INHERITANCE
Alone in his own room, high up in the northern tower of Melbourne Hall,
the Earl locked the door and turned up the lights with the air of a man
who has a considerable task before him and must make the most of the
hours of grace remaining.
He was very pale and greatly changed since he had returned from London
three hours ago. Some would have perceived in his manner, not the
evidences of fear but of displeasure, and such displeasure as events
bordering upon tragedy alone could provoke. Uttering but one harsh
instruction to the servant who answered his bell, he sat at his writing
table and for a full hour turned over the pages of a diary which had
not seen the light for twenty years or more.
Georges Odin! How the very name could seize upon his mind to the
exclusion of all other thoughts. Sitting there with the time-stained
papers before him, the Earl was no longer in Derbyshire but out upon
the Carpathians, a youth of the West craving for the excitements of the
East; a hunter upon a brave horse, the friend of brigands and of
outlaws--drinking deep of the intoxicating draughts of freedom and
debauch. Well and truly had this young Count, whom Fate had sent to
his door, reminded him of these scenes he had made it his life's
purpose to forget.
"Zallony, my lord," he had said, "Zallony still lives and you were one
of Zallony's band. They tell of your crimes to this day. The mad
Englishman who carried the village girls to the hills--the mad
Englishman who drank when no other could lift the cup--the mad
Englishman who rode out of Bukharest in a bandit's cloak and lived the
Bohemian days of which the very gypsies were ashamed. Shall I tell you
his name? It would be that of my father's murderer."
And the answer had been a cringing evasion.
"I met Georges Odin in fair fight. He was the better man. I could
show the scars his sword left to this day. Of what do you accuse me?
They sent him to prison--well, I did not make their laws. He died
there, a convict laborer in the salt mines. Was it my doing? Ask
those at the Ministry. We moved heaven and earth to save him. The
Government's reason was a political one. They sent your father to the
mines because the Russian Government--then all powerful at
Bukharest--believed him to be its most dangerous enemy. His affair
with me was the excuse. What had I to do with it?"
But the Count persisted.
"Your influence would have saved him. You preferred to keep silent, my
lord. And I will tell you more. It was at your instigation that the
Roumanian Government arrested my father in the first place. You wished
for revenge--I think it was more than that. You were afraid that the
woman you married would find you out if Georges Odin regained his
liberty. You were not sure that Dora d'Istran did not love him. And
so--you left Roumania and took her with you--luckily for you both--to
die before she had read her own heart truly. That's what I have come
this long way to tell you. To Robert Forrester--I said. How should I
know that in England they would make a lord of such a man! I did not
know it; but that to me is the same. You shall answer my question or
pay the price. My lord, I have brains of my own and I can use them.
You shall pay me what you owe--you will be wise to do so."
The Earl did not wince at the threat, nor did his habitual self-control
desert him. His insight would have been shallow indeed if he had not
perceived that he was face to face with a dangerous enemy, and one with
whom he might not trifle.
"Put your question to me and I will answer it," he said doggedly.
"Remember that we are not in Roumania, Count. A word from me and my
men would set you where questions would help you little. Speak freely
while I have the patience to hear you."
"As freely as you could desire, my lord. A wise man would not utter a
threat at such a time. Do you think that I, Georges Odin's son, do you
think that I come to England alone? Ah, my lord, how little you know
me! Open one of your windows and listen for the message my friends
will deliver to you. I come to you with white gloves upon my hands.
It is to ask you, my lord, in what prison my poor father is lying at
this moment. Tell me that, help me to open the gates for him, and we
are friends. It will be time to utter threats when you refuse."
The Earl's face blanched at the words, but he did not immediately reply
to them. The story which the young man told was too astonishing that
he should easily understand it.
"You father died in the fortress of Krajova," he said at length. "I
remember that it was in the month of November in the year 1874. Why do
you speak of the gates of his prison! It is incredible that you should
bring such a story to me."
"As little incredible as your own ignorance, my lord. I thought as you
did until the day, five years ago, which released Zallony's brother
from Krajova. He brought the news to us. My father lives. But he is
at Krajova no longer. The Russian Government never forgets, my lord.
It remembers the day when Georges Odin was its enemy. My own people
fear that my father's liberty would awaken old affairs that had better
sleep. He is the victim of them. Yours is the one hand in all Europe
that could set him free. My lord, the world must know his story and
you shall write it. And if not you--then my Lady Evelyn, your
daughter. Do you think I am so blind that I do not read the truth?
The blood that ran in the mother's veins runs in the daughter's. Open
the doors of this house to her and she will go to the hills as her
mother went. The desire of life throbs in her veins. When I speak to
her, I witness the struggle between the old and the new; faith and joy;
the convent and the theatre; love and the prison. Your pride, your
fear, have made a captive of her--but I, my lord, may yet cut her
pretty bonds. As God is in heaven, I will not spare her one hour of
shame if you do not give my father back to me. Think of that before
you answer me. The girl or the man. Your shame or her freedom. My
lord, you have not many hours in which to choose."
