Читать книгу The Celestial City - Baroness Orczy - Страница 8

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Lady Chartley had seen the last of her guests depart.

“Thank you so much! It has been a perfect afternoon!” The stock phrase had been reiterated a hundred times and a hundred times Litta had replied with a set smile:

“I am so glad we had it so fine!” or some other mechanical remark equally futile.

“Where is Sir Philip?”, most of the guests had added. “I want to tell him how much we admired the garden.”

And in answer to that Litta’s stock phrase had been: “You will find him down in the hall. I am so glad you liked the garden.”

How she had ever got through the afternoon she didn’t know. Two hours and more of idle chatter and stock phrases, while her thoughts were all with Gabrielle Bobrinsky, who was waiting for her in the blue drawing-room that adjoined the winter garden. Litta had had the room closed against all visitors; Gabrielle, wanting of course to be alone, should have it all to herself. Forgetting all about the “at home,” she had arrived less than a quarter of an hour before the first motor full of guests had drawn up at the gates. There hadn’t been time for more than a brief, very brief account of the marvellous thing that had happened. And Litta, longing to hear more, had to leave Gabrielle in the blue room and to go into the great drawing-room and talk to a crowd of people for whom she cared less than nothing; whilst her thoughts ran riot in her brain.

Now at last they were all gone and Phil fortunately had gone off to change into what he called his working clothes, preparatory to seeing whether that fool of a gardener had put in his new strawberry plants properly. And Litta was free to join her friend. She found Gabrielle in the pretty blue room, sitting in the corner of a sofa, gazing meditatively into the fire. Though it was mid-April and the day had been almost hot, the fire seemed welcome now that the sun was going down. A cool wind still blew from the north-west and the distant peaks of Cheiron and Haut Montel had not yet shed altogether their mantle of snow.

Litta ran impulsively to her friend, and sinking into the sofa close beside her, she took both her hands in hers.

“My dear!” she said. “I don’t know how I got through this awful afternoon. Every moment I longed to run away and hear more—more of this wonderful thing. I just hated all these futile, chattering people, and begrudged every minute they kept me away from you.”

Gabrielle gave the delicate hands a tender squeeze. Her sad eyes had lighted up at sight of her friend, and now lingered fondly on the exquisite picture before her: the dainty profile, the fringe of dark lashes that half-veiled and yet enhanced the glory of the eyes, the soft wavy hair in colour like a ripe chestnut, and the perfect curve of neck and shoulder, the bloom of which even the row of pearls—a priceless gem of dazzling sheen—could only rival, but not eclipse.

“It is wonderful,” Litta reiterated with a little gasp of excitement. “Too, too wonderful!”

“Too wonderful to be true, you mean?” Gabrielle asked in her quiet, gentle voice.

“No, I am not going to say that,” Litta replied impulsively. “But I must hear more—more, before I can judge.”

She paused a moment, as if to collect her thoughts, to bring them all back under control. Away from all the silly, senseless happenings of this afternoon, the tea-table gossip, the idle chatterings, the royal personage, the adulation and snobbishness, back to Gabrielle and to the wonderful thing that had occurred. With a thoughtful pucker between her brows she was gathering together the threads of the short conversation she had had with her friend, before the first of that stream of futile people had come to interrupt, and all the while she scrutinised Gabrielle’s pale face, which alone betrayed something of that inward excitement, which must have been intense, in the glow of the dark eyes and the slight quiver of the sensitive lips.

“Darling!” she said at last, taking up the thread of conversation just where it had been broken by all those tiresome people, “are you quite, quite sure, that the handwriting is your husband’s?”

“I am morally convinced that it is,” Gabrielle Bobrinsky replied quietly. “Of course the writing is shaky—it took me ages to decipher. But think of the conditions, my dear: in prison, or by the roadside—a hand stiff with cold—the mind almost tottering under the strain of privation——”

She too was ready to pick up those broken threads; she had no need to collect her thoughts or to bring her mind back to them. She had sat there, alone, for over two hours, and her thoughts had never strayed once from the great, the wonderful thing. But now she paused, her voice husky with sobs. She had closed her eyes for a moment in her effort to control her nerves, and thus failed to catch the slight movement of impatience which Litta had been unable to repress. Dearly as she loved Gabrielle, deeply as she sympathised with her over the strange event, her practical mind still rebelled against this blind belief in what seemed like a fairy-tale to her, whilst to her friend it just meant stark reality. She turned away very quickly, so as to hide even a look which might have wounded this dear, suffering woman who was clinging blindly to a slender thread of hope.

