Читать книгу The Counterstroke - Ambrose Pratt - Страница 6

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LORD FRANCIS CRESSINGHAM found Captain Lethby waiting for him upon the steps of Colonel Elliott's house. The Captain held a twisted piece of paper in one hand; with the other he was impatiently twirling his walking-stick.

"The Countess asked me to give you this note," he announced abruptly.

"Ah, thanks." Cressingham crushed the paper into his pocket. "Are you going city-wards?"

"I think not."

"Well then, good-day to you," with a nod.

"One moment, Cressingham, if you please."

"Ten if you like. Anything urgent?"

"Let us walk on." The Captain's face was troubled; they walked in silence for a little and stopped by common impulse at the corner of Dover Street and Piccadilly.

"The fact is, Cressingham, I've wanted to speak to you for quite a while, but you're so infernally hard to get hold of, since——" he hesitated.

"Since I got the sack from the F.O.," said the other grimly.

"I didn't quite mean that, but you've said it yourself. We used to be friends once, Cressingham——"

"Once!—--"

"Well——"

"Oh, I quite understand; your manner when we met to-day left little to be explained."

"Bosh!" blurted out the Captain. "It's not your part to be satirical; you are the deserter, Frank. The old rooms which you always shared with me are still there and never once have you come near me."

"I thought——"

"Never mind what you thought. You never gave me a chance. You resigned from the regiment without saying a word to a soul. You've never been to the club, never called at the mess. How can you wonder that your old pals are offended? The fellows are thinking all sorts of things——"

"Let them think!"

"Oh, it's all very well to take that stand, but you are not treating them properly. They have a right to an explanation, and you know it. Vernon and I have stood your sponsors long enough. It's time you took a hand, or at least gave one of us the right to speak."

Cressingham's face softened. "You're a good fellow, Jack, but I can't yet, I'm too cut up."

"Absurd," cried the other sharply. "Don't you see how foolish you are? What's the use of nursing the beastly thing? It's not as if you'd cleared out and gone to India or somewhere. Then they'd have understood your feelings and forgotten the whole business before this. But here you stay right in the heart of things, avoiding everybody and not condescending to offer the smallest explanation. 'Pon my soul, it's no wonder that people talk about you and imagine things."

"It's kind of you, Jack, to come down on me like this. I know you're right. Well then, I'll see the Colonel; Vernon's a good sort, he has refused to send on my resignation—I got a note from him to-day."

"Good man. You'll stay on with us, then."

"If Vernon advises me—after he hears what I have to say. Fact is, I was damnably careless, Jack, and deserved the thrashing I got. But for an accident, I'd have disgraced the old regiment. The facts were not published, but you have a right to know. It was a Nihilist conspiracy, and the brutes made use of me. The Czar might have been assassinated."

"Great heavens!"

"I was near to cutting my throat at one time, and would have, too, if they had called my honour into question."

"Don't talk rot, Frank. The F.O.'s stupid enough, but it never gets drunk, all at one time."

"I'm dashed glad to have chatted the thing over with you, old chap. I feel better now than I've done for weeks."

"Well, good-bye, old fellow. See Vernon soon, won't you?"

"To-morrow. Good-bye, Jack."

"Eh, by-the-bye, dine with me at the club to-morrow night?"

"Very well."

Captain Lethby got into a hansom, and presently remembered that he had entirely overlooked his original intention of rating his friend for his extraordinary treatment of Miss Elliott. But he soon forgot the whole matter in the recollection of Madame Viyella's bright eyes and certain kind speeches which she had murmured in his ears. Indeed, so fickle is the heart of man, he forgot also his own devotion to his cousin and the fact that he had worshipped at her shrine for six long years.

Cressingham wandered moodily to his rooms in Jermyn Street, and there arrived nervously plucked open the Countess' note.

It was laconic, and bore sharply to the point: "Expect me at twelve." He threw it in the fire, and lighting a cigar cast himself upon a lounge, the prey of exasperating thought and vain imaginings. He saw himself as he had set out from London half a year back, an ardent, and successful lover, for although Francine Elliott had not verbally accepted his proposal, still, she had promised to wear his ring and she had not been offended at his kiss. He recalled with heartfelt bitterness the ambitious and splendid future that had beckoned to him at that time. Rich and young, the only son of one of England's greatest nobles, a career had opened for him in the diplomatic service of his country which only needed his own diligence and intelligent cooperation to lead him to the foremost rank of power and statesmanship. And true happiness had seemed more than possible, for his sweetheart was a woman without peer in her class; well born, beautiful, an heiress, and, above all, worthy beyond dispute of the best blessings in the gift of Fortune, alike for her goodness of heart, her purity of mind and her sweet, untiring charity.