Such an alternative the Earl carried with him to his own room; such an
alternative spoke to him from every page of the diaries his hand turned
so painfully. It was as though the dead had risen to accuse him.
Yonder, in a great clamped drawer of the bureau, were the letters he
had received from his dead wife in the days when he contended with
Georges Odin for the love of that mad, wild girl of the Carpathians.
How ardently he had loved her! What mad hours they had lived amid the
gypsy children of Roumania! And yet in heart and will she was
another's. He had long known she loved the prisoner at Krajova. And
the one supremely cowardly thing he had done in the course of his life
had been done at the dictation of an uncontrollable passion which would
sacrifice even honor for her sake. Georges Odin, the Count's father,
had met him in fair fight--the better swordsman had won. Never would
he forget the day--the snow-capped hills, the white glen in which they
fought; the keen sword lightly engaging his own; then the swift attack,
the masterly _reposte_ and that sensation as of red-hot iron passing to
his very heart. No shame here, it is true; but there were days of
shame afterward when the story came out and King Charles himself asked
the question, was it so? A word from Robert Forrester would have saved
his enemy from the mines. He never spoke it. The man disappeared from
his ken, and he believed that he was dead. He could scarcely deny the
justice of the retribution which now overtook him.
Georges Odin alive and a prisoner still in some unknown fortress
citadel. How the very name could awaken forgotten sensations! It
seemed to the Earl as though the madness of his youth struggled once
more for mastery with the finer impulses and desires which a later day
had inspired. Yesterday he had been a country gentleman, seeking to
cast behind finally that cloak of unconventionally he had worn with
such pleasure in his youth. He had meant to whitewash the sepulchre;
to take his seat in the Lords; to equip himself for the great honors
thrust upon him; to marry Evelyn sedately to a son of a noble house and
then, as it were, to convince himself that the abnormal had been purged
out of him and would afflict him no more. These ambitions, however,
were powerless now to combat the more natural instincts which the story
of his youth could recreate for him. Once more in imagination he rode
the hills of Roumania as a free adventurer, submitting to the laws
neither of God nor of man. Once more the sensuous voluptuousness of
the Earl dominated him, and the spirit within him rebelled at its
captivity. He must escape convention, he thought, become a wanderer
once more. And Evelyn! Had he not feared to read in her acts this
very inheritance his own nature cried out for. He shuddered when he
thought of Evelyn. Who would save her in the hour of cataclysm?
Such were the thoughts of that night long drawn and terrible. In
moments of revulsion against those who had thus brought him to bay,
there were mad whisperings which reminded him that Georges Odin's son
was the prisoner of his house and that, as he would, he might readily
be detained there until some understanding had been come to. This was
a thought the Earl could recall again and again. The man was alone and
helpless in his hands. It would be folly to open the doors and to say,
"Go out and tell the story to the world." Melbourne Hall had harbored
greater secrets before that day, and might witness them again. Why
should he stand irresolute; what forbade him to save Evelyn from all
that revelation must mean to her? He knew not--it remained for the
house to answer him, silently and finally, with the answer of one who
has set out upon no idle mission but is well aware of the danger he
must face.
This was at the hour of dawn. Unable to sleep, the Earl sat by his
open window watching the chill gray light creeping over the dew-laden
grass and disclosing the trees one by one as though an unseen hand drew
back the curtain of the night from the stately branches. A thrush with
a sweet note heralded the day--the deer began to browse beneath the
great avenue of yews. Anon, a sweet fresh air, invigorating as a very
draught of life itself, came down from the hills and sent the ripples
leaping and splashing beneath the arches of the old bridge, as though
the river also had awakened from a lover's dreams. And now all stood
revealed as in a picture of a forest land; the vast spaces of ripe
green grass, delicious vistas of wood and thicket; home scenes, and
scenes of Nature untrammelled. Upon other days, often at such an hour
as this, the Earl had looked down upon them and said, "Mine--mine ...
all these are mine." To-day he viewed them with heavy eyes. Something
unfamiliar in the landscape attracted his attention and roused him from
his musings.
A loom of heavy white smoke floating upward from the glen! Nothing but
that. A drift of smoke and anon the figure of a man seen between the
trees! Another would hardly have remarked the circumstances, but
Robert Forrester became awake in an instant and as vigilant as one who
dreads that which his eyes discover.
"They are gypsies, by----" he said, "and they have come at this man's
bidding."
He knew the meaning of their presence without words to tell him. They
had come to demand the freedom of their old master, Georges Odin, whose
son had carried them across the seas with him.
"I must answer them," the Earl said, "and if I answer them, what then!
Will the other be silent?"
He turned away and shut the window violently, as though to shut the
spectre out.
"He would kill me," he said; "the world is not big enough to hide me
from Georges Odin."