George Brudenell, having passed a restless and troubled evening, passed
also a restless and dream-haunted night, coming down to breakfast the
next morning jaded and out of sorts. He could not for a moment dismiss
from his memory that interview in the garden last night, or explain to
himself the meaning of Alexia Boucheafen's extraordinary conduct. What
was he to understand from it? Had her behavior been prompted by
astonishment, indecision, or annoyance? He did not know; and he could
make nothing of it. The Doctor ate no breakfast; but came to the
conclusion that he must see her again, and that as soon as possible;
his earnestness and anxiety conquered his diffidence. He rang the bell
for Mrs. Jessop, and asked if Mademoiselle were down-stairs yet? He
wished to see her.
Mrs. Jessop, looking curiously at her master, went and returned. No,
Mademoiselle was not down yet; she had complained last night of
headache. Was it anything very particular; and should she be called?
Not on any account. The Doctor picked up the paper that he had
forgotten to read, and went to his consulting-room.
It was empty, for it was not yet his usual hour for receiving patients.
To fill up the time and to escape from his own thoughts he opened the
paper. The first thing that caught his eye and changed his indifference
to involuntarily interest was the announcement, in the most sensational
terms, of two supposed dynamite outrages which had taken place on the
previous night, resulting in the partial wreck of one house and the
almost total destruction of another, together with the death of the
Russian police-agent who lived in it.
It was just at this time that some such paragraph formed the chief
sensational "tit-bit" of almost every newspaper, and outraged public
opinion was ready to run wild upon the subject. The Doctor, excited,
horrified, interested, read the account. The two explosions had taken
place almost simultaneously, and had evidently been caused by the same
kind of infernal machine, whether containing dynamite or some other
explosive was not quite certain. As for the police-agent who had been
killed, it was known that he had been threatened by some secret
society, supposed to have lurking-places in various parts of London, he
having a year or two before been mainly instrumental in the breaking up
of a Nihilist society in Russia, and in bringing to the scaffold its
chief and most active member, a young Russian of noble birth. The
second explosion, which had done less damage, and was happily
unattended by any serious results beyond the partial wrecking of the
house, was at the private residence of a well-known English Detective.
The latest news was that there was a clue to the perpetrators of both
outrages.
Doctor Brudenell tossed aside the paper, shrugging his shoulders as at
a madman's irresponsible rashness and folly, and turned his attention
to the patient who just then came in. That patient and the many
succeeding patients thought the Doctor odd this morning, brusque,
absent, constrained, gruff. He was thinking of Alexia, wondering what
she would say to him, wondering still more what he would say to her.
The room was empty at last; and he went back to the dining-room and
rang again for Mrs. Jessop. He could not face the day's round of work
without seeing her first. Mrs. Jessop was asked to inquire if
Mademoiselle could see him now. The housekeeper went, and returned
looking rather puzzled. Mademoiselle was not down-stairs yet, although
her breakfast was cold and the children were waiting to begin their
lessons. Mrs. Jessop was alarmed; her master wondered, and felt anxious.
"She may be ill," he said; "you say she complained last night. Go and
see. Stay--I'll come up-stairs with you!"
He did so. At the governess's door Mrs. Jessop knocked softly and
waited, knocked loudly and waited. Then, in obedience to a gesture from
the Doctor, she tried to open the door. The handle yielded instantly;
and she, looking in, cried out:
"Sir, she isn't here!"
The bed was untouched, had not been slept in. The housekeeper looked
frightened at the Doctor's white face as he glanced round the room.
"Call her brother. He has not been seen either. Quick!"
A couple of curious maids, lingering on the stairs, ran up the next
flight to obey. There was the sound of knocking at panels, a pause, and
a cry at which George Brudenell felt his heart turn cold, for he
understood what it meant. That room was vacant too!
He sent all the women away, and examined Alexia's apartment himself.
There was not a line of writing, not a trace or clue of any sort to
explain this mystery. A few articles of clothing were scattered
carelessly about on the chairs and on the sofa; a faded flower which
she had worn yesterday in the bosom of her gown lay upon the
toilet-table. The poor blossom was dry and withered; he took it up in
his hand, crushed it, and flung its powdery fragments from him. Then he
came out, shut the door, and went straight down-stairs and out to his
waiting carriage.
