Part 20 (1/2)

The Seraph, with one of those oaths that made the Hebrew's blood run cold, though he was no coward, opened his lips to speak; Cecil arrested him with that singular impa.s.siveness, that apathy of resignation which had characterized his whole conduct throughout, save at a few brief moments.

”Make no opposition. The man is acting but in his own justification.

I will wait for mine. To resist would be to degrade us with a bully's brawl; they have the law with them. Let it take its course.”

The Seraph dashed his hand across his eyes; he felt blind--the room seemed to reel with him.

”Oh, G.o.d! that you----”

He could not finish the words. That his comrade, his friend, one of his own corps, of his own world, should be arrested like the blackest thief in Whitechapel or in the Rue du Temple!

Cecil glanced at him, and his eyes grew infinitely yearning--infinitely gentle; a shudder shook him all through his limbs. He hesitated a moment, then he stretched out his hand.

”Will you take it--still?”

Almost before the words were spoken, his hand was held in both of the Seraph's.

”Take it? Before all the world--always, come what will.”

His eyes were dim as he spoke, and his rich voice rang clear as the ring of silver, though there was the tremor of emotion in it. He had forgotten the Hebrew's presence; he had forgotten all save his friend and his friend's extremity. Cecil did not answer; if he had done so, all the courage, all the calm, all the control that pride and breeding alike sustained in him, would have been shattered down to weakness; his hand closed fast in his companion's, his eyes met his once in a look of grat.i.tude that pierced the heart of the other like a knife; then he turned to the Jew with a haughty serenity.

”M. Baroni, I am ready.”

”Wait!” cried Rockingham. ”Where you go I come.”

The Hebrew interposed demurely.

”Forgive me, my lord--not now. You can take what steps you will as regards your friend later on; and you may rest a.s.sured he will be treated with all delicacy compatible with the case, but you cannot accompany him now. I rely on his word to go with me quietly; but I now regard him, and you must remember this, as not the son of Viscount Royallieu--not the Honorable Bertie Cecil, of the Life Guards--not the friend of one so distinguished as yourself--but as simply an arrested forger.”

Baroni could not deny himself that last sting of his vengeance; yet, as he saw the faces of the men on whom he flung the insult, he felt for the moment that he might pay for his temerity with his life. He put his hand above his eyes with a quick, involuntary movement, like a man who wards off a blow.

”Gentlemen,” and his teeth chattered as he spoke, ”one sign of violence, and I shall summon legal force.”

Cecil caught the Seraph's lifted arm, and stayed it in its vengeance.

His own teeth were clinched tight as a vise, and over the haggard whiteness of his face a deep red blush had come.

”We degrade ourselves by resistance. Let me go--they must do what they will. My reckoning must wait, and my justification. One word only. Take the King and keep him for my sake.”

Another moment, and the door had closed; he was gone out to his fate, and the Seraph, with no eyes on him, bowed down his head upon his arms where he leaned against the marble table, and, for the first time in all his life, felt the hot tears roll down his face like rain, as the pa.s.sion of a woman mastered and unmanned him--he would sooner a thousand times have laid his friend down in his grave than have seen him live for this.

Cecil went slowly out beside his accuser. The keen, bright eyes of the Jew kept vigilant watch and ward on him; a single sign of any effort to evade him would have been arrested by him in an instant with preconcerted skill. He looked, and saw that no thought of escape was in his prisoner's mind. Cecil had surrendered himself, and he went to his doom; he laid no blame on Baroni, and he scarce gave him a remembrance.

The Hebrew did not stand to him in the colors he wore to Rockingham, who beheld this thing but on its surface. Baroni was to him only the agent of an inevitable shame, of a hapless fate that closed him in, netting him tight with the web of his own past actions; no more than the irresponsible executioner of what was in the Jew's sight and knowledge a just sentence. He condemned his accuser in nothing; no more than the conscience of a guilty man can condemn the discoverers and the instruments of his chastis.e.m.e.nt.

Was he guilty?

Any judge might have said that he knew himself to be so as he pa.s.sed down the staircase and outward to the entrance with that dead resignation on his face, that brooding, rigid look set on his features, and gazing almost in stupefaction out from the dark hazel depths of eyes that women had loved for their l.u.s.ter, their languor, and the softness of their smile.

They walked out into the evening air unnoticed; he had given his consent to follow the bill-discounter without resistance, and he had no thought to break his word; he had submitted himself to the inevitable course of this fate that had fallen on him, and the whole tone of his temper and his breeding lent him the quiescence, though he had none of the doctrine of a supreme fatalist. There were carriages standing before the hotel, waiting for those who were going to the ballroom, to the theater, to an archduke's dinner, to a princess' entertainment; he looked at them with a vague, strange sense of unreality--these things of the life from which he was now barred forever. The sparkling tide of existence in Baden was flowing on its way, and he went out an accused felon, branded, and outlawed, and dishonored from all place in the world that he had led, and been caressed by and beguiled with for so long.

To-night, at this hour, he should have been among all that was highest and gayest and fairest in Europe at the banquet of a Prince--and he went by his captor's side, a convicted criminal.