Under Two Flags Part 18

"The 15th!"

The echo of those words alone escaped the dry, white lips of Cecil; he showed no amaze, no indignation; once only, as the charge was made, he gave in sudden gesture, with a sudden gleam, so dark, so dangerous, in his eyes, that his comrade thought and hoped that with one moment more the Jew would be dashed down at his feet with the lie branded on his mouth by the fiery blow of a slandered and outraged honor. The action was repressed; the extraordinary quiescence, more hopeless because more resigned than any sign of pain or of pa.s.sion, returned either by force of self-control or by the stupor of despair.

The Seraph gazed at him with a fixed, astounded horror; he could not believe his senses; he could not realize what he saw. His dearest friend stood mute beneath the charge of lowest villainy--stood powerless before the falsehoods of a Jew extortioner!

"Bertie! Great Heaven!" he cried, well-nigh beside himself, "how can you stand silent there? Do you hear--do you hear aright? Do you know the accursed thing this conspiracy has tried to charge you with? Say something, for the love of G.o.d! I will have vengeance on your slanderer, if you take none."

He had looked for the rise of the same pa.s.sion that rang in his own imperious words, for the fearless wrath of an insulted gentleman, the instantaneous outburst of a contemptuous denial, the fire of scorn, the lightning flash of fury--all that he gave himself, all that must be so naturally given by a slandered man under the libel that brands him with disgrace. He had looked for these as surely as he looked for the setting of one sun and the rise of another; he would have staked his life on the course of his friend's conduct as he would upon his own, and a ghastly terror sent a pang to his heart.

Still--Cecil stood silent; there was a strange, set, repressed anguish on his face that made it chill as stone; there was an unnatural calm upon him; yet he lifted his head with a gesture haughty for the moment as any action that his defender could have wished.

"I am not guilty," he said simply.

The Seraph's hands were on his own in a close, eager grasp almost ere the words were spoken.

"Beauty, Beauty! Never say that to me. Do you think I can ever doubt you?"

For a moment Cecil's head sank; the dignity with which he had spoken remained on him, but the scorn of his defiance and his denial faded.

"No; you cannot; you never will."

The words were spoken almost mechanically, like a man in a dream. Ezra Baroni, standing calmly there with the tranquility that an a.s.sured power alone confers, smiled slightly once more.

"You are not guilty, Mr. Cecil? I shall be charmed if we can find it so.

Your proofs?"

"Proof? I give you my word."

Baroni bowed, with a sneer at once insolent but subdued.

"We men of business, sir, are--perhaps inconveniently for gentlemen--given to a preference in favor of something more substantial.

Your word, doubtless, is your bond among your acquaintance; it is a pity for you that your friend's name should have been added to the bond you placed with us. Business men's pertinacity is a little wearisome, no doubt, to officers and members of the aristocracy like yourself; but all the same I must persist--how can you disprove this charge?"

The Seraph turned on him with a fierceness of a bloodhound.

"You dog! If you use that tone again in my presence, I will double-throng you till you cannot breathe!"

Baroni laughed a little; he felt secure now, and could not resist the pleasure of braving and of torturing the "aristocrats."

"I don't doubt your will or your strength, my lord; but neither do I doubt the force of the law to make you account for any brutality of the prize-ring your lordship may please to exert on me."

The Seraph ground his heel into the carpet.

"We waste words on that wretch," he said abruptly to Cecil. "Prove his insolence the lie it is, and we will deal with him later on."

"Precisely what I said, my lord," murmured Baroni. "Let Mr. Cecil prove his innocence."

Into Bertie's eyes came a hunted, driven desperation. He turned them on Rockingham with a look that cut him to the heart; yet the abhorrent thought crossed him--was it thus that men guiltless looked?

"Mr. Cecil was with my partner at 7:50 on the evening of the 15th. It was long over business hours, but my partner to oblige him stretched a point," pursued the soft, bland, malicious voice of the German Jew. "If he was not at our office--where was he? That is simple enough."

"Answered in a moment!" said the Seraph, with impetuous certainty.

"Cecil!--to prove this man what he is, not for an instant to satisfy me--where were you at that time on the 15th?"

"The 15th!"

"Where were you?" pursued his friend. "Were you at mess? At the clubs?

Dressing for dinner?--where--where? There must be thousands of ways of remembering--thousands of people who'll prove it for you?"

Cecil stood mute still; his teeth clinched on his under lip. He could not speak--a woman's reputation lay in his silence.

"Can't you remember?" implored the Seraph. "You will think--you must think!"

There was a feverish entreaty in his voice. That hunted helplessness with which a question so slight yet so momentous was received, was forcing in on him a thought that he flung away like an asp.

Cecil looked both of them full in the eyes--both his accuser and his friend. He was held as speechless as though his tongue were paralyzed; he was bound by his word of honor; he was weighted with a woman's secret.

"Don't look at me so, Bertie, for mercy's sake! Speak! Where were you?"

"I cannot tell you; but I was not there."

The words were calm; there was a great resolve in them, moreover; but his voice was hoa.r.s.e and his lips shook. He paid a bitter price for the b.u.t.terfly pleasure of a summer-day love.

"Cannot tell me!--cannot? You mean you have forgotten!"

"I cannot tell you; it is enough."

There was an almost fierce and sullen desperation in the answer; its firmness was not shaken, but the ordeal was terrible. A woman's reputation--a thing so lightly thrown away with an idler's word, a Lovelace's smile!--that was all he had to sacrifice to clear himself from the toils gathering around him. That was all! And his word of honor.

Baroni bent his head with an ironic mockery of sympathy.

"I feared so, my lord. Mr. Cecil 'cannot tell.' As it happens, my partner can tell. Mr. Cecil was with him at the hour and on the day I specify; and Mr. Cecil transacted with him the bill that I have had the honor of showing you--"

"Let me see it."

The request was peremptory to imperiousness, yet Cecil would have faced his death far sooner than he would have looked upon that piece of paper.

Baroni smiled.

"It is not often that we treat gentlemen under misfortune in the manner we treat you, sir; they are usually dealt with more summarily, less mercifully. You must excuse altogether my showing you the doc.u.ment; both you and his lordship are officers skilled, I believe, in the patrician science of fist-attack."

He could not deny himself the pleasure and the rarity of insolence to the men before him, so far above him in social rank, yet at that juncture so utterly at his mercy.

"You mean that we should fall foul of you and seize it?" thundered Rockingham in the magnificence of his wrath. "Do you judge the world by your own wretched villainies? Let him see the paper; lay it there, or, as there is truth on earth, I will kill you where you stand."

The Jew quailed under the fierce flashing of those leonine eyes. He bowed with that tact which never forsook him.

"I confide it to your honor, my Lord Marquis," he said, as he spread out the bill on the console. He was an able diplomatist.