He reviewed the causes of his ruin as dispassionately as he could, but from the red coals into which he stared rose up the sorceress face and form of Katherin Viyella to taunt him and to disturb him as of old. She came, a Cleopatra smile upon her lips, bewildering and reckless challenge in her eyes, advancing towards him, gliding like a graceful phantom through the splendid ball-room of the Winter Palace, nearer, ever nearer, her gaze unfalteringly fixed on his, demanding, beseeching, commanding of him he knew not what.

Vividly he remembered how her first glance had filled his soul with doubt and trouble, with dreams and wild, intolerant desires. How he had struggled to resist her, to remain true to his English love, whom in his heart of hearts he always worshipped and worshipped still! Then the drifting, when day by day his resolutions weakened one by one. Last of all that mad and fateful night when Katherin had come at a witch hour to his rooms and prayed for his assistance.

The story she had told him! Her distress and her despair! Even now it was at times impossible to realize that she had been so base. He shuddered to recall her acting, her incredibly perfect acting. Weeping in his arms she had pretended a confession. She had fallen, she said, victim to a momentary weakness, a criminal weakness, and her desire was only to escape the consequences of her folly. A great man, the very greatest, had sought her love with gifts, and for a moment she had been tempted—the gifts were jewels, jewels fit only for a queen to wear. She gave him the jewels wrapped in an unsigned letter full of imprecation and remorse, whose contents she recited to his unwilling ears. She implored him to be the messenger of their return. He was to take them that very instant to a certain chamberlain, to say to him certain words, and then, on his return—well, what he would, she loved him, she said, and was willing to bestow on him for love that gift which another and greater than he had sought to purchase in vain.

He had done her bidding, blindly done her bidding, and then returning generously put her from him and refused to profit by her hour of weakness and surrender.

Then came the morrow, the darkest morning of his life, the saddest and most humiliating, when his angry chief with wrathful face and blazing eyes had informed him of that letter's inner meaning; had told him to his face he was a fool and unfitted for the duties of his office.

It seemed that he had carried to the hands of a double traitor a damnably injurious weapon of destruction, and for a moment the life of a king had rested on the fickle disposition of a rascal. The jewels were a snare, for their facets had been poisoned and their lightest handling meant certain death. The king had been saved, but policy demanded a sacrifice, and the traitor whose treachery had saved the king, the chamberlain into whose hands Cressingham had confided the fatal letter, was rightfully made the victim. A lesser victim was Cressingham himself, for he was constrained to resign, the world being carelessly informed that his own failing health was the cause of his retirement, an excuse ruinous to him from its transparent simplicity.

Only Viyella had entirely escaped, for Cressingham had kept her secret, and she had known how to convince both him and her imperial host that her hands were clean in the affair. Soon after his retirement she had followed him to England anxious for his complete subjugation, for curiously enough the woman had fallen deeply in love with the self-contained, reserved young Englishman whom she had ruined and who had never once reproached her for his ruin.

But he had been too severely handled by fate and felt his disaster too keenly and completely to resume at once the part of ardent lover. For her sake and at her bidding he had remained in England, longing all the while to hide himself at the world's end, but in spite of such a real sacrifice he had been unable to satisfy her of his devotion, and at the same time a closer knowledge of the woman had given him cause for much serious reflection and misgiving.

He had discovered her to possess an insatiable craving for admiration, excitement and conquest. His own coldness had aroused her every energy. He had studied the methods she employed with other men and recognized them applied in form a thousand times intensified to himself. Gradually she declined in his esteem; he commenced to harbour doubts and strange suspicions, and he would at last have been content to break the bonds between them; but here the tragic contrariety of fate came into evidence.

The more that his affection for her subsided, the stronger grew the flame of hers for him, and sometimes, the mask thrown altogether aside, she showed herself to him, a woman with her womanly armour of reserve dissolved, a creature of pathos and passion, imperious, languishing and pleading in a breath, madly resentful of his coldness, his slave, his plaything, did he care to stoop.