“Would you like to see the letter?” Gabrielle asked presently, when she had recovered her self-control.

“My dear!” Litta protested, “I can’t read Russian.”

“No, I know, but I will translate as I go along. It is quite short.”

Gabrielle fumbled in her bag and drew out from it a stained and much creased paper, which somehow in itself looked pathetic and unreal.

With a gentle, loving gesture she laid it on her knee, then softly stroked it up and down, smoothing out those creases that half obliterated the handwriting. Then, satisfied that she had her friend’s attention, she read, translating the Russian into English.

“My beloved Gabrielle,

“I am alive—sufficiently alive to think and dream of you. Providence has brought Paul Sergine to this awful hole where I have been a prisoner for over five years. How I have kept my reason, I don’t know. God willed it so, no doubt. Why those devils don’t shoot me, I can’t imagine, especially now that I am getting weak for my daily task. Come to me, my beloved. Paul will tell you how you can save me from this hell.”

Long after Gabrielle had finished reading there was silence in this pretty room, all gay with the firelight and the glow of the sunset that came slanting in through the tall windows. Only the slight crackling of the paper broke this silence, as Gabrielle’s delicate hands folded it with loving care and then slipped it inside her gown.

“And this man,” Litta asked after a while, “this Sergine has brought you nothing but this letter?”

“Nothing.”

“And you know him well?”

“Very well. He was Cyril’s secretary for two years before the war.”

“Only two years?”

“He was faithful and honest. We never had to complain of him. He travelled with us everywhere. When the war broke out we were in England; he had, of course, to leave for Russia immediately to join up. So I lost sight of him—until he came last night.”

“But how did he find you—here in France? How did he know you were here? Did he come all this way at his own expense—on the chance of finding you?” Litta rapped out these questions one on top of the other. Her voice sounded harsh, impatient; there was evidently something in this whole affair that roused her suspicions, her sense of danger for her friend, her opposition to the wild scheme which she instinctively knew that Gabrielle had already formulated.

But Gabrielle only smiled, her perfect calm in strange contrast to Litta’s vehemence. She seemed so sure of herself, so sure of the truth of this miracle which had just happened, and of the fidelity of the messenger who had come at the bidding of God Himself to bring her this word of hope. And when Litta had exhausted her string of questions, she replied with her gentle smile, patiently, like one explaining something to a stubborn child that couldn’t or wouldn’t understand.

“I’ll tell you, dear. Paul Sergine, who brought me this precious letter last night, fought all through the war; he was a corporal in Cyril’s regiment and later was with him during that awful Wrangel campaign. I knew that Cyril was with Wrangel, but the last I heard of him was just before the final disaster. What happened to him after that I never knew and I have never dared to think. All that I gathered from newspaper reports and so on was that this detachment was one of those that covered the retreat to Odessa. They fought a rear-guard action, and most of the officers were killed: a few only were taken prisoners; the men were forced into the Red Army, and Paul Sergine was one of these.”

“The wretch!”

“Poor wretch, I say. It was the Red Army for those men, else their lives, or worse. Anyway, Sergine, it seems, was recently in garrison at Koursk, and on several occasions he formed part of a detachment put to guard a gang of prisoners who were repairing the railway. How he came to notice one of these miserable wretches he doesn’t know, but the face suddenly struck him as vaguely familiar.”

“It was Prince Bobrinsky,” Litta cried involuntarily, horror-struck. “My dear! your husband?”

Gabrielle nodded.

“For a long time,” she went on, “Paul kept on wondering where he had seen that face before. Cyril was almost unrecognisable. Those wretched prisoners work in gangs for fifteen hours a day, road-mending or sweeping the streets of Koursk after the heavy falls of snow. At night they are herded in huts, the description of which Paul mercifully spared me. All the food they get is what passers-by give them; the government provides none for its prisoners and forces them to beg for their subsistence. And amongst these miserable wretches, hardly human now from excess of suffering and privations, is my husband, Prince Bobrinsky, at one time Grand Marshal of the Czar’s Court and Major in the 1st Division of the Regiment of Guards.”

“But alive!” Litta exclaimed with eager enthusiasm, carried away this time in spite of herself, and forgetting, during the fraction of a minute in the hearing of this terrible tragedy, her doubts and disbeliefs of a while ago.

