The Second Class Passenger Part 32

Behind the screen, the narrow bed was white, and on it Regnault lay in stillness, looking up.

He started slightly as O'Neill appeared at the foot of his bed, and the faint flush rose in his face. "Hush!" he said, with a forefinger uplifted, and poised for a few seconds on the brink of a spasm.

"Ah!" he said when he was safe. "That was a near thing, O'Neill. I am glad to see you back, my friend."

He was tranquil; even that undertone of mockery, so familiar in his voice, was gone. A rosary sprawled on his breast; O'Neill recognized it for a splendid piece of Renaissance work that had lain about the room for months.

"I have found my happiness in meditation," Regnault was saying, in a still, silken voice. "But tell me, O'Neill--will she come?"

"Yes," said O'Neill, wearily, "she will come." Regnault made a gentle gesture of thanks and closed his eyes. His long fingers slid on the ivory beads and his lips moved. O'Neill gazed down on him with a weakness of bewilderment; his landmarks were shifting.

He was standing thus, looking in mere absence of mind, when a footfall beyond the screen reached his ear.

"Oh Lord!" he cried.

It was she. As his eyes fell upon her she was letting fall her long cloak. It lay on the floor about her feet, and she towered over it, in superb scarlet. Against her background of shadow her neck and arms and the abundance of her breast shone like silver. Ere he could go to her she waved him away with a sweep of a naked arm. A hand was on her hip, and she moved towards the bed with the sliding gait of the Spanish dancer.

It was an affair of an instant. Buscarlet and Truelove hastened upon his exclamation, and Buscarlet, stumbling, brushed against the screen. He caught at it to save it from falling, and the bed was bare to the room. Regnault and his wife looked into each other's face.

She, undisturbed by the suddenness of it all, held yet her posture of the stage, glowing in her silk with something dangerous and ominous about her, something blatant and yet potent, like a knife in a stocking. It was as though she wrought in violence for the admiration of the man on the bed. He, on his elbow, turned to her a thin face with lips parted and trembling; for an intolerable instant they hung, mute and motionless. Then, slowly, she turned with one foot sliding, and the light of the lamp was full on her face.

It seemed to break the tense spell; Regnault's face was writhing; of a sudden he burst into shrill, hideous laughter, and his right hand flung out and pointed at her. None moved; none could. His laugh rang and broke, and rang again, outrageous and uncontrollable, merry and hearty and hateful. The woman, at the first peal of it, started and stood as though stricken to stone; they could see her shrivel under the blast of it, shrivel and shrink and age.

Then, as though it had been overdue and long awaited, the laugh checked and choked. It freed them from the thrall that held them.

Regnault's head fell back.

"The amyl!" cried O'Neill, and they were all about him. "The amyl-- where is it?"

Regnault's face was a mask of paralyzed pain; but the silver patch- box that held the capsules was not on the table. It took a minute to find it on the floor. O'Neill smashed a couple, and thrust his hand into the waxen face--and waited. Buscarlet was breathing like a man in a nightmare. Truelove stood to attention. But Regnault did not return to the shape of life.

O'Neill let his hand drop, and turned to Truelove. "He's got it," he said; "But fetch a doctor."

His eyes fell on the dancer in her shimmering scarlet, where she knelt at the bedside, with her head bowed to the counterpane and her hands clasped over it.

He sighed. He did not understand.

X

THE POOR IN HEART

It was his habit of an evening to play the flute; and he was playing it faithfully, with the score propped up against a pile of books on his table, when the noises from the street reached him, and interrupted his music. With the silver-dotted flute in his hand he moved to the window and put aside the curtains to look out.

The flute is the instrument of mild men; and Robert Lucas had mildness for a chief quality. At the age of thirty-five, in the high noon of his manhood, he showed to the world a friendly, unenterprising face, neatly bearded, and generally a little vacant.

The accident that gave him a Russian mother was his main qualification for the post he now held--that of representative of a firm of leather manufacturers in the Russian town of Tambov. He spoke Russian, he knew leather, and he could ignore the smells of a tanyard; these facts ent.i.tled him to a livelihood.

To right and left, as he looked forth, the cobbled street was dark; but opposite, in the silversmith's shop, there were lights, and, below, a small crowd had gathered. He watched wonderingly. He knew the silversmith well enough to nod as he pa.s.sed his door--a young, laborious man with a rapt, uncertain face and a tumbled mane of black hair. There were also a little, grave wife and a fat, grave baby; and these, when they were visible, received separate and distinctive nods, and always returned them. The hide-sellers and tanners were, for the most part, crude and sportive persons with whom he could have nothing in common; they lived, apparently, on drink and uproar; and he had come to regard the silversmith and his family as vague friends. He pressed his face closer to the gla.s.s of the double cas.e.m.e.nt to see more certainly.