Then came the interview with Perigord, in which his suspicions were converted into certainties and the scales finally removed from his eyes. Thereafter he had no choice but to recognize in Katherin Viyella her veritable ego, and while the man in him saw her outer covering beautiful as that of an angel, his mind's eye caught traces of a soul within, wicked, licentious and powerful for evil. Had he been a free agent he would have fled from England to escape her, but bound by chains he dared not break he was forced to remain and honestly endeavour to achieve the task which he had been allotted.

It became his duty to elucidate a hidden page in Madame's history, to win from her, since she alone held the key to the riddle, the story of her parentage, to ascertain the name of her father, well assured in his heart the while that that name once revealed would open the door to a chamber of horrors unspeakable. He felt that he stood upon the threshold of a tragedy mysterious and terrible. He knew himself that meanest of all creatures, a spy, and hating his occupation with all the ardour of a straightforward, upright nature, he caught himself pitying the woman and yielding to the weakness of procrastination.

Meanwhile Madame Viyella, seeking the reason of his growing coldness, had had her jealousy aroused. An inscribed photograph hanging above his desk, a sharp question and the manner of his answer, had been to her instinct all sufficient; she felt she had a rival, and she knew her rival's name. A storm had followed, and Madame, losing all self-control, passionately informed her lover of an intention so violently fantastical that he had smiled at first, but her words sank into his heart later, and in contemplation of her actions he became so fearful that she might really dare to try to realize her threat, that he had that afternoon forced himself to call upon and warn Miss Elliott in the manner that has already been described.

The remembrance of that interview made him restless and extremely self-dissatisfied. How gauche and awkward he had been: how melodramatic and foolish must have appeared his words, his spoken fears! They now appeared wild and senseless to himself, and yet he could not regret that he had spoken. That woman was capable of anything, and she was jealous as the devil; even in the cold light of day he could not divest himself of a certain undefinable dread of her. She inspired him now with the same consciousness of potential evil that the sight of a serpent gives to all human creatures, the same intangible power of fascination too that renders even the most loathing curious.

Toying with his solitary dinner he dreamed of her, and afterwards, trying vainly to read, her elfish face with its slow, subtle smile eclipsed the printed pages on his knee, defying him to concentrate his mind on aught but her. How he wished that he had never met her, that his life had never been inflicted with the burden of her blighting personality! Ah, if only that, what other things had been, what more tender, peaceful and purer visions had now been his! That thought was bitterest of all, for the sweet "might have been" had departed from the regions of the possible.

Francine Elliott's face took fashion in his fancy, too calm in its purity and self-control, pitiful for his pain but immeasurably scornful for his weakness. The expression of it maddened him, so infinitely far it placed her from his reach. How good she was, he thought, how beautiful, how strong! And he had lost her, for what? Dead Sea fruit! Ruin: almost disgrace: the love of a woman whom he had already almost ceased to find desirable.

The clock struck ten, and still he rested musing, gazing always into the glowing fire which his servant without his cognisance had periodically kept replenished. At eleven he aroused himself, for his man announced a visitor. It was strange to come back to things real, from the land of dreams. He caught himself looking curiously all about him, at the furniture, at the pictures, at the floor, as though he had returned from some long sojourn in a foreign country and expected to discover here and there the handiwork of time. Last of all he saw his visitor, and slowly got to his feet struggling to collect his thoughts.

"Ah," he said, "Ludwig von Oeltjen!"

"Yes, my Lord, I hope I find you well."

"Oh, ah, quite, thank you—get a chair, won't you? I fancy I must have been half asleep."

"No wonder, in a cosy nook like this," said the other, glancing in surprise at the luxuriant appointments of the room. "Himmel!" he cried suddenly, "not, surely not a Franchia, that?" pointing to a large crucifixion done on copper, which swung beside a pier glass on the mantel.

"It's an old favourite of mine," said Cressingham; "I always take it about with me. The colours are so rich and restful, you know, and the treatment so quaint and medieval."

"It's a perfect treasure," examining it critically. "My father has a small one, a copy, I fancy. I should like him to see this; he's a collector."

"Indeed! You have returned from France?"

"Yesterday. I have just left——" He made a peculiar sign with his hands.

"What, Perigord?"

"S—sh. Yes. He goes to-morrow to Brussels on some mysterious business or other. The man is a marvel! Who do you think was with him?"

"I'm a fool at riddles."

"The Prince of Wales!"

