FOR A WOMAN'S SAKE.
The door opened--Cecil entered.
The Seraph crossed the room, with his hand held out; not for his life
in that moment would he have omitted that gesture of friendship.
Involuntarily he started and stood still one instant in amaze; the next,
he flung thought away and dashed into swift, inconsequent words.
“Cecil, my dear fellow! I'm ashamed to send for you on such a blackguard
errand. Never heard of such a swindler's trick in all my life; couldn't
pitch the fellow into the street because of the look of the thing, and
can't take any other measure without you, you know. I only sent for you
to expose the whole abominable business, never because I believe----Hang
it! Beauty, I can't bring myself to say it even! If a sound thrashing
would have settled the matter, I wouldn't have bothered you about it,
nor told you a syllable. Only you are sure, Bertie, aren't you, that
I never listened to this miserable outrage on us both with a second's
thought there could be truth in it? You know me? you trust me too well
not to be certain of that?”
The incoherent address poured out from his lips in a breathless torrent;
he had never been so excited in his life; and he pleaded with as
imploring an earnestness as though he had been the suspected criminal,
not to be accused with having one shadow of shameful doubt against his
friend. His words would have told nothing except bewilderment to one who
should have been a stranger to the subject on which he spoke; yet Cecil
never asked even what he meant. There was no surprise upon his face,
no flush of anger, no expression of amaze or indignation; only the look
which had paralyzed Rock on his entrance; he stood still and mute.
The Seraph looked at him, a great dread seizing him lest he should have
seemed himself to cast this foul thing on his brother-in-arms; and in
that dread all the fierce fire of his freshly-loosened passion broke its
bounds.
“Damnation! Cecil, can't you hear me! A hound has brought against you
the vilest charge that ever swindlers framed: an infamy that he deserves
to be shot for, as if he were a dog. He makes me stand before you as if
I were your accuser; as if I doubted you; as if I lent an ear one second
to this loathsome lie. I sent for you to confront him, and to give him
up to the law. Stand out, you scoundrel, and let us see how you dare
look at us now!”
He swung round at the last words, and signed to Baroni to rise from the
couch were he sat. The Jew advanced slowly, softly.
“If your lordship will pardon me, you have scarcely made it apparent
what the matter is for which the gentleman is wanted. You have scarcely
explained to him that it is on a charge of forgery.”
The Seraph's eyes flashed on him with a light like a lion's, and his
right hand clinched hard.
“By my life! If you say that word again you shall be flung in the street
like the cur you are, let me pay what I will for it! Cecil, why don't
you speak?”
Bertie had not moved; not a breath escaped his lips. He stood like a
statue, deadly pale in the gaslight; when the figure of Baroni rose
up and came before him, a great darkness stole on his face--it was a
terrible bitterness, a great horror, a loathing disgust; but it was
scarcely criminality, and it was not fear. Still he stood perfectly
silent--a guilty man, any other than his loyal friend would have said:
guilty, and confronted with a just accuser. The Seraph saw that look,
and a deadly chill passed over him, as it had done at the Jew's first
charge--not doubt; such heresy to his creeds, such shame to his
comrade and his corps could not be in him; but a vague dread hushed his
impetuous vehemence. The dignity of the old Lyonnesse blood asserted its
ascendency.
“M. Baroni, make your statement. Later on Mr. Cecil can avenge it.”
Cecil never moved; once his eyes went to Rockingham with a look of
yearning, grateful, unendurable pain; but it was repressed instantly; a
perfect passiveness was on him. The Jew smiled.
“My statement is easily made, and will not be so new to this gentleman
as it was to your lordship. I simply charge the Honorable Bertie Cecil
with having negotiated a bill with my firm for 750 pounds on the 15th of
last month, drawn in his own favor, and accepted at two months' date
by your lordship. Your signature you, my Lord Marquis, admit to be a
forgery--with that forgery I charge your friend!”
“The 15th!”
The echo of those words alone escaped the dry, white lips of Cecil; he
showed no amaze, no indignation; once only, as the charge was made, he
gave in sudden gesture, with a sudden gleam, so dark, so dangerous, in
his eyes, that his comrade thought and hoped that with one moment more
the Jew would be dashed down at his feet with the lie branded on his
mouth by the fiery blow of a slandered and outraged honor. The action
was repressed; the extraordinary quiescence, more hopeless because more
resigned than any sign of pain or of passion, returned either by force
of self-control or by the stupor of despair.
The Seraph gazed at him with a fixed, astounded horror; he could not
believe his senses; he could not realize what he saw. His dearest friend
stood mute beneath the charge of lowest villainy--stood powerless before
the falsehoods of a Jew extortioner!