“Yes! alive!” Gabrielle responded slowly. “Paul recognised him. One night he entered into conversation with him, when he felt that they would not be spied upon. At his suggestion Cyril wrote this letter, and Paul promised that if ever he came into contact with anyone who had the means of communicating with England, he would give them the letter and ask them to see that it reached me. His opportunity came sooner than he expected. Indeed, I must see the hand of God in it all. A fortnight ago, if you remember, there was some commission or other sent over from Russia to England. As usual, these people came with a regular retinue of typists, servants, and so on; amongst the typists was Paul Sergine. I told you that he was loyal; and he has proved himself to be intelligent. He set to work at once to find me; traced me to my little flat in Knightsbridge and thence to my hotel in Nice; took French leave from his job, and arrived from England yesterday; the Rapide from Paris was several hours late, but he turned up at my hotel at eight o’clock, just as I had finished dinner, and—and—that’s the whole story, Litta dear. Simpler than you thought, isn’t it?”

But apparently Litta did not think it so simple as all that. Her enthusiasm had been momentary; cold reason and colder doubt had already swept it away; objections and arguments were forcing their way back into her mind.

“He risked a great deal, it seems to me, in order to get to you,” she mused. “And yet you say that he was in your employ about two years only. Not like an old retainer whose life is bound up with his employers.”

“Paul knows that he risks punishment for taking French leave in coming to see me; but punishment won’t be very severe—he thinks he may have to forfeit a month’s wages. In any case, he won’t, of course, mention my name.”

“You are determined to believe in him?” Litta commented drily.

“If I lost faith now,” Gabrielle said with sudden vehemence, whilst a warm glow quickly rushed to her cheeks, “I would die. But I have no cause to doubt,” she continued in her habitual, quiet monotone. “I know Paul, you see, and there’s something—something undefinable but very, very real which tells me that this message is from Cyril, and that I must go to him, as soon as ever possible.”

“Go to him? What do you mean?”

“That I start for Koursk as soon as my passport is in order.”

“Gabrielle!” Litta exclaimed, her voice expressing all the horror that she felt. “My dear——!”

“Well?”

“You can’t go to Russia.”

“Why not?”

“You’d never get back.”

“That wouldn’t matter much,” Gabrielle said softly, “if I found Cyril.”

“How do you know that you will find him?”

“I know where he is. He is waiting for me. In his letter he asks me to come to him and free him from this hell.”

“And this wonderful Paul Sergine has told you how you can do that?”

“Yes!”

“He has actually told you,” Litta insisted, “that Prince Bobrinsky, your husband, wants you to go and meet him in Russia, where, if you ever got there, you would probably share his fate.”

“Cyril asks me to go to Russia,” Gabrielle assented with quiet obstinacy, “but not only to meet him.”

“Then for what purpose?”

But Gabrielle shrugged her shoulders, and the sigh which she gave sounded forlorn and not a little hopeless.

“If I told you,” she said, “you would still disbelieve, you would more than ever try to dissuade me from what I am absolutely determined to do.”

It was Litta’s turn to shrug.

“If you are so determined, my dear,” she said, “what does it matter if I do try to oppose you? You may as well tell me,” she added, after a slight pause, during which her eager, luminous eyes had wandered searchingly over her friend’s wan face. “What further folly are you about to commit?” those eyes seemed to ask, and as if in answer to the mute question, Gabrielle said with sudden firmness:

“Paul says, and I know this to be a fact, that the whole of the bureaucracy of Russia is corrupt and venal to the core. From the highest to the lowest, every man in office has his price.”

“I dare say. What of it?”

“Just this: When it became clear to every thinking man in Russia that Kerensky was much too weak to stem the tide of revolution and anarchy that was sweeping over the country, Cyril got in touch with his bankers in Petrograd, who had charge of a quantity of valuables belonging to him, money, securities, jewellery, and so on. He felt that valuables were no longer safe in the cellars of the bank, because there was every possibility that the revolution would sweep into the city like a tornado, without any warning, and that looting and pillaging would at once become general. So Cyril withdrew from the bank everything that was both portable and negotiable and conveyed it to another place he considered very much safer, and which was nearer to his own estates in the province of Koursk. And so——”

“Did the ubiquitous Paul tell you all this?” Litta broke in curtly.

