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Aladdin of London; Or, Lodestar

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Title: Aladdin of London; Or, Lodestar

Author: Max Pemberton


        
Release date: March 15, 2009 [eBook #28326]
                Most recently updated: January 4, 2021

Language: English

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ALADDIN OF LONDON

Or

Lodestar

by

MAX PEMBERTON

Author of "The Hundred Days," "A Gentleman's Gentleman," "Doctor
Xavier," "The Lady Evelyn," etc., etc.

Illustrated by Frank Parker







New York Empire Book Company Publishers




[Illustration: A very orgy of blood and slaughter; a carnival of
whips.--Page 198]



Copyright, 1907, by Max Pemberton.
Entered at Stationers' Hall.
All rights reserved.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                       PAGE

     I. THE HALL BY UNION STREET                 5

    II. ALBAN KENNEDY MAKES A PROMISE           14

   III. WITHOUT THE GATE                        23

    IV. THE CAVES                               33

     V. DISMISSAL                               45

    VI. THE STRANGER                            56

   VII. THE HOUSE OF THE FIVE GABLES            62

  VIII. ALBAN KENNEDY DINES                     71

    IX. ANNA GESSNER                            79

     X. RICHARD GESSNER DEBATES AN ISSUE        90

    XI. WHIRLWIND                              109

   XII. ALBAN SEES LIFE                        121

  XIII. ALBAN REVISITS UNION STREET            132

   XIV. THERE ARE STRANGERS IN THE CAVES       145

    XV. A STUDY IN INDIFFERENCE                152

   XVI. THE INTRUDER                           160

  XVII. FATHER AND DAUGHTER                    167

 XVIII. FATE IRONICAL                          182

   XIX. THE PLOT HAS FAILED                    192

    XX. ALBAN GOES TO WARSAW                   198

   XXI. THE BOY IN THE BLUE BLOUSE             209

  XXII. A FIGURE IN THE STRAW                  224

 XXIII. AN INSTRUCTION TO THE POLICE           231

  XXIV. THE DAWN OF THE DAY                    240

   XXV. COUNT ZAMOYSKI SLEEPS                  247

  XXVI. AN INTERLUDE IN PICCADILLY             259

 XXVII. THE PRISON YARD                        268

XXVIII. THE MEETING                            276

  XXIX. ALBAN RETURNS TO LONDON                285

   XXX. WE MEET OLD FRIENDS                    294

  XXXI. THE MAN UPON THE PAVEMENT              303

 XXXII. IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY                307




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


"You love another woman, Alban Kennedy, and
you have wished to forget my daughter."        132

A very orgy of blood and slaughter; a
carnival of whips.                             198

"Why do you come here?" she asked him wildly.  267




ALADDIN OF LONDON

OR

LODESTAR




CHAPTER I

THE HALL BY UNION STREET


The orator was not eloquent; but he had told a human story and all
listened with respect. When he paused and looked upward it seemed to
many that a light of justice shone upon his haggard face while the tears
rolled unwiped down his ragged jerkin. His lank, unkempt hair, caught by
the draught from the open doors at the far end of the hall, streamed
behind him in grotesque profusion. His hands were clenched and his lips
compressed. That which he had told to the sea of questioning faces below
him was the story of his life. The name which he had uttered with an
oath upon his lips was the name of the man who had deprived him of
riches and of liberty. When he essayed to add a woman's name and to
speak of the wrongs which had been done her, the power of utterance left
him in an instant and he stood there gasping, his eyes toward the light
which none but he could see; a prayer of gratitude upon his lips because
he had found the man and would repay.

Look down upon this audience and you shall see a heterogeneous assembly
such as London alone of the cities can show you. The hall is a crazy
building enough, not a hundred yards from the Commercial Road at
Whitechapel. The time is the spring of the year 1903--the hour is eight
o'clock at night. Ostensibly a meeting to discuss the news which had
come that day from the chiefs of the Revolutionaries in Warsaw, the
discussion had been diverted, as such discussions invariably are, to a
recital of personal wrongs and of individual resolutions--even to mad
talk of the conquest of the world and the crowning of King Anarchy. And
to this the wild Asiatics and the sad-faced Poles listened alike with
rare murmurs and odd contortions of limbs and body. Let Paul Boriskoff
of Minsk be the orator and they knew that the red flag would fly. But
never before has Boriskoff been seen in tears and the spectacle
enchained their attention as no mere rhetoric could have done.

A man's confession, if it be honest, must ever be a profoundly
interesting document. Boriskoff, the Pole, did not hold these people
spellbound by the vigor of his denunciation or the rhythmic chant of his
anger. He had begun in a quiet voice, welcoming the news from Warsaw and
the account of the assassination of the Deputy Governor Lebinsky. From
that he passed to the old question, why does authority remain in any
city at all? This London that sleeps so securely, does it ever awake to
remember the unnumbered hosts which pitch their tents in the courts and
alleys of Whitechapel? "Put rifles into the hands of a hundred thousand
men who can be found to-night," he had said, "and where is your British
Government to-morrow? The police--they would be but as dead leaves under
the feet of a mighty multitude. The soldiers! Friends," he put it to
them, "do you ever ask yourselves how many soldiers there are in the
barracks of London to-night and what would happen to them if the people
were armed? I say to you that the house would fall as a house of cards;
the rich would flee; the poor would reign. And you who know this for a
truth, what do you answer to me? That London harbors you, that London
feeds you--aye, with the food of swine in the kennels of the dogs."

Men nodded their heads to this and some of the women tittered behind
their ragged shawls. They had heard it all so often--the grand assault
by numbers; the rifle shots ringing out in the sleeping streets by
Piccadilly; the sack of Park Lane; the flight of the Government; the
downfall of what is and the establishment of what might be. If they
believed it possible, they had sense enough to remember that a sacked
city of amnesty would be the poorest tribute to their own sagacity. At
least London did not flog them. Their wives and sisters were not here
dragged to the police stations to be brutally lashed at the command of
any underling they had offended. Applause for Boriskoff and his sound
and fury might be interpreted as a concession to their vanity. "We could
do all this," they seemed to say; "if we forbear, let London be
grateful." As for Boriskoff, he had talked so many times in such a
strain that a sudden change in voice and matter surprised them beyond
words. What had happened to him, then? Was the fellow mad when he began
to speak of the copper mines and the days of slavery he had spent
therein?

A hush fell upon the hall when the demagogue struck this unaccustomed
note; rude gas flares shed an ugly yellow glow upon faces which
everywhere asked an unspoken question. What had copper mines to do with
the news from Warsaw, and what had they to do with this assembly?
Presently, however, it came to the people that they were listening to
the story of a wrong, that the pages of a human drama were being
unfolded before them. In glowing words the speaker painted the miner's
life and that of the stokers who kept the furnaces. What a living hell
that labor had been. There were six operations in refining the copper,
he said, and he had served years of apprenticeship to each of them.
Hungry and faint and weary he had kept watch half the night at the
furnace's door and returned to his home at dawn to see white faces half
buried in the ragged beds of his house or to hear the child he loved
crying for the food he could not bring. And in those night watches the
great idea had come to him.

"Friends," he said, "the first conception of the Meltka furnace was
mine. The white heat of the night gave it to me; a child's cry, 'thou
art my father and thou wilt save me,' was my inspiration. Some of you
will have heard that there are smelting works to-day where the
sulphurous acid, which copper pyrites supplies when it is roasted, is
used for the manufacture of sulphuric acid. That was my discovery. Many
have claimed it since, but the Meltka furnace was mine--as God is in
heaven it was mine. Why, then, do I stand among you wanting bread, I who
should own the riches of kings? My friends, I will tell you. A devil
stole my secret from me and has traded it in the markets of the world.
I trusted him. I was poor and he was rich. 'Sell for me and share my
gains,' I said. His honor would be my protection, I thought, his
knowledge my security. Ah, God, what reward had I? He named me to the
police and their lashes cut the flesh from my body. I lay three years in
the prison at Irkutsk and five at Saghalin. The white faces were turned
to the earth they sprang from, my son was heard at the foot of God's
throne when they bade me go and set my foot in Poland no more. This I
knew even in that island of blood and death. Letters had come to me from
my dear wife; the Committee had kept me informed even there at the end
of the earth. I knew that my home had perished; that of all my family,
my daughter Lois alone remained to me; I knew that the days of the
tyranny were numbered and that I, even I, might yet have my work to do.
Did they keep me from Poland? I tell you that I lived there three years
in spite of them, searching for the man who should answer me. Maxim
Gogol, where had he hidden himself? The tale at the mines was that he
had gone to America, sold his interest and embarked in new ventures. I
wrote to our friends in New York and they knew nothing of such a man. I
had search made for him in Berlin, in Vienna and Paris. The years were
not too swift for my patience, but the harvest went ungathered. I came
to London and bent my neck to this yoke of starvation and eternal night.
I have worked sixteen hours a day in the foul holds of ships that I
might husband my desire and repay. Friends, ten days ago in London I
passed the man I am seeking and knew him for my own. Maxim Gogol may
hide from me no more. With these eyes have I seen him--ah, God give me
strength to speak of it--with these eyes have I seen him, with these
hands have I touched him, with this voice have I accused him. He lives
and he is mine--to suffer as I have suffered, to repay as I have
paid--until the eternal justice of God shall decide between us both."

There would have been loud applause in any other assembly upon the
conclusion of such an impassioned if verbally conventional an harangue;
but these Asiatics who heard Paul Boriskoff, who watched the tears
stream down his hollowed cheeks and beheld the face uplifted as in
ecstasy, had no applause to give him. Had not they also suffered as he
had suffered? What wrong of his had not been, in some phase or other, a
wrong of theirs? How many of them had lost children well beloved, had
known starvation and the sweater's block? Such sympathy as they had to
give was rather the cold systematical pity of their order which ever
made the individual's cause its own. This unknown Maxim Gogol, if he
were indeed in London so much the worse for him. The chosen hand would
strike him down when his hour had come--even if it were not the hand of
the man he had wronged. In so far as Boriskoff betrayed intense emotion
before them, it may be that they despised him. What nation had been made
free by tears? How would weeping put bread into the children's mouths?
This was the sentiment immediately expressed by a lank-haired Pole who
followed the speaker. Let Paul Boriskoff write out his case and the
Committee would consider it, he said. If Maxim Gogol were adjudged
guilty, let him be punished. For himself he would spare neither man,
woman, or child sheltered in the house of the oppressor. A story had
been told to them of an unusual order. He did not wholly regret that
Paul Boriskoff had not made a fortune, for, had he done so, he would not
be a brother among them to-night. Let him be assured of their sympathy.
The Committee would hear him when and where he wished.

There were other speakers in a similar mood, but the immediate interest
in the dramatic recital quickly evaporated. A little desultory talk was
followed by the serving of vodki and of cups of steaming coffee to the
women. The younger people at the far end of the hall, who had been
admitted to hear the music which should justify the gathering, grew
weary of waiting and pushed their way into the street. There they formed
little companies to speak, not of the strange entertainment which had
been provided for them, but of commonplace affairs--the elder women of
infantile sufferings, the girls of the songs they had heard on Saturday
at the Aldgate Empire or of the shocking taste in feathers of more
favored rivals. But here and there a black-eyed daughter of Poland or a
fair-haired Circassian edged away discreetly from the company and was as
warily followed by the necessary male. The dirty street caught snatches
of music-hall melodies. Windows were opened above and wit exchanged. A
voice, that of a young girl evidently, asked what had become of the
Hunter, and to this another voice replied immediately, as though
greatly satisfied, that Alban Kennedy had gone down toward the High
Street with Lois Boriskoff.

"As if you didn't know, Chris. Gawsh, you should 'ave seen her feathers
waggin' at the Union jess now. Fawther's took wiv the jumps, I hear, and
Alb's gone to the Pav to give her hair. Oh, the fine gentleming--I seed
his poor toes through his bloomin' boots this night, s'welp me Gawd I
did."

The admission was received with a shout of laughter from the window
above, where a red-haired girl leaned pensively upon the rail of a
broken balcony. The speaker, in her turn, moved away with a youth who
asked her, with much unnecessary emphasis, "what the 'ell she had to do
with Albey's feet and why she couldn't leave Chris Denham alone."

"If I ain't 'xactly gawn on Russian taller myself, wot's agen Albey
a-doin' of it," he asked authoritatively. "Leave the lidy alone and
don't arst no questions. They say as the old man is took with spasms
round at the Union. S'welp me if Albey ain't in luck--at his time of
life too."

He winked at the girl, who had put her arm boldly round his waist, and
marched on with the proud consciousness that his cleverness had not
failed to make a just impression. The red-haired girl of the pensive
face still gazed dreamily down the court and her head inclined a little
toward the earth as though she were listening for the sound of a
footstep. Not only the dreamer of dreams in that den of squalor, this
Alban Kennedy was her idol to-night as he had been the idol of fifty of
her class since he came to live among them. What cared she for his
ragged shoes or the frayed collar about his neck? Did not the whole
community admit him to be a very aristocrat of aristocrats, a diamond of
class in a quarry of ashes, a figure at once mysterious and heroical?
And this knight of the East, what irony led him away with that
white-faced Pole, Lois Boriskoff? What did he see in her? What was she
to him?

The pensive head was withdrawn sadly from the window at last. Silence
fell in the dismal court. The Russians who had been breathing fire and
vengeance were now eating smoked sturgeon and drinking vodki. A man
played the fiddle to them and some danced. After all, life has something
else than the story of wrong to tell us sometimes.




CHAPTER II

ALBAN KENNEDY MAKES A PROMISE


The boy and the girl halted together by one of the great lights at the
corner of the Commercial Road and there they spoke of the strange
confession which had just fallen from Paul Boriskoff's lips. Little
Lois, white-faced as a mime at the theatre, her black hair tousled and
unkempt, her eyes shining almost with the brightness of fever, declared
all her heart to the gentle Alban and implored him for God's sake to
take her from London and this pitiful home. He, as discreet as she was
rash, pitied her from his heart, but would not admit as much.

"If I could only speak Polish, Lois--but you know I can't," he said.
"Bread and salt, that's about what I should get in your country--and
perhaps be able to count the nails in the soles of my boots. What's the
good of telling me all about it? I saw that your father was angry, but
you people are always angry. And, little girl, he does his best for you.
Never forget that--he would sooner lose anything on earth than you."

"I don't believe it," said the girl, tossing her head angrily, "what's
he care about anything but that ole machine of his which he says they
stole from him? Ten hours have I been sewing to-day, Alb, and ten it
will be to-morrow. Truth, dear, upon my soul. What's father care so long
as the kettle boils and he can read the papers? And you're no
better--you'd take me away if you were--right away from here to the
gardens where he couldn't find me, and no one but you would ever find me
any more. That's what you'd do if you were as I want you to be. But you
ain't, Alb--you'll never care for any girl--now will you, Alb, dear?"

She clutched his arm and pressed closely to him, regardless of
passers-by so accustomed to love-making on the pavements that neither
man nor woman turned a head because of it. Alban Kennedy, however, was
frankly ashamed of the whole circumstance, and he pushed the girl away
from him as though her very touch offended.

"Look here, Lois, that's nonsense--let's go and see something, let's go
into the New Empire for an hour. Your father will be all right when he's
had a glass or two of vodki. You know he's always like this when there's
been news from Warsaw. Let's go and hear a turn and then you can tell me
what you want me to do."

They walked on a little way, she clinging to his arm timidly and looking
up often into his eyes as though for some expression of that affection
she hungered for unceasingly. The "Court" had named them for lovers long
ago, but the women declared that such an aristocrat as Alban Kennedy
would look twice before he put his neck into Paul Boriskoff's
matrimonial halter.

"A lot of good the Empire will do me to-night," Lois exclaimed
presently. "I feel more like dancing on my own grave than seeing other
people do it. What with father's temper and your cold shoulder, Alb--"

"Lois, that's unfair, dear; you know that I am sorry. But what can I do,
what can any one do for men who talk such nonsense as those fellows in
that hall? 'Seize London and the Government'--you said it was that,
didn't you?--well, they're much more likely to get brain fever and wake
up in the hospital. That's what I shall tell your father if he asks me.
And, Lois, how can you and I talk about anything serious when I haven't
a shilling to call my own and your father won't let you out of his sight
lest he should want something. It will all be different soon--bad things
always are. I shall make a fortune myself some day--I'm certain of it as
though I had the money already in the bank. People who make fortunes
always know that they are going to do so. I shall make a lot of money
and then come back for you--just my little Lois sewing at the window,
the same old dirty court, the same ragged fellows talking about sacking
London, the same faces everywhere--but Lois unchanged and waiting for
me--now isn't it that, dear, won't you be unchanged when I come back for
you?"

They stood for an instant in the shadow of a shuttered shop and, leaping
up at his question, she lifted warm red lips to his own--and the girl of
seventeen and the boy of mature twenty kissed as ardently as lovers
newly sworn to eternal devotion.

"I do love you, Alb," she cried, "I shall never love any other
man--straight, my dear, though there ain't much use in a-telling you.
Oh, Alb, if you meant it, you wouldn't leave me in this awful place;
you'd take me away, darling, where I could see the fields and the
gardens. I'd come, Alb, as true as death--I'd go this night if you arst
me, straight away never to come back--if it were to sleep on the hard
road and beg my bread from house to house--I'd go with you, Alb, as
heaven hears me, I'd be an honest wife to you and you should never
regret the day. What's to keep us, Alb, dear? Oh, we're fine rich, ain't
we, both of us, you with your fifteen shillings from the yard and me
with nine and six from the fronts. Gawd's truth, Rothschild ain't
nothink to you and me, Alb, when we've the mind to play the great lidy
and gentleman. Do you know that I lay abed some nights and try to think
as it's a kerridge and pair and you a-sittin' beside of me and nothink
round us but the green fields and the blue sky, and nothink never more
to do but jess ride on with your hand in mine and the sun to shine upon
us. Lord, what a thing it is to wake up then, Alb, and 'ear the caller
cryin' five and see my father like a white ghost at the door. And that's
wot's got to go on to the end--you know it is; you put me off 'cause you
think it'll please me, same as you put Chris Denham off when you danced
with her at the Institoot Ball. You won't never love no girl truly,
Alb--it isn't in you, my dear. You're born above us and we never shall
forget it, not none of us as I'm alive to-night."

She turned away her head to hide the tears gathering in her black eyes,
while Alban's only answer to her was a firm pressure upon the little
white hand he held in his own and a quicker step upon the crowded
pavement. Perhaps he understood that the child spoke the truth, but of
this he could not be a wise judge. His father had been a poor East End
parson, his mother was the daughter of an obstinate and flinty Sheffield
steel factor, who first disowned her for marrying a curate and then went
through the bankruptcy court as a protest against American competition.
So far Alban knew himself to be an aristocrat--and yet how could he
forget that among that very company of Revolutionaries he had so lately
quitted there were sons of men whose nobility was older than Russia
herself. That he understood so much singled him out immediately as a
youth of strange gifts and abnormal insight--but such, indeed, he was,
and as such he knew himself to be.

"I won't quarrel with you, Lois, though I see that you wish it, dear,"
he said presently, "you know I don't care for Chris Denham and what's
the good of talking about her. Let's go and cheer up--I'm sure we can do
with a bit and that's the plain truth, now isn't it, Lois?"

He squeezed her arm and drew her closer to him. At the Empire they found
two gallery seats and watched a Japanese acrobat balance himself upon
five hoops and a ladder. A lady in far from immaculate evening dress,
who sang of a flowing river which possessed eternal and immutable
qualities chiefly concerned with love and locks and unswerving fidelity,
appealed to little Lois' sentiment and she looked up at Alb whenever the
refrain recurred as much as to say, "That is how I should love you." So
many other couples about them were squeezing hands and cuddling waists
that no one took any notice of their affability or thought it odd. A
drunken sailor behind them kept asking the company with maudlin
reiteration what time the last train left for Plymouth, but beyond
crying "hush" nobody rebuked him. In truth, the young people had come
there to make love, and when the lights were turned down and the curtain
of the biograph revealed, the place seemed paradise itself.