“Bertie! Great Heaven!” he cried, well-nigh beside himself, “how can
you stand silent there? Do you hear--do you hear aright? Do you know
the accursed thing this conspiracy has tried to charge you with? Say
something, for the love of God! I will have vengeance on your slanderer,
if you take none.”
He had looked for the rise of the same passion that rang in his own
imperious words, for the fearless wrath of an insulted gentleman, the
instantaneous outburst of a contemptuous denial, the fire of scorn, the
lightning flash of fury--all that he gave himself, all that must be so
naturally given by a slandered man under the libel that brands him with
disgrace. He had looked for these as surely as he looked for the setting
of one sun and the rise of another; he would have staked his life on the
course of his friend's conduct as he would upon his own, and a ghastly
terror sent a pang to his heart.
Still--Cecil stood silent; there was a strange, set, repressed anguish
on his face that made it chill as stone; there was an unnatural calm
upon him; yet he lifted his head with a gesture haughty for the moment
as any action that his defender could have wished.
“I am not guilty,” he said simply.
The Seraph's hands were on his own in a close, eager grasp almost ere
the words were spoken.
“Beauty, Beauty! Never say that to me. Do you think I can ever doubt
you?”
For a moment Cecil's head sank; the dignity with which he had spoken
remained on him, but the scorn of his defiance and his denial faded.
“No; you cannot; you never will.”
The words were spoken almost mechanically, like a man in a dream. Ezra
Baroni, standing calmly there with the tranquility that an assured power
alone confers, smiled slightly once more.
“You are not guilty, Mr. Cecil? I shall be charmed if we can find it so.
Your proofs?”
“Proof? I give you my word.”
Baroni bowed, with a sneer at once insolent but subdued.
“We men of business, sir, are--perhaps inconveniently for
gentlemen--given to a preference in favor of something more substantial.
Your word, doubtless, is your bond among your acquaintance; it is a pity
for you that your friend's name should have been added to the bond you
placed with us. Business men's pertinacity is a little wearisome, no
doubt, to officers and members of the aristocracy like yourself; but all
the same I must persist--how can you disprove this charge?”
The Seraph turned on him with a fierceness of a bloodhound.
“You dog! If you use that tone again in my presence, I will
double-throng you till you cannot breathe!”
Baroni laughed a little; he felt secure now, and could not resist the
pleasure of braving and of torturing the “aristocrats.”
“I don't doubt your will or your strength, my lord; but neither do I
doubt the force of the law to make you account for any brutality of the
prize-ring your lordship may please to exert on me.”
The Seraph ground his heel into the carpet.
“We waste words on that wretch,” he said abruptly to Cecil. “Prove his
insolence the lie it is, and we will deal with him later on.”
“Precisely what I said, my lord,” murmured Baroni. “Let Mr. Cecil prove
his innocence.”
Into Bertie's eyes came a hunted, driven desperation. He turned them
on Rockingham with a look that cut him to the heart; yet the abhorrent
thought crossed him--was it thus that men guiltless looked?
“Mr. Cecil was with my partner at 7:50 on the evening of the 15th. It
was long over business hours, but my partner to oblige him stretched a
point,” pursued the soft, bland, malicious voice of the German Jew. “If
he was not at our office--where was he? That is simple enough.”
“Answered in a moment!” said the Seraph, with impetuous certainty.
“Cecil!--to prove this man what he is, not for an instant to satisfy
me--where were you at that time on the 15th?”
“The 15th!”
“Where were you?” pursued his friend. “Were you at mess? At the clubs?
Dressing for dinner?--where--where? There must be thousands of ways of
remembering--thousands of people who'll prove it for you?”
Cecil stood mute still; his teeth clinched on his under lip. He could
not speak--a woman's reputation lay in his silence.
“Can't you remember?” implored the Seraph. “You will think--you must
think!”
There was a feverish entreaty in his voice. That hunted helplessness
with which a question so slight yet so momentous was received, was
forcing in on him a thought that he flung away like an asp.
Cecil looked both of them full in the eyes--both his accuser and his
friend. He was held as speechless as though his tongue were paralyzed;
he was bound by his word of honor; he was weighted with a woman's
secret.
“Don't look at me so, Bertie, for mercy's sake! Speak! Where were you?”
“I cannot tell you; but I was not there.”
The words were calm; there was a great resolve in them, moreover; but
his voice was hoarse and his lips shook. He paid a bitter price for the
butterfly pleasure of a summer-day love.
“Cannot tell me!--cannot? You mean you have forgotten!”
“I cannot tell you; it is enough.”
There was an almost fierce and sullen desperation in the answer;
its firmness was not shaken, but the ordeal was terrible. A woman's
reputation--a thing so lightly thrown away with an idler's word, a
Lovelace's smile!--that was all he had to sacrifice to clear himself
from the toils gathering around him. That was all! And his word of
honor.
