The Prophet's Mantle

It was a long time since anyone had thought it worth while to talk so much to Alice, and she felt so interested, and withal so comfortable, that it never occurred to her that this interlude of warmth and companionship must soon be over, and that then she would have to face the desolate streets and that cheerless room. Of seeking again the chill refuge from which her new acquaintance had saved her she certainly never thought. That madness was over.

Her black-bearded preserver was in the midst of an economic dissertation of a somewhat confused character on the reasons of hard times and bad wages, when a black shadow falling on a moonlit slab of stone close by them made them both look up.

'Why, if it isn't Mr Peter Hitch,' said the pavior. 'So you're out again, sir? Chilly night, ain't it? Come and have a warm. This young woman's had a warm, and she feels better for it, I'll be bound.'

The new-comer sat down on some boards near the fire with a graceful salutation towards Alice.

'It is cold,' he said, with a distinctly foreign accent. 'You are the lucky one, Mr Toomey, with your warm fire.'

Alice glanced furtively at the stranger. He was tall, and was not dressed as she would have expected Mr Toomey's friends to be. He wore a grey military cloak with a high collar, and a large soft felt hat. The brim was turned up in a rather unusual way in front, and leaving exposed as it did a broad, well-shaped forehead and piercing grey eyes, gave to the whole face a bold and daring look. He did not seem to look at Alice at all, and yet he had hardly been seated a minute before he turned to her and said,—

'Forgive me, but I feel as if you were a sort of acquaintance already. I sat just behind you at a lecture in Soho last night. I am not mistaken—you were there, weren't you?'

The introduction of a third person to the enjoyment of the fire and shelter had brought back to Alice the full consciousness of her position, but the new-comer spoke to her so deferentially, and treated her so exactly as if they had met in quite an ordinary way, and there were nothing unusual in the situation, that she felt herself grow a little more at ease again as she answered, 'Yes; I was there.'

'Why, I'm blest if I wasn't there, too,' broke in Toomey, 'and a rare good 'un he was as spoke. Countryman o' yours too, eh, Mr Peter Hitch? By the way,' he added, as the other nodded assent, 'I was wanting to have a word or two with you, if miss here will excuse us. It's on the subject as you knows on,' he explained, seeing the other's look of surprise, and embellishing his speech by sundry winks, to which his visual peculiarities imparted an unusually enigmatical character.

The two men stepped a few paces away, and then Toomey said,—

'I say, mister, I'm in rather a tight place, and perhaps you can tell me a way out of it. That there young woman' (here he lowered his voice) 'would have been down somewhere off Greenwich by this time if it hadn't been for me—the tide was just on the turn. I stopped her going over, and now I feel responsible, like. I did think of taking her home to the missus, but my Mary Jane, though she have the kindest heart, has a sharp tongue, and I don't know quite how she might take it, nor what she might say in the first surprise, like, before she could be got to listen to reason, and that pore young thing's in trouble enough, I know, without being jawed at, and I can't abide jaw myself neither. And yet I don't like to lose sight of her just yet, and what am I to do?'

'I will charge myself with her,' said the other, without the slightest hesitation. 'You can trust her to me, friend Toomey, can you not?'

'I'd trust you with anything, sir,' said Toomey.

The other went straight back to the fire where Alice sat, already deep again in her own bitter thoughts.

'I am going home now, and as I go I will see you to your house. Come.'

She rose at once, and held out her hand to Mr Toomey.

'Thank you so much,' she said, 'for all your goodness. Good-bye.'

'Good-bye,' said Toomey, shaking her hand vigorously. 'This gentleman will take good care of you.'

'Take my arm,' said her escort, when they got on to the pavement. 'As you go to the Agora, I suppose we are interested in the same subjects, and perhaps know some of the same people. Do many of your friends go there?'

'I don't know anyone who goes there. I've never been there before myself.'

'Did you go by chance?'

'No.' She hesitated a moment. 'I wanted to hear the lecture.'

'Then we do take an interest in the same subjects. Which way do you go?' he asked, as they reached Ludgate Circus.

'Straight on; I am living near Gray's Inn Road.'

'Are you living with friends?'

'No, I am living alone.'

