend; I read it in a despatch four days after you left Kronstadt.”

Paul took heart.

“If you know my story, you know also that I am no traitor to Russia; you know that I am here in London to guard her secrets.”

“Exactly, or how could I receive you at my house? It was all clear to me from the first. A pretty face, a clever little head, a bribe from the English Government; my old friend falls in love with the pretty face, and persuades the woman to deliver up to him all the plans she has stolen. He comes here to give me those plans, and to tell me that the woman may go to the devil, while he goes back to Russia.”

The smile left Paul’s boyish face. He stood up awkwardly against the mantelshelf.

“You do not understand,” he said gravely. “It is not that, Count; there are no maps to be given up. Marian has none. I am convinced of it. When I left Russia it was to make sure that she did not see any of her friends--that she did not betray us. It is true that her father and mother died some years ago; but she has relations in London--the Englishman who tempted her. I did not wish her to meet those people. Judge me as you will for what is past, I have this to say, that, by God’s help, I will never leave her side again!”

Feodor, no longer the diplomatist, but the man of the world, laughed good-humouredly.

“Oh,” he said, “we are still in that stage, then. It is the second stage, I think. When I was the bel ami of ‘La Superbe’ in Paris, I took a course. You begin with a bad appetite and end by buying a pistol. Convalescence dates from the moment when you present your pistol to your brother at school and go out to dine at Voisin’s. Complete recovery is to hear with equanimity that she, for whom you would have died a thousand deaths, has married the leader of the orchestra. Possibly, in your case, if you had stayed in Russia, you would have been well by this time; but a change of air fosters these complaints. A month, even two months, may be necessary now. And pity is a factor. Send the girl back to her relations, since you know that she has brought no luggage with her, and enjoy London for a month. I can recommend nothing better.”

Paul took up his cigar and lit it. His hand trembled undisguisedly. The love creed, chanted by the man of the world, was a thing he had ever despised. He knew well the impossibility of convincing this dandy of a dozen cities of the reality of his love or of the nature of it. He would not try, he thought; he feared that mockery might cast a false light on the name so dear to him.

“Do not let us speak of Marian,” he said after a moment of silence; “you do not understand me, and I do not understand you. No man has a right to say to another, you shall love here or there. If you are my friend, you will help me at home. You must tell me what they are saying there. God knows, I dare not ask myself that question. Have I any longer a name in Russia? Is there any friend of mine to speak a word for me? These are the questions I ask myself while I lie awake at night and remember Kronstadt. The night is punishment enough--believe me, Feodor.”

The Count, who disliked emotion of any kind, looked foolishly at the fire of his cigar.

“My dear fellow,” he exclaimed in the tone of the candid friend, “it is no good exciting yourself. And it would be absurd to tell you any lies. How can I know what they are saying now at Petersburg. Am I likely to find the expression of any sympathy in official documents? When a man runs away from his regiment without leave, and takes with him a young lady who has been occupied for a month or more in stealing the plans of his fortress, he must expect his friends to open their eyes. How could it be otherwise? We judge men by their deeds. As the thing stands, you, in the eyes of the authorities, share the woman’s guilt; we, who are your well-wishers, cannot stoop to help you with the expression of false hopes. That you will ever return to Kronstadt I do not believe. The thing is out of the question. Discipline would suffer and you would suffer. But I will not say that influence at Petersburg might not, at some distant day, restore you to the Emperor’s service. It depends upon yourself and upon the course you take here in London. You will not expect us to join with any enthusiasm in a scheme for your benefit as long as you utter this ridiculous nonsense about marrying the Englishwoman and constituting yourself her protector. Oh, my dear Paul, do you not see that she is the soubrette of your opera, and that her tears are shed only while the curtain is up? By-and-bye she will be supping with the leading tenor, while you are back in your own country and are ready to thank Heaven that you have done with her.”

Paul bit his lip. He was within an ace of losing his temper and of quitting the house.

“It is a lie!” he said doggedly; “there is no better woman breathing. If you knew her, Feodor--if you were my friend, you would not say these things. I came here thinking that you would help me; I am sorry now that I came.”

The Count sank deeper into the cushions of his chair.

“Du calme, du calme!” he cried, with the air of one who is much amused. “We are at the third stage now, and these are the symptoms. While I knew ‘La Superbe,’ I had not a friend in Paris. There was not a man whose throat I did not wish to cut. See, mon ami, how these diseases resemble each other. As I live, you will fight me before dinner-time!”

“No, indeed,” replied Paul very quietly; “I cannot quarrel with you, Count. If your creed of life is not mine, I do not complain of that. We will talk of it no more, for I am going home. It was a promise to her. She will be waiting. I said that I would be away an hour, and three have passed.”

