The Masquerader Part 26

"And what did you think?"

Again she was silent; then again a faint excitement tinged her cheeks.

"I thought--" she began. "It seemed--" Once more she paused, hampered by her own uncertainty, her own sense of puzzling incongruity. "I don't know why I speak like this," she went on at last, as if in justification of herself, "or why I want to speak. But a feeling--an extraordinary, incomprehensible feeling seems to urge me on. The same feeling that came to me on the day we had tea together--the feeling that made me--that almost made me believe--"

"Believe what?" The words escaped him without volition.

At sound of his voice she turned. "Believe that a miracle had happened,"

she said--"that you had found strength--had freed yourself."

"From morphia?"

"From morphia."

In the silence that followed, Loder lived through a century of suggestion and indecision. His first feeling was for himself, but his first clear thought was for Chilcote and their compact. He stood, metaphorically, on a stone in the middle of a stream, balancing on one foot, then the other; looking to the right bank, then to the left. At last, as it always did, inspiration came to him slowly. He realized that by one plunge he might save both Chilcote and himself!

He crossed quickly to the fireplace and stood by Eve. "You were right in your belief," he said. "For all that time from the night you spoke to me of Fraide to the day you had tea in this room--I never touched a drug."

She moved suddenly, and he saw her face. "John," she said, unsteadily, "you--I--I have known you to lie to me--about other things."

With a hasty movement he averted his head. The doubt, the appeal in her words shocked him. The whole isolation of her life seemed summed up in the one short sentence. For the instant he forgot Chilcote. With a reaction of feeling he turned to her again.

"Look at me!" he said, brusquely.

She raised her eyes.

"Do you believe I'm speaking the truth?"

She searched his eyes intently, the doubt and hesitancy still struggling in her face.

"But the last three weeks?" she said, reluctantly. "How can you ask me to believe?"

He had expected this, and he met it steadily enough; nevertheless his courage faltered. To deceive this woman, even to justify himself, had in the last halfhour become something sacrilegious.

"The last three weeks must be buried," he said, hurriedly. "No man could free himself suddenly from--from a vice." He broke off abruptly. He hated Chilcote; he hated himself. Then Eve's face, raised in distressed appeal, overshadowed all scruples. "You have been silent and patient for years," he said, suddenly. "Can you be patient and silent a little longer?" He spoke without consideration. He was conscious of no selfishness beneath his words. In the first exercise of conscious strength the primitive desire to reduce all elements to his own sovereignty submerged every other emotion. "I can't enter into the thing," he said; "like you, I give no explanations. I can only tell you that on the day we talked together in this room I was myself--in the full possession of my reason, the full knowledge of my own capacities.

The man you have known in the last three weeks, the man you have imagined in the last four years, is a shadow, an unreality--a weakness in human form. There is a new Chilcote--if you will only see him."

Ewe was trembling as he ceased; her face was flushed; there was a strange brightness in her eyes She was moved beyond herself.

"But the other you--the old you?"

"You must be patient." He looked down into the fire. "Times like the last three weeks will come again--must come again; they are inevitable.

When they do come, you must shut your eyes--you must blind yourself. You must ignore them--and me. Is it a compact?" He still avoided her eyes.

She turned to him quietly. "Yes--if you wish it," she said, below her breath.

He was conscious of her glance, but he dared not meet it. He felt sick at the part he was playing, yet he held to it tenaciously.

"I wonder if you could do what few men and fewer women are capable of?"

he asked, at last. "I wonder if you could learn to live in the present?"

He lifted his head slowly and met her eyes. "This is an--an experiment,"

he went on. "And, like all experiments, it has good phases and bad. When the bad phases come round I--I want you to tell yourself that you are not altogether alone in your unhappiness--that I am suffering too--in another way."

There was silence when he had spoken, and for a s.p.a.ce it seemed that Eve would make no response. Then the last surprise in a day of surprises came to him. With a slight stir, a slight, quick rustle of skirts, she stepped forward and laid her hand in his.

The gesture was simple and very sweet; her eyes were soft and full of light as she raised her face to his, her lips parted in unconscious appeal.

There is no surrender so seductive as the surrender of a proud woman.

Loder's blood stirred, the undeniable suggestion of the moment thrilled and disconcerted him in a tumult of thought. Honor, duty, principle rose in a triple barrier; but honor, duty, and principle are but words to a headstrong man. The full significance of his position came to him as it had never come before. His hand closed on hers; he bent towards her, his pulses beating unevenly.

"Eve!" he said. Then at sound of his voice he suddenly hesitated. It was the voice of a man who has forgotten everything but his own existence.

For an instant he stayed motionless; then very quietly he drew away from her, releasing her hands.

"No," he said. "No--I haven't got the right."

XVIII

That night, for almost the first time since he had adopted his dual role, Loder slept ill. He was not a man over whom imagination held any powerful sway--his doubts and misgivings seldom ran to speculation, upon future possibilities; nevertheless, the fact that, consciously or unconsciously, he had adopted a new att.i.tude towards Eve came home to him with unpleasant force during the hours of darkness; and long before the first hint of daylight had slipped through the heavy window-curtains he had arranged a plan of action--a plan wherein, by the simple method of altogether avoiding her, he might soothe his own conscience and safeguard Chilcote's domestic interests.