'Are your parents living?'

'Yes,' she answered. 'Oh, yes.'

From anyone else she could and would have resented such questioning, but there was something about this man that compelled her to answer him.

'Were they unkind to you?'

'No, no!' cried Alice. 'They have always been the best of the best to me.'

'Kind parents living,' he said musingly, 'and you are not with them. Our good friend yonder told me how he met you. Tell me—what does it all mean? It will be to your good to tell me.'

'What do you want to know?'

'Everything.' He laid his hand on the hand that was on his arm. 'I know you will tell me.'

And very much to her own bewilderment, she found herself telling him, not all, but enough for him to be able easily enough to guess all. She laid most stress upon the sense of desolation which had come over her in her new lodgings, and on the resistless impulse that had driven her out into the streets. When once she had begun to speak, she found a quite unexpected relief in the telling of this story which had never passed her lips before.

'It is the loneliness I mind now,' she ended; 'not the work, though that is hard enough.'

'The greater part of life is hard,' said her companion, 'and the best thing in it for some of us is to be able to make the lives of others a little less hard. I think it possible I may be able to make your life somewhat easier for you. At any rate I think I could manage to get you work which would be better paid for than your tailors' sewing.'

'Thank you,' was all Alice said. 'You are very kind.'

'I shall do that for you with much pleasure, but in return you must do something for me. I cannot part from you until you have promised me never again to attempt what you were prevented in to-night.'

'I cannot promise never to do it. All I can say is, I do not mean to now.'

'At any rate, promise that you will do nothing till you have seen me again.'

'Yes, I will promise that. I wonder whether the house door will be unlocked. We are close there now. If it is not, I must walk about till morning.'

'I must walk with you in that case, so we will see before I leave you whether it is or not.'

She looked at him, and for the first time realised that her companion was not of her own class.

'No; don't come further than here. I only came here to-day, you know, and I must not be seen walking with a—a—gentleman.'

'Am I a gentleman? I am afraid all your countrymen would not give me that title; men call me a Socialist. Ho-la—you've heard that name before? Does it frighten you?'

'No, I am not frightened.'

'I will wait here,' he said, 'till I see if your house receives you. If not, come back to me, and we will walk together till it can. I will come and see you to-morrow—or rather this—evening, and I hope to bring good news. Do not be down-hearted; things will look brighter this time to-morrow.'

'Oh, I must not forget to ask your name. Did Mr Toomey call you right?'

'Ah, no,' he said, smiling; 'our good Toomey is not a linguist. My name is Petrovitch. What is yours? I must know that, because of asking for you when I come. I will come in the evening.'

'My name is—Mrs—Mrs Litvinoff. Good-bye.'

'Good-bye,' he said, with a start and quite a new expression on his face. 'I will come at noon.'

CHAPTER XI.

COUNT LITVINOFF IS SYMPATHETIC

AT the moment when Mrs Fludger's sense of propriety was being outraged by what she termed, in a subsequent recital of her wrongs to her first-floor front, 'that shindy on the stairs,' Miss Stanley was lying on the sofa in the sitting-room at Morley's Hotel, reading the novel that had taken the last season by storm, and pushed everything else out of sight on the bookstalls. But even the thrilling interest of this work did not keep her from falling fast asleep in the middle of the fourth chapter; and she passed the next half hour in a dreamland more pleasant than Morley's Hotel; for that hostelry, especially when her father was, as usual, in the City, seemed to her to be deadly dull. She had just come back to the world of solid furniture and characterless window curtains; her first waking thought was that some tea would be worth anything to her just then—except the trouble of getting up to ring for it—and she wished dreamily that waiters could know by intuition when they were wanted. It almost seemed as if they did, for a tap came at the door, and she had to stop her reflections to say,—

'Come in.'

'Mr Richard Ferrier,' said the waiter who appeared. 'Are you at home, ma'am?'

'Oh, yes; show him up,' she said; and to herself, wonderingly, 'How funny of him to come at this time.' Then, as he entered, 'Good afternoon, Mr Ferrier. What a dreadful day! Papa has not come home yet.'

'I am very sorry to say,' said Richard, as he took her offered hand, 'that I shall not be able to come this evening.'