Lois crept very close to Alban during this part of the entertainment,
nor did he repulse her. Moments there were undeniably when he had a
great tenderness toward her; moments when she lay in his embrace as some
pure gift from this haven of darkness and of evil, a fragile helpless
figure of a girlhood he idolized. Then, perchance, he loved her as Lois
Boriskoff hungered for love, with the supreme devotion, the abject
surrender of his manhood.

No meaner taint of passion inspired these outbreaks, nor might the most
critical student of character have found them blameworthy. Alban
Kennedy's rule of life defied scrutiny. His ignorance was often that of
a child, his faith that of a trusting woman--and yet he had traits of
strength which would have done no dishonor to those in the highest
places. Lois loved him and there were hours when he responded wholly to
her love and yet had no more thought of evil in his response than of
doing any of those forbidding things against which his dead mother had
schooled him so tenderly. Here were two little outcasts from the
civilized world--why should they not creep close together for that
sympathy and loving kindness which destiny had denied them.

"I darsn't be late to-night, Alb," Lois said when the biograph was over
and they had left the hall, "you know how father was. I must go back and
get his supper."

"Did he really mean all that about the copper mines and his invention?"
Alban asked her in his practical way, and added, "Of course I couldn't
understand much of it, but I think it's pretty awful to see a man
crying, don't you, Lois?"

"Father does that often," she rejoined, "often when he's alone. I might
not be in the world at all, Alb, for all he thinks of me. Some one
robbed him, you know, and just lately he thinks he's found the man in
London. What's the good of it all--who's goin' to help a poor Pole get
his rights back? Oh, yer bloomin' law and order, a lot we sees of you in
Thrawl Street, so help me funny. That's what I tell father when he talks
about his rights. We'll take ours home with us to Kingdom come and
nobody know much about 'em when we get there. A sight of good it is
cryin' out for them in this world, Alb--now ain't it, dear?"

Alban was in the habit of taking questions very seriously, and he took
this one just as though she had put it in the best of good faith.

"I can't make head or tail of things, Lois," he said stoically, "fact
is, I've given up trying. Why does my father die without sixpence after
serving God all his life, and another man, who has served the devil, go
under worth thousands? That's what puzzles me. And they tell us it will
all come right some day, just as we're all going to drive motor-cars
when the Socialists get in. Wouldn't I be selling mine cheap to-night if
anyone came along and offered me five pounds for it--wouldn't I say
'take it' and jolly glad to get the money. Why, Lois, dear, think what
we would do with five pounds."

"Go to Southend for Easter, Alb."

"Buy you a pretty ring and take you to the Crystal Palace."

"Drive a pony to Epping, Alb, and come back in the moonlight."

"Down to Brighton for the Saturday and two in the water together."

"Flash it on 'em in Thrawl Street and make Chris Denham cry."

They laughed together and cuddled joyously at a dream so bewildering.
Their united wealth that night was three shillings, of which Alb had two
and four pence. What untold possibilities in five pounds, what sunshine
and laughter and joy. Ah, that the dark court should be waiting for
them, the squalor, the misery, the woe of it. Who can wonder that the
shadows so soon engulfed them?

"Kiss me, Alb," she said at the corner, "shall I see you to-morrow
night, dear?"

"Outside the Pav at nine. You can tell me how your father took it. Say I
hope he'll get his rights. I think he always liked me rather, Lois."

"A sight more than ever he liked me, Alb, and that's truth. Ah, my dear,
you'll take me away from here some day, won't you, Alb? You'll take me
away where none shall ever know, where I shall see the world and forget
what I have been. Kiss me, Alb--I'm that low to-night, dear, I could cry
my heart out."

He obeyed her instantly. A voice of human suffering never failed to make
an instant appeal to him.

"As true as God's in heaven, if ever I get rich, I'll come first to Lois
with the story," he said--and so he bent and kissed her on the lips as
gently as though she had been his little sister.




CHAPTER III

WITHOUT THE GATE


Alban's garret lay within a stone's throw of the tenement occupied by
the Boriskoffs; but, in truth, it knew very little of him. They called
him "The Hunter," in the courts and alleys round about; and this was as
much as to say that his habits were predatory. He loved to roam afar in
quest, not of material booty, but of mental sensation. An imagination
that was simply wonderful helped him upon his way. He had but to stand
at the gate of a palace to become in an instant one of those who peopled
it. He could create himself king, or prince, or bishop as the mood took
him. If a holiday sent him to the theatre, he was the hero or villain at
his choice. In church he would preach well-imagined sermons to
spellbound listeners. The streets of the West End were his true
world--the gate without the scene of his mental pleasures.

He had no friends among the youths and lads of Thrawl Street and its
environment, nor did he seek them. Those who hung about him were soon
repelled by his secretive manner and a diffidence which was little more
than natural shyness. If he fell now and then into the speech of the
alleys, constant association was responsible for the lapse. Sometimes,
it is true, an acquaintance would defy the snub and thrust himself
stubbornly upon the unwilling wanderer. Alban was never unkind to such
as these. He pitied these folk from his very heart; but before them all,
he pitied himself.

His favorite walk was to the precincts of Westminster School, where he
had spent two short terms before his father died. The influence of this
life had never quite passed away. Alban would steal across London by
night and stand at the gate of Little Dean's Yard as though wondering
still what justice or right of destiny had driven him forth. He would
haunt St. Vincent's Square on Saturday afternoons, and, taking his stand
among all the little ragged boys who watched the cricket or football, he
would, in imagination, become a "pink" delighting the multitude by a
century or kicking goals so many that the very Press was startled. In
the intervals he revisited the Abbey and tried to remember the service
as he had known it when a schoolboy. The sonorous words of Tudor divines
remained within his memory, but the heart of them had gone out. What had
he to be thankful for now? Did he not earn his bitter bread by a task so
laborious that the very poor might shun it. His father would have made
an engineer of him if he had lived--so much had been quite decided. He
could tell you the names of lads who had been at Westminster with him
and were now at Oxford or Cambridge enjoying those young years which no
subsequent fortune can recall. What had he done to the God who ruled the
world that these were denied to him? Was he not born a gentleman, as the
world understands the term? Had he not worn good clothes, adored a
loving mother, been educated in his early days in those vain
accomplishments which society demands from its children? And now he was
an "East-ender," down at heel and half starved; and there were not three
people in all the city who would care a straw whether he lived or died.

This was the lad who went westward that night of the meeting in Union
Street, and such were his frequent thoughts. None would have taken him
for what he was; few who passed him by would have guessed what his
earlier years had been. The old gray check suit, frayed at the edges,
close buttoned and shabby, was just such a suit as any loafer out of
Union Street might have worn. His hollow cheeks betrayed his poverty. He
walked with his hands thrust deep into his pockets, his shoulders
slightly bent, his eyes roving from face to face as he numbered the
wayfarers and speculated upon their fortunes and their future. Two or
three friends who hailed him were answered by a quickening of his step
and a curt nod of the handsome head. Alb's "curl," a fair flaxen curl
upon a broad white forehead, had become a jest in Thrawl Street. "'E
throws it at yer," the youths said--and this was no untrue description.

Alban walked swiftly up the Whitechapel Road and was going on by Aldgate
Station when the Reverend "Jimmy" Dale, as all the district called the
cheery curate of St. Wilfred's Church, slapped him heartily on the
shoulder and asked why on earth he wasted the precious hours when he
might be in bed and asleep.

"Now, my dear fellow, do you really think it is wise? I am here because
I have just been to one of those exhibitions of unadorned gluttony they
call a City Banquet. Do you know, Alban, that I don't want to hear of
food and drink again for a month. It's perfectly terrible to think that
men can do such things when I could name five hundred children who will
go wanting bread to-morrow."

Alban rejoined in his own blunt way.

"Then why do you go?" was his disconcerting question.

"To beg of them, that's why I go. They are not uncharitable--I will hold
to it anywhere. And, I suppose, from a worldly point of view, it was a
very good dinner. Now, let us walk back together, Alban. I want to talk
to you very much."

"About what, sir?"

"Oh, about lots of things. Why don't you join the cricket club, Alban?"

"I haven't got the money, sir."

"But surely--five shillings, my dear boy--and only once a year."

"If you haven't got the five shillings, it doesn't make any difference
how many times a year it is."

"Well, well, I think I must write to Sir James Hogg about you. He was
telling me to-night--"

"If he sent me the money, I'd return it to him. I'm not a beggar, Mr.
Dale."

"But are you not very proud, Alban?"

"Would you let anybody give you five shillings--for yourself, Mr. Dale?"

"That would depend how he offered it. In the plate I should certainly
consider it acceptable."

"Yes, but sent to you in a letter because you were hard up, you know.
I'm certain you wouldn't. No decent fellow would. When I can afford to
play cricket, I'll play it. Good night, Mr. Dale. I'm not going back
just now."

The curate shook his head protestingly.

"Do you know it is twelve o'clock, Alban?"

"Just the time the fun begins--in the world--over there, sir."

He looked up at the Western sky aglow with that crimson haze which
stands for the zenith of London's night. The Reverend "Jimmy" Dale had
abandoned long ago the idea of understanding Alban Kennedy. "He will
either die in a lunatic asylum or make his fortune," he said to
himself--and all subsequent happenings did not alter this dogged
opinion. The fellow was either a lunatic or an original. "Jimmy" Dale,
who had rowed in the Trinity second boat, did not wholly appreciate
either species.

"What is the world to you, Alban--is not sleep better?"

"In a garret, sir, where you cannot breathe?"

"Oh, come, we must all be a little patient in adversity. I saw Mr.
Browning at the works yesterday. He tells me that the firm is very
pleased with you--you'll get a rise before long, Alban."

"Half a crown for being good. Enough to sole my boots. When I have shops
of my own, I'll let the men live to begin with, sir. The shareholders
can come afterwards."

"It would never do to preach that at a city dinner."

"Ah, sir, what's preached at a city dinner and what's true in Thrawl
Street, Whitechapel, don't ride a tandem together. Ask a hungry man
whether he'll have his mutton boiled or roast, and he'll tell you he
doesn't care a damn. It's just the same with me--whether I sleep in a
cellar or a garret, what's the odds? I'll be going on now, sir. You must
feel tired after so much eating."

He turned, but not rudely, and pushing his way adroitly through the
throng about the station disappeared in a moment. The curate shook his
head and resumed his way moodily eastward, wondering if his momentary
lapse from the straight and narrow way of self-sacrificing were indeed a
sin. After all, it had been a very good dinner, and a man would be
unwise to be influenced by a boy's argument. The Reverend "Jimmy" was a
thousand miles from being a hypocrite, as his life's work showed, and
this matter of the dinner really troubled him exceedingly. How many of
his parishioners could have been fed for such an expenditure? On the
other hand, city companies did a very great deal of good, and it would
be churlish to object to their members dining together two or three
times a year. In the end, he blamed the lad, Alban, for putting such
thoughts into his head.

"The fellow's off to sleep in Hyde Park, I suppose," he said to himself,
"or in one of his pirate's caves. What a story he could write if he had
the talent. What a freak of chance which set him down here amongst
us--well born and educated and yet as much a prisoner as the poorest.
Some day we shall hear of him--I am convinced of it. We shall hear of
Alban Kennedy and claim his acquaintance as wise people do when a man
has made a success."

He carried the thought home with him, but laid it aside when he entered
the clergy house, dark and stony and cheerless at such an hour. Alban
was just halfway down the Strand by that time and debating whether he
should sleep in the "caves," as he called those wonderful subterranean
passages under Pall Mall and the Haymarket, or chance the climate upon a
bench in Hyde Park. A chilly night of April drove him to the former
resolution and he passed on quickly; by the theatres now empty of their
audiences; through Trafalgar Square, where the clubs and the hotels were
still brilliantly lighted; up dark Cockspur Street; through St. James'
Square; and so to an abrupt halt at the door of a great house, open to
the night and dismissing its guests.

Alban despised himself for doing it, but he could never resist the
temptation of staring through the windows of any mansion where a party
happened to be held. The light and life of it all made a sure appeal to
him. He could criticise the figures of beautiful women and remain
ignorant of the impassable abyss between their sphere and his own.
Sometimes, he would try to study the faces thus revealed to him, as in
the focus of a vision, and to say, "That woman is utterly vain," or
again, "There is a doll who has not the sense of an East End flower
girl." In a way he despised their ignorance of life and its terrible
comedies and tragedies. Little Lois Boriskoff, he thought, must know
more of human nature than any woman in those assemblies where, as the
half-penny papers told him, cards and horses and motor-cars were the
subjects chiefly talked about. It delighted him to imagine the abduction
of one of these society beauties and her forcible detention for a month
in Thrawl Street. How she would shudder and fear it all--and yet what
human lessons might not she carry back with her. Let them show him a
woman who could face such an ordeal unflinchingly and he would fall in
love with her himself. The impertinence of his idea never once dawned
upon him. He knew that his father's people had been formerly well-to-do
and that his mother had often talked of birth and family. "I may be
better than some of them after all," he reflected; and this was his
armor against humiliation. What did money matter? The fine idealist of
twenty, with a few coppers in his pocket, declared stoically that money
was really of no consequence at all.

He lingered some five minutes outside the great house in St. James'
Square, watching the couples in the rooms above, and particularly
interested in one face which appeared in, and disappeared from, a
brilliantly lighted alcove twice while he was standing there. A certain
grace of girlhood attended this apparition; the dress was rich and
costly and exquisitely made; but that which held Alban's closer
attention was the fact that the wearer of it unquestionably was a Pole,
and not unlike little Lois Boriskoff herself. He would not say, indeed,
that the resemblance was striking--it might have been merely that of
nationality. When the girl appeared for the second time, he admitted
that the comparison was rather wild. None the less, he liked to think
that she resembled Lois and might also have heard the news from Warsaw
to-day. Evidently she was the daughter of some rich foreigner in London,
for she talked and moved with Continental animation and grace. The type
of face had always made a sure appeal to Alban. He liked those broad
contrasts of color; the clear, almost white, skin; the bright red lips;
the open expressive eyes fringed by deep and eloquent lashes. This
unknown was taller than little Lois certainly--she had a maturer figure
and altogether a better carriage; but the characteristics of her
nationality were as sure--and the boy fell to wondering whether she was
also capable of that winsome sentiment and jealous frenzy which dictated
many of the seemingly inconsequent acts of the little heroine of Thrawl
Street. This he imagined to be quite possible. "They are great as a
nation," he thought, "but most of them are mad. I will tell Lois
to-morrow that I have seen her sister in St. James' Square. I shouldn't
wonder if she knew all about this house and the party--and Boriskoff
will, if she doesn't."

He contented himself with this; and the girl having disappeared from the
alcove and a footman announced, in a terrible voice, that Lady Smigg's
carriage barred the way, he turned from the house and continued upon his
way to the "caves." It was then nearly one o'clock, and save for an
occasional hansom making a dash to a club door, St. James' Street was
deserted. Alban took one swift look up and down, crossed the street at a
run and disappeared down the court which led to those amazing "tombs"
of which few in London save the night-birds and the builders so much as
suspect the existence.

He did not go alone; he was not, as he thought, unwatched. A detective,
commissioned by an unknown patron to follow him, crossed the road
directly he had disappeared, and saying, "So that's the game," began to
wonder if he also might dare the venture.

He, at least, knew well what he was doing and the class of person he
would be likely to meet down there in the depths of which even the
police were afraid.




CHAPTER IV

THE CAVES


The "labyrinth" beneath the West End of London was rediscovered in our
own time when the foundations for the Carlton Hotel and his Majesty's
Theatre were laid. It is a network of old cellars, subterranean passages
and, it may even be, of disused conduits, extended from the corner of
Suffolk Street, Pall Mall, away to the confines of St. James' Park--and,
as more daring explorers aver, to the river Thames itself. Here is a
very town of tunnels and arches, of odd angled rooms, of veritable caves
and depths as dark as Styx. If, in a common way, it be shut by the
circumstance of the buildings above to the riff-raff and night-hawks who
would frequent it, there are seasons, nevertheless, when the laying of
new foundations, the building of hotels and the demolition of ancient
streets in the name of "improvement" fling its gates open to the more
cunning of the "destitutes," and they flock there as rooks to a field
newly sown.

Of these welcome opportunities, the building of the Carlton Hotel is the
best remembered within recent times; but the erection of new houses off
St. James' Street in the year 1903 brought the ladies and the gentlemen
of the road again to its harborage; and they basked there for many weeks
in undisputed possession. Molesting none and by none molested, it was
an affair neither for the watchmen (whose glances askance earned them
many a handsome supper) or for the police who had sufficient to do in
the light of the street lamps that they should busy themselves with
supposed irregularities where that light was not. The orgies thus became
a nightly feature of the vagrant's life. There was no more popular hotel
in London than the "Coal Hole," as the wits of the company delighted to
style their habitation.

A city below a city! Indeed imagination might call it that. A replica of
famous catacombs with horrid faces for your spectres, ghoulish women and
unspeakable men groping in the darkness as though, vampire-like, afraid
of the light. Why Alban Kennedy visited this place, he himself could not
have said. Possibly a certain morbid horror of it attracted him. He had,
admittedly, such a passport to the caves as may be the reward of a
shabby appearance and a resolute air. The criminal company he met with
believed that he also was a criminal. Enjoying their confidence because
he had never excited their suspicion, they permitted him to lie his
length before reddened embers and hear tales which fire the blood with
every passion of anger and of hate. Here, in these caverns, he had seen
men fight as dogs--with teeth and claws and resounding yells; he had
heard the screams of a woman and the cries of helpless children. A
sufficient sense of prudence compelled him to be but an apathetic
spectator of these infamies. The one battle he had fought had been
impotent to save the object of his chivalry.

When first he came here, heroic resolutions followed him. He had
thrashed a ruffian who struck a woman, and narrowly escaped with his
life for doing so. Henceforth he could but assent to a truce which
implied mutual toleration; and yet he understood that his presence was
not without its influence even on these irredeemables. Men called him
"The Hunter," or in mockery "The Dook." He had done small services for
one or two of them--even written a begging letter for a rogue who could
not write at all, but posed as an "old public school man," fallen upon
evil days. Alban was perfectly well aware that this was a shameless
imposition, but his ideas of morality as it affected the relations of
rich and poor were ever primitive and unstable. "If this old thief gets
half a sovereign, what's it matter?" he would argue; "the other man
stole his money, I suppose, and can well afford to pay up." Here was a
gospel preached every day in Thrawl Street. He had never stopped to ask
its truth.

Alban crossed St. James' Street furtively, and climbed, as an athlete
should climb, the boarding which defended the entrance to this amazing
habitation. A contented watchman, dozing by a comfortable fire, cared
little who came or went and rarely bestirred himself to ask the
question. There were two entrances to the caves: one cramped and
difficult, the other broad and open; and you took your choice of them
according to the position of the policeman on the beat. This night, or
rather this morning, of the day following upon the meeting in Union
Street, discovered Alban driven to the more hazardous way. His quick eye
had detected, on the far side of the enclosure, an amiable flirtation
between a man of law and a lady of the dusters; and avoiding both
discreetly, he slipped into a trench of the newly made foundations and
crawled as swiftly through an aperture which this descent revealed.