Baroni bent his head with an ironic mockery of sympathy.
“I feared so, my lord. Mr. Cecil 'cannot tell.' As it happens, my
partner can tell. Mr. Cecil was with him at the hour and on the day I
specify; and Mr. Cecil transacted with him the bill that I have had the
honor of showing you--”
“Let me see it.”
The request was peremptory to imperiousness, yet Cecil would have faced
his death far sooner than he would have looked upon that piece of paper.
Baroni smiled.
“It is not often that we treat gentlemen under misfortune in the manner
we treat you, sir; they are usually dealt with more summarily, less
mercifully. You must excuse altogether my showing you the document; both
you and his lordship are officers skilled, I believe, in the patrician
science of fist-attack.”
He could not deny himself the pleasure and the rarity of insolence
to the men before him, so far above him in social rank, yet at that
juncture so utterly at his mercy.
“You mean that we should fall foul of you and seize it?” thundered
Rockingham in the magnificence of his wrath. “Do you judge the world by
your own wretched villainies? Let him see the paper; lay it there, or,
as there is truth on earth, I will kill you where you stand.”
The Jew quailed under the fierce flashing of those leonine eyes. He
bowed with that tact which never forsook him.
“I confide it to your honor, my Lord Marquis,” he said, as he spread out
the bill on the console. He was an able diplomatist.
Cecil leaned forward and looked at the signatures dashed across the
paper; both who saw him saw also the shiver, like a shiver of intense
cold, that ran through him as he did so, and saw his teeth clinch tight,
in the extremity of rage, in the excess of pain, or--to hold in all
utterance that might be on his lips.
“Well?” asked the Seraph, in a breathless anxiety. He knew not what to
believe, what to do, whom to accuse of, or how to unravel this mystery
of villainy and darkness; but he felt, with a sickening reluctance which
drove him wild, that his friend did not act in this thing as he should
have acted; not as men of assured innocence and secure honor act beneath
such a charge. Cecil was unlike himself, unlike every deed and word of
his life, unlike every thought of the Seraph's fearless expectance, when
he had looked for the coming of the accused as the signal for the sure
and instant unmasking, condemnation, and chastisement of the false
accuser.
“Do you still persist in denying your criminality in the face of that
bill, Mr. Cecil?” asked the bland, sneering, courteous voice of Ezra
Baroni.
“I do. I never wrote either of these signatures; I never saw that
document until to-night.”
The answer was firmly given, the old blaze of scorn came again in
his weary eyes, and his regard met calmly and unflinchingly the looks
fastened on him; but the nerves of his lips twitched, his face was
haggard as by a night's deep gambling; there was a heavy dew on his
forehead--it was not the face of a wholly guiltless, of a wholly
unconscious man; often even as innocence may be unwittingly betrayed
into what wears the semblance of self-condemnation.
“And yet you equally persist in refusing to account for your occupation
of the early evening hours of the 15th? Unfortunate!”
“I do; but in your account of them you lie!”
There was a sternness inflexible as steel in the brief sentence. Under
it for an instant, though not visibly, Baroni flinched; and a fear of
the man he accused smote him, more deep, more keen than that with which
the sweeping might of the Seraph's fury had moved him. He knew now why
Ben Davis had hated with so deadly a hatred the latent strength that
slept under the Quietist languor and nonchalance of “the d----d Guards'
swell.”
What he felt, however, did not escape him by the slightest sign.
“As a matter of course you deny it!” he said, with a polite wave of his
hand. “Quite right; you are not required to criminate yourself. I wish
sincerely we were not compelled to criminate you.”
The Seraph's grand, rolling voice broke in; he had stood chafing,
chained, panting in agonies of passion and of misery.
“M. Baroni!” he said hotly, the furious vehemence of his anger and his
bewilderment obscuring in him all memory of either law or fact, “you
have heard his signature and your statements alike denied once for
all by Mr. Cecil. Your document is a libel and a conspiracy, like your
charge; it is false, and you are swindling; it is an outrage, and you
are a scoundrel; you have schemed this infamy for the sake of extortion;
not a sovereign will you obtain through it. Were the accusation you dare
to make true, I am the only one whom it can concern, since it is my name
which is involved. Were it true--could it possibly be true--I should
forbid any steps to be taken in it; I should desire it ended once and
forever. It shall be so now, by God!”
He scarcely knew what he was saying; yet what he did say, utterly as it
defied all checks of law or circumstance, had so gallant a ring, had so
kingly a wrath, that it awed and impressed even Baroni in the instant of
its utterance.
“They say that those fine gentlemen fight like a thousand lions when
they are once roused,” he thought. “I can believe it.”