A shadow of anxiety crossed the Count’s face.

“Oh, you must not talk about going,” he exclaimed earnestly, “and you must not think me unfriendly. What has passed is nothing. We will talk of serious things presently, and you shall meet one better able to advise you than the mere diplomatist who sees everything through the glass of office. If you think that mademoiselle will be anxious, write a little letter and the man will take it. You will find pens and ink in the library on the next floor. I am going to smoke here until you return. It would be folly to go away now, at the beginning of it.”

Paul stood irresolute, but the Count touched a gong at his side, and the Russian appeared once more.

“Demetrius, show the way to the library. His Excellency will give you a letter; see that it is delivered at once.”

The library was a small room furnished prettily, with many books chiefly in French. Paul wrote his letter quickly--a letter of love and hope. He had met Feodor; the Count was his friend still; he was waiting for another to help him to some position of honour and emolument--all this he honestly believed as he wrote it. Never for a moment did it dawn upon him that he was the victim of a trick. He was convinced that the note would be delivered at once. He did not know that Demetrius would carry it so far as the kitchen of the house and there burn it in the stove. When he returned to the conservatory a smile of content was upon his face. It was good to have found a friend again. He determined to show a greater gratitude to the Count; but the words he wanted would not come to his lips. Nor was the reason far to seek. When he descended the stairs, whom should he see with Feodor but old Bonzo himself--the Bonzo of Kronstadt; the Bonzo whose name had struck terror into his heart so often; the Man of Iron whom all feared.

The Colonel sat upon a basket sofa. He wore a black frock coat with flowing skirts; his trousers were grey; his tie was a tremendous bow in the French fashion, _négligé_ and ample. He smoked a black cigar and sipped a glass of absinthe. When he saw Paul, confused and hesitating, upon the threshold of the conservatory, his little eyes twinkled merrily, and he held out a great paw, as though to give the younger man confidence.

“Le voici!” he exclaimed boisterously, “le voici! the renegade, the traitor, who has brought me all the way from Petersburg!”

Paul shook the outstretched hand timidly. The room seemed to dance before his eyes.

“You here, my Colonel--you?” he repeated, with broken words. “You have come to London to see me?”

“If I have come to London to see you! Do I make the Cook’s Tour then? Am I here to visit the Westminster Abbey--have I the tourist’s suit? Look at me--Bonzo--and ask why I come?”

He put the question in a voice of thunder--the voice Paul had heard so often on the ramparts of Kronstadt. But the note of jest mingled with a deeper chord, and the two who listened to him laughed when he laughed.

“I should not call it a tourist’s suit,” said the Count, surveying the tremendous proportions of Bonzo’s coat; “there is too much cloth in it. They don’t make a fortune out of you, Colonel--those tailors.”

Bonzo nodded his head approvingly. He was a stranger to civilian dress, and his new appearance amused him.

“Behold!” he said, “it is a coat for my son and for my son’s son. I have worn it twice in fourteen years. It is only a barbarous people that would wear a coat like this. Sit down, my friend, Paul, and see how I degrade myself for you.”

He thrust a low chair forward, and Paul sat down, hoping he knew not what, afraid to ask why the Man of Iron had followed him to the land of exile.

“You are well, my Colonel? You had a good passage?”

“I am very well, my son.”

“You stay in London long?”

“Until I hear that a foolish young man has come to his senses again.”

Paul flushed. There came upon him irresistibly the impulse to appeal to this strong man’s pity.

“Oh,” he said, “you do not think me guilty, Colonel? You do not believe that I am a traitor to my country?”

“Du tout, du tout, my son; you are no traitor--you have not the brains.”

Paul stopped as though one had shot him. The eloquence of pity, which had inspired him in thought, deserted him at the first word of that ironical response. As well ask mercy of the tomb as of the Man of Iron.

“It was not a question of brains!” he blurted out presently. “I am not clever, my Colonel, I know that, but I am no traitor to Russia.”

“Pah!” said old Bonzo, a little severely; “traitors do not run off with chorus-girls and then say they could not help it. You are a fool, my son; you have not the wisdom of the boy! What, when you had the woman in Alexander, when she was alone with you, when you could have made love to her all day, you bring her back here to her friends, you cut yourself off from those who love you, and then say that you did it for us! Oh, it is a story for a fairy-book.”

Bonzo spoke with a strong man’s contempt for the folly of the child. Paul shuddered at his words. The horrible suggestion--for he knew well what the other meant--fired his blood. He could have struck the speaker on the mouth.