Here, laid bare by the picks and shovels of twentieth-century Trade
Unionism, was a veritable Gothic arch, bricked up to the height of a
tall man's waist, but open at the tympanum. Alban hoisted himself to the
aperture and, slipping through, his feet discovered the reeking floor of
a dank and dripping subway; and guiding himself now by hands
outstretched and fingers touching the fungi of the walls, he went on
with confidence until the roof lifted above him and the watch-fires of
the confraternity were disclosed. He had come by now into a vast cellar
not very far from the Carlton Hotel itself. There were offshoots
everywhere, passages more remote, the arches as of crypts, smaller
apartments, odd corners which had guarded the casks five hundred years
ago. Each of these could show you its little company safe harbored for
the night; each had some face from which Master Timidity might well
avert his eyes. But Alban went in amongst them as though he had been
their friend. They knew his very footstep, the older "lags" would
declare.

"All well, Jack?"

"All well, old cove."

"The Panorama come along?"

"Straight art of the coffee shawp, s'help me blind."

"Ship come in?"

"Two tharsand next Toosday--same as usual."

A lanky hawker, lying full length upon a sack, his pipe glowing in the
darkness, exchanged these pleasantries with Alban at the entrance. There
were fires by here and there in these depths and the smoke was often
suffocating. The huddled groups declared all grades of ill-fortune and
of crime; from that of the "pauper parson" to the hoariest house-breaker
"resting" for a season. Alban's little set, so far as he had a "set" at
all, consisted of the sometime curate of a fashionable West End Church,
known to the company as the Archbishop of Bloomsbury; the Lady Sarah, a
blooming, red-cheeked girl who sold flowers in Regent Street, "the
Panorama," an old showman's son who had not a sixpenny piece in his
pocket, but whose schemes were invariably about to bring him in "two
thousand next Tuesday morning"; and "Betty," a pretty, fair-haired lad,
thrown on the streets God knows how or by what callous act of
indifferent parentage. Regularly as the clock struck, this quartette
would gather in a tiny "chapel" of the cellars and sleep about a fire
kindled in a grate which might have baked meats for the Tudors. They
spoke of the events of the day with moderation and wise philosophy. It
would be different to-morrow. Such was ever their text.

"My lord the Duke is late. Does aught of fortune keep your nobility?"

The ex-parson made way for Alban, grandiloquently offering a niche upon
the bare floor and a view of the reddening embers. The boy "Betty" was
already asleep, while the Lady Sarah and "the Panorama" divided a
fourpenny pie most faithfully between them. A reeking atmosphere of
spirit (but not of water) testified to the general conviviality. A hum
of conversation was borne in upon them from the greater cellar--at odd
times a rough oath of protest or the mad complainings of a drunkard. For
the most part, however, the night promised to be uneventful. Alban had
never seen the Lady Sarah more gracious, and as for "the Panorama" he
had no doubt whatever that his fortune was made.

"My contract for America's going through and I shall be out there with a
show in a month," this wild youth said--and added patronizingly, "When I
come back, it will be dinner upstairs, old chaps--and some of the best.
Do you suppose that I could forget you? I would as soon forget my
father's grave."

They heard him with respect--no one differing from him.

"I shall certainly be pleased to accept your kind invitation," said the
Archbishop, "that is, should circumstance--and Providence--enable me to
redeem the waistcoat, without which--eh--hem--I understand no visitor
would be admitted to those noble precincts."

The Lady Sarah expressed her opinion even more decidedly.

"Don't 'e talk," she said pleasantly, "can't you 'ear the thick 'uns a
rattlin' in his mouse-trap. Poor little man and 'im a horphin. Stun me
mother if I ain't a goin' ter Jay's termerrer ter buy mournin' in honor
of him."

"I presume," continued the Archbishop, "that we shall all be admitted to
this entertainment as it were--that is--as the colloquial expression
goes--on the nod. It will be enough to mention that we are the
proprietor's friends."

"You shall have a season-ticket for life, Archbishop. Just you tell me
where you want a church built and I'll see that it's done. Of course I
don't mind your chaff--I'm dead in earnest and the money will be there."

"A real contract this time?" Alban suggested kindly.

"A real contract. I saw Philips about it to-day, and he knows a man who
is Pierpont Morgan's cousin. We are to open in New York in September and
be in San Francisco the following week."

"Rather a long journey, isn't it, old chap?"

"Oh, they do those things out there. I'm told you play Hamlet one night
and Othello six hours afterwards, which is really the next night because
of the long distances and the differences in the latitudes. Ask the
Archbishop. I expect he hasn't forgotten all his geography."

"A Cambridge man," said the Archbishop, loftily, "despises geography.
Heat, light, electricity, the pure and the impure mathematics--these are
his proper study. I rise superior to the occasion and tell you that San
Francisco is a long way from New York. The paper in which I wrapped a
ham sandwich yesterday--the advertisement of a shipping company, I may
inform you--brings that back to my recollection. San Francisco is the
thickness of two slices of stale bread from the seaport you mention. And
I believe there are Red Indians in between."

The Lady Sarah murmured lightly the refrain of the old song concerning
houses which stood in that annoying position; but Alban had already
lighted a cigarette and was watching the girl's face critically.

"You've had some luck to-day, Sarah?"

"A bloomin' prophet and that I won't deny. Gar'n, Dowie."

"But you did have some luck?"

"Sure and certain. What d'ye fink? A bit of a boy, same as 'Betty' 'ere,
'e comes up and says, 'What'll ye take fer the whole bloomin' caravan?'
he says, 'for ter send ter a lidy?' 'Gentleman,' I says, 'I'm only a
poor girl and a widered muver ter keep, and, gentleman, I can't tike
less than two pound fer 'em sure and certain as there's a God in 'eaven,
I can't.' 'Well,' says he, 'it's a blarsted swindle but I'll take
'em--and mind you deliver 'em ter the lidy yerself.' 'They shall go this
very minute,' says I, 'and, oh, sir, God bless you both and may yer have
long life and 'appiness ter-gether.' Strike me dead, wot d'yer think he
said next? Why he arst me fer my bloomin' name, same as if I wus a
Countess a steepin' art of a moter-kar at the door of Buckingem Peliss.
'What's yer name, girl?' says 'e. 'Sarah Geddes, an it please yer
capting,' says I. 'Then send the bally flowers to Sarah Geddes,' says
'e, 'and take precious good care as she gets 'em.' Gawd's truth, yer
could 'ave knocked me darn with a 'at pin. I never was took so suddin in
all me life."

"I wonder you didn't have your dinner in the Carlton Hotel, Sarah."

"So I would 'a' done if I'd hev bed time ter chinge me dress. You orter
know, Dook, as no lidy ever goes inter them plices in wot she's bin a
wearin' afore she cleaned herself. I'ad ter go ter Marlborough 'Ouse ter
tell the Prince of Wales, and that's wot kept me."

"Better luck next time, Sarah. So it only ran to a 'fourpenny' between
you and 'the Panorama.'"

"You shall all dine with me next week," said the young man in question.
"On my honor, I'll give you the best dinner you ever had in your life.
As for Sarah here, I'm going to put her in a flower shop in Bond
Street."

"Gar'n, silly, what 'ud I do in Bond Street? Much better buy the
Archbishop a church."

The erstwhile clergyman did not take the suggestion, in good part.

"I have always doubted my ability to conduct the affairs of a parish
methodically," he said, "that is--a little habit--a slight partiality to
the drug called morphia is not in my favor. This, I am aware, is a
drawback. The world judges my profession very harshly. A man in the city
who counts the collection indifferently will certainly become Lord
Mayor. The Establishment has no use for him--he is _de trop_, or as we
might say, a drop too much. This I recognize in frankly declining our
young friend's offer--with grateful thanks."

Sarah, the flower girl, seemed particularly amused by this frank
admission. Feeling in the depth of her shawl she produced a capacious
flask and a bundle of cigars.

"'Ere, boys," she said, "let's talk 'am and heggs. 'Ere's a drop of the
best and five bob's worth of chimney afire, stun me mother if there
ain't. I'm sick of talkin' and so's 'the Panerawma.' Light up yer
sherbooks and think as you're in Buckingem Peliss. There ain't no 'arm
thinkin' anyways."

"I dreamed last night," said the Archbishop very sadly, "that this
cellar had become a cottage and that the sun was shining in it."

"I never dream," said "the Panorama," stoically; "put my head on the
floor and I won't lift it until the clock strikes ten."

"Then begin now, my dear," exclaimed the Lady Sarah with a sudden
tenderness, "put it there now and forget what London is ter you and me."

The words were uttered almost with a womanly tenderness, not without its
influence upon the company. Some phrase spoken of Frivolity's mouth had
touched this group of outcasts and spoken straight to their hearts. They
bandied, pleasantries no more, but lighting the cigars--the Lady Sarah
boldly charging a small clay pipe--they fell to an expressive silence,
of introspection, it may be, or even of unutterable despair. The woman
alone amongst them had not been cast down from a comparative altitude to
this very abyss of destitution. For the others life was a vista far
behind them; a vista, perchance, of a cottage and the sunshine, as the
parson had said; an echo of voices from a forgotten world; the memory of
a hand that was cold and of dead faces reproaching them. Such pauses are
not infrequent in the conversation of the very poor. Men bend their
heads to destiny less willingly than we think. The lowest remembers the
rungs of the ladder he has descended.

Alban had lighted one of the cigars and he smoked it stoically,
wondering again why the caves attracted him and what there was in this
company which should not have made him ashamed of such associations.
That he was not ashamed admitted of no question. In very truth, the
humanities were conquering him in spite of inherited prejudice. Had the
full account of it been written down by a philosopher, such a sage would
have said that the girl Sarah stood for a type of womanly pity, of
sympathy, and, in its way, of motherhood; qualities which demand no gift
of birth for their appeal. The unhappy parson, too, was there not much
of good in him, and might he not yet prove a human field worthy to be
tilled by a husbandman of souls? His humor was kindly; his disposition
gentle; his faults punished none but himself. And for what did "the
Panorama" stand if not for the whole gospel of human hope without which
no life may be lived at all? Alban had some glimmering of this, but he
could not have set down his reasons in so many words. As for the little
lad "Betty"--was not the affection they lavished upon him that which
manhood ever owes to the weak and helpless. Search London over and you
will not find elemental goodness in a shape more worthy than it was to
be found in the caves--nor can we forego a moment's reflection upon the
cant which ever preaches the vice of the poor and so rarely stops to
preach their virtues.

This was the human argument of Alban's association, but the romantic
must not be forgotten. More imaginative than most youths of his age, his
boyish delight in these grim surroundings was less to him than a real
and inspiring sense of the power of contrast they typified. Was he not
this very night sleeping beneath some famous London house, it might be
below that very temple of the great God Mammon, the Carlton Hotel? Far
above him were the splendid rooms, fair sleepers in robes of lace, tired
men who had earned enough that very day perhaps to feed all the hungry
children in Thrawl Street for a lifetime and to remain rich men
afterwards. Of what were the dreams of such as those--not of sunshine
and a cottage as the old parson had dreamed, surely? Not of these nor of
the devoted sacrifice of motherhood or of that gentle sympathy which the
unfortunate so readily give their fellows. Not this certainly--and yet
who should blame them? Alban, at least, had the candor to admit that he
would be much as they were if his conditions of life were the same. He
never deceived himself, young as he was, with the false platitudes of
boastful altruists. "I should enjoy myself if I were rich," he would
say--and sigh upon it; for what assumption could be more grotesque?

No, indeed, there could be no sunshine for him to-morrow. Nothing but
the shadows of toil; and, in the background, that grim figure of
uncertainty which never fails to haunt the lives of the very poor.




CHAPTER V

DISMISSAL


Alban had been a disappointment to his employers, the great engineer of
the Isle of Dogs, to whom Charity had apprenticed him in his fourteenth
year. Faithful attempts to improve his position in the works were met,
as it would seem, by indifference and ingratitude. He did his work
mechanically but without enthusiasm. Had he confessed the truth, he
would have said, "I was not born to labor with my hands." A sense of
inherited superiority, a sure conviction, common to youth, that he would
become a leader, of men, conduced to a restlessness and a want of
interest which he could not master. He had the desire but not the will
to please his employers.

To such a lad these excursions to the West End, these pilgrimages to the
shrine of the outcast and the homeless were by way of being a mental
debauch. He arose from them in the morning as a man may arise to the
remembrance of unjustified excess, which leaves the mind inert and the
body weary. His daily task presented itself in a revolting attitude. Why
had he been destined to this slavery? Why must he set out to his work at
an hour of the chilly morning when the West End was still shuttered and
asleep and the very footmen still yawned in their beds? If he had any
consolation, it was that the others were often before him in that
cunning debauch from the caves which the dawn compelled. The Lady Sarah
would be at Covent Garden by four o'clock. The Archbishop, who rarely
seemed to sleep at all, went off to the Serpentine for his morning
ablutions when the clock struck five. "Betty," the pale-faced infant,
disappeared as soon as the sun was up--and often, when Alban awoke in
the cellar, he found himself the only tenant of that grim abode.
Sometimes, indeed, and this morning following upon the promise to little
Lois Boriskoff was such an occasion, he overslept himself altogether and
was shut out from the works for the day. This had happened before and
had brought frequent reprimands. He feared them and yet had not the will
to remember them.

Big Ben was striking seven when he quitted the cellar and London was
awake in earnest. Alban usually spent twopence in the luxury of a "wash
and brush up" before he went down to the river; but he hastened on this
morning conscious of his tardiness and troubled at the possible
consequences. The bright spring day did little to reassure him. Weather
does not mean very much to those who labor in heated atmospheres, who
have no profit of the sunshine nor gift of the seasons. Alban thought
rather of the fateful clock and of the excuses which might pacify the
timekeeper. He had never stooped to the common lies; he would not stoop
to them this day. When, at the gate of the works, a heavy jowled man
with a red beard asked him what he meant by coming there at such an
hour, he answered as frankly that he did not know.

"Been out to supper with the Earl of Barkin, perhaps," the burly man
suggested. "Well, young fellow, you go up and see Mr. Tucker. He's
particularly desirous of making your acquaintance--that he is. Tell him
how his lordship's doin' and don't you forget the ladies."

Alban made no reply, but crossing the open yard he mounted a little
flight of stairs and knocked indifferently at the door of the dreaded
office thus indicated. An angry voice, bidding him "come in," did not
reassure him. He found the deputy manager frank but determined. There
could be no doubt whatever of the issue.

"Kennedy," he said quietly, "I hope you understand why I have sent for
you."

"For being late, sir. I am very sorry--I overslept myself."

"My boy, if your work was as honest as your tongue, your fortune would
be made. I am afraid I must remember what passed at our last meeting.
You promised me then--"

"I am quite aware of it, sir. The real truth is that I can't get up. The
work here is distasteful to me--but I do my best."

The manager shook his head in a deprecating manner.

"We have given you many chances, Kennedy," he rejoined. "If it rested
with me, I would give you another. But it doesn't rest with me--it rests
with that necessary person. Example. What would the men say if I treated
you as a privileged person? You know that the work could not go on. For
the present, at any rate, you are suspended. I must see my directors
and take instructions from them. Now, really, Kennedy, don't you think
that you have been very foolish?"

"I suppose so, sir. That's what foolish people generally think. It must
make a lot of difference to you whether a man comes at six or seven,
even if he does a good deal more work than the early ones. I could do
what you ask me to do in three hours a day. That's what puzzles me."

The amiable Mr. Tucker was up in arms in a moment.

"Now, come, I cannot discuss abstract propositions with you. Our hours
are from six to six. You do not choose to keep them and, therefore, you
must go. When you are a little more practically inclined, I will speak
to the directors for you. You may come and tell me so when that is the
case."

"I shall never come and tell you so, sir. I wish that I could--but it
will never be the truth. The work that I could do for you is now what
you want me to do. I am sure it is better for me to go, sir."

"Then you have something in your mind, Kennedy?"

"So many things, sir, that I could fill a book with them. That is why I
am foolish. Good-by, Mr. Tucker. I suppose you have all been very kind
to me--I don't rightly understand, but I think that you have. So good-by
and thank you."

The discreet manager took the outstretched hand and shook it quite
limply. There had been a momentary contraction of the brows while he
asked himself if astute rivals might not have been tampering with this
young fellow and trying to buy the firm's secrets. An instant's
reflection, however, reassured him. Alban had no secrets worth the name
to sell, and did he possess them, money would not buy them. "Half mad
but entirely honest," was Mr. Tucker's comment, "he will either make a
fortune or throw himself over London Bridge."

Alban had been quite truthful when he said that he had many things in
his mind, but this confession did not mean to signify a possibility of
new employment. In honest truth, he had hardly left the gates of the
great yard when he realized how hopeless his position was. Of last
week's wages but a few shillings remained in his pocket. He knew no one
to whom he might offer such services as he had to give. The works had
taught him the elements of mechanical engineering, and common sense told
him that skilled labor rarely went begging if the laborer were worthy
his hire. None the less, the prospect of touting for such employment
affrighted him beyond words. He felt that he could not again abase
himself for a few paltry shillings a week. The ambition to make of this
misfortune a stepping-stone to better things rested on no greater
security than his pride and yet it would not be wholly conquered. He
spent a long morning by the riverside planning schemes so futile that
even the boy's mind rejected them. The old copybook maxims recurred to
him and were treated with derision. He knew that he would never become
Lord Mayor of London--after a prosperous career in a dingy office which
he had formerly swept out with a housemaid's broom.

The lower reaches of the Thames are a world of themselves; peopled by a
nation of aliens; endless in the variety of their life; abounding in
weird and beautiful pictures which even the landsman can appreciate.
Alban rarely tired of that panorama of swirling waters and drifting
hulks and the majestic shapes of resting ships. And upon such a day as
this which had made an idler of him, their interest increased tenfold;
and to this there was added a wonder which had never come into his life
before. For surely, he argued, this great river was the high road to an
El Dorado of which he had often dreamed; to that shadowy land of valley
and of mountain which his imagination so ardently desired. Let a man
find employment upon the deck of one of those splendid ships and
henceforth the whole world would be open to him. Alban debated this as a
possible career, and as he thought of it the spell of the craving for
new sights and scenes afar mastered him to the exclusion of all other
thoughts. Who was to forbid him; who had the right to stand between him
and his world hunger so irresistibly? When a voice within whispered a
girl's name in his ear, he could have laughed aloud for very derision. A
fine thing that he should talk of the love of woman or let his plans be
influenced for the sake of a pretty face! Why, he would be a beggar
himself in a week, it might be without a single copper in his pocket or
a roof to shelter him! And he was just the sort of man to live on a
woman's earnings--just the one to cast the glove to fortune and of his
desperation achieve the final madness. No, no, he must leave London. The
city had done with him--he had never been so sure of anything in all
his life.

It was an heroic resolution, and shame that hunger should so maltreat
it. When twelve o'clock struck and Alban remembered how poor a breakfast
he had made, he did not think it necessary to abandon any of his old
habits, at least not immediately; and he went, as he usually had done,
to the shabby dining-room in Union Street where he and Lois had taken
their dinners together for many a month past. Boriskoff's daughter was
already at table and waiting for him when he entered; he thought that
she was unusually pale and that her expectancy was not that of a common
occasion. Was it possible that she also had news to tell him--news as
momentous as his own? Alban feared to ask her, and hanging his cap on a
peg above their table without a word, he sat down and began to study the
greasy menu.

"What's the luck, Alb, dear--why do you look like that?"

Little Lois asked the question, struck by his odd manner and appearance.

He answered her with surprising candor--for the sudden determination
came to him that he must tell Lois.

"No luck at all, Lois."

"Why, you don't mean--?"

"I do, and that's straight. There is no further need of my services--"

"You've got the sack?"

"The whole of it, Lois--and now I'm selling it cheap."

The girl laughed aloud, but there were tears in her eyes while she did
so. What a day for them both. She was angry almost with him for telling
her.