'Oh, I'm so sorry!' she said, cheerfully. 'I hope there's nothing wrong. Can't your brother come, either?'

'I don't know, Miss Stanley,' he answered, leaning one arm on the mantelpiece, and looking down, but not at her, though she had seated herself in a low chair near the fire, and was quite within easy visual range. 'I am not likely to know much more about my brother.'

'Not know much more about your brother, Mr Richard?' she said, opening her eyes very wide. 'What can you mean? Surely you haven't quarrelled?'

'I suppose we have quarrelled. At anyrate, my brother told me half an hour ago never to speak to him again on this side of the grave.'

Clare felt that this promised to be several degrees more interesting even than her book. She couldn't help wondering what they had quarrelled about. Was it perhaps—

'What did you say to him?'

'I said nothing—he went away, and I came here.' He spoke in that particularly even and monotonous voice which, with some people, is always the token of suppressed agitation.

'I mean what had you said to make him say that?'

'I told him the truth.'

'But perhaps you said the truth too sharply, and, besides, you ought to make it up with him—especially as you're the eldest. It's so terrible for brothers to quarrel.' She ended with a little didactic air which became her very well.

'I am afraid this is one of the quarrels that can't be made up. I can't alter facts; neither can he, unfortunately.'

'Is it so very serious?' she asked. 'Oh—papa will be so sorry. But you'll feel differently when you have had time to think it over.'

'Circumstances don't change by being thought over.'

'No, but our view of them does.'

'Well, I can say this, Miss Stanley; if ever I could change my opinion of my brother's conduct I should be only too glad, and I should be the first to make advances towards reconciliation.'

'Why, surely, Mr Roland's done nothing wrong?'

'You may be sure he has, in my opinion at least, or I should not have spoken to him as I did; knowing, too, all that it involved,' he added in a lower voice.

'Oh, yes,' said Clare in quite an awestruck tone—all that her father had told her about old Mr Ferrier's will coming into her mind with a rush. 'Why, I had forgotten that.'

'Yes,' said Richard, looking straight at her for the first time that afternoon, 'I shall lose my living, and more, the hope of my life; but at anyrate, thank God, I keep my honour, and he has lost even that.'

Clare returned his gaze steadily.

'You have no right to say that, unless you are quite, quite, quite sure,' she said rather haughtily.

She had no motive for that little speech, save a natural love for fair play, but he read in it a desire to champion his brother against his attack, and he was goaded to the point of indiscretion.

'I am so sure,' he answered bitterly, 'that sooner than touch hands in friendship with him again, I am giving up all my chances in life, and with them the hope of winning you. Don't say anything,' he went on, seeing that she was about to speak. 'I had no right to say that. I did not mean to annoy you with any hint of my vain devotion, but I couldn't help saying it. Consider it unsaid if you like, but don't be vexed with me. There is one thing I must ask you. I should be untrue to my love for you if I did not ask it. Do not let my brother win what his fault forbids me to try for.'

She rose.

'I have given you no right to talk in that way, nor to ask me any such promise, and I will promise nothing since I know nothing,' she said, indignantly.

'Then at least it shall not be my fault,' said Richard with equal fire, 'if you do not know what every woman he comes near ought to know. He is not free to offer love to any woman. He owes all the love he is capable of to a woman he has ruined and deserted.'

Miss Stanley looked at him coldly and contemptuously. He stood silent a moment, and in that moment felt the utter falseness of the step he had taken. She turned slightly away from him, and he knew that there were no more words to be said on either side.

'Good-bye,' he said; 'I shall not be at all likely to trouble you again.'

'Good afternoon,' she said, without moving; and he went out. Now, indeed, everything was over.

Clare, left to herself, sank down again in her low chair, and knitted her brows in annoyed meditation. Quarrels, separations, and crushing impertinent people with 'dynamic glances' were all very well in novels, but in real life it was much nicer to have things go smoothly. She could not quite foresee all the complications that this quarrel might lead to, but she knew that it would make a great difference at Firth Vale. Aspinshaw would be duller than ever. Would Roland come this evening? Could what Dick had said be true? If it was, she thought, he had no right to say it to her; and it was mean of him to say it to anyone behind his brother's back. Count Litvinoff would be sure to come, at anyrate. 'Let's hope he'll be entertaining,' she said to herself.