“Colonel,” he asked in a low voice, “you knew Mademoiselle at Kronstadt, and yet you are ready to say these things of her!”

“Certainly I am ready. Would you have me cry that she is of noble birth? Shall I raise my hat when I mention the name of Stefanovitch’s governess, the daughter of an English _batushka_, a village priest at fifteen hundred roubles a year? What, a woman who played with you as I play with this leaf; who brings you to England to draw for her the maps which she had not time to draw when she was with us; who will laugh in your face presently and tell you to go to the devil--is this the one that Tolma’s heir would marry? Pah! I have not the patience to speak of it!”

Paul picked up a cigarette and began to roll it in his fingers. He was unable to answer such an argument. Bonzo, he made sure, would never understand him; the hopes he had placed in his friends were shattered at last; they did not know Marian; they would never know her. He was still searching for his reply to the accusation when the Colonel spoke again, but with less heat.

“À la bonne heure!” he said, “I am not here to scold you. We will say good-bye to this day of folly, for it is done. To-morrow you will leave London for Paris, my son. It will be the beginning of your journey to Vienna, where you will stay until this madness is forgotten. After that we shall appeal to the Emperor. His clemency may find for you some duty in the East. If you have suffered, those who love you have suffered too. Even I--Bonzo--could I hear of this, and forget that, of all at Kronstadt, you alone were a son to me? You shall be a son to me once more--when you have left England.”

Paul stood up as the speaker continued. An undefined dread of some calamity about to overtake him prompted him to speak.

“Colonel,” he said, “I cannot go to Paris with you to-morrow. I cannot leave England. Mademoiselle is waiting for me now. I thank you with all my heart for your promises, but the day for them is past. I think of Russia no more. I shall find a home here. Some day you will understand me.”

Bonzo waved his arm dramatically.

“Sit--sit,” he said; “this is not a theatre, Captain Paul. You are in Russia here. This house is our house. It is the Emperor’s house. Your English friends may come, but we shall not let them in. Be reasonable, and make up your mind that mademoiselle must wait a little longer.”

Paul looked from one to the other with dazed eyes. Count Feodor had risen, and stood with his back towards the window; the Colonel’s face was not to be read.

“I do not understand!” he exclaimed excitedly. “You would not keep me here against my wish, Colonel?”

Bonzo laughed ironically.

“For a few days,” he said, with a gesture of indifference, “until you come to your senses, Captain. Meanwhile, if mademoiselle is waiting, send another little note.”

In that moment the truth flashed upon Paul. He stepped backward as though seeking a way of escape; there was the look of a hunted animal in his eyes when he turned to the master of the house.

“My God!” he cried, “you would not do this, Count! You have no right to do it. I must go back to my house. I tell you that she is waiting for me.”

Bonzo answered him by striking a gong at his side.

“My son,” he said sternly, “she will wait many days yet. It is the duty of your friends to save you from yourself.”

The deep note of the gong echoed through the silent rooms of the house like an alarum. The three men--for all had risen--stood facing each other. They knew that the time for words was past. As for Bonzo, he had ceased to smile; anger and determination were to be read in his eyes. He looked around him with the air of one who has planned everything, and whose plan is to be put into execution.

“You are mad, Captain Zassulic, and we shall cure you,” he repeated triumphantly. “To-morrow we set out, but not for Vienna. The fortress of St. Peter shall be your hospital. Fool that you were to pit your wits against mine.”

He raised his hand to point threateningly, and, as if in instant answer to the signal, the conservatory was filled with troopers in the uniform of the Russian service. Silently, determinedly, with great strength, they fell upon the fugitive and threw him to the ground. So sudden was the attack, so swift had been the sequence of word and of event, that Paul was a prisoner in their arms even while the thought of escape was shaping in his mind. For a moment he struck at them with the strength of ten men. Agony and despair gave him courage. The whole bitterness of life seemed to be his portion.

“Marian!” he cried. “O my God, let me go to her--you kill me--I suffocate--let me go to her--let me go----”

A strong arm, the arm of a giant, stifled the broken cries. The whole landing seemed to be full of men. Though the captive struck right and left, clutching at this object and at that, they carried him swiftly from the place up and still up to the prison of the garrets. He beheld other landings and the interiors of bedrooms poorly furnished, the stairs were stairs of marble no longer, the light of the fuller day fell upon his face through a frosted dome of glass. When they flung him down at last, with blood upon his hands, and torn clothes, the light was shut swiftly from his eyes. He lay in utter darkness, and he thought it the darkness of hell. For he knew that the unpitying hand of the Russian had fallen upon him even in England--the England for which she whom he loved had longed so earnestly.