“My lord,” he said softly, “you have called me by many epithets, and
menaced me with many threats since I have entered this chamber; it is
not a wise thing to do with a man who knows the law. However, I can
allow for the heat of your excitement. As regards the rest of your
speech, you will permit me to say that its wildness of language is only
equaled by the utter irrationality of your deductions and your absolute
ignorance of all legalities. Were you alone concerned and alone the
discoverer of this fraud, you could prosecute or not as you please;
but we are subjects of its imposition, ours is the money that he
has obtained by that forgery, and we shall in consequence open the
prosecution.”
“Prosecution?” The echo rang in an absolute agony from his hearer; he
had thought of it as, at its worst, only a question between himself and
Cecil.
The accused gave no sigh, the rigidity and composure he had sustained
throughout did not change; but at the Seraph's accent the hunted and
pathetic misery which had once before gleamed in his eyes came there
again; he held his comrade in a loyal and exceeding love. He would have
let all the world stone him, but he could not have borne that his friend
should cast even a look of contempt.
“Prosecution!” replied Baroni. “It is a matter of course, my lord, that
Mr. Cecil denies the accusation; it is very wise; the law specially
cautions the accused to say nothing to criminate themselves. But we
waste time in words; and, pardon me, if you have your friend's interest
at heart, you will withdraw this very stormy championship; this utterly
useless opposition to an inevitable line of action. I must attest Mr.
Cecil; but I am willing--for I know to high families these misfortunes
are terribly distressing--to conduct everything with the strictest
privacy and delicacy. In a word, if you and he consult his interests,
he will accompany me unresistingly; otherwise I must summon legal force.
Any opposition will only compel a very unseemly encounter of physical
force, and with it the publicity I am desirous, for the sake of his
relatives and position, to spare him.”
A dead silence followed his words, the silence that follows on an insult
that cannot be averted or avenged; on a thing too hideously shameful for
the thoughts to grasp it as reality.
In the first moment of Baroni's words Cecil's eyes had gleamed again
with that dark and desperate flash of a passion that would have been
worse to face even than his comrade's wrath; it died, however, well-nigh
instantly, repressed by a marvelous strength of control, whatever its
motive. He was simply, as he had been throughout, passive--so passive
that even Ezra Baroni, who knew what the Seraph never dreamed, looked at
him in wonder, and felt a faint, sickly fear of that singular, unbroken
calm. It perplexed him--the first thing which had ever done so in his
own peculiar paths of finesse and of intrigue.
The one placed in ignorance between them, at once as it were the judge
and champion of his brother-at-arms, felt wild and blind under this
unutterable shame, which seemed to net them both in such close and
hopeless meshes. He, heir to one of the greatest coronets in the world,
must see his friend branded as a common felon, and could do no more to
aid or to avenge him than if he were a charcoal-burner toiling yonder in
the pine woods! His words were hoarse and broken as he spoke:
“Cecil, tell me--what is to be done? This infamous outrage cannot pass!
cannot go on! I will send for the Duke, for--”
“Send for no one.”
Bertie's voice was slightly weaker, like that of a man exhausted by a
long struggle, but it was firm and very quiet. Its composure fell on
Rockingham's tempestuous grief and rage with a sickly, silencing
awe, with a terrible sense of some evil here beyond his knowledge and
ministering, and of an impotence alike to act and to serve, to defend
and to avenge--the deadliest thing his fearless life had ever known.
“Pardon me, my lord,” interposed Baroni, “I can waste time no more. You
must be now convinced yourself of your friend's implication in this very
distressing affair.”
“I!” The Seraph's majesty of haughtiest amaze and scorn blazed from his
azure eyes on the man who dared say this thing to him. “I! If you dare
hint such a damnable shame to my face again, I will wring your neck with
as little remorse as I would a kite's. I believe in his guilt? Forgive
me, Cecil, that I can even repeat the word! I believe in it? I would as
soon believe in my own disgrace--in my father's dishonor!”
“How will your lordship account, then, for Mr. Cecil's total inability
to tell us know he spent the hours between six and nine on the 15th?”
“Unable? He is not unable; he declines! Bertie, tell me what you did
that one cursed evening. Whatever it was, wherever it was, say it for my
sake, and shame this devil.”
Cecil would more willingly have stood a line of leveled rifle-tubes
aimed at his heart than that passionate entreaty from the man he loved
best on earth. He staggered slightly, as if he were about to fall, and
a faint white foam came on his lips; but he recovered himself almost
instantly. It was so natural to him to repress every emotion that it was
simply old habit to do so now.
“I have answered,” he said very low, each word a pang--“I cannot.”
Baroni waved his hand again with the same polite, significant gesture.
“In that case, then, there is but one alternative. Will you follow me
quietly, sir, or must force be employed?”
“I will go with you.”
