already. For she knows them, of course. They are the Bukatys. Of course,
you know the history of the Bukatys of Warsaw.”
“I know the history of Poland,” answered Cartoner, looking straight in
front of him with reflective eyes. He had an odd way of carrying his
head a little bent forward, as if he bore behind his heavy forehead
a burden of memories and knowledge of which his brain was always
conscious--as a man may stand in the centre of a great library, and
become suddenly aware that he has more books than he can ever open and
understand.
“Of course you do; you know a host of things. And you know more history
that was ever written in books. You know more than I do, and Heaven
knows that I know a great deal. For you are a reader, and I never look
into a book. I know the surface of things. The Bukatys are in London. I
give you that--to put in your pipe and smoke. Father and son. It is
not for them that I seek Lady Orlay's help. They must take care of
themselves--though they will not do that. It does not run in the family,
as you know, who read history books.”
“Yes, I know,” said Cartoner, pausing before crossing to the corner
of St. James's Street, in the manner of a man whose life had not been
passed in London streets. For it must be remembered that English traffic
is different to the traffic of any other streets in the world.
“There is a girl,” pursued the Frenchman. “Families like the Bukatys
should kill their girls in infancy. Not that Wanda knows it; she is
as gay as a bird, and quite devoted to her father, who is an old
ruffian--and my very dear friend.”
“And what do you want Lady Orlay to do for Princess Wanda?” inquired
Cartoner, with a smile. It was always a marvel to him that Paul Deulin
should have travelled so far down the road of life without losing his
enthusiasm somewhere by the way.
“That I leave to Lady Orlay,” replied Deulin, with an airy wave of his
neat umbrella, which imperilled the eyesight of a passing baker-boy, who
abused him. Whereupon Deulin turned and took off his hat and apologized.
“Yes,” he said, ignoring the incident, “I would not presume to dictate.
All I should do would be to present Wanda to her. 'Here is a girl who
has the misfortune to be a Bukaty; who has no mother; who has a father
who is a plotter and an old ruffian--a Polish noble, in fact--and a
brother who is an enthusiast, and as brave as only a prince can be.' I
should say, 'You see that circumstances have thrown this girl upon the
world, practically alone--on the hard, hard upper-class world--with only
one heart to break. It is only men who have a whole row of hearts on a
shelf, and, when one is broken, they take down another, made, perhaps,
of ambition, or sport, or the love of a different sort of woman--and,
vogue la galere, they go on just as well as they did before.'”
“And my accomplished aunt . . .” suggested Cartoner.
“Would laugh at me, I know that. I would rather have Lady Orlay's laugh
than another woman's tears. And so would you; for you are a man of
common-sense, though deadly dull in conversation.”
As if to prove the truth of this assertion, Deulin was himself silent
until they had ascended St. James's Street and turned to the left in
Piccadilly; and, sure enough, Cartoner had nothing to say. At last
he broke the silence, and made it evident that he had been placidly
following the stream of his own thoughts.
“Who is Joseph P. Mangles?” he asked, in his semi-inaudible monotone.
“An American gentleman--the word is applicable in its best sense--who
for his sins, or the sins of his forefathers, has been visited with the
most terrible sister a man ever had.”
“So much I know.”
Deulin turned and looked at his companion.
“Then you have met him--that puts another complexion on your question.”
“I have just crossed the Atlantic in the next chair to him.”
“And that is all you know about him?”
Cartoner nodded.
“Then Joseph P. Mangles is getting on.”
“What is he?” repeated Cartoner.
“He is in the service of his country, my friend, like any other poor
devil--like you or me, for instance. He spends half of his time kicking
his heels in New York, or wherever they kick their heels in America.
The rest of his time he is risking his health, or possibly his neck,
wherever it may please the fates to send him. If he had been properly
trained, he might have done something, that Joseph P. Mangles; for he
can hold his tongue. But he took to it late, as they all do in America.
So he has come across, has he? Yes, the storm-birds are congregating, my
silent friend. There is something in the wind.”
Deulin raised his long, thin nose into the dusty May air and sniffed it.
“Was that girl with them?” he inquired presently--“Miss Netty Cahere?”
“Yes.”
“I always make love to Miss Cahere--she likes it best.”