"Why, if father ain't a-gettin' on the prophet line--he said you would,
Alb. So help me rummy, I was that angry with him I couldn't hear myself
speak. And now it's all come true. Why, Alb, dear--and I wanted to tell
you--"

She could not finish the sentence for a sob that almost choked her. The
regular customers of the room had turned to stare at the sound of such
unwonted hilarity. Dinner was far too serious a business for most of
them that laughter should serve it.

"What was your father saying, Lois?"

"That you were going away, dear, and that the sooner I gave up thinking
about you the fatter I should be."

"How did he know what was going to happen?"

"Ask me another and don't pay the bill. He's been as queer as white
rabbits since yesterday--didn't go to work this morning, but sat all day
over a letter he's received. I shall be frightened of father just now. I
do really believe he's getting a bit balmy on the crumpet."

"Still talking about the man who stole the furnace?"

"Why, there you've got it. We're going to Buckingham Palace in a donkey
cart and pretty quick about it. You'll be ashamed of such fine people,
Alb--father says so. So I'm not to speak to you to begin with--not till
the dresses come home from Covent Garden and the horses are pawing the
ground for her lidyship. That's the chorus all day--lots of fun when the
bricks come home and father with a watch-chain as big as Moses. He knew
you were going to get the sack and he warned me against it. 'We can't
afford to associate with those people nowadays'--don't yer know--'so
mind what you're a-doing, my child.' And I'm minding it all day--I was
just minding it when you came in, Alb. Don't you see her lidyship is
taking mutton chops? Couldn't descend to nothink less, my dear--not on
such a day as this--blimme."

Lois' patter, acquired in the streets, invariably approached the purely
vulgar when she was either angry or annoyed--for at other times her
nationality saved her from many of its penalties. Alban quite understood
that something beyond ordinary must have passed between father and
daughter to-day; but this was neither the time nor the place to discuss
it.

"We'll meet outside the Pav to-night and have a good talk, Lois," he
said; "everybody's listening here. Be there at nine sharp. Who knows, it
may be the last time we shall ever meet in London--"

"You're not going away, Alb?"

A look of terror had come into the pretty eyes; the frail figure of the
girl trembled as she asked the question.

"Can't say, Lois--how do I know? Suppose I went as a sailor--"

Lois laughed louder than before.

"You--a blueboy! Lord, how you make me laugh. Fancy the aristocrat being
ordered about. Oh, my poor funny-bone! Wouldn't you knock the man down
that did it--oh, can't I see him."

The idea amused her immensely and she dwelt upon it even in the street
outside. Her Alb as Captain Jack--or should it be the cabin-boy. And, of
course, he would bring her a parrot from the Brazils and perhaps a
monkey.

"An' I'll keep a light in the winder for fear you should be shipwrecked
in High Street, Alb, and won't we go hornpiping together. Oh, you silly
boy; oh, you dear old Captain Jack--whatever put a sailorman into your
mind?"

"The water," said Alban, as stolidly--"it leads to somewhere, Lois. This
is the road to nowhere--good God, how tired I am of it."

"And of those who go with you, Alb."

"I am ashamed of myself because of them, Lois."

"You silly boy, Alb--are they ashamed, Alb? Oh, no, no--people who love
are never ashamed."

He did not contest the point with her, nor might she linger. Bells were
ringing everywhere, syrens were calling the people to work. It was a new
thing for Alban Kennedy to be strolling the streets with his hands in
his pockets when the clock struck one. And yet there he was become a
loafer in an instant, just one of the many thousand who stare up idly at
the sky or gaze upon the windows of the shops they may not patronize, or
drift on helpless as though a dark stream of life had caught them and
nevermore would set them on dry land again. Alban realized all this, and
yet the full measure of his disaster was not wholly understood. It was
so recent, the consequences yet unfelt, the future, after all, pregnant
with the possibilities of change. He knew not at all what he should do,
and yet determined that the shame of which he had spoken should never
overtake him.

And so determining, he strolled as far as Aldgate Station--and there he
met the stranger.




CHAPTER VI

THE STRANGER


There is a great deal of fine philanthropic work done east of Aldgate
Station by numbers of self-sacrificing young men just down from the
Universities. So, when a slim parson touched Alban upon the arm and
begged for a word with him, he concluded immediately that he had
attracted the notice of one of these and become the objective of his
charity.

"I beg your pardon," he said a little stiffly. The idea of stooping to
such assistance had long been revolting to him. He was within an ace of
breaking away from the fellow altogether.

"Your name is Alban Kennedy, I think? Will you permit me to have a few
words with you?"

Alban looked the parson up and down, and the survey did something to
satisfy him. He found himself face to face with a man, it might be of
thirty years of age, whose complexion was dark but not unpleasant, whose
eyes were frank and open, the possessor, too, of fair brown hair and of
a manner not altogether free from a suspicion of that which scoffers
call the "wash-hand" basin cult.

"I do not know you, sir."

"Indeed you do not--we are total strangers. My name is Sidney Geary; I
am the senior curate of St. Philip's Church at Hampstead. If we could go
somewhere and have a few words, I would be very much obliged to you."

Alban hardly knew what to say to him. The manner was not that of a
philanthropist desiring him to come to a "pleasant afternoon for the
people"; he detected no air of patronage, no vulgar curiosity--indeed,
the curate of St. Philip's was almost deferential.

"Well, sir--if you don't mind a coffee shop--"

"The very place. I have always thought that a coffee shop, properly
conducted and entirely opposed to the alcoholic principle, is one of the
most useful works in the civic economy. Let us go to a coffee shop by
all means."

Alban crossed the road and, leading the stranger a little way eastward,
turned into a respectable establishment upon the Lockhart plan--almost
deserted at such an hour and the very place for a confidential chat.

"Will you have anything, sir?"

The curate looked at the thick cups upon the counter, turned his gaze
for an instant upon a splendid pile of sausages, and shuddered a little
ominously.

"I suppose the people here have excellent appetites," he reflected
sagely. "I myself, unfortunately, have just lunched in Mount Street--but
a little coffee--shall we not drink a little coffee?"

"Suppose I order you two doorsteps and a thick 'un?"

"My dear young fellow, what in heaven's name are 'two doorsteps and a
thick 'un?'"

Alban smiled a little scornfully.

"Evidently you come from the West. I was only trying you. Shall we have
two coffees--large? It isn't so bad as it looks by a long way."

The coffee was brought and set steaming before them. In an interval of
silence Alban studied the curate's face as he would have studied a book
in which he might read some account of his own fortunes. Why had this
man stopped him in the street?

"Your first visit to Aldgate, sir?"

"Not exactly, Mr. Kennedy--many years ago I have recollections of a
school treat at a watering-place near the river's mouth--an exceedingly
muddy place since become famous, I understand. But I take the children
to Eastbourne now."

"They find that a bit slow, don't they? Kids love mud, you know."

"They do--upon my word. A child's love of mud is one of the most
incurable things in nature."

"Then why try to cure it?"

"But what are you to do?"

"Wash them, sir,--you can always do that. My father was a parson, you
know--"

"Good heavens, a clergyman--and you are come to--that is, you choose to
live amidst these dreadful surroundings?"

"I do not choose--death chose for me."

"My poor boy--"

"Not at all, sir. Give a man a good appetite and enough to gratify it,
and I don't know that other circumstances count much."

"Trial has made of you an epicurean, I see. Well, well, so much the
better. That which I have to offer you will be the more acceptable."

"Employment, sir?"

"Employment--for a considerable term. Good employment, Mr. Kennedy.
Employment which will take you into the highest society, educate you,
perhaps, open a great career to you--that is what I came to speak of."

The good man had meant to break the news more dramatically; but it
flowed on now as a freshet released, while his eyes sparkled and his
head wagged as though his whole soul were bursting with it. Alban
thought for a moment that he had met one of those pleasant eccentrics
who are not less rare in the East End than the West. "This good fellow
has escaped out of an asylum," he thought.

"What kind of a job would that be, sir?"

"Your own. Name it and it shall be chosen for you. That is what I am
commissioned to say."

"By whom, sir?"

"By my patron and by yours."

"Does he wish to keep his name back?"

"So little that he is waiting for you at his own house now."

"Then why shouldn't we go and see him, sir?"

He put the question fully believing that it would bring the whole
ridiculous castle down with a crash, as it were, upon the table before
him. Its effect, however, was entirely otherwise. The parson stood up
immediately.

"My carriage is waiting," he said; "nothing could possibly suit me
better."

Alban, however, remained seated.

"Mr. Geary," he exclaimed, "you have forgotten to tell me something."

"I can think of nothing."

"The conditions of this slap-up job--the high society and all the rest
of it! What are the conditions?"

He spoke almost with contempt, and deliberately selected a vulgar
expression. It had come to him by this time that some unknown friend had
become interested in his career and that this amiable curate desired to
make either a schoolmaster or an organist of him. "Old Boriskoff knew I
was going to get the sack and little Lois has been chattering," he
argued--nor did this line of reasoning at all console him. Sidney Geary,
meanwhile, felt as though some one had suddenly applied a slab of
melting ice to those grammatical nerves which Cambridge had tended so
carefully.

"My dear Mr. Kennedy--not 'slap-up,' I beg of you. If there are any
conditions attached to the employment my patron has to offer you, is not
he the best person to state them? Come and hear him for yourself. I
assure you it will not be waste of time."

"Does he live far from here?"

"At Hampstead Heath--it will take us an hour to drive there."

"And did he send the char a bancs especially for my benefit?"

"Not really--but naturally he did."

"Then I will go with you, sir."

He put on his cap slowly and followed the curate into the street--one of
the girls racing after them to say that they had forgotten to pay the
bill. "And a pretty sort of clergyman you must be, to be sure," was her
reflection--to the curate's blushing annoyance and his quite substantial
indignation.

"I find much impertinence in this part of the world," he remarked as
they retraced their steps toward the West; "as if the girl did not know
that it was an accident."

"We pay for what we eat down here," Alban rejoined dryly; "it's a good
plan as you would discover if you tried it, sir."

Mr. Geary looked at the boy for an instant as though in doubt whether he
had heard a sophism or a mere impertinence. This important question was
not, however, to be decided; for a neat single brougham edged toward the
pavement at the moment and a little crowd collected instantly to remark
so signal a phenomenon.

"Your carriage, sir?" Alban asked.

"Yes," said the curate, quietly, "my carriage. And now, if you please,
we will go and see Mr. Gessner. He is a Pole, Mr. Kennedy, and one of
the richest men in London to-day."




CHAPTER VII

THE HOUSE OF THE FIVE GABLES


It was six o'clock as the carriage passed Swiss Cottage station and ten
minutes later when they had climbed the stiff hill to the Heath. Alban
had not often ridden in a carriage, but he would have found his
sensations very difficult to set down. The glossy cushions, the fine
ivory and silver fittings, were ornaments to be touched with caressing
fingers as one touches the coat of a beautiful animal or the ripe bloom
upon fruit. Just to loll back in such a vehicle, to watch the houses and
the people and the streets, was an experience he had not hitherto
imagined. The smooth motion was a delight to him. He felt that he could
continue such a journey to the ends of the earth, resting at his ease,
untroubled by those never ended questions upon which poverty insisted.

"Is it far yet, sir--is Mr. Gessner's house a long way off?"

He asked the question as one who desired an affirmative reply. The
parson, however, believed that his charge was already wearied; and he
said eagerly:

"It is just over there between the trees, my lad. We shall be with our
good friend in five minutes now. Perhaps you know that you are on
Hampstead Heath?"

"I came here once with little Lois Boriskoff--on a Bank Holiday. It was
not like this then. If Mr. Gessner is rich, why does he live in a place
where people come to keep Bank Holiday? I should have thought he would
have got away from them."

"He is not able to get away. His business takes him into town every
day--he goes by motor-car and comes back at night to breathe pure air.
Bank Holidays do not occur every day, Mr. Kennedy. Fortunately for some
of us they are but four a year."

"Of course you don't like going amongst all those poor people, Mr.
Geary. That's natural. I didn't until I had to, and then I found them
much the same as the rest. You haven't any poor in Hampstead, I am
told."

Mr. Geary fell into the trap all unsuspectingly.

"Thank heaven"--he began, and then checking himself clumsily, he added,
"that is to say we are comparatively well off as neighborhoods go. Our
people are not idlers, however. Some of the foremost manufacturers in
the country live in Hampstead."

"While their work-people starve in Whitechapel. It's an odd world, isn't
it, Mr. Geary--and I don't suppose we shall ever know much about it. If
I had made a fortune by other people's work, I think I should like some
of them to live in Hampstead too. But you see, I'm prejudiced."

Sidney Geary looked at the boy as though he had heard a heresy. To him
the gospel of life meant a yearly dole of coals at Christmas and a bout
of pleasant "charity organizations" during the winter months. He would
as soon have questioned the social position of the Archbishop of
Canterbury as have criticised the conduct and the acts of the
manufacturers who supported his church so generously.

"I am afraid you have received some pernicious teaching down yonder," he
said, with a shake of his abundant locks. "Mr. Gessner, I may tell you,
has an abhorrence of socialism. If you wish to please him, avoid the
topic."

"But I do not wish to please him--I do not even know him. And I'm not a
socialist, sir. If Mr. Gessner had ever lived in Whitechapel; if he had
starved in a garret, he would understand me. I don't suppose it matters,
though, whether he does or not, for we are hardly likely to discuss such
things together."

"My dear lad, he has not sent for you for that, believe me. His
conversation will be altogether of a different nature. Let me implore
you to remember that he desires to be your benefactor--not your judge.
There is no kinder heart, no more worthy gentleman in all London to-day
than Richard Gessner. That much I know and my opportunities are unique."

Alban could make no reply to this; nor did he desire one. They had
passed the Jack Straw's Castle by this time, and now the carriage
entered a small circular drive upon the right-hand side of the road and
drew up before a modern red-bricked mansion, by no means ostentatious or
externally characteristic of the luxury for which its interior was
famed. Just a trim garden surrounded the house and boasted trees
sufficient to hide the picturesque gables from the eyes of the curious.
There were stables in the northern wing and a great conservatory built
out toward the south. Alban had but an instant to glance at the
beautiful facade when a young butler opened the door to them and ushered
them into a vast hall, panelled to the ceiling in oak and dimly lighted
by Gothic windows of excellent stained glass. Here a silence, amazing in
its profundity, permitted the very ticking of the clocks to be heard.
All sounds from without, the hoot of the motors, the laughter of
children, the grating voices of loafers on the Heath, were instantly
shut out. An odor of flowers and fine shrubs permeated the apartment.
The air was cool and clear as though it had passed through a lattice of
ice.

"Please to wait one moment, Kennedy, and I will go to Mr. Gessner. He
expects us and we shall not have long to wait. Is he not in the library,
Fellows--ah, I thought he would be there."

The young butler said "Yes, sir;" but Alban perceived that it was in a
tone which implied some slight note of contempt. "That fellow," he
thought, "would have kicked me into the street if I had called here
yesterday--and his father, I suppose, kept a public-house or a fish
shop." The reflection flattered his sense of irony; and sitting
negligently upon a broad settee, he studied the hall closely, its
wonderful panelling, the magnificently carved balustrades, the great
organ up there in the gallery--and lastly the portraits. Alban liked
subject pictures, and these masterpieces of Sargent and Luke Fildes did
not make an instantaneous appeal to him. Indeed, he had cast but a brief
glance upon the best of them before his eye fell upon a picture which
brought the blood to his cheeks as though a hand had slapped them. It
was the portrait of the supposed Polish girl whom he had seen upon the
balcony of the house in St. James' Square--last night as he visited the
caves.

Alban stared at the picture open-mouthed and so lost in amazement that
all other interests of his visit were instantly lost to his memory. A
hard dogmatic common-sense could make little of a coincidence so
amazing. If he had wished to think that the unknown resembled little
Lois Boriskoff--if he had wished so much last night, the portrait, seen
in this dim light, flattered his desire amazingly. He knew, however,
that the resemblance was chiefly one of nationality; and in the same
instant he remembered that he had been brought to the house of a Pole.
Was it possible, might he dare to imagine that Paul Boriskoff's
friendship had contrived this strange adventure. Some excitement
possessed him at the thought, for his spirit had ever been adventurous.
He could not but ask himself to whose house had he come then and for
what ends? And why did he find a portrait of the Polish girl therein?

Alban's eyes were still fixed upon the picture when the young butler
returned to summon him to the library. He was not a little ashamed to be
found intent upon such an occupation, and he rose immediately and
followed the man through a small conservatory, aglow with blooms, and so
at once into the sanctum where the master of the house awaited him.
Perfect in its way as the library was, Alban had no eyes for it in the
presence of Richard Gessner whom thus he met for the first time. Here,
truly, he might forget even the accident of the portrait. For he stood
face to face with a leader among men and he was clever enough to
recognize as much immediately.

Richard Gessner was at that time fifty-three years of age. A man of
medium height, squarely built and of fine physique, he had the face
rather of a substantial German than of the usually somewhat cadaverous
Pole. A tousled black beard hid the jowl almost completely; the eyes
were very clear and light blue in color; the head massive above the neck
but a little low at the forehead. Alban noticed how thin and fragile the
white hand seemed as it rested upon a strip of blotting-paper upon the
writing-table; the clothes, he thought, were little better than those
worn by any foreman in Yarrow's works; the tie was absolutely shabby and
the watch-chain nothing better than two lengths of black silk with a
seal to keep them together. And yet the mental power, the personal
magnetism of Richard Gessner made itself felt almost before he had
uttered a single word.

"Will you take a seat, Mr. Kennedy--I am dining in the city to-night and
my time is brief. Mr. Geary, I think, has spoken to you of my
intentions."

Alban looked the speaker frankly in the face and answered without
hesitation:

"He has told me that you wish to employ me, sir."

"That I wish to employ you--yes, it is not good for us to be idle. But
he has told you something more than that?"

"Indeed," the curate interrupted, "very much more, Mr. Gessner. I have
told Kennedy that you are ready and willing to take an interest, the
greatest possible interest, in his future."

The banker--for as such Richard Gessner was commonly known--received the
interjection a little impatiently and, turning his back slightly, he
fixed an earnest look upon Alban's face and watched him critically while
he spoke.

"Mr. Kennedy," he said, "I never give my reasons. You enter this house
to confer a personal obligation upon me. You will remain in that spirit.
I cannot tell you to-night, I may be unable to tell you for many years
why you have been chosen or what are the exact circumstances of our
meeting. This, however, I may say--that you are fully entitled to the
position I offer you and that it is just and right I should receive you
here. You will for the present remain at Hampstead as one of my family.
There will be many opportunities of talking over your future--but I wish
you first to become accustomed to my ways and to this house, and to
trouble your head with no speculations of the kind which I could not
assist. I am much in the city, but Mr. Geary will take my place and you
can speak to him as you would to me. He is my Major Domo, and needless
to say I in him repose the most considerable confidence."

He turned again toward Mr. Geary and seemed anxious to atone for his
momentary impatience. The voice in which he spoke was not unpleasant,
and he used the English language with an accent which did not offend.
Rare lapses into odd and unusual sentences betrayed him occasionally to
the keen hearer, but Alban, in his desire to know the man and to
understand him, made light of these.

"I am to remain in this house, sir--but why should I remain, what right
have I to be here?" he asked very earnestly.

The banker waved the objection away a little petulantly.

"The right of every man who has a career offered to him. Be content with
that since I am unable to tell you more."

"But, sir, I cannot be content. Why should I stay here as your guest
when I do not know you at all?"

"My lad, have I not said that the obligation is entirely on my side. I
am offering you that to which you have every just claim. Children do not
usually refuse the asylum which their father's door opens to them. I am
willing to take you into this house as a son--would it not be a little
ungrateful to argue with me? From what I know of him, Alban Kennedy is
not so foolish. Let Mr. Geary show you the house while I am dressing. We
shall meet at breakfast and resume this pleasant conversation."

