Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  Apparently satisfied with the applause of his audience, in which he seemed to delight and revel, Litvinoff turned from the present and the past, and invited his hearers to look with him into the future, ‘not only of Russia, but of mankind,’ he said; ‘what the world might be — what it would be.’ Then were done into rhetorical English the concluding pages of that famous Russian pamphlet, ‘A Prophetic Vision’ — the pamphlet for whose sake Russian peasants had braved the spydom of the police, and to hear which read aloud by some of their fellows who could read, they had crowded together at nights in outhouses and sheds, by the dim light of tallow candles — the pamphlet for whose possession St Petersburg and Moscow students had quarrelled and almost fought, knowing all the time that the mere fact of its being found upon their persons or among their belongings meant certain imprisonment, and possible death — the pamphlet, in short, the discovery of whose authorship three years back had sent Count Litvinoff and his luckless secretary flying for the Austrian frontier.

  It was certainly a pleasant vision this of the Russian noble, whether it was prophetic or no, a dream of a time when men would no longer sow for other men to reap, when the fruits of the earth would be the inheritance of all the earth’s children, and not only of her priests and her rulers; when, in fact, rulers would be no more, for all would rule and each would obey; when every man would do as he liked, and every man would like to do well.

  All this seemed very high-flown and remote to the young university critics on the front seats, though even they were moved for a moment or two, by the vibrating tones of the speaker, out of the attitude of English stolidity which they had carefully kept up during the evening. But those behind them were less reserved, and perhaps more credulous — more given to believing in visions; and when Litvinoff sat down, the walls of the Agora rang again and again with the cheers of a sympathetic and delighted audience.

  When the chairman had announced that ‘Mr’ Litvinoff would be happy to answer any questions that might be suggested by the lecture, there was a moment or two of that awkward silence which always occurs on these occasions, when everyone feels that there are at least half-a-dozen questions he would like to ask, but experiences the greatest possible difficulty in putting even one into an intelligible shape.

  At length a man in one of the far corners of the room rose to put a question. His accent showed him to be a foreigner, but that was not a very remarkable thing in Soho. He had a scrubby chin and dirty linen, two other characteristics not uncommon in that region. After a preliminary cough he explained that his question was rather personal than general, and he quite allowed that the lecturer was not bound to answer it; but he said that, having been in Russia, he could bear testimony to the truth of all that had been said that evening, and that while in the south of Russia he had come across a small pamphlet, called ‘A Prophetic Vision,’ which he had been told had been written by a Count Michael Litvinoff. Some parts of the address to-night had reminded him of that excellent pamphlet, and he thought it would be interesting to the audience to know whether the author of that pamphlet was the speaker of the evening.

  Litvinoff rose at once.

  ‘I had no idea,’ he said, ‘that the little brochure would ever be heard of outside the country for whose children it was written; but since the question is asked me so frankly to-night, I will answer as frankly — Yes, I wrote it.’

  An approving murmur ran through the room, and the foreigner rose again. He was sorry again to trouble Citizen Litvinoff, but was he right in supposing (it had been so reported) that the discovery of this pamphlet by the Russian Government had occasioned Count Litvinoffs exile?

  Litvinoff was very pale as he answered, —

  ‘Yes; it was that unhappy pamphlet which deprived me of the chance of serving my country on the scene of action, and which lost me a life I valued above my own — that of a fellow-countryman of the audience which I have the pleasure of addressing to-night — my secretary and friend, whom I loved more than a brother.’ His voice trembled as he ended.

  There was another round of applause, and, no more questions being forthcoming, the meeting broke up, and people stood talking together in little groups. Richard was discussing a knotty economic point with a sturdy carpenter and trades unionist, and Roland, close by, was earnestly questioning a French Communist to whom Litvinoff had introduced him, and was receiving an account of the so-called murder of the hostages very different from any which had appeared in the daily papers of the period, when the Count came up to them.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘I am désolé; but I shall be unable to stay longer. You will be able, doubtless, to pilot yourselves back to civilisation, and will pardon my abrupt departure. I have just seen someone going out of the door whom I’ve been trying to catch for the last three months, and I’m off in pursuit.’

  And he was off. As he passed a small knot of youths outside the door they looked after him, and one of them said with a laugh, ‘Blest if I don’t believe he’s after that handsome gal. What chaps these foreigners are for the ladies.’

  The discerning youth was right. He was after that girl — but though he followed her and watched her into the house where she lived, he did not speak to her.

  ‘Think twice before you speak once is a good rule,’ he said to himself, as he turned westwards, ‘and I know where she lives, at any rate.’

  Even discussions on political economy, and historical revelations by those who helped to make the history, must come to an end at last, and the Ferriers came away, after Dick had received a pressing invitation from the chairman to address the club, and to choose his own subject, and Roland, who had suddenly conceived a passion for foreigners of a revolutionary character, had made an appointment with his Communist acquaintance for an evening in the week.