Cartoner stared straight in front of him, and made no comment. The
Frenchman gave a laugh, which was not entirely pleasant. It was rare
that his laugh was harsh, but such a note rang in it now. They did not
speak again until they had walked some distance northward of Piccadilly,
and stopped before a house with white window-boxes. Several carriages
stood at the other side of the road against the square railings.
“Is it her day?” inquired Deulin.
“Yes.”
Deulin made a grimace expressive of annoyance.
“And we shall see a number of people we had better not see. But, since
we are here, let us go in--with a smile on the countenance, eh? my brave
Cartoner.”
“And a lie on the tongue.”
“There I will meet you, too,” replied Deulin, looking into his
card-case.
They entered the house, and, as Deulin had predicted, there found a
number of people assembled, who noted, no doubt, that they had come
together. It was observable that this was not a congregation of
fashionable or artistic people; for the women were dressed quietly, and
the men were mostly old and white-haired. It was also dimly perceptible
that there was a larger proportion of brain in the room than is allotted
to the merely fashionable, or to that shallow mixture of the dramatic
and pictorial, which is usually designated the artistic world. Moreover,
scraps of conversation reached the ear that led the hearer to conclude
that the house was in its way a miniature Babel.
The two men separated on the threshold, and Deulin went forward to shake
hands with a tall, white-haired woman, who was the centre of a vivacious
group. Over the heads of her guests this lady had already perceived
Cartoner, who was making his way more slowly through the crowd. He
seemed to have more friends there than Deulin. Lady Orlay at length
went to meet Cartoner, and as they shook hands, one of those slight and
indefinable family resemblances which start up at odd moments became
visible.
“I want you particularly to-morrow night,” said the lady; “I have some
people coming. I will send a card to your club this evening.”
And she turned to say good-bye to a departing guest. Deulin was at
Cartoner's elbow again.
“Here,” he said, taking him by the sleeve and speaking in his own
tongue, “I wish to present you to friends of mine. Prince Pierre
Bukaty,” he added, stopping in front of a tall, old man, with bushy,
white hair, and the air of a mediaeval chieftain, “allow me to present
my old friend Cartoner.”
The two men shook hands without other greeting than a formal bow. Deulin
still held Cartoner by the sleeve, and gently compelled him to turn
towards a girl who was looking round with bright and eager eyes. She had
a manner full of energy and spirit, and might have been an English girl
of open air and active tastes.
“Princess Wanda,” said the Frenchman, “my friend Mr. Cartoner.”
The eager eyes came round to Cartoner's face, of which the gravity
seemed suddenly reflected in them.
“He is the best linguist in Europe,” said Deulin, in a gay whisper;
“even Polish; he speaks with the tongue of men and of angels.”
And he himself spoke in Polish.
Princess Wanda met Cartoner's serious eyes again, and in that place,
where human fates are written, another page of those inscrutable books
was folded over.
V
AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE
Prince Bukaty was an affable old man, with a love of good wine and a
perfect appreciation of the humorous. Had he been an Englishman, he
would have been an honest squire of the old Tory type, now fast fading
before facilities for foreign travel and a cheap local railway service.
But he was a Pole, and the fine old hatred which should have been
bestowed upon the Radicals fell to the lot of the Russians, and the
contempt hurled by his British prototype upon Dissent was cast upon
Commerce as represented in Poland by the thrifty German _emigre_.
The prince carried his bluff head with that air which almost invariably
bespeaks a stormy youth, and looked out over mankind from his great
height as over a fine standing crop of wild oats. As a matter of fact,
he had grown to manhood in the years immediately preceding those wild
early sixties, when all Europe was at loggerheads, and Poland seething
in its midst, as lava seethes in the crater of a volcano.
The prince had been to England several times. He had friends in London.
Indeed, he possessed them in many parts of the world, and, oddly enough,
he had no enemies. To his credit be it noted that he was not an exile,
which is usually another name for a scoundrel. For he who has no abiding
city generally considers himself exempt from the duties of citizenship.
“They do not take me seriously,” he said to his intimate friends; “they
do not honor me by recognizing me as a dangerous person; but we shall
see.”