The reply was very tranquil, but in the look that met his own as it was
given, Baroni saw that some other motive than that of any fear was its
spring; that some cause beyond the mere abhorrence of “a scene” was at
the root of the quiescence.
“It must be so,” said Cecil huskily to his friend. “This man is right,
so far as he knows. He is only acting on his own convictions. We cannot
blame him. The whole is--a mystery, an error. But, as it stands, there
is no resistance.”
“Resistance! By God! I would resist if I shot him dead, or shot myself.
Stay--wait--one moment! If it be an error in the sense you mean, it must
be a forgery of your name as of mine. You think that?”
“I did not say so.”
The Seraph gave him a rapid, shuddering glance; for once the suspicion
crept in on him--was this guilt? Yet even now the doubt would not be
harbored by him.
“Say so--you must mean so! You deny them as yours; what can they be but
forgeries? There is no other explanation. I think the whole matter a
conspiracy to extort money; but I may be wrong--let that pass. If it
be, on the contrary, an imitation of both our signatures that has
been palmed off upon these usurers, it is open to other treatment.
Compensated for their pecuniary loss, they can have no need to press the
matter further, unless they find out the delinquent. See here”--he went
to a writing-cabinet at the end of the room, flung the lid back, swept
out a heap of papers, and wrenching a blank check from the book, threw
it down before Baroni--“here! fill it up as you like, and I will sign it
in exchange for the forged sheet.”
Baroni paused a moment. Money he loved with an adoration that excluded
every other passion; that blank check, that limitless carte blanche,
that vast exchequer from which to draw!--it was a sore temptation.
He thought wistfully of the welsher's peremptory forbiddance of
all compromise--of the welsher's inexorable command to “wring the
fine-feathered bird,” lose whatever might be lost by it.
Cecil, ere the Hebrew could speak, leaned forward, took the check and
tore it in two.
“God bless you, Rock,” he said, so low that it only reached the Seraph's
ear, “but you must not do that.”
“Beauty, you are mad!” cried the Marquis passionately. “If this
villainous thing be a forgery, you are its victim as much as I--tenfold
more than I. If this Jew chooses to sell the paper to me, naming his
own compensation, whose affair is it except his and mine? They have been
losers, we indemnify them. It rests with us to find out the criminal. M.
Baroni, there are a hundred more checks in that book; name your price,
and you shall have it; or, if you prefer my father's, I will send to him
for it. His Grace will sign one without a question of its errand, if I
ask him. Come! your price?”
Baroni had recovered the momentary temptation, and was strong in the
austerity of virtue, in the unassailability of social duty.
“You behave most nobly, most generously by your friend, my lord,” he
said politely. “I am glad such friendship exists on earth. But you
really ask me what is not in my power. In the first place, I am but one
of the firm, and have no authority to act alone; in the second, I
most certainly, were I alone, should decline totally any pecuniary
compromise. A great criminal action is not to be hushed up by any
monetary arrangement. You, my Lord Marquis, may be ignorant in the
Guards of a very coarse term used in law, called 'compounding a felony.'
That is what you tempt me to now.”
The Seraph, with one of those oaths that made the Hebrew's blood run
cold, though he was no coward, opened his lips to speak; Cecil arrested
him with that singular impassiveness, that apathy of resignation which
had characterized his whole conduct throughout, save at a few brief
moments.
“Make no opposition. The man is acting but in his own justification.
I will wait for mine. To resist would be to degrade us with a bully's
brawl; they have the law with them. Let it take its course.”
The Seraph dashed his hand across his eyes; he felt blind--the room
seemed to reel with him.
“Oh, God! that you----”
He could not finish the words. That his comrade, his friend, one of his
own corps, of his own world, should be arrested like the blackest thief
in Whitechapel or in the Rue du Temple!
Cecil glanced at him, and his eyes grew infinitely yearning--infinitely
gentle; a shudder shook him all through his limbs. He hesitated a
moment, then he stretched out his hand.
“Will you take it--still?”
Almost before the words were spoken, his hand was held in both of the
Seraph's.
“Take it? Before all the world--always, come what will.”
His eyes were dim as he spoke, and his rich voice rang clear as the
ring of silver, though there was the tremor of emotion in it. He had
forgotten the Hebrew's presence; he had forgotten all save his friend
and his friend's extremity. Cecil did not answer; if he had done so, all
the courage, all the calm, all the control that pride and breeding alike
sustained in him, would have been shattered down to weakness; his hand
closed fast in his companion's, his eyes met his once in a look of
gratitude that pierced the heart of the other like a knife; then he
turned to the Jew with a haughty serenity.
“M. Baroni, I am ready.”
“Wait!” cried Rockingham. “Where you go I come.”
The Hebrew interposed demurely.