He stood up as he spoke and began to gather his papers together. To
Alban the scene was amazingly false and perplexing. He was perfectly
aware that this stranger had no real interest in him at all; he felt,
indeed, that his presence was almost resented and that he was being
received into the house as upon compulsion. All the talk of obligation
and favor and justice remained powerless to deceive. The key to the
enigma did not lie therein; nor was it to be found in the churchman's
suavity and the fairy tale which he had recited. Had the meeting
terminated less abruptly, Alban believed that his own logic would have
carried the day and that he would have left the house as he had come to
it. But the clever suggestion of haste on the banker's part, his hurried
manner and his domineering gestures, left a young lad quite without
idea. Such an old strategist as Richard Gessner should have known how to
deal with that honest original, Alban Kennedy.

"We will meet at breakfast," the banker repeated; "meanwhile, consider
Mr. Geary as your friend and counsellor. He shall by me so be appointed.
I have a great work for you to do, Mr. Kennedy, but the education, the
books, the knowledge--they must come first. Go now and think about
dinner--or perhaps you would like to walk about the grounds a little
while. Mr. Geary will show you the way--I leave you in his hands."

He folded the papers up and thrust them quickly in a drawer as he spoke.
The interview was plainly at an end. He had welcomed a son as he would
have welcomed any stranger who had brought a letter of introduction
which decency compelled him to read.




CHAPTER VIII

ALBAN KENNEDY DINES


Silas Geary led the way through the hall and thence to the winter
garden. Here the display of plants was quite remarkable and the building
one that had cost many thousands of pounds. Designed, as all that
Richard Gessner touched, to attract the wonder of the common people and
to defy the derision of the connoisseur, this immense garden had been
the subject of articles innumberable and of pictures abundant. Vast in
size, classic in form, it served many purposes, but chiefly as a gallery
for the safe custody of a collection of Oriental china which had no
rival in Europe.

"It is our patron's hobby," said the curate, mincingly, as he indicated
the treasures of cloisonne and of porcelain; "he does not frivol away
his money as so many do, on idle dissipations and ephemeral pleasures.
On the contrary, he devotes it to the beautiful objects--"

"Do you call them beautiful, sir?" Alban asked ingenuously. "They seem
to me quite ugly. I don't think that if I had money I should spend it on
plates and jars which nobody uses. I would much sooner buy a battle ship
and give it to the nation." And then he asked, "Did Mr. Gessner put up
all this glass to keep out the fresh air? Does he like being in a
hot-house? I should have thought a garden would have been better."

Silas Geary could make nothing of such criticism as this.

"My dear lad," he protested, "you are very young and probably don't know
what sciatica means. When I was your age, I could have slept upon a
board and risen therefrom refreshed. At fifty it is otherwise. We study
the barometer then and dust before we sit. This great glass house is Mr.
Gessner's winter temple. It is here that he plans and conceives so many
of those vast schemes by which the world is astonished."

Alban looked at him curiously.

"Is the world really astonished by rich men?" he asked.

Mr. Geary stood still in amazement at the question.

"Rank and birth rule the nation," he declared vehemently; "it is fit and
proper that it should be so. Our aristocracy is rightly recruited from
those who have accumulated the wealth necessary to such a position.
Riches, Kennedy, mean power. You will know that some day when you are
the master of riches."

Alban walked on a little way without saying anything. Then almost as one
compelled to reply he exclaimed:

"In the East End, they don't speak of money like that. I suppose it is
their ignorance--and after all it is a very great thing to be able to
compel other people to starve for you. Some day, I'll take you down to
the sweating-shops, Mr. Geary. You'll see a lot of old china there, but
I don't think it would be worth much. And all our flowers are for
sale--poor devils, we get little enough for supper if we don't sell
them."

The curate expressed no profound desire to accept this promising
invitation, and desiring to change so thorny a subject entered a
delightful old-world garden and invited Alban's attention to a superb
view of Harrow and the Welsh Harp. In the hall, to which at last they
returned, he spoke of that more substantial reality, dinner.

"I am sorry to say that I have a Dorcas meeting to-night and cannot
possibly dine with you," he explained to the astonished lad. "I shall
return at nine o'clock, however, to see that all is as Mr. Gessner
wishes. The servants have told you, perhaps, that Miss Anna is in the
country and does not return until to-morrow. This old house is very dull
without her, Kennedy. It is astonishing how much difference a pretty
face makes to any house."

"Is that Miss Anna's portrait over the fireplace, sir?"

"You know her, Kennedy?"

"I have seen her once, on the balcony of a house in St. James' Square.
That was last night when I was on my way to sleep in a cellar."

"My poor, poor boy, and to-night you will sleep in one of the most
beautiful rooms in England. How wonderful is fortune, how
amazing--er--how very--is not that seven o'clock by the way? I think
that it is, and here is Fellows come to show you your room. You will
find that we have done our best for you in the matter of
clothes--guesswork, I fear, Kennedy, but still our best. To-morrow
Westman the tailor is to come--I think and hope you will put up with
borrowed plumes until he can fit you up. In the meantime, Fellows has
charge of your needs. I am sure that he will do his very best for you."

The young butler said that he would--his voice was still raised to a
little just dignity, and he, in company with Silas Geary, the
housekeeper and the servants' hall had already put the worst
construction possible upon Alban's reception into the house. His
determination to patronize the "young man" however received an abrupt
check when Alban suddenly ordered him to show the way upstairs. "He
spoke like a Duke," Fellows said in the kitchen afterwards. "There I was
running up the stairs just as though the Guv'ner were behind me. Don't
you think that you can come it easy with him--he ain't the sort by a
long way. I tell you, I never was so astonished since the Guv'ner raised
my wages."

Alban, of course, was sublimely unconscious of this. He had been
conducted to an enormous bedroom on the first floor, superbly furnished
with old Chippendale and excellent modern Sevres--and there he had been
left to realize for the first time that he was alone and that all which
had happened since yesterday was not a dream but a hard invincible truth
so full of meaning, so wonderful, so sure that the eyes of his brain did
not dare to look at it unflinchingly. Boyishly and with a boy's gesture
he had thrown himself upon the bed and hidden his face from the light as
though the very atmosphere of this wonder world were insupportable. Good
God, that it should have happened to him, Alban Kennedy; that it should
have been spoken of as his just right; that he should have been told
that he had a claim which none might refute! A hundred guesses afforded
no clue to the solution of the mystery. He could not tell himself that
he was in some way related to Richard Gessner, the banker; he could not
believe that his dead parents had any claim upon this foreigner who
received him coldly and yet would hear nothing of his departure. Pride
had little share in this, for the issues were momentous. It was
sufficient to know that a hand had suddenly drawn him from the abyss,
had put him on this pinnacle--beyond all, had placed him in Anna
Gessner's home as the first-born, there to embark upon a career whose
goal lay beyond the City Beautiful of his dreams.

He rose from the bed at length, and trying to put every thought but that
of the moment from his head, he remembered that he was expected to dine
alone in the great room below, and to dress himself for such an ordeal
in the clothes which the reverend gentleman's wit had provided for him.
Courageous in all things, he found himself not a little afraid of all
the beautiful objects which he touched, afraid to lift the Sevres
pitcher, afraid to open the long doors of the inlaid wardrobe, timid
before the dazzling mirror--a reluctant guest who, for the time being,
would have been thankful to escape to a carpetless floor and glad to
wash in a basin of the commonest kind. When this passed, and it was but
momentary, the delusion that a trick was being played upon him succeeded
to it and he stood to ask himself if he had not been a fool to believe
their story at all, a fool thus to be made sport of by one who would
relate the circumstance with relish to-morrow. This piece of nonsense,
however, was as quick to give way to the somewhat cynical common sense
with which, Alban Kennedy had rightly been credited as the other. He
turned from it impatiently and began to dress himself. He had last
dressed in black clothes and a white waistcoat for a school concert at
Westminster when he was quite a little lad--but his youth had taught him
the conventions, and he had never forgotten those traditions of what his
dead father used to call the "decent life." In his case the experience
was but a reversion to the primitive, and he dressed with every
satisfaction, delighted to put off the shabby old clothes and no less
content with his new appearance as a mirror revealed it to him.

The dining room at "Five Gables" was normally a little dark in the
daytime, for it looked upon the drive where ancient trees shaded its
lofty latticed windows. At night, however, Richard Gessner's fine silver
set off the veritable black oak to perfection, and the room had an air
of dignity and richness neither artificial nor offensive. When Alban
came down to dinner he perceived that a cover had been set for him at
the end of a vast table, and that he was expected to take the absent
master's place; nor could he forbear to smile at the solemn exercises
performed by Fellows the young butler, and two footmen who were to wait
upon him. These rascals, whatever they might say in the kitchen
afterwards, served him at the table as though he had been an eldest son
of the house. If they had expected that the ragged, shabby fellow, who
entered the house so stealthily an hour ago, would provide food for
their exquisitely delicate sense of humor, they were wofully
disappointed. Alban ate his dinner without uttering a single remark.

And last night it had been supper in the caves! There must be no charge
of inconsistency brought against him if a momentary shudder marked this
recollection of an experience. A man may bridge a great gulf in a single
instant of time. Alban had no less affection for, no less interest
to-night in those pitiful lives than yesterday, but he understood that a
flood of fortune had carried him for the time being away from them, and
that his desire must be to help but not to regret them. Indeed, he could
not resist, nor did he wish to resist a great content in this
well-being, which overtook him in so subtle a manner. The sermons of the
old days, preached by many a mad fanatic of Union Street, declared that
any alliance between the rich and the poor must be false and impossible.
Alban believed it to be so. A mere recollection of the shame of poverty
could already bring the blood to his cheeks, and yet he would have
defended poverty with all the logic of which his clever brain was
capable.

So in a depressing silence the long dinner was eaten. Methodically and
with velvet steps the footmen put dish after dish before him, the butler
filled his rarely lifted glass, the whole ceremony of dining performed.
For his own part he would have given much to have escaped after the fish
had been served, and to have gone out and explored the garden which had
excited Mr. Geary to such poetic thoughts. Not a large eater (for the
East End does not dare to cultivate an appetite), he was easily
satisfied; and he found the mere length of the menu to be an ordeal
which he would gladly have been spared. Why did people want all these
dishes, he asked himself. Why, in well-to-do circles, is it considered
necessary to serve precisely similar portions of fish and flesh and fowl
every night at eight o'clock? Men who work eat when they are disposed.
Alban wondered what would happen if such a custom were introduced into
the House of the Five Gables. A cynical reverie altogether--from which
the butler's purring voice awakened him.

"Will you have your coffee in the Winter Garden, sir? Mr. Gessner always
does."

"Cannot I have it in the garden?"

"Oh, yes, if you like, sir. We'll carry out a chair--the seats are very
damp at night, sir."

Alban smiled. Was he not sleeping on the reeking floor of the caves but
twenty hours ago.




CHAPTER IX

ANNA GESSNER


They set a table in the vestibule overlooking the trim lawn, and thither
they carried cigars and coffee. Alban had learned to smoke fiercely--one
of the few lessons the East End had taught him thoroughly--and Richard
Gessner's cigars had a just reputation among all who frequented the
House of the Five Gables--some of these, it must be confessed, coming
here for no other particular reason than to smoke them. Alban did not
quite understand what it was that differentiated this particular cigar
from any he had ever smoked, but he enjoyed it thoroughly and inhaled
every whiff of its fragrant bouquet as though it had been a perfume of
morning-roses.

A profound stillness, broken at rare intervals by the rustling of young
leaves, prevailed in the garden. Night had come down, but it was a night
of spring, clear and still and wonderful of stars. Distantly across a
black waste of heath and meadow, the spire of Harrow Church stood up as
a black point against an azure sky. The waters of the Welsh Harp were as
a shimmering lake of silver in the foreground; the lights of Hendon and
of Cricklewood spoke of suburban life, but might just as well have
conjured up an Italian scene to one who had the wit to imagine it. Alban
knew nothing of Italy, he had never set foot out of England in his
life, but the peace and the beauty of the picture impressed him
strangely, and he wondered that he had so often visited the Caves when
such a fairyland stood open to his pleasure. Let it not be hidden that
he would have been easily pleased this night. Youth responds quickly to
excitements of whatever nature they may be. He was as far from realizing
the truth of his position as ever, but the complete change of
environment, the penetrating luxury of the great house, the mystery
which had carried him there and the promise of the morrow, conspired to
elate him and to leave him, in the common phrase, as one who is walking
upon air. Even an habitual cynicism stood silent now. What mattered it
if he awoke to-morrow to a reality of misunderstanding or of jest? Had
not this night opened a vista which nothing hereafter might shut out?
And the truth might be as Richard Gessner had promised--a truth of
permanence, of the continued possession of this wonderland. Who shall
blame him if his heart leaped at the mere contemplation of this
possibility?

It would have been about nine o'clock when they carried his coffee to
the garden--it was just half-past nine when Anna Gessner returned
unexpectedly to the house. Alban heard the bell in the courtyard ring
loudly, and upon that the throttled purr of a motor's heavy engine. He
had expected Silas Geary, but such a man, he rightly argued, would not
come with so much pomp and circumstance, and he stood at once, anxious
and not a little abashed. Perhaps some suspicion of the truth had
flashed upon him unwittingly. He heard the voice of Fellows the butler
raised in some voluble explanation, there were a few words spoken in a
pleasing girlish tone, and then, the boudoir behind him flashed its
colors suddenly upon his vision, and he beheld Anna Gessner herself--a
face he would have recognized in ten thousand, a figure of yesternight
that would never be forgotten.

She had cast aside her motor veil, and held it in her hand while she
spoke to the butler. A heavy coat bordered and lined with fur stood open
to reveal a gray cloth dress; her hair had been blown about by the fresh
breezes of the night and covered her forehead in a disorder far from
unbecoming. Alban thought that the cold light in the room and the heavy
bright panelling against which she stood gave an added pallor to her
usually pale face, exaggerating the crimson of her lips and the dark
beauty of her eyes. The hand which held the veil appeared to him to be
ridiculously small; her attitudes were so entirely graceful that he
could not imagine a picture more pleasing. If he remembered that he had
likened her to little Lois Boriskoff, he could now admit the
preposterous nature of the comparison. True it was that nationality
spoke in the contour of the face, in its coloring and its expression,
but these elementals were forgotten in the amazing grace of the girl's
movements, the dignity of her gestures and the vitality which animated
her. Returning to the house unexpectedly, even a lad was shrewd enough
to see that she returned also under the stress of an agitation she could
conceal from none. Her very questions to the servants were so quick and
incoherent that they could not be answered. The letters which the
butler put into her hands were torn from the envelopes but were not
read. When she opened the boudoir window and so permitted Alban to
overhear her hurried words, it was as one who found the atmosphere of a
house insupportable and must breathe fresh air at any cost.

"Has my father returned, Fellows?"

"No, miss, he is not expected until late."

"Why did you not send the carriage to the station?"

"Mr. Gessner said that you were coming to-morrow, miss."

She flushed slightly at the retort and made as though to step out into
the garden--but hesitating an instant, she said:

"I have had nothing to eat since one o'clock, Fellows. I must have some
supper."

"Yes, miss."

"Anything will do--tell cook it does not matter. Has Lord Portcullis
called?"

"No, miss--not since yesterday."

"Or Mrs. Melville?"

"This afternoon. She asked for your address, miss--but I did not give
it."

"Quite right--I suppose that Captain Forrest did not come?" She turned
away as though not wishing to look the man in the face--a gesture which
Alban's quick eyes instantly perceived.

Fellows, on the other hand, permitted a smile to lurk for an instant
about the corners of his mouth before he said--

"I understood that Captain Forrest was at Brighton, miss."

The girl's face clouded perceptibly, and she loosened her cloak and
threw it from her shoulders as though it had become an insupportable
burden.

"If he calls to-morrow, I do not wish to see him. Please tell them
all--I will not see him."

The butler smiled again, but answered, "Yes, miss."

Anna Gessner herself, still hesitating upon the threshold suddenly
remembered another interest and referred to it with no less ardor.

"Oh, that reminds me, Fellows. Has my father spoken again of that
dreadful silly business?"

"Concerning the young gentleman, miss?"

She heard him with unutterable contempt.

"The beggar-boy that he wishes to bring to this house. Did he speak of
him to-night?"

Fellows came a step nearer and, hushing his voice, he said, with a
servant's love of a dramatic reply:

"Mr. Kennedy is in the garden now, miss--indeed, I think he's sitting
near the vestibule."

She looked at him astonished. Ugly passions of disappointment and
thwarted desire betrayed themselves in the swift turn and the angry
pursing of her lips. Of her father's intentions in bringing this
beggar-boy to the house, she knew nothing at all. It seemed to her one
of those mad acts for which no sane apology could be offered.

"He is here now, Fellows! Who brought him then?"

"Mr. Geary--at six o'clock."

"Mr. Geary is a hateful busybody--I suppose I must speak to the boy."

"I think that Mr. Gessner would wish it, miss."

She hesitated a brief instant, her annoyance giving battle to her
father's well-known desire. Curiosity in the end helped her decision.
She must see the object of a charity so eccentric.

"You say that he is in the garden?" she continued, taking two steps
across the vestibule.

But this time Alban answered her himself.

"The beggar-boy is here," he said.

He had risen from his chair and the two confronted each other in the
aureole of light cast out from the open window. Just twenty-four hours
ago, Alban had been sitting by little Lois Boriskoff's side in the
second gallery at the Aldgate Empire. To-night he wore a suit of good
dress clothes, had dined at a millionaire's table and already recovered
much of that polish and confident manner which an English public school
rarely fails to bestow. Anna Gessner, in her turn, regarded him as
though he were the agent of a trick which had been played upon her. To
her amazement a hot flush of anger succeeded. She knew not how to meet
him or what excuses to make.

"My father has not told me the truth," she exclaimed presently. "I am
sorry that you overheard me--but I said what I meant. If he had told me
that you were coming--"

Alban stood before her quite unabashed. He understood the circumstances
and delighted in them.

"I am glad that you meant it," he rejoined, "of course, it is in some
way true. Those who have no money are always beggars to those who have.
Let me say that I don't know at all why I am here, and that I shall go
unless I find out. We need not quarrel about it at all."

Anna, however, had recovered her composure. Mistress of herself to a
remarkable degree when her passions were not aroused, she suddenly held
out her hand to Alban as though she would apologize--but not by the
spoken word.

"They have played a trick upon me," she cried. "I shall have it out with
Mr. Geary when he comes. Of course I am very sorry. My father said that
you were a distant relative, but he tried to frighten me by telling me
that you lived in Whitechapel and were working in a factory. I was silly
enough to believe it--you would have done so yourself."

"Most certainly--for it is quite true. I have been living in Whitechapel
since my mother died, and I worked in a factory until yesterday. If you
had come here a few hours back, you would have run away from the
beggar-boy or offered him sixpence. I wonder which it would have been."

She would not admit the truth of it, and a little peevishly contested
her point.

"I shall never believe it. This is just the kind of thing Mr. Geary
would do. He is the most foolish man I have ever known. To leave you all
alone here when he brought you as a stranger to our house. I wonder what
my father would say to that."

She had drawn her cloak about her white throat again and seated herself
near Alban's chair. Imitating her, he sat again and began to talk to her
as naturally as though he had known her all her life. Not a trace of
vexation at the manner of her reception remained to qualify that rare
content he found in her company. Alban had long acquired the sense which
judges every word and act by the particular circumstances under which it
is spoken. He found it natural that Anna Gessner should resent his
presence in the house. He liked her for telling him that it was so.

"My father says that he is going to make an engineer of you--is that
just what you wish, Mr. Kennedy?"