“No. I knew that all the time. In the very last letter which Cyril managed to get through to me, he told me just what he had done with the money and the jewels.”

“And you really think, my dear, that you will be able to go to Russia, get hold of your valuables, use them in order to buy your husband’s freedom and your own safety? Do you really believe that you could do all that? Alone? Or do you know of someone who will help you, and see that you come to no harm?”

“No,” Gabrielle replied quietly. “I know nobody who would trouble about me to that extent. I am going alone.”

“You can’t!” Litta protested energetically.

“My dear, I am going,” Gabrielle retorted with all the obstinacy peculiar to the meek.

“When?”

“I have told you, as soon as my passport is in order.”

“Who is seeing to your passport?”

“Paul.”

“The ubiquitous Paul?”

“He has friends in London.”

“His sort of people always have friends in London.”

“What sort of people do you mean?”

“I mean Russians, Bolsheviks, Germans, foreign agitators of all sorts. The fraternities’ headquarters always seem to be in London.”

“Which is all right for me, as it happens,” Gabrielle rejoined with a smile. “I shall have to go back to England, in any case, to see to one or two things. I should like to let my flat, if possible, and I shall want to pick up some clothes. I have nothing down here.”

“You have thought it all out, I see,” Litta remarked drily.

“Yes; I have had a long night in which to think things out.”

“When do you leave here?”

“To-morrow. I should have gone to-day, only I wanted to tell you.”

“My dear! I wish to God I could come with you—if you really are determined to go.”

“I am determined to go,” Gabrielle reiterated firmly, “and there can be no question of your coming with me. I wouldn’t have you, for one thing,” she went on with a smile, “and Sir Philip wouldn’t allow it.”

“I wouldn’t ask him,” Litta retorted with a sudden note of harshness in her fresh, young voice. “Thank Heaven I’m not on such terms with my husband that I need his permission. And I am not dependent on him for supplies.”

A hot flush had risen to her cheeks, and a frown of irritation gave her beautiful face a sudden look of hard obstinacy. She turned an uncompromising back on her friend and stared, motionless, into the glow.

“I know, my dear, I know,” Princess Bobrinsky said in gentle, soothing tones; “but as a matter of fact you couldn’t get a visa for Russia without a great deal of trouble and a lot of fuss. And what I want above everything for my journey is secrecy. It is most important, for Cyril’s sake.”

“And the omnipotent Paul is going to arrange this for you also?”

“I told you he had a friend in the commission.”

“And you are going straight to this place in the Something province?”

“Yes. I am going straight there to get the money and jewels, and then see how I can make use of them for Cyril’s benefit.”

“And do you mean to tell me that you have no one in the world who would go with you on this mad adventure?”

“You may call it a mad adventure if you like, but there certainly is not anybody in the world who would share it with me, even if I cared to have a companion.”

“But you’ve got relations?” insisted Litta.

“None,” Gabrielle replied firmly. “None, that is, who care two straws about me. I think I told you once that my father and mother were killed in a terrible motor accident a couple of years before the war. My only brother, Tom Balleine, died of wounds which he got at Vimy Ridge. The title and property have gone to a cousin who cares far less for me than he does for his dogs. My people were always poor and I only have a small jointure—just enough to live on. I am no longer smart, nor pretty, nor amusing; I don’t dance, I don’t play tennis, and can’t afford bridge. It was only when I married Cyril that I was popular with the family. Cyril was rich, and they liked to talk of me as their cousin the Princess Bobrinsky, ‘wife, don’t you know, of the Czar’s Grand Marshal.’ But now, if they ever mention my husband or me it is only with the remark that they never could make out what so distinguished a personage could see in poor Gabrielle. And you know, dear,” she added with a quaintly humorous smile, “when you are once referred to as ‘poor So-and-So,’ it is the last word in social ostracism. As a matter of fact, it was the family who persuaded me to remain in England when Cyril went to join his regiment in Russia at the outbreak of the war. I wanted to go with him. I hated to see him go—we had never been away from one another for more than a couple of days since we were married. But you know how it was during those first few weeks of the war: it was only going to last three months—by Christmas it would be all over—and all the talk about the Russian steam-roller. And then my little Alec was very delicate. I couldn’t have left him, and I shouldn’t have dared to take him to Russia with me. Anyway, I stayed. My little Alec died, and until last night I thought that my dear husband was dead.”