“Forgive me, my lord--not now. You can take what steps you will as
regards your friend later on; and you may rest assured he will be
treated with all delicacy compatible with the case, but you cannot
accompany him now. I rely on his word to go with me quietly; but I
now regard him, and you must remember this, as not the son of Viscount
Royallieu--not the Honorable Bertie Cecil, of the Life Guards--not the
friend of one so distinguished as yourself--but as simply an arrested
forger.”
Baroni could not deny himself that last sting of his vengeance; yet, as
he saw the faces of the men on whom he flung the insult, he felt for the
moment that he might pay for his temerity with his life. He put his hand
above his eyes with a quick, involuntary movement, like a man who wards
off a blow.
“Gentlemen,” and his teeth chattered as he spoke, “one sign of violence,
and I shall summon legal force.”
Cecil caught the Seraph's lifted arm, and stayed it in its vengeance.
His own teeth were clinched tight as a vise, and over the haggard
whiteness of his face a deep red blush had come.
“We degrade ourselves by resistance. Let me go--they must do what they
will. My reckoning must wait, and my justification. One word only. Take
the King and keep him for my sake.”
Another moment, and the door had closed; he was gone out to his fate,
and the Seraph, with no eyes on him, bowed down his head upon his arms
where he leaned against the marble table, and, for the first time in
all his life, felt the hot tears roll down his face like rain, as the
passion of a woman mastered and unmanned him--he would sooner a thousand
times have laid his friend down in his grave than have seen him live for
this.
Cecil went slowly out beside his accuser. The keen, bright eyes of the
Jew kept vigilant watch and ward on him; a single sign of any effort
to evade him would have been arrested by him in an instant with
preconcerted skill. He looked, and saw that no thought of escape was in
his prisoner's mind. Cecil had surrendered himself, and he went to his
doom; he laid no blame on Baroni, and he scarce gave him a remembrance.
The Hebrew did not stand to him in the colors he wore to Rockingham, who
beheld this thing but on its surface. Baroni was to him only the agent
of an inevitable shame, of a hapless fate that closed him in, netting
him tight with the web of his own past actions; no more than the
irresponsible executioner of what was in the Jew's sight and knowledge
a just sentence. He condemned his accuser in nothing; no more than
the conscience of a guilty man can condemn the discoverers and the
instruments of his chastisement.
Was he guilty?
Any judge might have said that he knew himself to be so as he
passed down the staircase and outward to the entrance with that dead
resignation on his face, that brooding, rigid look set on his features,
and gazing almost in stupefaction out from the dark hazel depths of eyes
that women had loved for their luster, their languor, and the softness
of their smile.
They walked out into the evening air unnoticed; he had given his consent
to follow the bill-discounter without resistance, and he had no thought
to break his word; he had submitted himself to the inevitable course of
this fate that had fallen on him, and the whole tone of his temper and
his breeding lent him the quiescence, though he had none of the doctrine
of a supreme fatalist. There were carriages standing before the hotel,
waiting for those who were going to the ballroom, to the theater, to an
archduke's dinner, to a princess' entertainment; he looked at them with
a vague, strange sense of unreality--these things of the life from which
he was now barred forever. The sparkling tide of existence in Baden
was flowing on its way, and he went out an accused felon, branded, and
outlawed, and dishonored from all place in the world that he had led,
and been caressed by and beguiled with for so long.
To-night, at this hour, he should have been among all that was highest
and gayest and fairest in Europe at the banquet of a Prince--and he went
by his captor's side, a convicted criminal.
Once out in the air, the Hebrew laid his hand on his arm. He started--it
was the first sign that his liberty was gone! He restrained himself from
all resistance still, and passed onward, down where Baroni motioned him
out of the noise of the carriages, out of the glare of the light, into
the narrow, darkened turning of a side street. He went passively; for
this man trusted to his honor.
In the gloom stood three figures, looming indistinctly in the shadow
of the houses. One was a Huissier of the Staats-Procurator, beside whom
stood the Commissary of Police of the district; the third was an English
detective. Ere he saw them their hands were on his shoulders, and the
cold chill of steel touched his wrists. The Hebrew had betrayed him, and
arrested him in the open street. In an instant, as the ring of the rifle
rouses the slumbering tiger, all the life and the soul that were in him
rose in revolt as the icy glide of the handcuffs sought their hold on
his arms. In an instant, all the wild blood of his race, all the pride
of his breeding, all the honor of his service, flashed into fire and
leaped into action. Trusted, he would have been true to his accuser;
deceived, the chains of his promise were loosened, and all he thought,
all he felt, all he knew were the lion impulses, the knightly instincts,
the resolute choice to lose life rather than to lose freedom, of a
soldier and a gentleman. All he remembered was that he would fight to
the death rather than be taken alive; that they should kill him where he
stood, in the starlight, rather than lead him in the sight of men as a
felon.