"Nonsense!"

"I beg your pardon, my Lord."

"Forgive me, Count, you took my breath away. He sent for you, I suppose. I have not heard from him yet."

"Be easy; you will. He sent for me to carry you a message."

"Ah!" Lord Francis Cressingham's monocle became displaced—an infallible sign with him of mental agitation.

"He is dissatisfied; he bids you waste no further time but get to work immediately."

Cressingham's cheeks coloured slowly with anger and embarrassment. "He sent only a verbal message, then?"

"Yes, and appointed me besides to an unpleasant duty. As he has not forbidden me to speak, I shall inform you of it. I am to be a spy on you, my Lord."

"What!" thundered Cressingham, springing abruptly to his feet; "he does not trust me?"

Oeltjen waved his hand. "Softly, softly," he murmured with a humorously deprecating smile. "He trusts nobody. In my turn I too am watched by an unknown agent. He makes no secret of his methods, and quite frankly disclosed his arrangements for—what shall I say—our comfort."

Cressingham's indignation changed presently to mirth. The quaintness of the plan appealed to him, and he resumed his seat laughing a little, but his laughter was half-hearted.

"You will have a bad time, I fear, Count; do you propose to sleep on my doorstep? I hope you won't bore too many holes through the doors, and there are one or two cabinets and things I'd like you respect—for instance, that old——"

"Excuse me," struck in the Count with dignity; "really the matter is serious; we are, I think, men of honour."

"I hope so," drily.

"I do not like my position at all."

"I am quite of your way of thinking."

"I am an officer of the German Army."

Cressingham eyed him interrogatively. "I of the English Army," he remarked. "Besides that, we are members of——"

"Just so, whose orders I must obey."

"So I suppose must I."

"Precisely—but afterwards——"

"Afterwards? Count."

"Afterwards, my Lord, we shall be free agents, and should you feel in any way aggrieved by what I am obliged to do in the course of my present duty—you understand me?"

"Proceed."

"Why, I shall hold myself entirely at your service."

Cressingham put up his eye-glass and surveyed the German with visage calm and imperturbable. "Really, Count, I don't want to fight you. We don't fight in England nowadays, you know. Besides, I shouldn't be at all aggrieved with you—you can't help yourself any more than I."

Oeltjen shrugged his shoulders. "So long as we understand each other."

"Quite so. When, er, when do your duties commence?"

"Immediately."

"I see. Do you intend to live with me?"

"It would be convenient."

"As my guest, I hope."

"With pleasure, my lord. Otherwise I must have taken rooms in this building."

Cressingham rang a bell, and presently a servant entered. "John, a friend has come to stay with me. Get a bedroom fixed up somehow. And, er" (turning to the Count), "have you any luggage with you?"

"A bag downstairs."

"Take the Count von Oeltjen's bag to his room, John. Let us know when everything is ready."

"Yes, sir." The servant departed, and the gentlemen stared grimly at each other, the expression of either anything but cordial.

"I expect a visitor at midnight," said Cressingham slowly.

"Indeed."

"Yes; a lady."

"Ah!"

"In fact, Madame."

The Count flushed crimson, and bit his lip. "You are fortunate," he said with a snarl of suppressed rage.

"What!" cried Cressingham, "you still——"

The German flung out his hands, and stamped violently upon the floor. "I am no stick nor stone, sir; the lady was to have been my wife."

"Mine also."

"My Lord!" The Count's face was livid, and he hissed the words.

"Calm yourself, sir," said Cressingham very coldly; "why should we quarrel—yet, at all events?"

"True—there is always time."

"Pardon me, it is almost twelve; do your instructions include eavesdropping? I use the phrase without an afterthought."

The Count with pain restrained himself, but unable to speak could only shake his head; he was furious with passion.

"I might suggest then that you retire. Ah, what is it, John?"

The servant muttered: "A lady, sir."

"Keep her a second, John. Count, it is unfortunate, but you must meet Madame, unless——"

"Anything, my Lord, but that, anything."

"Then there is nothing for it but my bedroom—through that door yonder."

The Count hurried from the room, and had barely disappeared when a woman, heavily cloaked and veiled, entered by the other door.

Cressingham strode across the room to meet her. "You are punctual, Madame," he said.

"Madame!" echoed the woman, and slowly drew aside her veil.

The man fell back with a startled cry. "My God! Miss Elliott—you here!"