Part 8 (2/2)

He leaped down from his position and disappeared, and in obedience to his command the crowd began to melt away with almost miraculous speed.

Before the police could reach the centre of the square, there were only some thirty or forty people left, and these were quietly entering the Cathedral where the service for the saint whose feast day was being celebrated was now in full and solemn progress.

For one instant, on the first step of the great porch, Sergius Thord and his companion, Johan Zegota, met,--but making a rapid sign to each other with the left hand, they as quickly separated,--Zegota to enter the Cathedral, Thord to walk rapidly down one of the narrowest and most unfrequented streets to the lower precincts of the city.

The afternoon grew darker, and the weather more depressing, and by the time evening closed in, the rain was pouring persistently. The wind had ceased, and the thunder had long since died away, its force drenched out by the weight of water in the clouds. The saint's day had ended badly for all concerned;--many of the children who had taken part in the procession had been carried home by their parents wet through, all the pretty white frocks and veils of the little girls having been completely soaked and spoilt by the unkind elements. A drearier night had seldom gloomed over this fair city of the southern sea, and down in the quarters of the poor, where men and women dwelt all huddled miserably in overcrowded tenements, and sin and starvation kept hideous company together, the streets presented as dark and forbidding an aspect as the heavy skies blackly brooding above. Here and there a gas-lamp flared its light upon the drawn little face of some child crouching asleep in a doorway, or on the pinched and painted features of some wretched outcast wending her way to the den she called 'home.' The loud brutal laughter of drunken men was mingled with the wailing of half-starved and fretful infants, and the mean, squalid houses swarmed with the living sp.a.w.n of every vice and l.u.s.t in the calendar of crime. Deep in the heart of the so-called civilized, beautiful and luxurious city, this 'quarter of the poor,' the cancer of the social body, throbbed and ate its destructive way slowly but surely on, and Sergius Thord, who longed to lay a sharp knife against it and cut it out, for the health of the whole community, was as powerless as Dante in h.e.l.l to cure the evils he witnessed. Yet it was not too much to say that he would have given his life to ease another's pain,--as swiftly and as readily as he would have taken life without mercy, in the pursuit of what he imagined to be a just vengeance.

”How vain, after all, is my labour!” he thought--”How helpless I am to move the self-centred powers of the Government and the Throne! Even were all these wretched mult.i.tudes to rise with me, and make havoc of the whole city, should we move so much as one step higher out of the Gehenna of poverty and crime? Almost I doubt it!”

He walked on past dark open doorways, where some of the miserable inhabitants of the dens within, stood to inhale the fresh wet air of the rainy night. His tall form was familiar to most of them,--if they were considered as wolves of humanity in the sight of the law, they were all faithful dogs to him; doing as he bade, running where he commanded, ready at any moment to a.s.semble at any given point and burn and pillage, or rob and slay. There were no leaders in the political government,--but this one leader of the ma.s.sed poor could, had he chosen, have burned down the city. But he did not choose. He had a far-sighted, clear brain,--and though he had sworn to destroy abuses wherever he could find them, he moved always with caution; and his plans were guided, not by impulse alone, but by earnest consideration for the future. He was marked out by the police as a dangerous Socialist; and his movements were constantly tracked and dodged, but so far, he had done nothing which could empower his arrest. He was a free subject in a free country; and provided he created no open disturbance he had as much liberty as a mission preacher to speak in the streets to those who would stop to listen. He paused now in his walk at the door of one house more than commonly dingy and tumble-down in appearance, where a man lounged outside in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, smoking.

”Is all well with you, Matsin?” he asked gently.

”All is well!” answered the man called Matsin,--”better than last night.

The child is dead.”

”Dead!” echoed Thord,--”And the mother----”

”Asleep!” answered Matsin. ”I gave her opium to save her from madness.

She was hungry, too--the opium fed her and made her forget!”

Thord pushed him gently aside, and went into the house. There on the floor lay the naked body of a dead child, so emaciated as to be almost a skeleton; and across it, holding it close with one arm, was stretched a woman, half clothed, her face hidden in her unbound dark hair, breathing heavily in a drugged sleep. Great tears filled Thord's eyes.

”G.o.d exists!” he said,--”And He can bear to look upon a sight like this!

If I were G.o.d, I should hate myself for letting such things be!”

”Perhaps He does hate Himself!” said the man Matsin, who had also come in, and now looked at the scene with sullen apathy--”That may be the cause of all our troubles! I don't understand the ways of G.o.d; or the ways of man either. I have done no harm. I married the woman--and we had that one child. I worked hard for both. I could not get sufficient money to keep us going; I did metal work--very well, so I was told. But they make it all abroad now by machinery--I cannot compete. They don't want new designs they say--the old will serve. I do anything now that I can--but it is difficult. You, too,--you starve with us!”

”I am poor, if that is what you mean,” said Thord,--”but take all I have to-night, Matsin--” and he emptied a small purse of silver coins into the man's hand. ”Bury the poor little innocent one;--and comfort the mother when she wakes. Comfort her!--love her!--she needs love! I will be back again to-morrow.”

He strode away quickly, and Matsin remained at his door turning over the money in his hand.

”He will sacrifice something he needs himself, for this,” he muttered.

”Yet that is the man they say the King would hang if ever he got hold of him! By Heaven!--the King himself should hang first!”

Meanwhile Sergius Thord went on, slackening his pace a little as he came near his own destination, a tall and narrow house at the end of the street, with a single light s.h.i.+ning in one of the upper windows. There was a gas-lamp some few paces off, and under this stood a man reading, or trying to read, a newspaper by its flickering glare. Thord glanced at him with some suspicion--the stranger was too near his own lodging for his pleasure, for he was always on his guard against spies. Approaching more closely, he saw that though the man was shabbily attired in a rough pilot suit, much the worse for wear, he nevertheless had the indefinable look and bearing of a gentleman. Acting on impulse, as he often did, Thord spoke to him.

”A rough night for reading by lamplight, my friend!” he said.

The man looked up, and smiled.

”Yes, it is, rather! But I have only just got the evening paper.”

”Any special news?”

”No--only this--” and he pointed to a bold headline--”The King _versus_ The Jesuits.”

”Ah!” said Thord, and he studied the looks and bearing of the stranger with increasing curiosity. ”What do you think of it?”

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