With the strength that lay beneath all the gentle languor of his habits
and with the science of the Eton Playing Fields of his boyhood, he
wrenched his wrists free ere the steel had closed, and with the single
straightening of his left arm felled the detective to earth like a
bullock, with a crashing blow that sounded through the stillness like
some heavy timber stove in; flinging himself like lightning on the
Huissier, he twisted out of his grasp the metal weight of the handcuffs,
and wrestling with him was woven for a second in that close-knit
struggle which is only seen when the wrestlers wrestle for life and
death. The German was a powerful and firmly built man; but Cecil's
science was the finer and the most masterly. His long, slender delicate
limbs seemed to twine and writhe around the massive form of his
antagonist like the coils of a cobra; they rocked and swayed to and fro
on the stones, while the shrill, shrieking voice of Baroni filled the
night with its clamor. The viselike pressure of the stalwart arms of his
opponent crushed him in till his ribs seemed to bend and break under the
breathless oppression, the iron force; but desperation nerved him, the
Royallieu blood, that never took defeat, was roused now, for the first
time in his careless life; his skill and his nerve were unrivaled,
and with a last effort he dashed the Huissier off him, and lifting him
up--he never knew how--as he would have lifted a log of wood, hurled
him down in the white streak of moonlight that alone slanted through the
peaked roofs of the crooked by-street.
The cries of Baroni had already been heard; a crowd, drawn by their
shrieking appeals, were bearing toward the place in tumult. The Jew had
the quick wit to give them, as call-word, that it was a croupier who
had been found cheating and fled; it sufficed to inflame the whole mob
against the fugitive. Cecil looked round him once--such a glance as a
Royal gives when the gaze-hounds are panting about him and the fangs are
in his throat; then, with the swiftness of the deer itself, he dashed
downward into the gloom of the winding passage at the speed which had
carried him, in many a foot-race, victor in the old green Eton meadows.
There was scarce a man in the Queen's Service who could rival him for
lightness of limb, for power of endurance in every sport of field and
fell, of the moor and the gymnasium; and the athletic pleasures of
many a happy hour stood him in good stead now, in the emergence of his
terrible extremity.
Flight!--for the instant the word thrilled through him with a loathing
sense. Flight!--the craven's refuge, the criminal's resource. He wished
in the moment's agony that they would send a bullet through his brain as
he ran, rather than drive him out to this. Flight!--he felt a coward and
a felon as he fled; fled from every fairer thing, from every peaceful
hour, from the friendship and good will of men, from the fame of his
ancient race, from the smile of the women that loved him, from all that
makes life rich and fair, from all that men call honor; fled, to leave
his name disgraced in the service he adored; fled, to leave the world
to think him a guilty dastard who dared not face his trial; fled, to bid
his closest friend believe him low sunk in the depths of foulest felony,
branded forever with a criminal's shame--by his own act, by his own
hand. Flight!--it has bitter pangs that make brave men feel cowards
when they fly from tyranny and danger and death to a land of peace and
promise; but in his flight he left behind him all that made life worth
the living, and went out to meet eternal misery; renouncing every hope,
yielding up all his future.
“It is for her sake--and his,” he thought; and without a moment's pause,
without a backward look he ran, as the stag runs with the bay of the
pack behind it, down into the shadows of the night.
The hue and cry was after him; the tumult of a crowd's excitement,
raised it knows not why or wherefore, was on his steps, joined with the
steadier and keener pursuit of men organized for the hunter's work, and
trained to follow the faintest track, the slightest clew. The moon was
out, and they saw him clearly, though the marvelous fleetness of his
stride had borne him far ahead in the few moments' start he had gained.
He heard the beat of their many feet on the stones, the dull thud of
their running, the loud clamor of the mob, the shrill cries of the
Hebrew offering gold with frantic lavishness to whoever should stop
his prey. All the breathless excitation, all the keen and desperate
straining, all the tension of the neck-and-neck struggle that he had
known so often over the brown autumn country of the Shires at home, he
knew now, intensified to horror, made deadly with despair, changed into
a race for life and death.
Yet, with it the wild blood in him woke; the recklessness of peril,
the daring and defiant courage that lay beneath his levity and languor
heated his veins and spurred his strength; he was ready to die if they
chose to slaughter him; but for his freedom he strove as men will strive
for life; to distance them, to escape them, he would have breathed his
last at the goal; they might fire him down, if they would, but he swore
in his teeth to die free.
Some Germans in his path, hearing the shouts that thundered after him
in the night, drew their mule-cart across the pent-up passage-way down
which he turned, and blocked the narrow road. He saw it in time; a
second later, and it would have been instant death to him at the pace he
went; he saw it, and gathered all the force and nervous impetus in his
frame to the trial, as he came rushing downward along the slope of the
lane, with his elbows back, and his body straight, as prize-runners run.