"That's what I don't know," he replied as frankly. "You see, I have
always wanted to get on, but how to do so is what beats me. Engineering
is a big profession and I'm not sure that I have the gifts. There you
have a candid confession. I'm one of those fellows who can do everything
up to a certain point, but a certain point isn't good enough nowadays.
And a man wants money to get on. I'm sure it's easy enough to make a
fortune if you have a decent share of brains and a bigger one capital. I
want to make money and yet the East End has taught me to hate money. If
Mr. Gessner can convince me that I have any claim upon his patronage, I
shall go right into something and see if I cannot come out on top. You,
I suppose, don't think much of the dirty professions. You'd like your
brother to be a soldier, wouldn't you--or if not that, in the navy. Half
the fellows at Westminster wanted to go into the army, just as though
killing other people were the chief business in life. Of course, I
wouldn't run it down--but what I mean to say is, that I never cared at
all about it myself and so I'm not quite the best judge."

His little confession ended somewhat abruptly, for he observed that his
words appeared to distress Anna Gessner beyond all reason. For many
minutes she remained quite silent. When she spoke her eyes were turned
away and her confusion not altogether to be concealed.

"I'm afraid you take your ideas of us from the cheap story-books," she
said in a low voice; "women, nowadays, have their own ambitions and
think less of men's. My dearest friend is a soldier, but I'm sure he
would be a very foolish one if war broke out. They say he worked
terribly hard in South Africa, but I don't think he ever killed any one.
So you see--I shouldn't ask you to go into the army, and I'm sure my
father would not wish it either."

"It would do no good if he did," said Alban as bluntly. "I should only
make a fool of myself. Your friend must have told you that you want a
pretty good allowance to do upon--and fancy begging from your people
when you were twenty-one. Why, in the East End many a lad of nineteen
keeps a whole family and doesn't think himself ill-used. Isn't it rot
that there should be so much inequality in life, Miss Gessner? I don't
suppose, though, that one would think so if one had money."

She smiled at his question, but diverted the subject cleverly.

"Are you very self-willed, Mr. Kennedy?"

"Do you mean that I get what I want--or try to?"

"I mean that you have your own way in everything. If you were in love
you would carry the poor thing off by force."

"If I were in love and guessed that she was, I should certainly be
outside to time. That's East End, you know, for punctuality."

"You would marry in haste and repent at leisure?"

"It would be yes or no, and that would be the end of it. Girls like a
man who compels them--they like to obey, at least when they are young. I
don't believe any girl ever loved a coward yet. Do you think so
yourself?"

She astonished him by rising suddenly and breaking off the conversation
as abruptly.

"God help me, I don't know what I think," she said; and then, with half
a laugh to cover it, "Here is Mr. Geary come to take care of you. I will
say good-night. We shall meet at breakfast and talk of all this
again--if you get up in time."

He made no answer and she disappeared with just a flash of her ample
skirts into the boudoir and so to the hall beyond. The curate appeared a
minute later, full of apologies and of the Dorcas meeting he had so
lately illuminated with his intellectual presence. A mild cigarette and
a glass of mineral water found him quite ready for bed.

"There will be so much to speak of to-morrow, my dear boy," he said in
that lofty tone which attended his patronage, "there is so much for you
to be thankful for to-day. Let us go and dream of it all. The reality
must be greater than anything we can imagine."

"I'll tell you in a week's time," said Alban, dryly.

A change had come upon him already. For Anna Gessner had betrayed her
secret, and he knew that she had a lover.




CHAPTER X

RICHARD GESSNER DEBATES AN ISSUE


Richard Gessner returned to "Five Gables" as the clock of Hampstead
Parish Church was striking one. A yawning footman met him in the hall
and asked him if he wished for anything. To the man's astonishment, he
was ordered to carry brandy and Vichy water to the bedroom immediately.

"To your room, sir?"

"To my room--are you deaf?"

"I beg your pardon, sir. Miss Gessner has returned."

"My daughter--when?"

"After dinner, sir."

"Was there any one with her?"

"I didn't rightly see, sir. Fellows opened the door--he could tell you,
sir."

Gessner cast a searching glance upon the man's face And then mounted the
great staircase with laborious steps. Passing the door of the room in
which Alban slept, he listened intently for a moment as though half of a
mind to enter; but abandoning the intention, went on to his apartment
and there, when the footman had attended to his requirements, he locked
the door and helped himself liberally to the brandy. An observer would
have remarked that drops of sweat stood upon his brow and that his hand
was shaking.

He had dined with a city company; but had dined as a man who knew
little of the dinner or of those who ate it. Ten days ago his energy,
his buoyant spirits, and his amazing vitality had astonished even his
best friends. To-night these qualities were at their lowest ebb--and he
had been so silent, so self-concentrated, so obviously distressed, that
even a casual acquaintance had remarked the change. To say that a just
Nemesis had overtaken him would be less than the truth. He knew that he
stood accused, not by a man, but by a nation. And to a nation he must
answer.

He locked the door of his room and, drawing a chair to a little Buhl
writing-table, set in the window, he opened a drawer and took therefrom
a little bundle of papers, upon which he had spent nine sleepless nights
and, apparently, would spend still another. They were odd scraps--now of
letters, now of legal documents--the _precis_ of a past which could be
recited in no court of justice, but might well be told aloud to an
unsympathetic world. Had an historian been called upon to deal with such
documents, he would have made nothing whatever of them--but Richard
Gessner could rewrite the story in every line, could garnish it with
passions awakened, fears unnamable, regrets that could not save, despair
that would suffer no consolations.

He had stolen Paul Boriskoff's secret from him and thereby had made a
fortune. Let it be admitted that the first conception of the new furnace
for the refining of copper had come from that white-faced whimpering
miner, who could talk of nothing but his nation's wrongs and had no
finer ambition in life than to feed his children. He, Richard Gessner,
had done what such a fellow never could have done. He had made the
furnace commercially possible and had exploited it through the copper
mines of the world. Such had been the first rung of that magnificent
pecuniary ladder he had afterwards climbed so adroitly. Money he had
amassed beneath his grasping hand as at a magician's touch. He
regretted, he had always regretted, that misfortune overtook Paul
Boriskoff's family--he would have helped them had he been in Poland at
the time; but their offences were adjudged to be political; and if the
wretched woman suffered harm at the hands of the police, what share had
he in it? To this point he charged himself lightly--as men will in
justifying themselves before the finger of an hoary accusation. Gessner
cared neither for God nor man. His only daughter had been at once his
divinity and his religion. Let men call him a rogue, despot, or thief,
and he would shrug his shoulders and glance aside at his profit and loss
account. But let them call him "fool" and the end of his days surely was
at hand.

And so this self-examination to-night troubled itself with no thought of
wrongs committed, with no desire to repay, but only with that supreme
act of folly, to which the sleeping lad in the room near by was the
surest witness. What would the threats of such a pauper as Paul
Boriskoff have mattered if the man had stood alone against him? A word
to the police, a hundred pounds to a score of ruffians, and he would
have been troubled no more. But his quarrel was not with a man but a
nation. Perceiving that the friendship of the Russian Government was
necessary to many of his mining schemes in the East, he had changed his
name as lightly as another would have changed his coat, had cast the
garments of a sham patriotism and emerged an enemy to all that he had
hitherto befriended, a foe to Poland, a servant to Russia.

Acting secretly and with a strong man's discretion, no bruit of this odd
conversion had been made public, no whisper of it heard in the camp of
the Revolutionaries. Many knew Maxim Gogol--none had heard of Richard
Gessner. His desire for secrecy was in good accord with the plans of a
police he assisted and the bureaucracy he bribed. He lived for a while
in Vienna, then at Tiflis--he came at length to England where his
daughter had been educated; and there he established himself, ostensibly
as a wealthy banker, in reality as the secret director of one of the
greatest conspiracies against the liberty of a little nation that the
world had ever seen.

Upon such a man, the blow of discovery fell with, stunning force.
Gessner had grown so accustomed to the security of this suburban life
that he could imagine no circumstance which might disturb it. All that
he did for the satisfaction of the Russian Government had been cleverly
done by agents and deputies. Entitled by his years to leisure, he had
latterly almost abandoned politics for a culture of the arts and the
sciences, in some branches of which he was a master. His leisure he gave
almost entirely to his daughter. To contrive for her an alliance worthy
of his own fortune and of her beauty had become the absorbing passion of
his life. He studied the Peerage as other men study a balance-sheet.
All sorts and conditions of possible husbands appeared at "Five Gables;"
were dined, discussed, and dismissed. The older families despised him
and would not be appeased. To crown his vexation, his daughter named a
lover for herself. He had twice shown Captain Willy Forrest from the
door and twice had the man returned. Anna seemed fascinated by this
showy adventurer as by none other who visited them. Gessner, for his
part, would sooner have lost the half of his fortune than that she
should have married him.

These vexations had been real enough ten days ago; but, to-night, a
greater made light of them and now they were almost forgotten. Detection
had stalked out of the slums to humble this man in an instant and bring
him to his knees. Gessner could have recited to you the most trivial
detail attending the reception of Paul Boriskoff's letter and the claim
it made upon him--how a secretary had passed it to him with a suggestion
that Scotland Yard should know of it; how he had taken up the scrawl
idly enough to flush before them all an instant later and to feel his
heart sink as in an abyss of unutterable dismay. He had crumpled the
dirty paper in his hand, he remembered, and thrown it to the ground--to
pick it up immediately and smooth it out as though it were a precious
document. To his secretary he tried to explain that the writer was an
odd fanatic who must be humored. Determined at the first blush to face
the matter out, to answer and to defy this pauper Pole who had dared to
threaten him, he came ultimately to see that discretion would best serve
him. Paul Boriskoff had named Kensington Gardens as a rendezvous where
matters might be discussed. Gessner was there to the minute--without
idea, without hope, seeking only that pity which he himself had never
bestowed upon any human being.

Paul Boriskoff did not hurry to the Gardens, so sure was he of the
success of his undertaking. The frowsy black coat, in which he made his
bow to the millionaire, had not seen the light for many years--his hat
was a wide-brimmed eccentricity in soft felt which greatly delighted the
nursemaids who passed him by. Gessner would never have recognized, in
the hollow-cheeked, pale-faced, humble creature the sturdy young Pole
who had come to him nearly a generation ago and had said, "Our fortunes
are made; this is my discovery." Believing at the moment that money
would buy such a derelict, body and soul, he opened the negotiations
firmly and in that lofty tone which suited Throgmorton Street so well.
But five minutes had not passed before he understood his mistake and
realized that Boriskoff, the lad who had trusted him, and Boriskoff, the
Pole who now threatened him, were one and the same after all.

"I remember you perfectly," he said; "it would be idle to say that I do
not. You had some claim in the matter of a certain furnace. Yes, I
remember that and would willingly admit it. But, my friend, you fell
into trouble with the Government, and what could I do then? Was not I
also compelled to leave Poland? Did not I change my name for that very
reason? How could I repay the debt? Here in England it is different.
You make your existence known to me and I respond at once. Speak
freely, then, for I shall hear you patiently."

They were seated on a bench beneath a chestnut in full bloom. Distantly,
through a vista of giant trunks, the waters of the Round Pond glimmered
in the evening light. Children, worn out by the day, sat idle in groups
on the benches of the Long Walk or lagged through a fitful game on the
open spaces between the trees. Few observed these two men who thus
earnestly recalled the drama of their lives; none remarked their odd
association, for were not both obviously foreigners, and who shall
dictate a fashion to such as they? Indeed, they conversed without any
animation of gesture; the one convulsed by fears he did not dare to
express, the other by hopes on the threshold of realization.

"I speak freely," said Boriskoff with unaffected candor, "for to do that
I have come here. And first I must set your memory right in a matter
that concerns us both. You did not leave Poland to serve your country;
you left it to betray us. Spare your words, for the story has been told
many times in Warsaw and in London. Shall I give you the list of those
who are tortured to-day at Saghalien because of what you did? It would
be vain, for if you have any feeling, even that of a dog, they are
remembered by you. You betrayed the man who trusted you; you betrayed
your country--for what? Shall I say that it was for this asylum in a
strange land; for power, for the temptations which all must suffer? No,
no. You have had but one desire in all your life, and that is money. So
much even I understand. You are ready now to part with a little of that
money--so little that it would be as a few grains from the sands of the
sea--to save your neck from the rope, to escape the just punishment
which is about to fall upon you. Do not believe that you can do so. I
hold your secret, but at any hour, at any minute, others may share it
with me. Maxim Gogol--for I shall call you by your true name--if one
word of this were spoken to the Committee at Warsaw, how long would you
have to live? You know the answer to that question. Do not compel me to
dwell upon it."

He spoke in a soft purring tone, an echo of a voice, as it were, beneath
the rustling leaves; but, none the less, Richard Gessner caught every
word as though it had been the voice of an oracle. A very shrewd man, he
had feared this knowledge, and fear had brought him to this covert
interview. The Pole could betray him and betrayal must mean death--and
what a death, reluctant, procrastinating, the hour of it unknown, the
manner of it beyond any words terrible. Such had been the end of many
who had left Poland as he had done. He had read their story and
shuddered even in his imagined security. And now this accusation was
spoken, not as a whisper of a voice in the hours of the night, but as
the truth of an inevitable day.

And what should he answer? Would it profit him to speak of law; to
retort with a threat; to utter the commonplaces concerning Scotland Yard
and a vigilant police? He was far too wise even to contemplate such
folly. Let him have this man arrested, and what then? Would any country
thereafter shelter the informer from the vengeance of the thousands
whom no law could arrest? Would any house harbor him against the dagger
of the assassin, the swift blow, it might even be the lingering justice
of such fanatics as sought to rule Poland. He knew that there was none.
Abject assent could be the only reply. He must yield to any humiliation,
suffer any extortion rather than speak the word which would be as
irrevocable as the penalty it invited.

"I shall not dispute with you, Paul Boriskoff," he said, with a last
attempt to save his dignity; "yes, it would be in your power to do me a
great injury even in this country which gives you liberty. It is your
own affair. You did not come here to threaten me, but to seek a favor.
Name it to me and I shall be prepared to answer you. I am not an
ungenerous man as some of our countrymen know. Tell me what you wish and
I shall know how to act."

Boriskoff's answer astonished him by its impetuosity.

"For myself nothing," he exclaimed contemptuously--and these brief words
echoed in Gessner's ears almost as a message of salvation--"for myself
nothing, but for my children much. Yes, your money can make even Paul
Boriskoff despise himself--but it is for the children's sake. I sell my
honor that they may profit by it. I ask for them that which is due to
me, but which I have sworn to forego. Maxim Gogol, it is for the
children that I ask it. You have done me a great wrong, but they shall
profit by it. That is what I am come here to say to-day--that you shall
repay, not to me but to my children."

The words appeared to cost him much, as though he had deliberately
sacrificed a great vengeance that those he loved might profit. Leaping
to the hope of it, and telling himself that this after all was but a
question of pounds, shillings, and pence, Gessner answered with an
eagerness beyond all bounds ridiculous.

"There could be nothing I would do more willingly. Yes, I remember--you
left a daughter in Warsaw and she was not to be discovered by those of
us who would have befriended her. Believe me when I say that I will help
her very gladly. Anything, my friend, anything that is humbly
reasonable--"

Boriskoff did not permit him to finish.

"My daughter will be educated in Germany at your cost," he said curtly.
"I would speak first of one who is as a son to me because of her
affection for him. There is a young Englishman living in Union Street,
the son of a poor clergyman who died in the service of the poor. This
lad you will take into your own house and treat as your own son. It is
my desire and must be gratified. Remember that he is the son of a
gentleman and treat him as such. There will be time enough afterwards to
tell you how you must act in the interests of our people at Warsaw. This
affair is our own and not of politics at all. As God is in heaven, but
for my daughter you, Maxim Gogol, would not be alive this night."

Gessner's heart sank again at the hint of further requests subsequently
to come. The suggestion that he should adopt into his own house a youth
of whom he knew nothing seemed in keeping with the circumstances of this
dread encounter and the penalty that must be paid for it. After all, it
was but a small price to pay for comparative security and the silence of
a tongue which could work such ill. Accustomed to deal with men of all
natures, honest and simple, clever and foolish, secretive and
loquacious, there ran in his mind the desperate idea that he would
temporize with Paul Boriskoff and ultimately destroy him. Let the
Russian Government be informed of the activity of this Pole and of his
intention to visit the Continent of Europe again, and what were
Boriskoff's chances? Such were the treacherous thoughts which stood in
Gessner's mind while he framed an answer which should avert the final
hour of reckoning and give him that opportunity for the counter-stroke
which might yet save all.

"Your youth will profit little in my house," he said with some pretense
of earnestness. "Had you asked an education abroad for him, that would
have been a wiser thing in these days. Frankly, I do not understand your
motive, but I am none the less willing to humor it. Let me know
something more of the lad, let me have his history and then I shall be
able to say what is the best course. I live a very quiet life and my
daughter is much away. There is the possibility also that the boy, if he
be the son of a clergyman, would do much better at Oxford or at
Cambridge than at Hampstead, as you yourself must see. Let us speak of
it afterwards. There will be time enough."

"The time is to-day," rejoined Boriskoff, firmly, "Alban Kennedy will
live under your roof as your own son. I have considered the matter and
am determined upon it. When the time comes for him to marry my
daughter, I will inform you of it. Understand, he knows nothing of your
story or of mine. He will not hear of me in my absence from England. I
leave the burden of this to you. He is a proud lad and will accept no
charity. It must be your task to convince him that he has a title to
your benevolence. Be wise and act discreetly. Our future requisitions
will depend upon your conduct of this affair--and God help you, Maxim
Gogol, if you fail in it."

Something of the fanatic, almost of the madman, spoke in this vehement
utterance. If Gessner had been utterly at a loss as yet to account for a
request so unusual, he now began to perceive in it the instrument of his
own humiliation. Would not this stranger be a perpetual witness to the
hazard of his life, a son who stood also as a hostage, the living voice
of Paul Boriskoff's authority? And what of his own daughter Anna and of
the story he must tell her? These facts he realized clearly but had no
answer to them. The reluctant assent, wrung from his unwilling lips, was
the promise of a man who stood upon the brink of ruin and must answer as
his accusers wished or pay the ultimate penalty. All his common
masterfulness, the habit of autocracy, the anger of the bully and the
tyrant, trembled before the clear cold eyes of this man he had wronged.
He must answer or pay the price, humiliate himself or suffer.

       *       *       *       *       *

And to-night Alban Kennedy slept beneath his roof; the bargain had been
clinched, the word spoken. Twenty thousand pounds had he paid to Paul
Boriskoff that morning for the education of his daughter and in part
satisfaction of the ancient claim. But the witness of his degradation
had come to him and must remain.

Aye, and there the strife of it began. When he put detectives upon the
lad's path, had him followed from Union Street to the caves and from the
caves to his place of employment, the report came to him that he was
interesting himself in a callous ne'er-do-well, the friend of rogues and
vagabonds, the companion of sluts, the despair of the firm which
employed him. He had expected something of the kind, but the seeming
truth dismayed him. In a second interview with Boriskoff he used all his
best powers of argument and entreaty to effect a compromise. He would
send the lad to the University, have him educated abroad, establish him
in chambers--do anything, in fact, but that which the inexorable Pole
demanded of him. This he protested with a humility quite foreign to him
and an earnestness which revealed the depth of the indignity he
suffered; but Boriskoff remained inflexible.

"I am determined upon it," was the harsh retort; "the boy shall be as a
link between us. Keep him from this hell in which he has lived and I
will set so much to your credit. I warn you that you have a difficult
task. Do not fail in it as you value your own safety."

The manner of this reply left Gessner no alternative, and he sent Silas
Geary to Whitechapel as we have seen. A less clever man, perhaps, would
have fenced alike with the proposal and the threat; but he knew his own
countrymen too well for that. Perhaps a hope remained that any kindness
shown to this vagrant lad would win back ultimately his ancient
freedom. Alone in his room this night, a single light rebutting the
darkness, he understood into what an abyss of discovery he had fallen,
the price that must be paid, the debt that he owed to forgotten years.