George Brudenell, afterward looking back upon that day, wondered how he
got through it; but he did, and reached home at last, to be met by Mrs.
Jessop, who, in the last stage of amazement, indignation, and
perplexity, informed him that Mademoiselle and her brother had not yet
made their appearance. He had expected that, and, cutting short the
good woman's garrulous comments and questions, sent her away. He left
his dinner untouched, and went into his consulting-room; and, as he
waited for the usual influx of patients, strove to understand, to
think. People came in, and he attended to them and watched them go;
they told him, some of them, that he looked out of sorts and pale, and
he laughed, saying that he was all right. The evening wore away, it
grew late, every one in the house had retired but himself. It was
nearly twelve o'clock; and he was still sitting, with his head in his
hands, trying to solve the problem that perplexed him. Suddenly he
started up, and listened. There were footsteps outside--rapid,
cautious--a key was placed in the lock, and the door yielded. He darted
out into the hall, and grasped the arm of the stealthily-entering
figure.
"Alexia!"
With a swift gesture she signed to him to go back into the room,
entered after him, and cautiously shut and locked the door. Then with
another rapid movement she pulled aside her veil and stood looking at
him. He was too astonished to speak, but he saw that she was
breathless, intensely pale, that her dress was slightly disordered, and
that in the eyes which he knew that he had never understood there was
an expression which he could read at last--a look of mingled defiance
and fear.
"Sir, will you save me?"
"Save you!" In his bewilderment he could only confusedly echo her
words. She moved a pace nearer to him.
"Yes, save me. Last night you said you loved me; but I do not plead to
you for that. I plead because I am a woman, alone, friendless, lost
without your aid. Sir, will you give it--will you save me?"
"From whom? From what?"
"From the hands of the police, who are now, as I speak, on my track;
from the Russian Government, to which I shall be delivered; from the
death, or worth than death, which their sleuth-hounds will mete out to
me."
"Death! Good heavens, what have you been doing?"
She laughed, glanced round the room, caught up the paper which lay
where he had put it down, and pointed to the column which he had read.
"That!" she cried.
"That? What do you mean?"
"I mean that I killed that man," she answered, deliberately. "I placed
the infernal machine by his door, and so took the vengeance which I
swore to take a year ago, when he took prisoner and gave to torture and
death my lover. I failed once, I failed twice; last night I succeeded.
He is dead!"
"You murdered this man?
"Yes, as my lover was murdered, as my brother was murdered, as my
mother and my sister are being murdered in Siberia, as my father died,
murdered in the dungeons of St. Peter and St. Paul. And for what? For
daring to act, to speak, to read, to think; for striving to be men and
women, for revolting against the horrible tyranny which crushed them as
it crushes millions! That was their crime. Bah! what do you know, you
English, of brutality, of force, of cruelty, of slavery? You play with
the words, and think you have the thing!"
She looked at him as he shrank from her, horrified, unable to grasp or
believe her words. Again she laughed bitterly, and, putting her hand
into the bosom of her dress, drew out a little roll of paper, and held
it toward him. The Doctor drew back. It had suddenly become horrible.
He faltered:
"What is it?"
"The last lines of farewell which my lover contrived to have sent to me
from his prison the day before they butchered him," she answered,
steadily. "He bade me farewell, and called upon me to avenge him. It
was redder then than now, for even the blood of an innocent man fades
with time; and he wrote this with his blood. With it in my hand, with
the memory of his face, when they dragged him away from me forever,
always before me, I swore I would obey his last prayer. It is done. His
murderer is dead!"
She spoke with an air of dreary triumph, a dreadful exultation that
chilled her listener's blood. This was not the woman he had loved, upon
whom he had poured out all his long-guarded stores of devotion and
passion--this terrible, beautiful, avenging Medusa! His utter confusion
and bewilderment were patent to her; as he sank into a chair, she drew
a pace nearer to him, speaking rapidly, never pausing except when he
himself interrupted her, never halting for a word.
"Sir, listen! I am in your power, since without your aid I cannot
escape. I should have been a prisoner now had I not thought of you and
had about me the key of your door. I thought you would save me--I think
you will, for I have already saved you."