When a woman is bored, or tired, or vexed, or perplexed, or worried, after a quarrel, or before a journey, there is one resource to which she always flies. Miss Stanley rang for tea.

The waiter who announced Mr Ferrier had quite settled in his own mind that in so doing he was ushering in one of the chief characters in a love scene, but when he caught sight of the young man's face as he came from Miss Stanley's presence, he decided that the scene in which Mr Ferrier had just played his part, had not had much love-sweetness about it, at anyrate. Count Litvinoff, coming up the stairs a moment afterwards, met Dick going down, and thought so too.

'Ah! Mr Ferrier,' he said genially; 'we are to be fellow guests to-night, I believe.'

'I think not,' said Dick, shaking hands; 'I shall not be able to come.'

Litvinoff's face fell, and he looked quite naturally grieved.

'How unfortunate,' he said.

'I say,' said Richard, after a minute's pause, 'were you in a place called Spray's Buildings, a turning out of Porson Street, about an hour ago? You'll think it strange of me to ask, but I have a particular reason for wanting to know.'

'Porson Street—Porson Street. I've heard the name somewhere, but I certainly haven't been there this afternoon.'

The Court of St Petersburg had evidently missed a good diplomatist in Count Michael Litvinoff. The lie was admirably told.

'No,' said Richard, 'I didn't suppose you had, but I thought I'd just set my mind at rest about it.'

'May I ask,' said Litvinoff, leaning on the banisters and idly swinging his eyeglass by the guard, 'why your mind was disturbed concerning my incomings and outgoings?'

'You are quite right. It is no business of mine; but I asked, in order to verify or disprove a statement of my brother's.'

'So your brother, at anyrate, honours me with his interest, does he?'

'You'd better ask him—good afternoon.'

'A sweet disposition that,' observed Litvinoff, when, having watched the other out of sight, he turned towards his room. 'They ought to teach politeness at Cambridge, and put it down among the extras. By the way, there may be something to be got out of our brother. Things are getting too mixed to be pleasant. Wonder whether he'll turn up to-night?'

He did turn up, in such a state of depression as to promise to be a thorough wet blanket on all the fires of social gaiety. In fact, none of the little party which assembled round Mr Stanley's dinner-table were in a state of mind to make them what is called good company. Roland was thoroughly unhinged by the events of the afternoon, which to him had been so utterly unexpected, and were so completely unexplained. It needed a determined effort on his part to listen to Mr Stanley's commonplaces instead of thinking out some means of compassing a reconciliation with his brother. He felt sure that their quarrel hinged on a mistake, but what that mistake was, or what its subject was, he was at a loss to conjecture.

Clare was listless and distraite. She was intensely annoyed by the remembrance of that little episode with Richard, and, though she told herself that she did not believe a word he had said, she found it hard to forget it and to treat Roland as usual. She had not had a chance of telling her father anything about Richard, for Litvinoff had been punctual, and Mr Stanley had come back from the City late, and cross as well as late; and the old gentleman's continued references to the absentee, and his regrets for the 'sudden business' which had prevented him from being present, made matters several degrees more uncomfortable than they would otherwise have been.

Litvinoff had his own reasons for not feeling very joyous on this occasion, but he had not had three years of wandering in exile among all sorts and conditions of men for nothing, and he was able to put his own personal feelings on one side, and to do what was exacted by the proprieties. No one could have told from his manner that he had a care in the world. More than this, he succeeded after a while in inspiring the others with some of his own powers of self-repression; and though they did not perhaps feel more festive, they made a successful effort to seem so, in order to be not out of harmony with what seemed to them to be his gaiety and light-heartedness.

During the earlier part of the evening he devoted himself entirely to Mr Stanley, a real act of self-abnegation in any young man, when Mr Stanley's daughter was in the room. But Mr Stanley was interested in the financial condition of United States railways, and Count Litvinoff—odd thing in an exile—knew absolutely everything that was to be known about the financial condition of United States railways, and, what was better, he had a friend who knew even more than that, and whose knowledge was quite at Mr Stanley's service. If during the long conference on these entrancing topics he cast occasional glances across the room to where Clare and young Ferrier sat talking, they were certainly not envious ones, for 'the gentle Roland' did not seem to be having a good time of it. Litvinoff took pity on him presently, and came to the rescue.