"This man is a devil," he said, "he will rob me shilling by shilling
until I am a beggar. Good God! that it should have come to this after
twenty years; twenty years which have achieved so much; twenty years of
such slavery as few men have known. And I am helpless; and this beggar
is here to remind me of my enemies, to tell me that I walk in chains and
that their eyes are following me."

He threw himself upon his bed dressed as he was and tried to sleep. The
stillness of the house gave fruitful visions, magnifying all his fears
and bringing him to an unspeakable terror of the days which must come
after. He had many ambitions yet to achieve, great ideas which remained
ideas, masterly projects which must bring him both fame and riches, but
he would have abandoned them all this night if freedom had been offered
him. Years ago, he remembered, Boriskoff, the young miner, had earned
his hatred, he knew not why unless it were a truth that men best hate
those who have served them best. To-night found that old hatred
increased a thousand fold and shaping itself in schemes which he would
not even whisper aloud. He had always been looked upon as a man of good
courage and that courage prompted him to a hundred mad notions--to swift
assassination or to slow intrigue--last of all to self destruction
should his aims miscarry. He would kill himself and cheat them after
all. Many another in Petersburg had sacrificed his life rather than
suffer those years of torture which discovery brought. He knew that he
would not shrink even from the irrevocable if he were driven far enough.

A man may take such a resolution as this and yet a great desire of life
may remain to thwart it. Gessner found himself debating the issues more
calmly as the night wore on, and even asking himself if the presence of
a stranger in his house might be so intolerable as he had believed. He
had seen little of Alban and that little had not been to the young man's
disadvantage. If the youth were not all that report had painted him, if
the amenities of the house should civilize him and kindness win his
favor, then even he might be an advocate for those to whom he owed such
favors. This new phase set Gessner thinking more hopefully than at any
time since the beginning of it. He rose from his bed and turning on the
lamps began to recall all that the Pole had demanded of him. The terms
of the compact were not so very unreasonable, surely, he argued. Let
this young Kennedy consent to remain at "Five Gables" and he, Richard
Gessner, would answer for the rest. But would he consent to
remain--would that wild life of the slums call him back to its freedom
and its friendships? He knew not what to think. A great fear came to
him, not that the lad would remain but that he would go. Had it been at
a reasonable hour, he would have talked to him there and then, for the
hours of that night were beyond all words intolerable. He must see
Kennedy and convince him. In the end, unable to support the doubt, he
quitted his own room, and crossed the landing, irresolute, trembling,
hardly knowing what he did.

       *       *       *       *       *

It would have been about five o'clock of the morning when he entered
Alban's room and discovered him to be still sleeping. A sound of heavy
breathing followed by a restless movement had deceived him and he
knocked upon the door gently, quite expecting to be answered. When no
reply came, he ventured in as one who would not willingly pry upon
another but is compelled thereto by curiosity. The room itself should
have been in darkness, but Alban had deliberately drawn the heavy
curtains back from the windows before he slept, and the wan gray light
of dawn struck down upon his tired face as though seeking out him alone
of all that slept in the house. A lusty figure of shapely youth, a
handsome face which the finger of the World had touched already, these
the light revealed. He slept upon his back, his head turned toward the
light, his arm outstretched and almost touching the floor.

Gessner stood very still, afraid to wake the sleeper and by him to be
thus discovered. No good nationalist at any time, he had always admired
that product of a hard-drinking, hard-fighting ancestry, the British
boy; and in Alban it seemed to him that he discovered an excellent type.
Undoubtedly the lad was both handsome and strong. For his brains, Silas
Geary would answer, and he had given evidence of good wit in their brief
encounter last night. Gessner drew a step nearer and asked himself again
if the detective's reports were true. Was this the friend of vagabonds,
the companion of sluts--this clean-limbed, virile fellow with the fair
face and the flaxen curls and the head of a thinker and a sage? A judge
of men himself, he said that the words were a lie, and then he
remembered Boriskoff's account, the story of a father who had died to
serve an East End Mission, and of a devoted mother worsted in her youth
by those gathering hosts of poverty she had set out so bravely to
combat. Could the son of such as these be all that swift espionage would
have him? Gessner did not believe it. New hopes, as upon a great freshet
of content, came to him to give him comfort. He had no son. Let this lad
be the son whom he had desired so ardently. Let them live together, work
together in a mutual affection of gratitude and knowledge. Who could
prevail against such an alliance? What rancor of Boriskoff's would harm
the lad he desired to be the husband of his daughter. Aye, and this was
the supreme consolation--that if Alban would consent, he, Gessner, would
so earn his devotion and his love that therein he might arm himself
against all the world.

But would he consent? How if this old habit of change asserted itself
and took him back to the depths? Gessner breathed quickly when he
remembered that such might be the end of it. No law could compel the
boy, no guardian claim him. Twice already he had expressed in this house
his contempt for the riches which should have tempted him. Gessner began
to perceive that his fate depended upon a word. It must be "yes" or "no"
to-morrow--and while "yes" would save him, the courage of a hundred men
would not have faced the utmost possibilities of "no."

This simple truth kept the man to the room as though therein lay all his
hopes of salvation. At one time he was upon the point of waking Alban
and putting the question to him. Or again, he tried to creep back to the
landing, determined, in his own room, to suffer as best he could the
hours of uncertainty. Distressed by irresolution he crossed to the
window at last and breathed the cool sweet air of morning as one being a
stranger to such a scene at such an hour. The sun had risen by this time
and all the landscape stood revealed in its morning beams. Not yet had
London stirred to the murmur of the coming day--no smoke rose from her
forest of chimneys, no haze drifted above the labyrinth. Far below she
lay, a maze of empty streets, of shuttered shops, of vast silent
buildings--a city of silence, hiding her cares from the glory of the
dawn, veiling her sorrow and her suffering, hushing her children to
rest, deaf to the morning voices; rich and poor alike turning from the
eyes of the day to Mother Sleep upon whose heart is eternal rest. Such a
city Gessner beheld while he looked from the window, and the golden
beams lighted his pallid face and the sweet air of day called him to
deed and resolution. What victories he had won upon that grimy field;
what triumphs he had known; what hours of pomp and vanity--what bitter
anguish! And now he might rule there no longer. Detection had stalked
out of the unknown and touched him upon the shoulder. Somewhere in that
labyrinth his enemies were sleeping. But one human being could shield
him from them, and he a lad--without home or friends, penniless and a
wanderer.

He drew back from the window, saying that the hours of suspense must be
brief and that his will should prevail with this lad, at whatever
sacrifice. Believing that his old shrewdness would help him, and that in
Alban not only the instrument of his salvation but of his vengeance
should be found, he would have quitted the room immediately, had not his
eye lighted at hazard upon a rough paper, lying upon the floor by the
bed, and a pencil which had tumbled from Alban's tired hand. Perceiving
that the lad had been drawing, and curious beyond ordinary to know the
subject of his picture, he picked the paper up to discover thereon a
rude portrait which he recognized instantly for that of his daughter,
Anna. Such a discovery, thrusting into his schemes as it did an idea
which hitherto had escaped him, held him for an instant spellbound with
wonder. A clever man, accustomed to arrive at conclusions swiftly, the
complexity of his thoughts, the strife of arguments now unnerved him
utterly. For he perceived both a great possibility and a great danger.

He is "to marry Lois Boriskoff" was the silent reflection--"to marry the
daughter. And this--this--good God, the man would never forgive me
this!"

The paper tumbled from his hands. Alban, turning upon his pillow, sighed
in his sleep. A neighboring church clock struck six; there were workmen
going down to the city which must now awake to the labors of the day.




CHAPTER XI

WHIRLWIND


Captain Willy Forrest admitted that he had few virtues, but he never
charged himself with the vice of idleness. In town or out of it, his
trim man-servant, Abel, would wake him at seven o'clock and see that he
had a cup of tea and the morning papers by a quarter-past. Fine physical
condition was one of the ambitions of this lithe shapely person, whose
father had been a jockey and whose mother had not forgotten to the day
of her death the manner in which measurements are taken upon a counter.

Willy Forrest, by dint of perseverance, had really come to believe that
these worthy parents never existed but in his imagination. To the world
he was the second son of the late Sir John Forrest, Bart., whose
first-born, supposed to be in Africa, had remained beyond the pale for
many years. Society, which rarely questions pleasant people, took him at
his word and opened many doors to him. In short, he was a type of
adventurer by no means uncommon, and rarely unsuccessful when there are
brains to back the pretensions.

He was not a particularly evil rascal, and women found him charming.
Possessed of a merry face, a horsey manner and a vocabulary which would
have delighted a maker of slang dictionaries, he pushed his my
everywhere, not hoping for something to turn up, but determined that his
own cleverness should contrive that desirable arrival. When he met Anna
Gessner at Ascot a year ago, the propitious moment seemed at hand. "The
girl is a gambler to her very boots," he told himself, while he
reflected that a seat upon the box of such a family coach would
certainly make his fortune. Willy Forrest resolved to secure such a seat
without a moment's loss of time.

This determination taken, the ardor with which he pursued it was
surprising. A cunning fox-like instinct led him to read Anna Gessner's
character as few others who had known her. Believing greatly in the
gospel of heredity, he perceived that Anna owed much to her father and
more to her nationality. "She is selfish and passionate, a little devil
in single harness who would be worse in double"--this was his reading of
her; to which he added the firm resolution to put the matter to the
proof without loss of time.

"I shall weigh in immediately and the weights will be light," he
thought. "She likes a bit of a flutter and I'll see that she gets it.
There is plenty of corn in the old man's manger, and if it comes to
bursting the bag, I will carry home the pieces. There's where I drive
the car. She shall play and I will be her pet lamb. Great Jupiter, what
a catch!"

The result of this pretty conclusion is next to be seen in a cottage in
Hampshire, not far removed from the racing stables of the great John
Farrier, who, as all the world knows, is one of the most honest and the
most famous trainers in the country. This cottage had Willy Forrest
furnished (indirectly at Anna's expense) in a manner worthy of all the
artistic catalogues. And hither would Anna come, driving over from her
father's country-house near Basingstoke, and caring not a fig what the
grooms might think of her.

"Captain Forrest is my trainer," she told the men, bidding them to be
secret.

For any other explanation they cared not at all. To run a horse in a
great race seemed to them the highest of human achievements, and great
was their wonder that this fragile girl should dare it. "She be a rare
good 'un and a stayer. Derned if I don't put my last button on
Whirlwind." This was the extent of the scandal that she caused.

Anna motored over to "The Nest" some three weeks after Alban had been
received at Hampstead, and found Willy Forrest anxiously waiting for her
at the gate. She had brought with her one of those obliging dependents
who act so cheerfully as unnecessary chaperones, and this "person" she
left in the smart car while she entered the cottage and told the owner
that he was forgiven. Their quarrel had been vehement and tempestuous
while it lasted--and the Captain remembered that she had struck him with
her whip.

"I knew you'd come, Anna," he said good-humoredly while he opened the
gate for her. "Of course, I don't bear you any grudge. Good Lord, how
you went it last time. I might have been a hair-trunk that had let you
down at a gate. Eh, what--do you remember it? And the old chin-pot which
cost me twenty guineas. Why, you smashed it all to bits with your
whip--eh, what? I've laughed till I cried every time I tried to stick it
together again. Come right in and let's shake hands. You've got an
oddish looking lot in the car--bought her in at the sale, I suppose--eh,
what? Well, I'm glad to see you really."

She looked a little downcast, he thought, but prettier than he had ever
seen her before. It was quite early in the morning and his table had
been set out for breakfast, with dainty old-fashioned china and a silver
kettle singing over a lamp. Anna took her favorite arm-chair, and
drawing it close to the table permitted him to give her a cup of tea.

"You wanted to make a cheat of me," she said calmly enough. "Oh, yes, I
have heard all about it. There's nothing whatever the matter with
Whirlwind. He must win the cup--John Farrier says so. You are the person
who does not wish him to win."

Adventurers never blush when they are found out, and Willy Forrest was
no exception to the rule.

"Oh, there you are," he cried boisterously, "just the same old
kettle-drum and the same old sticks. Do you think I don't know as much
about a horse as Farrier? Good Lord, he makes me sick--I'd sooner hear a
Salvation Army Band playing 'Jumping Jerusalem' on the trombone than old
John Farrier talking honest. Are we running nags to pay the brokers out
or to make a bit on our sweet little own--eh, what? Are we
white-chokered philanthropists or wee wee baby mites on the nobbly
nuggets? Don't you listen to him, Anna. You'll have to sell your boots
if you follow old John."

She stirred her tea and sipped it slowly.

"You said Whirlwind was going lame on the near fore-leg, and it isn't
true," she exclaimed upon a pause. "What was your object in telling me
that?"

"I said it before the grooms and you didn't give me a chance of blowing
the smoke away afterwards. You say you are racing to make money and
what's the good of hymns and milk? This horse will start at eleven to
four on unless you're careful--where's my gold-lined shower bath then?
Don't you see that you must put the market back--frighten the backers
off and then step in? That's what I was trying to teach you all the
time. Give out on the loud trumpet that the horse has gone dickey and
leave 'em uncertain for a week whether he's running or sticking. Your
money's on through a third party in the 'tween times and your cheeks are
as red as roses when the flag goes down."

"And if the horse should not win after you have cheated the people?"

"You'll be some five thousand out of pocket--that's all. Now, Anna,
don't let us have any mumble-pie between us. I'm not the dark man of the
story-books who lures the beautiful heroine on to play, and you're not
the wonderful Princess who breaks her old pa and marries because he's
stony. You can't get overmuch out of the old man and you're going to
make the rest at Tattersalls. If you listen to me, you'll make it--but
if you don't, if you play the giddy goat with old John Farrier in the
pulpit; well, then, the sooner you write cheques the better. That's the
plain truth and you may take it or leave it. There are not three honest
men racing and Willy Forrest don't join the trinity. We'll do as all
the crowd does and leave 'em to take care of themselves. You make a book
that they know how to do it. Oh, my stars, don't they--eh, what?"

Anna did not reply immediately to this odd harangue. She knew a good
deal about horses, but nothing whatever about the knavery of betting,
the shoddy tricks of it and the despicable spirit in which this great
game is often played. Something of her father's cunning, inherited and
ineradicable, led her to condone the Captain's sporting creed and not to
seek understanding. The man's high spirits made a sure appeal to her.
She could not comprehend it wholly--but she had to admit that none of
all her father's widening circle had ever appealed to her as this
nimble-tongued adventurer, who could make her heart quicken every time
their hands touched.

"I don't like it," she said anon, "and I don't want anything to do with
it. You make Whirlwind win the race and nobody will be hurt. If they bet
against the horse, what is that to me? How can I help what they
think--and I don't care either if they are so foolish. Didn't you
promise me that I should see him gallop this morning? I wouldn't have
motored over otherwise. You said that there was to be a Trial--"

"Divine angel, we are at your feet always. Of course, there's a Trial.
Am I so foolish as to suppose that you came over to see Willy
Forrest--eh, what? Have I lost the funny-bone up above? Farrier is going
to gallop the nags in half an hour's time. Your smoke-machine can take
us up the hill and there we'll form our own conclusions. You leave the
rest to me. It will be a bright sunny morning when they put any salt on
Willy Forrest's tail--eh, what?"

She admitted the truth with the first smile he had seen since she
entered the cottage. His quick bustling manner, the deference he always
paid to her, despite his odd phrases, won upon her good humor and led
her to open her heart to him.

"My father is going mad," she said quietly--his startled "eh, what" not
preventing her; "we are making our house a home for the destitute, and
the first arrived just three weeks ago. Imagine a flaxen-haired image of
righteousness, who draws my portrait on the covers of books and puts
feathers in my hat. He is in love with me, Willy, and he is to be my big
brother. Yesterday I took him to Ranalegh and heard a discourse upon the
beauties of nature and the wonders of the air and the sky. Oh, my dear
man--what a purgatory and what an event. We are going to sell our jewels
presently and to live in Whitechapel. My father, I must tell you, seems
afraid of this beautiful apparition and implores him every day not to go
away. I know that he stops because he is inclined to make love to me.

"Whew--so it's only 'inclined' at present?"

"Absolutely as you say. There appear to be two of us. I have been
expecting a passionate declaration--but the recollections of a feathered
beauty who once lived in a fairy palace, in a wonderland where you dine
upon red herrings--she is my hated rival. I am more beautiful,
observe--that is conceded, but he cannot understand me. The feathered
hat has become my salvation. My great big brother can't get over
it--and oh, the simplicity of the child, the youthful verdant
confidence, my Willy. Don't you see that the young man thinks I am an
angel and is wondering all the time where the wings have gone to."

"Ha, ha--he'd better ask Paquin. Are you serious, Anna?"

"As serious as the Lord High Executioner himself. My father has adopted
a youth--and I have a big brother. He has consented to dwell in our
house and to spend our savings because he believes that by so doing he
is in some way helping me. I don't in the least want his help, but my
father is determined that I shall have it. I am not to bestow my young
affections upon him--nor, upon the other hand, am I to offend him. Admit
that the situation is delightful. Pity a poor maiden in her distress."

Willy Forrest did not like the sound of it at all.

"The old chap must have gone dotty," he remarked presently; "they're
often taken this way when they get to a certain age. You'll have to sit
tight and see about it, Anna. He isn't too free with the ready as it
is--and if you've a boy hanging about, God help you. Why don't you be
rude to him? You know the way as well as most--eh, what?"

"I'm positively afraid to. Do you know, my dear man, that if this
Perfect Angel left us, strange things would happen. My father says so,
and I believe he speaks the truth. There is a mystery--and I hate
mysteries."

"Get hold of the feathered lady and hear what she has to say."

"Impossible but brilliant. She has gone to Germany."

"Oh, damn--then he'll be making love to you. I say, Anna, there's not
going to be any billing and cooing or anything of that sort. I'm not
very exacting, but the way you look at men is just prussic acid to me.
If this kid should begin--"

She laughed drolly.

"He is my great big brother," she said--and then jumping up--"let us go
and see the horses. You'll be talking nonsense if we don't. And, Willy,
I forbid you to talk nonsense."

She turned and faced him in mock anger, and he, responding instantly,
caught her in his arms and kissed her ardently.

"What a pair of cherubs," he exclaimed, "what a nest of cooing doves--I
say, Anna, I must kill that kid--or shall it be the fatted calf?
There'll be murder done somewhere if he stops at Hampstead."

"If it were done, then when it were done--O let me go, Willy, your arms
are crushing me."

He released her instantly and, snatching up a cap, set out with her to
the downs where the horses were being stripped for the gallop. The
morning of early summer was delightfully fragrant--a cool breeze came up
from the sea and every breath invigorated. Old John Farrier, mounted on
a sturdy cob, met them at the foot of a great grassy slope and
complained that it was over late in the day for horses to gallop, but,
as he added, "they'll have to do it at Ascot and they may as well do it
here." A silent man, old John had once accompanied Willy Forrest to a
dinner at the Carlton which Anna gave to a little sporting circle. Then
he uttered but one remark, seeming to think some observation necessary,
and it fell from his lips in the pause of a social discussion. "I always
eat sparrer-grass with my fingers," he had said, and wondered at the
general hilarity.

Old John was unusually silent upon this morning of the trial, and when
he named the weights at which the horses would gallop, his voice sank to
a sepulchral whisper. "The old 'oss is giving six pounds," he said, "he
should be beat a length. If it's more, go cautious, miss, and save your
money for another day. He hasn't been looking all I should like of him
for a long time--that's plain truth; and when a horse isn't looking all
I should like of him, 'go easy' say I and keep your money under the
bed."

