Aladdin of London Part 14

"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 shining 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 worshippers 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 dashing 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 shirts 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 worship 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 worship 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.

There were house-boats being tugged up and down the river, little groups of rowing men upon the bridge all day, the music of banjos by night, and lanterns glowing in the darkness. Anna watched this pretty scene as one who would really take a young girl's part in it. She simulated an interest in the rowing about which she knew nothing at all--visited the house-boats of such of her friends as had come down for the regatta, and was, in w.i.l.l.y Forrest's words, as "skittish as a two-year-old that had slipped its halter." Forrest had been to and fro from the stable near Winchester on several occasions. "He comes to tell me that I am about to lose a fortune, and I am beginning to hate him," Anna said; and on this occasion she enjoyed that diverting and unaccustomed recreation known as speaking the truth.

There had been such a visit as this upon the morning of the day when Anna spoke intimately to Alban of his future and her own. Her mood now abandoned itself utterly to her purpose. The close intimacy of these quiet days had brought her to the point where a real if momentary pa.s.sion compelled her to desire this boy's love as she had never desired anything in all her life. To bring him to that declaration she sought so ardently, to feel his kisses upon her lips, to play the young lover's part if it were but for a day, to this folly her vanity had driven her.

And now the opportunities for words were not denied. She had spent the afternoon in the backwaters up by Shiplake; there had been a little dinner afterwards with the old crone who served them so usefully as chaperone--a dependent who had eyes but did not see, ears which, as she herself declared, "would think scorn to listen." Amiable dame, she was in bed by nine o'clock, while Alban and Anna were lying in a punt at the water's edge, listening to the music of a distant guitar and watching the twinkling lights far away below the bridge where the boat-houses stand.

A Chinese lantern suspended upon a short boat-hook cast a deep crimson glow upon the faces of those who might well have been young lovers. The river rippled musically against the square bows of their ugly but comfortable craft. But few pa.s.sed them by and those were also seekers after solitude, with no eyes for their co-religionists in the amatory gospel. Alban, wholly fascinated by the silence and the beauty of the scene, lay at Anna's feet, so full of content that he did not dare to utter his thoughts aloud. The girl caught the tiny wavelets in her outstretched hand and said that Corydon had become blind.

"Do you like w.i.l.l.y Forrest?" she asked, "do you think he is clever, Alban?"--a question, the answer to which would not interest her at all if it did not lead to others. Alban, in his turn, husbanding the secrets, replied evasively:

"Why should I think about him? He is not a friend of mine. You are the one to answer that, Anna. You like him--I have heard you say so."

"Never believe what a girl says. I adore w.i.l.l.y Forrest because he makes me laugh. I am like the poor little white rabbit which is fascinated by the great black wriggly snake. Some day it will swallow me up--perhaps on Thursday--after Ascot. I wish I could tell you. Pandora seems to have dropped everything out of her basket except the winner of the Gold Cup.

If w.i.l.l.y Forrest is right, I shall win a fortune. But, of course, he doesn't tell the truth any more than I do."

Alban was silent a little while and then he asked her:

"Do you know much about him, Anna? Did you ever meet his people or anything?"

She looked at him sharply.

"He is the son of Sir John Forrest, who died in India. His brother was lost at sea. What made you ask me?"

He laughed as though it had not been meant.

"You say that he doesn't tell the truth. Suppose it were so about himself. He might be somebody else--not altogether the person he pretends to be. Would it matter if he were? I don't think so, Anna--I would much rather know something about a man himself than about his name."

She sat up in the punt and rested her chin upon the knuckles of her shapely hands. This kind of talk was little to her liking. She had often doubted w.i.l.l.y Forrest, but had never questioned his t.i.tle to the name he bore.

"Have they ever told you anything about us, Alban?" she continued, "did you ever hear any stories which I should not hear?"

"Only from Captain Forrest himself; he told me that he was engaged to you. That was when I went to the Savoy Hotel."

"All those weeks ago. And you never mentioned it?"

"Was it any business of mine? What right had I to speak to you about it?"

She flushed deeply.

"A secret for a secret," she said. "When you first came to Hampstead, I thought that you liked me a little Alban. Now, I know that you do not.

Suppose there were a reason why I let w.i.l.l.y Forrest say that he was engaged to me. Suppose some one else had been unkind when I wished him to be very kind to me. Would you understand then?"

This was in the best spirit of the coquette and yet a great earnestness lay behind it. Posing in that romantic light, the thick red lips pouting, the black eyes shining as with the clear flame of a soul awakened, the head erect as that of a deer which has heard a sound afar, this pa.s.sionate little actress, half Pole, half Jewess, might well have set a man's heart beating and brought him, suppliant, to her feet. To Alban there returned for a brief instant all that spirit of homage and of awe with which he had first beheld her on the balcony of the house in St. James' Square. The cynic in him laid down his robe and stood before her in the garb of youth spellbound and fascinated. He dared to say to himself, she loves me--it is to me that these words are spoken.

"I cannot understand you, Anna," he exclaimed, tortured by some plague of a sudden memory, held back from a swift embrace he knew not by what instinct. "You say that you only let w.i.l.l.y Forrest call himself engaged to you. Don't you love him then--is it all false that you have told him?"

"It is quite false, Alban--I do not love him as you would understand the meaning of the word. If he says that I am engaged to him, is it true because he says it? There are some men who marry women simply because they are persevering. w.i.l.l.y Forrest would be one of them if I were weak enough. But I do not love him--I shall never love him, Alban."