Part 14 (1/2)

”If you mean Captain Forrest of the Trafalgar Club, I have just left him,” interposed Alban, quickly; ”this lad has been known to me for some years and I am positively sure he is not a thief. Indeed, I will answer for him anywhere--and if he did pick up the box, I can promise you that Captain Forrest will not prosecute.”

He turned to ”Betty” and asked him an anxious question.

”Is it true, Betty--did you pick up the box?”

”I picked it up and put it into the gentleman's hand. He couldn't stand straight and he dropped it again. Then a cab runner found it and some one cried 'stop thief.' I was frightened and ran away. That's the truth, Mr. Alban, if I die for it--”

”We must search you, Betty, to satisfy the officers.”

”Oh, yes, sir--I'm quite willing to be searched.”

He turned out all his pockets there and then, was pinched and pushed and cuffed to no avail. The indignant Sarah shaking her clothes in the sergeant's face dared him to do the same for her and to take the consequences of his curiosity. The Archbishop obligingly offered his pockets, which, as he said, were open at all times to the inspection of his Majesty's authorized servants. A few words aside between Alban and the a.s.sembled police, the crisp rustle of a bank-note in the darkness, helped conviction to a final victory. There were other ferrets in that dark warren and bigger game to be had.

”Well, sir,” said the sergeant, ”if you'll answer for Captain Forrest--and he'll want a lot of answering for to-night--I'll leave the lad in your hands. But don't let me find any of 'em down here again, or it will go hard with them. Now, be off all of you, for we have work to do. And mind you remember what I say.”

It was a blessed release and all quitted the place without an instant's delay. Out in the open street, the Archbishop of Bloomsbury took Alban aside and congratulated him upon his good fortune.

”So your old friend Boriskoff has found you a job?” he said, laying a patronizing hand on the lad's stout shoulder. ”Well, well, I knew Richard Gessner when I was--er--hem--on duty in Kensington, and in all matters of public charity I certainly found him to be an example. You know, of course, that he is a Pole and that his real name is Maxim Gogol. General Kaulbars told me as much when he was visiting England some years ago. Your friend is a Pole who would find himself singularly inconvenienced if he were called upon to return to Poland. Believe me, how very much astonished I was to hear that you had taken up your residence in his house.”

”Then you heard about it--from whom?” Alban asked.

”Oh, 'Betty' followed you, on the day the person who calls himself w.i.l.l.y Forrest, but is really the son of a jockey named Weston, returned from Winchester. We were anxious about you, Alban--we questioned the company into which you had fallen. I may say, indeed, that our hearths were desolate and c.r.a.pe adorned our spears. We thought that you had forgotten us--and what is life when those who should remember prefer to forget.”

Alban answered at hazard, for he knew perfectly well what was coming.

The boy ”Betty,” still frightened out of his wits, clung close to the skirts of the homeless Sarah and walked with her, he knew not whither. A drizzle of rain had begun to fall; the streets were s.h.i.+ning as desolate rivers of the night--the Caves behind them stood for a house of the enemy which none might enter again. But Alban alone was silent--for his generosity had loosened the pilgrims' tongues, and they spoke as they went of a morrow which should give them bread.

CHAPTER XV

A STUDY IN INDIFFERENCE

There are many spurs to a woman's vanity, but declared indifference is surely the sharpest of them all. When Anna Gessner discovered that Alban was not willing to enroll himself in the great band of wors.h.i.+ppers who knelt humbly at her golden shrine, she set about converting him with a haste which would have been dangerous but for its transparent dishonesty. In love herself, so far as such a woman could ever be in love at all, with the das.h.i.+ng and brainless jockey who managed her race-horses, she was quite accustomed, none the less, to add the pa.s.sionate confessions and gold-sick protestations of others to her volume of amatory recollections, and it was not a little amazing that a mere youth should be discovered, so obstinate, so chilly and so indifferent as to remain insensible both to her charms and their value, in what her father had called ”pounds sterling.”

When Alban first came to ”Five Gables,” his honesty amused her greatly.

She liked to hear him speak of the good which her father's money could do in the slums and alleys he had left. It was a rare entertainment for her to be told of those ”dreadful people” who sewed s.h.i.+rts all day and were frequently engaged in the same occupation when midnight came. ”I shall call you the Missionary,” she had said, and would sit at his feet while he confessed some of the wild hopes which animated him, or justified his desire for that great humanity of the East whose supreme human need was sympathy. Anna herself did not understand a word of it--but she liked to have those clear blue eyes fixed upon her, to hear the soft musical voice and to wonder when this pretty boy would speak of his love for her.

But the weeks pa.s.sed and no word of love was spoken, and the woman in her began to ask why this should be. She was certain as she could be that her beauty had dazzled the lad when first he came to ”Five Gables.”

She remembered what fervid glances he had turned upon her when first they met, how his eyes had expressed unbounded admiration, nay wors.h.i.+p such as was unknown in the circles in which she moved. If this silent adoration flattered her for the moment, honesty played no little part in its success--for though there had been lovers who looked deep into her heart before, the majority carried but liabilities to her feet and, laying them there, would gladly have exchanged them for her father's cheques to salve their financial wounds. In Alban she had met for the first time a natural English lad who had no secrets to hide from her.

”He will wors.h.i.+p the ground upon which I walk,” she had said in the mood of sundry novelettes borrowed from her maid. And this, in truth, the lad might very well have come to do.

But the weeks pa.s.sed and Alban remained silent, and the declaration she had desired at first as an amus.e.m.e.nt now became a vital necessity to her fasting vanity. Believing that their surroundings at Hampstead, the formality, the servants, the splendor of ”Five Gables,” forbade that little comedy of love for which she hungered, she went off, in her father's absence, to their cottage at Henley, and compelling Alban to follow her, she played Phyllis to his Corydon with an ardor which could not have been surpa.s.sed. Aping the schoolgirl, she would wear her hair upon her shoulders, carry her gown shortened, and bare her sleeves to the suns of June. The rose garden became the arbor of her delights. ”You shall love me,” she said to herself--and in the determination a pa.s.sion wholly vain and not a little hazardous found its birth and prospered.

For hours together now, she would compel this unconscious slave to row her in the silent reaches or to hide with her in backwaters to which the mob rarely came. Deluding him by the promise that her father was returning shortly from Paris and would come to Henley immediately upon his arrival, she led Alban to forget the days of waiting, petted him as though he had been her lover through the years, invited him a hundred times a day to say, ”I love you--you shall be my wife.”

In his turn, he remained silent and amazed, tempted sorely by her beauty, not understanding and yet desiring to understand why he could not love her. True, indeed, that the image of another would intervene sometimes--a little figure in rags, wan and pitiful and alone; but the environment in which the vision of the past had moved, the slums, the alleys, the mean streets, these would hedge the picture about and then leave the dreamer averse and shuddering. Not there could liberty be found again. The world must show its fields to the wanderer when again he dared it alone.

Alban remembered one night above all others of this strange seclusion, and that was a night of a woman's humiliation. There had been great bustle all day, the coming of oarsmen and of coaches to Henley, and all the aquatic renaissance which prefaces the great regatta. Their own cottage, lying just above the bridge with a shady garden extending to the water's edge, was no longer the place apart that it had been.

Strangers now anch.o.r.ed a little way from their boat-house and consumed monstrous packets of sandwiches and the contents of abundant bottles.