"Me!" he exclaimed, wonderingly.
"You! Think you I do not know where you were taken on Saturday night?"
"You knew! Then----"
"I was there--yes. I knew you would be waylaid and taken there. I knew
what you would be asked to do--first, to attend to the injuries of the
foolish one among us who had tried to do what he could not do;
secondly, to finish what he had begun. You are a braver man than I
thought you, and you refused. Without those chemicals we were helpless,
for it is those that were used last night. In that deserted house--our
meeting-place at intervals for the past year--your dead body might have
lain undiscovered for months--would have lain undiscovered in all
probability--for you were dealing with desperate men, and you defied
them. I went there, as I have done twice before since I lived here, and
I pleaded for you and saved you. But I could not have done it except
for one thing--I took with me what they wanted. Gustave understands
chemicals, and how to combine them; he came here, after I had lied to
you about him--for all that story that I told you was one great lie,
told because I knew something of my power over you, and that you would
probably act as you did--hoping that he could here possess himself of
the chemicals that were needed, and which we could not obtain without
too great risk of discovery. You believed every word of the story with
which I befooled you; he came here, and obtained them easily."
Her audacity, her frankness were almost brutal. His bewilderment was
subsiding, but he revolted more and more, understanding so little of
the horrible tree of which such a woman as this was the poisoned and
poisoning fruit.
"Your brother?" he said, withdrawing from her a little farther. "How
did he become possessed of them here?"
"My brother!" she cried, laughing. "He is not my brother; his name is
Boucheafen no more than mine. My name! I have almost forgotten what it
is, I have borne so many that are false; were I to tell you it you
would be no wiser. Where, you ask, did he get the chemicals? From your
laboratory. We stole them; look, examine, and you will find them
missing!"
She stopped, turning with dilating eyes toward the window, as footsteps
approached. They passed, and she turned back again, once more drawing a
step nearer to him, fascinating him with the light of her brilliant
inflexible eyes.
"Sir, listen again. You have been deceived, as I have shown, but you do
not know how much. You recollect the day upon which you saw me first?"
"Yes."
"I told you that I had been robbed; it was a lie. The man that you saw
attack me meant to murder me."
"To murder you?"
"Yes. Sir, once more. You don't know what they are, these secret
societies, these hidden leagues moulded by Russian oppression and
tyranny, these cliques, of which hate, vengeance, extermination, are
the watchwords. Knowing so well what treachery is, they are jealous of
the faith of their members. Death punishes treachery, and I had been
treacherous, and death was my sentence. The Cause avenges itself; the
appointed man accepted his appointed task. The man who threatened you
that night--that old man, our chief--saved me."
George Brudenell passed his hand over his forehead. The feeling which
had assailed him when he was a prisoner in the mysterious house
assailed him again--the involuntary doubt as to the reality of what he
saw and heard. Still with her relentless eyes fixed upon him, she went
on:
"I had been treacherous--I will tell you how. There belonged to us a
lad, a boy, almost a child--he was innocent, simple; he was our errand
boy, cat's-paw--what you will; and he did what you have done, fell in
love with me--because I am beautiful, perhaps. Bah! Many men have
loved me--it is nothing. We suspected him, thought him false; with the
Cause to suspect is to condemn. He was condemned, and to me was
allotted the task of striking him. I meant to do it, I swore to do it.
At the last moment my courage failed me--perhaps I pitied him--and I
spared him. The sentence passed upon him was passed also upon me."
"And he?"
"He?" She met his look with a gloomy smile. "The Cause does not forgive
unless for its own good, as it afterward forgave me. Our chief absolved
me, for I was useful--so useful that my one act of treachery, my one
moment of weakness, was condoned. For him--what was he? An
untrustworthy tool merely. Another hand struck the blow which I had
been appointed to strike. He died as I nearly died." She stopped and
smiled in the same gloomy way. "No suspicion struck you when his body
lay there yonder, and I stood beside you, looking at his dead face!"
"That boy!" cried George Brudenell, horrified.
"That boy," she assented.