It was a satisfactory if a somewhat negative arrangement, and he rose next morning with a feeling that things had begun to shape themselves.

But chance sometimes has a disconcerting knack of forestalling even our best-planned schemes. He dressed slowly, and descended to his solitary breakfast with the pleasant sensation of having put last night out of consideration by the turning over of a new leaf; but scarcely had he opened Chilcote's letters, scarcely had he taken a cursory glance at the morning's newspaper, than it was borne in upon him that not only a new leaf, but a whole sheaf of new leaves, had been turned in his prospects--by a hand infinitely more powerful and arbitrary than his own. He realized within the s.p.a.ce of a few moments that the leisure Eve might have claimed, the leisure he might have been tempted to devote to her, was no longer his to dispose of--being already demanded of him from a quarter that allowed of no refusal.

For the first rumbling of the political earthquake that was to shake the country made itself audible beyond denial on that morning of March 27th, when the news spread through England that, in view of the disorganized state of the Persian army and the Shah's consequent inability to suppress the open insurrection of the border tribes in the north-eastern districts of Meshed, Russia, with a great show of magnanimity, had come to the rescue by despatching a large armed force from her military station at Merv across the Persian frontier to the seat of the disturbance.

To many hundreds of Englishmen who read their papers on that morning this announcement conveyed but little. That there is such a country as Persia we all know, that English interests predominate in the south and Russian interests in the north we have all superficially understood from childhood; but in this knowledge, coupled with the fact that Persia is comfortably far away, we are apt to rest content. It is only to the eyes that see through long-distance gla.s.ses, the minds that regard the present as nothing more nor less than an inevitable link joining the future to the past, that this distant, debatable land stands out in its true political significance.

To the average reader of news the statement of Russia's move seemed scarcely more important than had the first report of the border risings in January, but to the men who had watched the growth of the disturbance it came charged with portentous meaning. Through the entire ranks of the opposition, from Fraide himself downward, it caused a thrill of expectation--that peculiar prophetic sensation that every politician has experienced at some moment of his career.

In no member of his party did this feeling strike deeper root than in Loder. Imbued with a lifelong interest in the Eastern question, specially equipped by personal knowledge to hold and proclaim an opinion upon Persian affairs, he read the signs and portents with instinctive insight. Seated at Chilcote's table, surrounded by Chilcote's letters and papers, he forgot the breakfast that was slowly growing cold, forgot the interests and dangers, personal or pleasurable, of the night before, while his mental eyes persistently conjured up the map of Persia, travelling with steady deliberation from Merv to Meshed, from Meshed to Herat, from Herat to the empire of India! For it was not the fact that the Hazaras had risen against the Shah that occupied the thinking mind, nor was it the fact that Russian and not Persian troops were destined to subdue them, but the deeply important consideration that an armed Russian force had crossed the frontier and was encamped within twenty miles of Meshed-Meshed, upon which covetous Russian eyes have rested ever since the days of Peter the Great.

So Loder's thoughts ran as he read and reread the news from the varying political stand-points, and so they continued to run when, some hours later, an urgent telephone message from the 'St. George's Gazette' asked him to call at Lakely's office.

The message was interesting as well as imperative, and he made an instant response. The thought of Lakely's keen eyes and shrewd enthusiasms always possessed strong attractions for his own slower temperament, but even had this impetus been lacking, the knowledge that at the 'St. George's' offices, if anywhere, the true feelings of the party were invariably voiced would have drawn him without hesitation.

It was scarcely twelve o'clock when he turned the corner of the tall building, but already the keen spirit that Lakely everywhere diffused was making itself felt. Loder smiled to himself as his eyes fell on the day's placards with their uncompromising headings, and pa.s.sed onward from the string of gayly painted carts drawn up to receive their first consignment of the paper to the troop of eager newsboys pa.s.sing in and out of the big swing-doors with their piled-up bundles of the early edition; and with a renewed thrill of antic.i.p.ation and energy he pa.s.sed through the doorway and ran up-stairs.

Pa.s.sing unchallenged through the long corridor that led to Lakely's office, he caught a fresh impression of action and vitality from the click of the tape machines in the subeditors' office, and a glimpse through the open door of the subeditors themselves, each occupied with his particular task; then without time for further observation he found himself at Lakely's door. Without waiting to knock, as he had felt compelled to do on the one or two previous occasions that business had brought him there, he immediately turned the handle and entered the room.

Editors' offices differ but little in general effect.

Lakely's surroundings were rather more elaborate than is usual, as became the dignity of the oldest Tory evening paper, but the atmosphere was unmistakable. As Loder entered he glanced up from the desk at which he was sitting, but instantly returned to his task of looking through and marking the pile of early evening editions that were spread around him. His coat was off and hung on the chair behind him, axed he pulled vigorously on a long cigar.

"Hullo! That's right," he said, laconically. "Make yourself comfortable half a second, while I skim the 'St. Stephen's'."