And the Prince Bukaty was thus allowed to go where he listed, and live
in Warsaw if he so desired. Perhaps the secret of this lay in the fact
that he was poor; for a poor man has few adherents. In the olden times,
when the Bukatys had been rich, there were many professing readiness to
follow him to the death--which is the way of the world. “You have but to
hold up your hand,” cries the faithful follower. But wise men know
that the hand must have something in it. The prince had been young and
impressionable when Poland was torn to pieces, when that which for eight
centuries had been one of the important kingdoms of the world was wiped
off the face of Europe, like writing off a slate. He was not a ruffian,
as Deulin had described him; but he was a man who had been ruffled, and
nothing could ever smooth him.
He was too frank by nature to play a hopeless game with the cunning and
the savor of spite which hopeless games require. If he liked a man, he
said so; if he disliked one, he was equally frank about it. He liked
Cartoner on the briefest of brief introductions, and said so.
“It is difficult to find a man in London who speaks anything but
English, and of anything but English topics. You are the narrowest
people in the world--you Londoners. But you are no Londoner; I beg your
pardon. Well, then, come and see me to-morrow. We are in a hotel in
Kensington--will you come? That is the address.”
And he held out a card with a small gold crown emblazoned in the corner,
after the mode of eastern Europe. Cartoner reflected for a moment, which
was odd in a man whose decisions were usually arrived at with lightning
speed. For he had a slow tongue and a quick brain. There are few better
equipments with which to face the world.
“Yes,” he said at length; “it will give me much pleasure.”
The prince glanced at him curiously beneath his bushy eyebrows. What was
there to need reflection in such a small question?
“At five o'clock,” he said. “We can give you a cup of the poisonous tea
you drink in this country.”
And he went away laughing heartily at the small witticism. People whose
lives are anything but a joke are usually content with the smallest
jests.
It was scarcely five o'clock the next day when Cartoner was conducted by
a page-boy to the Bukatys' rooms in the quiet old hotel in Kensington.
The Princess Wanda was alone. She was dressed in black. There is in some
Varsovian families a heritage of mourning to be worn until Poland is
reinstated. She was slightly but strongly made. Like her father and her
brother, there was a suggestion of endurance in her being, such as is
often found in slightly made persons.
“I came as early as I could,” said Cartoner, and, as he spoke, the clock
struck.
The princess smiled as she shook hands, and then perceived that she had
not been intended to show amusement. Cartoner had merely made a rather
naïve statement in his low monotone. She thought him a little odd, and
glanced at him again. She changed color slightly as she turned towards a
chair. He was quite grave and honest.
“That is kind of you,” she said, speaking English without the least
suspicion of accent; for she had had an English governess all her life.
“My father will take it to mean that you wanted to come, and are not
only taking pity on lonely foreigners. He will be here in a minute. He
has just been called away.”
“It was very kind of him to ask me to call,” replied Cartoner.
There was a simple directness in his manner of speech which was quite
new to the Princess Wanda. She had known few Englishmen, and her own
countrymen had mostly the manners of the French. She had never met a
man who conveyed the impression of purpose and of the habit of going
straight towards his purpose so clearly as this. Cartoner had not come
to pay an idle visit. She wondered why he had come. He did not rush into
conversation, and yet his silence had no sense of embarrassment in it.
His hair was turning gray above the temples. She could see this as
he took a chair near the window. He was probably ten years older than
herself, and gave the impression of experience and of a deep knowledge
of the world. From living much alone he had acquired the habit of
wondering whether it was worth while to say that which came into his
mind--which is a habit fatal to social success.
“Monsieur Deulin dined with us last night,” said the princess, following
the usual instinct that silence between strangers is intolerable. “He
talked a great deal of you.”
“Ah, Deulin is a diplomatist. He talks too much.”
“He accuses you of talking too little,” said Wanda, with some spirit.
“You see, there are only two methods of leaving things unsaid,
princess.”
“Which is diplomacy?” she suggested.
“Which is diplomacy.”
“Then I think you are both great artists,” she said, with a laugh, as
the door opened and her father entered the room.
“I only come to ask you a question--a word,” said the prince. “Heavens!
your English language! I have a man down-stairs--a question of
business--and he speaks the oddest English. Now what is the meaning of
the word jettison?”
Cartoner gave him the word in French.
“Ah!” cried the prince, holding up his two powerful hands, “of course.
How foolish of me not to guess. In a moment I will return. You will
excuse me, will you not? Wanda will give you some tea.”