There was a pause, during which the Doctor rose and drew back from the
tall, splendidly-poised figure, as firm and erect as he had ever seen
it. He did not realize yet the blow that had fallen upon him, the blank
in his life that would come later; but he felt as though he were
struggling in a sea of horror, and was unable to disguise his shrinking
from her, his avoidance of her, the woman to whom yesterday he had
offered his love humbly, and whom he had besought to be his wife. He
asked coldly, not looking at her:
"What can I do?"
"Sir, I have told you--save me. We were seen last night, the clue was
followed up, and we were surprised an hour ago in our most secret
meeting-place. Three of us were taken--all would have been but for the
darkness, and that we knew so well each winding of the place. Where the
others are I do not know. Sir, help me! I am penniless, your
police--blood-hounds!--are on my track. Every moment that I stay here
makes the danger greater. To-day I am a creature you hate, scorn,
shrink from; but yesterday I was the woman you loved--help me, then! I
am young to die--I saved you! Answer, will you save me?"
"I will help you," said George Brudenell, quietly.
* * * * *
Time has effaced many things from Doctor Brudenell's memory, but it can
never blot out his mental picture of that night--the drive through the
silent street to the distant railway-station, from which a train could
be taken to carry them to the sea, the waiting through the dragging
hours until the tardy dawn broke, the fear, the stealth, the suspicion,
the watching, the rapid flight through the early morning, that ended
only when the blue water--so cruelly bright, untroubled, and tranquil
it looked!--was audible and visible. Not a word had he spoken to his
companion through the night, nor did either of them break silence until
they stood upon the deck of the vessel which was to bear her to the New
World which has rectified so many of the mistakes of the Old.
The deck was being cleared of those who were to return to the shore,
when, for the last time, she turned her beautiful eyes upon his face.
"Farewell, Monsieur," she said, quietly; and he echoed:
"Farewell, Mademoiselle."
* * * * *
Good Mrs. Jessop never discovered which patient it was to whom her
master had been called in the dead of the night, and who had kept him
away for the best part of twenty-four hours; and she never could
understand what that "foreign young woman"--a person concerning whom
she was for a long time exceedingly voluble and bitter--could possibly
mean by running off in that scandalous way. But there were several
other things that Mrs. Jessop did not understand--for instance, why the
doctor for the next few weeks lost his appetite so completely, was so
"snappish and short," and seemed to care for nothing but the newspaper;
and she was quite scandalized when he actually spent a whole day, as
she, by dint of judiciously "pumping" Patrick, contrived to ascertain,
in attending the trial of those "horrid wretches of dynamitards," where
he heard the case, and heard the sentence of five years' penal
servitude passed upon a gray-haired man with a scar upon his cheek.
* * * * *
Laura has come home now, and the children are a great deal bigger and
even more tiresome than ever. She thinks her brother is very stupid not
to marry, and often roundly tells him so. But the Doctor takes her
suggestion very quietly; he is too old now, he says, and, besides, as
he reminds Laura, it was never "in his line."
Typographical errors silently corrected:
Chapter 1: _He hardly hardly knew_ silently corrected as _He hardly
knew_
Chapter 1: _see yon now_ silently corrected as _see you now_
Chapter 2: _indorsed this opinion_ silently corrected as _endorsed
this opinion_
Chapter 2: _he say a pale face_ silently corrected as _he saw a pale
face_
Chapter 4: _and in driving their nursery incmfwycmfwycmfwypppp driving
the unhappy nursemaid nearly mad_ silently corrected as _and in driving
the unhappy nursemaid nearly mad_
Chapter 5: _poor Gustave, He is_ silently corrected as _poor Gustave?
He is_
Chapter 5: _show me! Come!_ silently corrected as _show me! Come!"_
Chapter 5: _I did?_ silently corrected as _I did._
Chapter 6: _in another momen the door_ replaced by _in another moment
the door_
Chapter 6: _absolutely, unfurnished_ silently corrected as _absolutely
unfurnished_
Chapter 7: _What is this?"_ silently corrected as _What is this?_
Chapter 8: _well-knows English_ silently corrected as _well-known
English_
Chapter 8: _was vacant too."_ Silently corrected as _was vacant too._
Chapter 8: _He went all_ silently corrected as _He sent all_
Chapter 8: _he sad ever seen_ silently corrected as _he had ever seen_
Chapter 8: _he reminds, Laura_ silently corrected as _he reminds Laura_