  As they passed down the street, two men standing under a lamp looked at them with interest. One was the man who had put the questions regarding the pamphlet. The other was a foreigner too, though he was clean in his attire and had not a scrubby chin, but a long, light silky beard. He wore the slouch hat so much affected by the High Church Clergy, and which is popularly supposed to mark any nonclerical wearer as a man of revolutionary views. He was tall, and pale, and thin, and had very deeply-set hollow eyes, which he kept fixed on the retreating millowners till they turned the corner and went out of sight Then he said, in a Hungarian dialect, —

  ‘Our pamphlet-writing friend doesn’t seem to choose his friends solely among the poor and needy; and that is politic to say the least of it.’

  ‘Money seeks money,’ growled the other, ‘and he has plenty.’

  ‘Not so much as you’d suppose. The greater part of the Litvinoff property is quite out of his reach. Our “little father” takes good care of that.’

  ‘That which he has he takes care to keep,’ said the other.

  ‘I’m not so sure; at any rate, he uses his tongue, which is a good one, in our cause. Speeches like that are good. A man who can speak so is not to be sneered at, and I’m certain he could not speak like that unless he felt some of it at least. He has done us good service before, and he will again. The Mantle of the Prophet fits him uncommonly well.’

  CHAPTER VIII. ‘YOU LIE!’

  ‘Morley’s Hotel, Sunday Evening.

  ‘DEAR MR FERRIER, — YOU were so full of Russia yesterday afternoon that you made me forget to say to you what might have saved you the trouble of answering this by post. Will you and your brother dine with us (papa says) to-morrow evening at seven? I hope you enjoyed yourselves last night. I am sure I should have done if I had been there. With papa’s and my kind regards to you and Mr Roland, — I am, dear Mr Ferrier, yours very truly,

  ‘CLARE STANLEY’.

  ‘P.S. — Count Litvinoff, your interesting Russian friend, will be here.’

  Miss Stanley smiled to herself rather wickedly as she folded this note. She had noticed that her interest in the Russian acquaintance did not seem to enhance theirs, and she thought to herself that wh
atever the dinner might be at which those three assisted, it certainly would not be dull for her.

  In Derbyshire, where her amusements were very limited, she would have thought twice before permitting herself to risk offending the masters of Thornsett, but here that risk only seemed to offer a new form of amusement. But experimenting on the feelings of these gentlemen was an entertainment which was somehow not quite so enthralling as it had been, and she now longed, not for a fresh world to conquer — here was one ready to her hand — but for the power to conquer it. She would have given something to be able to believe that she had anything like the same power over this hero of romance, whom fate had thrown in her way, as she had over the excellent but commonplace admirers with whom she had amused herself for the last year.

  Litvinoff had distinctly told her that the goddess of his idolatry, the one mistress of his heart, was Liberty, and though this statement was modified in her mind by her recollection of certain glances cast at herself, she yet believed in it enough to feel a not unnatural desire to enter into competition with that goddess. Her classical studies taught her that women had competed successfully with such rivals, and she was not morbidly self-distrustful, especially when a looking-glass was near her.

  With the letter in her hand she glanced at the mirror over the mantelpiece, and the fair vision of dark-brown lashes, gold-brown waving hair, delicate oval face, and well-shaped if rather large mouth, might have reassured her had she felt any doubts of her own attractions. But the glance she cast at herself over her shoulder was one of saucy triumph, and the smile with which she sealed her letter one of conscious power.

  Would she have been gratified if she could have seen the effect of her note? It was not at all with the sort of expression you would expect to see on the face of a man who had just received a dinner invitation transmitted through the lady of his heart from that lady’s papa, that Richard Ferrier tossed the note over to his brother next morning.

  ‘Here you are,’ he said. ‘Bouquet de Nihilist, trebly distilled.’

  ‘Well, don’t let’s go, then.’

  ‘Why, I thought you were so fond of the Count. I wonder you don’t jump at it I thought it would please you.’

  ‘So I do like him — he’s a splendid speaker; but I didn’t come to London to spend all my days and nights with him, any more than you did. Besides, I’m engaged for to-night.’

  ‘Oh, are you? Well, I think I shall go.’

  ‘You’d better leave it alone. You won’t stand much chance beside a man with such a moustache as that. Besides, he sings, don’t you know? and with all your solid and admirable qualities, Richard, you’re not a nightingale.’

  ‘Nor yet a runaway rebel.’

  ‘I say, you’d better look a little bit after your epithets. Litvinoff doesn’t look much of the running-away sort. According to what I heard last night, he can use a revolver with effect on occasion. By the way, Richard,’ he went on, more seriously, ‘I believe I saw a face at that club I knew, but it was only for a minute, and I lost sight of it, and I couldn’t be sure.’

  ‘Who did you think it was?’

  ‘Little Alice.’

  ‘Think — you think!’ said his brother, turning fiercely on him. ‘Do you mean to say you didn’t know?’

  ‘Know? Of course not, or I should say so. What the deuce do you mean?’

  ‘I should like to ask you what the deuce you mean by even debating whether or no to accept that invitation when you know you’ve no earthly right to go near Miss Stanley—’

  ‘You’d better mention your ideas to Mr Stanley. I don’t in the least know what you’re driving at — and I don’t care; but since you choose to bring her name in, I shall throw over my other engagement and go to Morley’s to-night.’