And he hurried out of the room, leaving Cartoner to wonder what a person
so far removed above commerce could have to do with the word jettison.
The conversation returned to Deulin. He was a man of whom people spoke
continually, and had spoken for years. In fact, two generations had
found him a fruitful topic of conversation without increasing their
knowledge of him. If he had only been that which is called a public
man, a novelist or a singer, his fortune would have been easy. All his
advertising would have been done for him by others. For there was in him
that unknown quantity which the world must needs think magnificent.
“I want you to tell me all you know about him,” said the princess in her
brisk way. “He is the only old man I have ever seen whose thoughts have
not grown old too. And, of course, one wonders why. He is the sort
of person who might do anything surprising. He might fall in love
and marry, or something like that, you know. Papa says he is married
already, and his wife is in a mad asylum. He says there is a tragedy.
But I don't. He has no wife--unless he has two.”
“I know nothing of that side of his life. I only know his career.”
“I do not care about his career,” said the princess, lightly. “I go
deeper than careers.”
She looked at Cartoner with a wise nod and a shrewd look in her gay,
blue eyes.
“A man's career is only the surface of his life.”
“Then some men's lives are all surface,” said Cartoner.
Wanda gave a little, half-pitying, half-contemptuous jerk of her head.
“Some men have the soul of an omnibus-horse,” she replied.
Cartoner reflected for a moment, looking gravely the while at this girl,
who seemed to know so much of life and to have such singularly clear and
decisive views upon it.
“What would you have them do beyond going on when required and stopping
when expedient--and avoiding collisions?” he inquired.
“I should like them to break the omnibus up occasionally,” she answered,
“and take a wrong turning sometimes, just to see if a little happiness
lay that way.”
“Yes,” he laughed. “You are a Pole and a Bukaty. I knew it as soon as I
saw you.”
“One must do something. We were talking of such things last night, and
Monsieur Deulin said that his ideal combination in a man was an infinite
patience and a sudden premeditated recklessness.”
“Now you have come down to a mere career again,” said Cartoner.
“Not necessarily.”
The prince came into the room again at this moment.
“What are you people discussing,” he asked, “so gravely?”
He spoke in French, which was the language that was easiest to him, for
he had been young when it was the fashion in Poland to be French.
“I do not quite know,” answered Cartoner, slowly. “The princess was
giving me her views.”
“I know,” retorted the old man, with his rather hollow laugh. “They are
long views, those views of hers.”
Cartoner was still standing near the window. He turned absently and
looked out, down into the busy street. There he saw something which
caused him intense surprise, though he did not show it; for, like any
man of strong purpose, his face had but one expression, and that of
thoughtful attention. He saw Captain Cable, of the _Minnie_, crossing
the street, having just quitted the hotel. This was the business
acquaintance of Prince Bukaty's, who had come to speak of jettison.
Cartoner knew Captain Cable well, and his specialty in maritime skill.
He had seen war waged before now with material which had passed in and
out of the _Minnie's_ hatches.
The prince did not refer again to the affairs that had called him away.
The talk naturally turned to the house where they had first met, and
Wanda mentioned that her father and she were going to the reception
given by the Orlays that evening.
“You're going, of course?” said the prince.
“Yes, I am going.”
“You go to many such entertainments?”
“No, I go to very few,” replied Cartoner, looking at Wanda in his
speculative way.
Then he suddenly rose and took his leave, with a characteristic omission
of the usual “Well, I must be off,” or any such catch-word. He certainly
left a great deal unsaid which this babbling world expects.
He walked along the crowded streets, absorbed in his own thoughts, for
some distance. Then he suddenly emerged from that quiet shelter, and
accepted the urgent invitation of a hansom-cab driver to get into his
vehicle.
“Westminster Bridge,” he said.
He quitted the cab at the corner of the bridge, and walked quickly down
to the steamboat-landing.
“Where do you want to go to?” inquired the gruff, seafaring
ticket-clerk.
“As far as I can,” was the reply.
A steamer came almost at once, and Cartoner selected a quiet seat over
the rudder. He must have known that the _Minnie_ was so constructed that
she could pass under the bridges, for he began to look for her at once.