'Are we to have no music, Miss Stanley?' he asked, when the subject of the financial condition of the United States railways was exhausted for the time being, and his host showed decided symptoms of a desire to descant on the beauties of 'our great Conservative institutions, sir,' and 'the glorious Constitution which,' etc.

Miss Stanley felt that singing to three people would be better than talking to one, and in the intervals between the songs that followed she and Litvinoff seemed to conspire to keep the conversation general.

'Penny Napoleon,' so often a refuge of the bored and the uncongenial, helped the long evening to its end, and though the last state of it was better than the first, everyone was glad to say good-night to everyone else.

The two young men, by the way, did not say good-night to each other when they left the Stanleys.

'Come and have a cigar,' said Litvinoff, precisely as he had done on the last occasion of their meeting there. And Roland, nothing loth to defer the moment of being alone again with his own perplexities, consented.

But even in the Count's comfortable little sitting-room his perplexities pursued him, and in more objectionable shape, too. For the first words his companion uttered, after he had supplied his guest with one of his special cigars and a tumbler of something unexceptionable, with lemon, hot, were—

'Your brother tells me you're taking an interest in my movements, Mr Ferrier.'

'How do you mean?'

'I had the felicity to meet him to-day, and he asked me—rather bluntly, perhaps—if I had been this afternoon in some street, the name of which escapes me at the moment—Morford Street, was it? I told him no, and begged to know the reason of his question. He then said he wished to verify (I think those were his exact words) a statement of yours. I asked him, did you take an interest in my movements? He then said, in a manner tant soit peu abrupt, 'You'd better ask him,' and vanished into the Ewigkeit. Voilà, I have asked you.'

Roland took two or three puffs at his cigar, and surrounded himself with a little cloud of smoke. Then he rose and stood with his back to the fire, and in that attitude he looked, Litvinoff thought, uncommonly like his brother.

'Look here,' he said slowly, 'according to the laws of etiquette and all that sort of thing, I have known you far too short a time to think of talking to you about my relations with my brother, but I am horribly perplexed about him; and since he has let you know that there is something wrong between us, I may as well tell you all I know about it. I need hardly say that all I say to you is said in strict confidence.'

The Count bowed.

'For some time we have not been upon the very best of terms; but that's neither here nor there. There was nothing seriously wrong between us. This morning, without any apparent cause, he made a kind of veiled accusation against me, which I could not understand, and even went so far as to tell me I ought not to go near—'

He hesitated. Litvinoff made an interrogatory movement, which prevented his stopping short, as he seemed inclined to do.

'Miss Stanley,' he ended.

'Ah, so?' said the other, raising his eyebrows, and looking sympathetically interested.

'We had a sharp word; but I should not have thought much more of it if it hadn't been for what came later. This afternoon I was going to see a man you introduced me to the other night, Lenoir, who, I thought, I remembered lived in Porson Street.'

'Ah, yes, it was Porson Street your brother named,' interrupted Litvinoff.

'As I was looking about for him I fancied I caught sight of you, but it was foggy, and when I followed the man into a house, it turned out not to be you. At least, I suppose not.'

'No, no; it certainly was not I.'

'Well, as I was looking about, bewildered, on a staircase, I met my brother, who, I suppose, had followed me. He asked me what I wanted there. I told him. He said I was a scoundrel and a liar. Of course, I couldn't stand that, so I let out at him, and came away—and there the matter stands. What do you make of it?'

'Excuse me,' said the other, 'does your brother drink?'

'Certainly not; he's one of the most temperate men I know.'

'Could he have done it because—But ah, no, that is quite impossible.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'Is your brother in love with Miss Stanley?' said Litvinoff, slowly and directly.

'I think he is. What made you think so?'

'It was coming from her presence that I met him.'

'By God! That may account for her manner to-night,' said Roland in a low tone, but not so low but that Litvinoff heard him, and read his thought almost before he heard his word.