  ‘You can go to the devil if you choose!’ said Dick, who seemed to have entirely lost his self-control, and he flung out, slamming the door behind him.

  Clare’s note was bearing more fruit than she desired or anticipated in setting the brothers not so much against Litvinoff as against each other, for what but her letter could have stirred Dick’s temper to this sudden and unpremeditated outbreak? What but her note and Dick’s comments thereon could have ruffled Roland’s ordinarily even nature in this way? It is always a mistake to play with fire; but people, girls especially, will not believe this until they have burned their own fingers, and, en passant, more of other people’s valuables than they can ever estimate.

  * * * * *

  ‘I wish I had spoken to that girl yesterday,’ said Count Litvinoff to himself; ‘it would have saved my turning out this vile afternoon. If fate has given England freedom, she has taken care to accompany the gift with a fair share of fog. I wish I could help worrying about other people’s troubles. It is very absurd, but I can’t get on with my work for thinking of that poor tired little face. Hard up, she looked, too. Ah, well! so shall I be very soon, unless something very unexpected turns up. I’ll go now, and earn an easy conscience for this evening.’

  He threw down his pen and rose. The article on the Ethics of Revolution on which he was engaged had made but small progress that afternoon. He had felt ever since lunch that go out he must sooner or later, and the prospect was dispiriting. He glanced out of his window as he put on his fur-lined coat. From the windows of Morley’s Hotel the view on a fine day is about as cheerful as any that London can present — though one may have one’s private sentiments respecting the pepper-boxes which emphasise the bald ugliness of the National Gallery, and though one may sometimes wish that the slave of the lamp would bring St George’s Hall from Liverpool and drop it on that splendid site. But this was not a fine day. It was a gloomy, damp, foggy, depressing, suicidal day. The fog had, with its usual adroitness, managed to hide the beauties of everything, and to magnify the uglinesses. Nelson was absolutely invisible, and the lions looked like half drowned cats. Litvinoff shuddered as he lighted a large cigar and pulled his gloves on.

  ‘This is a detestable climate,’ he said, as he drew the first whiffs; ‘but London is about the only place I know where good cigars can be had at a price to fit the pocket of an exile.

  I suppose I shall soon have to leave this palatial residence, and become one of the out-at-elbows gentlemen who make life hideous in Leicester Square and Soho.’

  Like many men who have lived lonely lives, Michael Litvinoff had an inveterate habit of soliloquy. It had been strengthened by his life at the ancestral mansion on the Litvinoff estate, and had not grown less in his years of solitary wanderings.

  His walk to-day was not a pleasant one, and more than once he felt inclined to turn back. But he persevered, and when he reached the house which he had seen her enter he asked a woman on the ground floor if Miss Hatfield lived there.

  ‘There’s a young person named Hatfield in the front attic,’ was the reply, as the informant stared with all her eyes at the Count, who was certainly an unusual sort of apparition in Spray’s Buildings.

  As he strode up the dirty, rotten stairs, stumbling more than once, he thought to himself, as Dick had done, that Alice did not make her new life profitable, whatever it was.

  ‘Poor girl!’ he thought; ‘if she’s of the same mind now as she was when I saw her last, I suppose I must find an opportunity of doing good by stealth.’

  The house, though poor enough, did not seem to be one of those overcrowded dens of which we have heard so much lately, and which a Royal Commission is to set right, as a Royal Commission always does set everything right. Or perhaps the lodgers were birds of prey, who only came home to roost at uncertain hours; or beasts of burden, who were only stabled at midnight to be harnessed again at sunrise. At any rate, the Count saw no one on the stairs, and he saw no one in the front attic either. Not only no one, but no thing. The door and window were both open. The room appeared to have been swept and garnished, but was absolutely empty of everything but fog. There was another door opposite, but it was closed and locked.

  ‘She’s evidently not here. We’ll
try lower down.’ But before he had time to turn he heard a foot on the stairs, coming up with the light and springy tread which is the result of good and well-fitting boots, and which does not mark those who walk through life, from the cradle to the grave, shod in boots several sizes too large and several pounds too heavy.

  He glanced over the broken banisters, and recoiled hastily.

  ‘The gentle Roland, by all that’s mysterious!’ he said, ‘Now, what on earth can he want here? At any rate, he’d better not see me.’

  The landing on which he stood was very dark, and there was a heap of lumber, old boxes, a hopelessly broken chair, a tub, and some boards. Litvinoff crept behind them, and in his black coat and the obscurity of the dusky landing and the dark afternoon he felt himself secure. He had hardly taken up this position when Roland Ferrier’s head appeared above the top stair, to be followed cautiously by the rest of him. He cast a puzzled look round the empty attic, tried the closed door, and, turning, went downstairs again.

  Litvinoff was just coming out of his not over savoury lurking-place when he heard a voice on the landing below, which was not Roland’s.

  ‘Parbleu!’ he said to himself; ‘it rains Ferriers here this afternoon. Here’s the engaging Richard, and evidently not in the best of tempers.’

  He evidently was not — if one might judge by his voice, which was icy with contempt as he said sneeringly, ‘So this was the engagement you were going to put off, was it?’