It was six o'clock, and a spring tide was running out. All the passenger
traffic was turned to the westward, and a friendly deck-hand, having
leisure, came and gave Cartoner his views upon cricket, in which, as was
natural in one whose life was passed on running water, his whole heart
seemed to be absorbed. Cartoner was friendly, but did not take advantage
of this affability to make inquiries about the _Minnie_. He knew,
perhaps, that there is no more suspicious man on earth than a river-side
worker.
The steamer raced under the bridges, and at last shot out into the
Pool, where a few belated barges were drifting down stream. A number of
steamers lay at anchor, some working cargo, others idle. The majority
were foreigners, odd-shaped vessels, with funnels like a steam
threshing-machine, and gayly painted deck-houses.
In one quiet corner, behind a laid-up excursion-boat and a file of
North Sea fish-carriers, lay the _Minnie_, painted black, with nothing
brighter than a deep brown on her deck-house, her boats painted a
shabby green. She might have been an overgrown tug or a superannuated
fish-carrier.
Cartoner landed at the Cherry Orchard Pier, and soon found a boatman to
take him to the _Minnie_.
“Just took the skipper on board a few minutes ago, sir,” he said. “He
must have come down by the boat before yours.”
A few minutes later Cartoner stood on the deck of the _Minnie_, and
banged with his fist on the cover of the cabin gangway, which was
tantamount to ringing at Captain Cable's front door.
The sailor's grim face appeared a moment later, emerging like the face
of a hermit-crab from its shell. The frown slowly faded, and the deep,
unwashed wrinkles took a kindlier curve.
“It's you, Mr. Cartoner,” he said. “Glad to see you.”
“I was passing in a steamer,” answered Cartoner, quietly, “and
recognized the _Minnie_.”
“I take it friendly of you, Mr. Cartoner, remembering the rum time
you and me had together. Come below. I've got a drop of wine somewhere
stowed away in a locker.”
VI
THE VULTURES
“I suppose,” Miss Mangles was saying--“I suppose, Joseph, that Lady
Orlay has been interested in the work without our knowing it?”
“It is possible, Jooly--it is possible,” replied Mr. Joseph P. Mangles,
looking with a small, bright, speculative eye out of the window of his
private sitting-room in a hotel in Northumberland Avenue.
Miss Mangles was standing behind him, and held in her hand an
invitation-card notifying that Lady Orlay would be at home that same
evening from nine o'clock till midnight.
“This invitation,” said the recipient, “accompanied as it is by a
friendly note explaining that the shortness of the invitation lies in
the fact that we only arrived the day before yesterday, seems to point
to it, Joseph. It seems to indicate that England is prepared to give me
a welcome.”
“On the face of it, Jooly, it would seem--just that.”
Mr. Mangles continued to gaze with a speculative eye into Northumberland
Avenue. If, as Cartoner had suggested, the profession of which Mr.
Joseph P. Mangles was a tardy ornament, needed above all things a
capacity for leaving things unsaid, the American diplomatist was
not ignorant in his art. For he did not inform his sister that the
invitation to which she attached so flattering a national importance
owed its origin to an accidental encounter between himself and Lord
Orlay--a friend of his early senatorial days--in Pall Mall the day
before.
Miss Mangles stood with the card in her hand and reflected. No woman and
few men would need to be told, moreover, the subject of her thoughts.
Of what, indeed, does every woman think the moment she receives an
invitation?
“Jooly,” Mr. Mangles had been heard to say behind that lady's
back--“Jooly is an impressive dresser when she tries.”
But the truth is that Jooly did not always try. She had not tried this
morning, but stood in the conventional hotel room dressed in a black
cloth garment which had pleats down the front and back and a belt like a
Norfolk jacket. Miss Mangles was large and square-shouldered. She was a
rhomboid, in fact, and had that depressing square-and-flat waist which
so often figures on the platform in a great cause. Her hair was black
and shiny and straight; it was drawn back from her rounded temples by
hydraulic pressure. Her mouth was large and rather loose; it had grown
baggy by much speaking on public platforms--a fearsome thing in a woman.
Her face was large and round and white. Her eyes were dull. Long
ago there must have been depressing moments in the life of Julia P.
Mangles--moments spent in front of her mirror. But, like the woman
of spirit that she was, she had determined that, if she could not be
beautiful, she could at all events be great.
One self-deception leads to another. Miss Mangles sat down and accepted
Lady Orlay's invitation in the full and perfect conviction that she owed
it to her greatness.