The wagon, sideways, stretched across--a solid barrier, heaped up with
fir boughs brought for firing from the forests; the mules stood abreast,
yoked together. The mob following saw too, and gave a hoot and yell of
brutal triumph; their prey was in their clutches; the cart barred his
progress, and he must double like a fox faced with a stone wall.
Scarcely!--they did not know the man with whom they had to deal--the
daring and the coolness that the languid surface of indolent fashion had
covered. Even in the imminence of supreme peril, of breathless jeopardy,
he measured with unerring eye the distance and the need; rose as lightly
in the air as Forest King had risen with him over fence and hedge; and
with a single, running leap cleared the width of the mules' backs, and
landing safely on the farther side, dashed on; scarcely pausing for
breath. The yell that hissed in his wake, as the throng saw him escape,
by what to their slow Teutonic instincts seemed a devil's miracle, was
on his ear like the bay of the slot-hounds to the deer. They might kill
him, if they could; but they should never take him captive.
And the moon was so brightly, so pitilessly clear; shining down in the
summer light, as though in love with the beauty of earth! He looked up
once; the stars seemed reeling round him in disordered riot; the chill
face of the moon looked unpitying as death. All this loveliness was
round him; this glory of sailing cloud and shadowy forest and tranquil
planet, and there was no help for him.
A gay burst of music broke on the stillness from the distance; he
had left the brilliance of the town behind him, and was now in its
by-streets and outskirts. The sound seemed to thrill him to the bone; it
was like the echo of the lost life he was leaving forever.
He saw, he felt, he heard, he thought; feeling and sense were quickened
in him as they had never been before, yet he never slackened his pace
save once or twice, when he paused for breath; he ran as swiftly, he ran
as keenly, as ever stag or fox had run before him; doubling with their
skill, taking the shadow as they took the covert; noting with their
rapid eye the safest track; outracing with their rapid speed the pursuit
that thundered in his wake.
The by-lanes he took were deserted, and he was now well-nigh out of the
town, with the open country and forest lying before him. The people whom
he met rushed out of his path; happily for him they were few, and were
terrified, because they thought him a madman broken loose from his
keepers. He never looked back; but he could tell that the pursuit was
falling farther and farther behind him, that the speed at which he went
was breaking the powers of his hunters; fresh throngs added indeed to
the first pursuers as they tore down through the starlight night, but
none had the science with which he went, the trained, matchless skill
of the university foot-race. He left them more and more behind him each
second of the breathless chase, that, endless as it seemed, had lasted
bare three minutes. If the night were but dark! He felt that pitiless
luminance glistening bright about him everywhere; shining over all the
summer world, and leaving scarce a shadow to fall athwart his way. The
silver glory of the radiance was shed on every rood of ground; one hour
of a winter night, one hour of the sweeping ink-black rain of an autumn
storm, and he could have made for shelter as the stag makes for it
across the broad, brown Highland water.
Before him stretched indeed the gloom of the masses of pine, the upward
slopes of tree-stocked hills, the vastness of the Black Forest; but they
were like the mirage to a man who dies in a desert; he knew, at the pace
he went, he could not live to reach them. The blood was beating in his
brain and pumping from his heart; a tightness like an iron band seemed
girt about his loins, his lips began to draw his breath in with
loud gasping spasms; he knew that in a little space his speed must
slacken--he knew it by the roar, like the noise of water, that was
rushing on his ear, and the oppression, like a hand's hard grip, that
seemed above his heart.
But he would go till he died; go till they fired on him; go, though the
skies felt swirling round like a sea of fire, and the hard, hot earth
beneath his feet jarred his whole frame as his feet struck it flying.
The angle of an old wood house, with towering roof and high-peaked
gables, threw a depth of shadow at last across his road; a shadow black
and rayless, darker for the white glisten of the moon around. Built more
in the Swiss than the German style, a massive balcony of wood ran round
it, upon and beneath which in its heavy shade was an impenetrable gloom,
while the twisted wooden pillars ran upward to the gallery, loggia-like.
With rapid perception and intuition he divined rather than saw these
things, and, swinging himself up with noiseless lightness, he threw
himself full-length down on the rough flooring of the balcony. If
they passed he was safe, for a brief time more at least; if they found
him--his teeth clinched like a mastiff's where he lay--he had the
strength in him still to sell his life dearly.
The pursuers came closer and closer, and by the clamors that floated up
in indistinct and broken fragments, he knew that they had tracked him.
He heard the tramp of their feet as they came under the loggia; he
heard the click of the pistols--they were close upon him at last in the
blackness of night.