The little shop seemed to be full of lights and people, and outside its door there was a press of folk. The murmur of voices was audible, though he could distinguish nothing that was said. But now and again there was laughter. It was the laughter that held him gazing and apprehensive; it had a harsher note than mirth. It seemed to him, too, that some of the men in the doorway were in uniform; he could see them only in outline, mere black silhouettes against the interior lights; but there was about them the ominous cut of the official, that Russian bird of ill-omen. And then, while yet he doubted, there sounded the very keynote of disaster. From somewhere within the silversmith's shop a woman screamed, sudden and startling.

"Now, now!" said Robert Lucas, at his window, grasping his flute nervously. And, as though in answer to his remonstrance, there was again that guttural, animal laughter. He frowned.

"I must see into this," he told himself very seriously.

He turned from the window. His pleasant room, with the bright lamp on the table and the music leaning beside it, seemed to advise him to proceed with caution. He and his life were not devised for situations in which women screamed on that tense note of anguish and terror; he had never done a violent thing in all his days. There was no clear purpose in his mind as he pulled open his door to go out--merely an ill-ease that forced him to go nearer to the cause of those screams.

He had descended the stairs and was fumbling at the latch of the street-door before he realized that he was still holding the flute.

"Oh, bother!" he exclaimed, in extreme exasperation when the instrument proved too long for his pocket, and went out carrying it like some remarkable and ornate baton.

The small crowd before the silversmith's shop numbered, perhaps, a hundred people, and even before his eyes were acclimatized to the darkness he smelt sheepskin coats and tan-bark. He touched one big man on the arm and asked a question. The lights in the shop lit up the fellow's hairy face and loose grin as he turned to answer.

"Eh?" said the man. "Why, it's a Jew that the police are clearing out. Did you hear the Jewess squeal?"

"Yes, I heard," said Lucas, and moved away.

He was cut off from the door of the shop by the backs of the crowd, and pa.s.sed along the street to get round them. Inside the lighted house the baby had begun to cry, but there was no more screaming. He had a sense that unless he hurried he might be too late for what was in preparation. The crowd seemed to be waiting for some culminating scene, with more than screams in it. A touch of nervous excitement came to fortify him, and he thrust in between two huge slaughterers, whose clothes reeked of the killing sheds.

"Make way!" he said breathlessly, as they turned on him.

One of them swore and would have shoved him back, and others looked round at the sound of strife. Lucas put up an uncertain hand to guard the blow. It, was the hand that held the flute, whose silver keys flashed in the lights from the shop.

"Ha!" grunted the slaughterer, arrested by that sight. He looked at Lucas doubtfully, his neat clothes, his general aspect of a superior.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

"Make way!" repeated Lucas.

It seemed to confirm the slaughterer in his suspicion that this was a personage to be deferred to.

"Hi, there!" he bellowed helpfully. "Give room for his Excellency.

Let his Excellency come through! Don't you see what he's got in his hand? Make way, will you?"

He bent his huge, unclean shoulder to the business of clearing a path, and drove through like a snow-plough. Lucas followed along the lane that he made, and came to the pavement close by the shop.

It was fortunate that events marched sharply from that point, and forced him to act without thinking. He had some vague notion of finding the officer in charge of the police and speaking to him. But before he could move to do so there was a fresh activity of the people within the bright windows; he saw something that had the look of a struggle. Voices babbled, and the crowd pressed closer; and suddenly, from the open doorway, two figures reeled forth, clutching and thrusting. One was in uniform, the other was a woman. For a couple of seconds they wrenched and fought, staged before the crowd on the lighted doorstep; and then the woman broke away and ran blindly towards the spot where Lucas stood. She had, he saw suddenly, a child in her arms that cried unceasingly.

The uniformed man who had tried to hold her came plunging after her; his face was creased in clownish and cruel smiles. Lucas saw the thing stupidly; his mind prompted him to nothing; he stood where he was, empty of resource. He was directly in the flying woman's path, and she rushed at him as to a refuge. He was the sole thing in that narrow arena of dread which she did not recognize as a figure of oppression; and she floundered to her knees at his-feet and held forth the terrified child to him in an agony of appeal. Her tormented and fearful face was upturned to him; he knew her for the Jewess, the wife of the silversmith.

"Father!" she breathed, in the pitiful idiom of that land of orphans.

"Ye-es," said Robert Lucas vaguely, and put a hand on her head.

Never before, in all the orderly level of his life, had a human being chosen him for champion and savior. He was aware of something within him that surged, some spate of force and potency in his blood; he stood upright with a start to confront the policeman who was on the woman's heels. The man was grinning still, fatuously and consciously, like a buffoon who knows he will be applauded; Lucas fronted his smiling security with a still fury that wiped the mirth from his face and left him gaping.

"Get back!" said Lucas. He spoke in a low tone, and the crowd jostled nearer to hear.

The policeman stared at him, amazed and uncomprehending.

"Sir," he stammered; "Excellency--this Jewess she----"