Part 27 (2/2)

”I would not go, Alb dear. Not while my father is a prisoner. Who is there to work for him, if I don't? No, my dear, I must not think of it.

I have my duty to do whatever comes. But you, it is different for you, Alban, you would be right to go.”

He answered her hotly with a boyish phrase, conventional but true.

”You would make a coward of me, Lois,” he said, ”just a coward like the others. But I am not going to let you. You left me once before; I have never forgotten that. You went to Russia, and forgot that we had ever been friends. Was that very kind, was it your true self that did so?

I'll never believe, unless you say so now.”

She sat a little apart from him, regarding him wistfully as though she wondered greatly at his accusation.

”You went to live in another world, dear, and so did I. My father made me promise that I would not try to see you for six months, and I kept my word. That was better for you and better for me. If money had changed you, and money does change most of us, you would have been happier for my silence. I have told you about the letters, and that's G.o.d's truth.

If I had not been ashamed, I couldn't have kept my word, for I loved you, dear, and I shall always love you. When my father sent you to Mr.

Gessner's house, I think he wished to find out if his good opinion of you was right or not. He said that you were going to carry a sword into Wonderland and kill some of the giants. If you came back to us, you were to marry me, but if you forgot us, then he would never believe in any man again. There's the truth for you, my dear, I tell you because it all means nothing to me now. I could not go to London and leave my father in prison here, and they will never release him, Alban, they will never do it as things are, for they are more frightened of him than of any man in Russia. When I go away from here, it will be to Petersburg to try and see my father. There's no one else in all the world to help him, and I shall go there and try to see him. If they will let me stay with him, that will be something, dear. You can ask them that for me; when Mr.

Gessner writes, you can beg it of the Ministry in Mr. Gessner's name.”

”Ask them to send you to prison, Lois?”

”To send me to my father, dear.”

Alban sat very silent, almost ashamed for himself and his own desires.

The stupendous sacrifice of which she spoke so lightly revealed to him a page in the story of human sympathy which he had often read and as often derided. Here in the prison cell he stood face to face with human love as Wonderland knew nothing of it. Supreme above all other desires of her life, this desire to save her father, to share his sorrows, to stand by him to the end, prevailed. The riches of the world could not purchase a devotion as precious, or any fine philosophy belittle it. He knew that she would go to Petersburg because Paul Boriskoff, her father, had need of her. This was her answer to his selfish complaints during the years of their exile.

”And what am I to do if they give you the permission, Lois?”

”To go back to London and marry Anna Gessner. Won't you do that, Alban?”

”You know that I shall never do so.”

”There was a time when you would not have said that, my dear.”

He was greatly troubled, for the accusation was very just. The impossibility of making the whole truth plain to her had stared him in the face since the moment of her pathetic confession when he met her on the barge. Impossible to say to her, ”I had an ideal and pursued it, looking to the right and the left for the figure of the vision and suffering it to escape me all the time.” This he could not tell her or even hint at. The lie cried for a hearing, and the lie was detestable to him.

”There was a time, yes, Lois,” he said, turning his face from her, ”I am ashamed to remember it now, since you have spoken. If you love me, you would understand what all the wonders of Mr. Gessner's house meant to a poor devil, brought up as I had been. It was another world with strange people everywhere. I thought they were more than human and found them just like the rest of us. Oh, that's the truth of it, and I know it now.

Our preachers are always calling upon the rich to do fine things for the poor, but the rich man is deaf as often as not, because some little puny thing in their own lives is dinning in their ears and will shut out all other sounds. I know that it must be so. The man who has millions doesn't think about humanity at all. He wages war upon trifles, his money-books are his library, he has blinded himself by reading them and lost his outlook upon the world. I thought it would all be so different, and then somebody touches me upon the shoulder and I look up and see that my vision is no vision at all, and that the true heart of it is my own all the time. Can you understand that, Lois, is it hidden from you also?”

”It is not hidden, Alban, it is just as I said it would be.”

”And you did not love me less because of it?”

”I should never have loved you less, whatever you had done.”

”I shall remind you of that when we are in England together.”

”That will never be, Alban dear, unless my father is free.”

She repeated it again and again. Her manner of speaking had now become that of one who understood that this was a last farewell.

”You cannot help us,” she said, ”why should you suffer because we must?

<script>