Anna laughed at the kindly advice, and leaving the car she walked to the
summit of the hill and there watched the horses--but three pretty specks
they appeared--far down in the hollow. The exhilaration of the great
open spaces, the wide unbroken grandeur of the downs, the sweetness of
the air, the freshness of the day, brought blood to her pallid cheeks
and a sparkle of life to her eyes. How free it all was, how
unrestrained, how suggestive of liberty and of a boundless kingdom! And
then upon it all the excitements of the gallop, the thunder of hoofs
upon the soft turf, the bent figures of the jockeys, the raking strides
of the beautiful horses--Anna no longer wondered why sport could so
fascinate its devotees. She felt at such a moment that she would have
gladly put her whole fortune upon Whirlwind.

"He wins--he wins--he wins," she cried as the three drew near, and Willy
Forrest, watching her with cunning eyes, said that the trap was closed
indeed and the key in his possession. Whirlwind, a magnificent chestnut
four-year-old, came striding up the hill as though the last furlong of
the mile and a half he had galloped were his chief delight. He was a
winner by a short head as they passed the post, and old John Farrier
could not hide his satisfaction.

"He's the best plucked 'un in England to-day, lady, and you may put your
wardrobe on him after that. Be quick about it though, for there'll be no
odds to speak of when the touts have written to-day's work in the
newspapers. Go and telegraph your commissions now. There isn't a minute
to lose."

Willy Forrest seconded the proposal eagerly.

"I should back him for five thou," he said as they left the course
together, "what's the good of half measures? You might as well play
dominoes in a coffee shop. And I can always break the news to your
father if you lose."

Anna hardly knew what to say. When she consented finally to risk the
money, she did not know that Willy Forrest was the man who laid against
her horse, and that if she lost it would be to him.

"The boss is good enough," he told himself, "but the near-off is dicky
or I never saw one. She'll lose the money and the old boy will pay
up--if I compel her to ask him. That depends on the kid. She couldn't
help making eyes at him if her life depended on it. Well--she's going to
marry me, and that's the long and short of it. Fancy passing a certainty
at my time of life. Do I see it--eh, what?"

And so they went their ways: Anna back to London to the solemn routine
of the big house; Willy Forrest to Epsom to try, as he said, "and pick
up the nimble with a pencil."




CHAPTER XII

ALBAN SEES LIFE


Alban had been five weeks at Hampstead when he met Willy Forrest for the
first time, and was able to gratify his curiosity concerning one whom he
believed to be Anna's lover.

The occasion was Richard Gessner's absence in Paris upon a business of
great urgency and the immediate appearance of the dashing captain at
"Five Gables." True, Anna behaved with great discretion, but, none the
less, Alban understood that this man was more to her than others, and he
did not fail to judge him with that shrewd scrutiny even youth may
command.

Willy Forrest, to give him his due, took an instinctive liking to the
new intruder and was not to be put off, however much his attentions were
displeasing to Anna. A cunning foresight, added to a fecund imagination
and a fine taste for all _chroniques scandaleuses_, led him to determine
that Alban Kennedy might yet inherit the bulk of Gessner's fortune and
become the plumpest of all possible pigeons. Should this be the case,
those who had been the young man's friends in the beginning might well
remain so to the end. He resolved instantly to cultivate an acquaintance
so desirable, and lost not a moment in the pursuit of his aims.

"My dear chap," he said on the third day of their association, "you are
positively growing grass in this place. Do you never go anywhere? Has no
one taught you how to amuse yourself?"

Alban replied that everything was so new to him that he desired no other
amusement than its enjoyment.

"It was almost years since I saw a tree that was not black," he said;
"the water used to drip through the roof of my garret, and there was a
family in the room on the opposite side of the landing. I don't think
you can understand what this house means to me. Perhaps I don't
understand myself. I'm almost afraid to go to sleep at night for fear I
should wake up in Union Street and find it all a fairy story. Mr.
Gessner says I am to stop with them always--but he might change his mind
and then it would be Commercial Road again--if I had the courage to go
back there."

Forrest had known evil times himself, and he could honestly appreciate
the possibility.

"Stick by the old horse while he sticks by you," was his candid advice.
"I expect he's under a pretty stiff obligation to some of your people
who are gone, and this is how he's paying it. You take all the corn you
can get and put it in your nose-bag. Anna herself tells me that the old
man is only happy while you are in the house. Play up to it, old chap,
and grease your wheels while the can's going round."

This very worldy advice fell upon ears strikingly deficient in
understanding subtleties. Alban could not dislike Forrest, though he
tried his best to do so. There was something sympathetic about the
fellow, rogue that he was, and even shrewd men admitted his
fascination. When the Captain proposed that they should go down to the
West End of London and see a little of life together, Alban consented
gladly. New experiences set him hungering after those supposed delights
which were made so much of in the newspapers. He reflected how very
little he really knew of the world and its people.

It was a day of early June when they set off in that very single
brougham which had carried Silas Geary to Whitechapel. The Captain,
having first ascertained the amount of money in his friend's possession,
proposed a light lunch in the restaurant of the Savoy, and there, to do
him justice, he was amusing enough.

"People are all giving up houses and living in restaurants nowadays," he
said as they sat at table. "I don't blame 'em either. Just think of the
number of nags in those big stables, all eating their heads off and
smoking your best cigars--eh, what? Why, I kept myself in weeds a few
years ago--got 'em for twopence halfpenny from a butler in Curzon Street
and never smoked better. You don't want to do that, for you can bottle
old Bluebeard's and try 'em on the dog--eh, what? When you marry, don't
you take a house. A man who lives in a hotel doesn't seem as though he
were married and that's good for the filly. Look at these angels here.
Why, half of them sold the family oak tree a generation ago, and
Attenborough down the street will tell you what their Tiffanies are
worth. They live in hotels because it's cheaper, and they wear French
paste because the other is at uncle's. That's the truth, my boy, and all
the world knows it."

Alban listened with an odd cynical smile upon his face, but he did not
immediately reply. This famous hotel had seemed a cavern of all the
wonders when first he entered it, and he would not willingly abandon his
illusions. The beautifully dressed women, the rustling gowns, the
chiffon, the lace, the feathers, the diamonds--might he not have thought
that they stood for all that pomp and circumstance of life which the
East End denounced so vehemently and the West End as persistently
demanded? Of the inner lives of these people he knew absolutely nothing.
And, after all, he remembered, men and women are much the same whatever
the circumstance.

"I like to be in beautiful places," he confessed in his turn, "and this
place seems to me very beautiful. Does it really matter to us, Forrest,
what the people do or what they are so long as they don't ask us to be
the same? Jimmy Dale, a parson in Whitechapel, used to say that a man
was just what his conscience made him. I don't see how the fact of
living in or out of a hotel would matter anyway--unless you leave your
conscience in a cab. The rest is mostly talk, and untrue at that, they
say. You yourself know that you don't believe half of it."

"My dear man, what would life be if one were incredulous? How would the
newspaper proprietors buy bread and cheese, to say nothing of pate de
foie gras and ninety-two Pommery if the world desired the truth? This
crowd is mostly on the brink of a precipice, and a man or a woman goes
over every day. Then you have the law report and old Righteousness in a
white wig, who has not been found out, to pronounce a judgment. I'd
like to wager that not one in three of these people ever did an honest
day's work in a lifetime. One half is rank idle--the other half is
trying to live on the remainder. Work it out and pass me the wine--and
mind you don't get setting up any images for time to knock down--eh,
what?"

Alban would not wrangle with him, and for a little while he ate in
silence, watching the sparkling throng and listening to such scraps of
conversation as floated to him from merry tables. Down in Union Street
it had been the fashion to decry idleness and the crimes of the
rich--the orators having it that leisure was criminal and ease a heinous
sin. Alban had never believed in any such fallacy. "We are all born
lazy," he had said, "and few of us would work unless we had to. Vanity
is at the bottom of all that we do. If no one were vain, the world would
stand still." In the Savoy, his arguments seemed to be justified a
hundredfold. A sense of both content and dignity came to him. He began
almost to believe that money could ennoble as well as satisfy.

Willy Forrest, of course, knew nothing whatever of thoughts such as
these. He was a past master in the art of killing time and he boasted
that he rarely knew an "idle hour." His programme for this day seemed
altogether beyond criticism.

"We'll look in at the club afterwards and play a game of bridge--you can
stand by me and see me win--or perhaps you'd like a side bet. Then we
might turn into the park to give the girls a treat--eh, what?--and go
on to the New Bridge Club to dress. After that there's the old sporting
shanty and a bit of a mill between Neddy Tinker and Marsh Hill. You
never saw a fight, I suppose? Man, but your education has been
neglected."

Alban smiled and admitted his deficiencies.

"I've seen many a set-to in Commercial Road and taken a hand sometimes.
Is it really quite necessary to my education?"

"Absolutely indispensable. You must do everything and be seen
everywhere. If I had time, I'd give you the personal history of half the
light-weights in this room. Look at that black crow in the corner there.
He's a Jew parson from Essex--as rich as bottled beer and always stops
here. Last time I rode a welter down his way they told me his favorite
text was "Blessed are the poor." He's a pretty figurehead for a
bean-feast, isn't he? That chirpy barrister next door has a practice of
fifteen thou. The blighter once cross-examined me in a card-sharping
case and made me look the biggest damned fool in Europe. Did I rest on
my laurels--eh, what? Why, sir, he can't cross a race-course now without
having his pocket picked. My doing, my immortal achievement. The little
Countess next door used to do stunts at the _Nouveau Cirque_. Lord
Saxe-Holt married her when he was hazy and is taming her. That old chap,
who eats like a mule, is Lord Whippingham. He hasn't got a sixpence, and
if you ask me how he lives--well, there are ways and means foreign to
your young and virgin mind. The old geezer used to run after little
Betty Sine at the Apollo--but she put an ice down his back at supper
here one night and then there were partings. Some day I'll take you to
the Blenheim and show you England's aristocracy in arm-chairs--we
haven't time to-day and here's the coffee coming. Pay up and be thankful
that your new pa isn't overdrawn, and has still a shekel or two in his
milk jug. My godfather!--but you are a lucky young man, and so you are
beginning to think, I suppose."

Alban did not condescend to answer a question so direct. He was still
quite uncertain as to his future, and he would not discuss it with this
irresponsible, who had undertaken to be his worldly mentor. When they
left the Savoy it was to visit a club in Trafalgar Square and there
discover the recumbent figures of aged gentlemen who had lunched not
wisely but too well. Of all that he had seen in the kingdoms of money,
Alban found this club least to his liking. The darkness of its great
rooms, the insolence of its members toward the servants who waited upon
them, the gross idleness, the trivial excitements of the card-room, the
secret drinking in remote corners--he had never imagined that men of
brains could so abase themselves, and he escaped ultimately to Hyde Park
with a measure of thankfulness he would not conceal.

"Why do people go to places like that, Forrest?" he asked as they went.
"What enjoyment do they get out of them?"

Willy Forrest, who had taken a "mahogany one" in the club and was
getting mighty confidential, answered him as candidly.

"Half of 'em go to get away from their wives, the other half to win
money--eh, what?"

"But why do they never speak to each other?"

"Put two game-cocks in a pen and then ask again. It's a club, my boy,
and so they think every other man a rogue or a fool."

"And do they pay much for the privilege?"

"That depends on the airs they give themselves. I've been pilled for
half the clubs in town and so, I suppose, I'm rather a decent sort of
chap. It used to be a kind of hall-mark to get in a good club, but we
live at hotels nowadays and don't care a dump for them. That's why half
of 'em are on the verge of bankruptcy. Don't you trouble about them,
unless you get a filly that bolts. I shall have to give up clubs
altogether, I suppose, when I marry Anna--eh, what?"

He laughed at the idea, and Alban remaining silent, he whistled a hansom
in a way that would have done credit to a railway porter, and continued
affably.

"You knew that I was going to marry Anna, didn't you? She told you on
the strict q.t., didn't she? Oh, my stars, how she can talk! I shall buy
an ear-trumpet when we're in double harness. But Anna told you, now
didn't she?"

"I have only once heard her mention your name--she certainly did not
speak of being engaged."

"They never do when the old man bucks--eh, what? Gessner don't like me,
and I'd poison him for a shilling. Why shouldn't I marry her? I can ride
a horse and point a gun and throw a fly better than most. Can Old
Bluebeard go better--eh, what? The old pot-hook, I'd play him any game
you like to name for a pony aside and back myself to the Day of
Judgment. And he's the man who talks about bagging a Duke for his girl!
Pshaw, Anna would kick the coronet downstairs in three days and the
owner after it. You must know that for yourself--she's a little devil to
rear and you can't touch her on the curb--eh, what, you've noticed it
yourself?"

Alban declared quite frankly that he had noticed nothing whatever. Not
for a fortune would he have declared his heart to this man, the hopes,
the perplexities, and the self-reproach which had attended ever these
early weeks in wonderland. Just as Anna's shrewdness had perceived, so
was it the truth that an image of perfect womanhood dazzled his
imagination and left him without any clear perception whatever. For
little Lois of the slums he had a sterling affection, begotten of long
association and of mutual sympathy--but the vision of Anna had been the
beatification of his love dream, so to speak, deceiving him by its
immense promise and leading him to credit Gessner's daughter with all
those qualities of womanhood which stood nearest to his heart's desire.
Here was a Lois become instantly more beautiful, more refined, more
winning. If he remained true to the little friend of his boyish years,
his faith had been obscured for a moment by this superb apparition of a
young girl's beauty, enshrined upon the altar of riches and endowed with
those qualities which wealth alone could purchase. Anna, indeed, held
him for a little while spellbound, and now he listened to Forrest as
though a heresy against all women were spoken.

"I did not know you were engaged," he said quite frankly. "Anna
certainly has never told me. Of course, I congratulate you. She is a
very beautiful girl, Forrest."

"That's true, old chap. You might see her in the paddock and pick her at
a glance--eh, what? But it's mum at present--not a whistle to the old
man until the south wind blows. And don't you tell Anna either. She'd
marry somebody else if she thought I was really in love with her--eh,
what?"

Alban shrugged his shoulders but had nothing to say. They had now come
to the famous Achilles Statue in Hyde Park, and there they walked for
half an hour amidst the showily dressed women on the lawn. Willy Forrest
was known to many of these and everywhere appeared sure of a familiar
welcome. The very men, who would tell you aside that he was a "wrong
'un," nodded affably to him and sometimes stopped to ask him what was
going to win the Oaks. He patronized a few pretty girls with
condescending recognition and immediately afterwards would relate to
Alban the more intimate and often scandalous stories of their families.
At a later moment they espied Anna herself in a superb victoria drawn by
two strawberry roans. And to their intense astonishment they perceived
that she had the Reverend Silas Geary in the carriage by her side.

"A clever little devil, upon my soul," said the Captain, ecstatically,
"to cart that fire-escape round and show him to the crowd. She must
have done it to annoy me--eh, what? She thinks I'm not so much an angel
as I look and is going to make me good. Oh, my stars--let's get. I shall
be saying the catechism if I stop here any longer."




CHAPTER XIII

ALBAN REVISITS UNION STREET


Alban escaped from the Sporting Club at a quarter to eleven, sick of its
fetid atmosphere and wearied by its mock brutalities. He made no
apologies for quitting Willy Forrest--for, truth to tell, that merry
worthy was no longer capable of understanding them. Frequent calls for
whisky-and-soda, added to a nice taste for champagne at dinner, left the
Captain in that maudlin condition in which a man is first cousin to all
the world--at once garrulous and effusive and generally undesirable.
Alban had, above all things, a contempt for a drunken man; and leaving
Forrest to the care of others of his kind, he went out into the street
and made his way slowly eastward.

It was an odd thing to recall; but he had hardly set foot east of the
Temple, he remembered, since the day when the bronze gates of Richard
Gessner's house first closed upon him and the vision of wonderland burst
upon his astonished eyes. The weeks had been those of unending kindness,
of gifts showered abundantly, of promises for the future which might
well overwhelm him by their generosity. Let him but consent to claim his
rights, Gessner had said, and every ambition should be gratified. No
other explanation than that of a lagging justice could he obtain--and no
other had he come to desire. If he remained at Hampstead, the image of
Anna Gessner, of a perfect womanhood as he imagined it, kept him to the
house. He did not desire his patron's money; he began to discover how
few were his wants and how small the satisfaction of their gratification
could be. But the image he worshipped ever--and at its feet all other
desires were forgotten.

And now reality had come with its sacrilegious hand, warring upon the
vision and bidding him open his eyes and see. It was easy enough to
estimate this adventurer Willy Forrest at his true worth, less easy to
bind the wounds imagination had received and to set the image once more
upon its ancient pedestal. Could he longer credit Anna with those
qualities with which his veneration had endowed her? Must there not be
heart searchings and rude questionings, the abandonment of the dream and
the stern corrections of truth? He knew not what to think. A voice of
reproach asked him if he also had not forgotten. The figure of little
Lois Boriskoff stood by him in the shadows, and he feared to speak with
her lest she should accuse him.

Let it be said in justice that he had written to Lois twice, and heard
but lately that she had left Union Street and gone, none knew whither.
His determination to do his utmost for her and her father, to bid them
share his prosperity and command him as they would, had been strong with
him from the first and delayed only by the amazing circumstances of his
inheritance. He did not understand even yet that he had the right to
remain at "Five Gables," but this right had so often been insisted upon
that he began at last to believe in its reality and to accept the
situation as a _chose jugee_. And with the conviction, there came an
intense longing to revisit the old scenes--who knows, it may have been
but the promptings of a vanity after all.

It was a great thing, indeed, to be walking there in the glare of the
lamps and telling himself that fortune and a future awaited him, that
the instrument of mighty deeds would be his inheritance, and that the
years of his poverty were no more. How cringingly he had walked
sometimes in the old days when want had shamed him and wealth looked
down upon him with contempt. To-night he might stare the boldest in the
face, nurse fabulous desires and know that they would be gratified, peer
through the barred windows of the shops and say all he saw was at his
command. A sense of might and victory attended his steps. He understood
what men mean when they say that money is power and that it rules the
world.

He turned eastward, and walking with rapid strides made his way down the
Strand and thence by Ludgate Circus to Aldgate and the mean streets he
knew so well. It was nearly midnight when he arrived there, and yet he
fell in with certain whom he knew and passed them by with a genial nod.
His altered appearance, the black overcoat and the scarf which hid his
dress clothes, called for many a "Gor blime" or "Strike me dead." Women
caught his arm and wrestled with him, roughs tried to push him from the
pavement and were amazed at his good humor. In Union Street he first met
little red-haired Chris Denham and asked of her the news. She shrank
back from him as though afraid, and answered almost in a whisper.

"Lois gone--she went three weeks ago. I thought you'd have know'd it--I
thought you was sweet on her, Alban. And now you come here like
that--what's happened to you, whatever have you been doing of?"

He told her gaily that he had found new friends.

"But I haven't forgotten the old ones, Chris, and I'm coming down to see
you all some day soon. How's your mother--what's she doing now?"

The girl shrugged her shoulders and the glance she turned upon him
seemed to say that she would sooner speak on any other subject.

"What should she be doin'--what's any of us doin' but slave our bones
off and break our hearts. You've come to see Lois' father, haven't you?
Oh, yes, I know how much you want to talk about my mother. The old man's
up there in the shop--I saw him as I came by."

Alban stood an instant irresolute. How much he would have liked to offer
some assistance to this poor girl, to speak of real pecuniary help and
friendship. But he knew the people too well. The utmost delicacy would
be necessary.

"Well," he said, "I'm sorry things are not better, Chris. I've had a
good Saturday night, you see, and if I can do anything, don't you mind
letting me know. We'll talk of it when we have more time. I'm going on
to see Boriskoff now, and I doubt that I'll find him out of bed."

She laughed a little wildly, still turning almost pathetic eyes upon
him.

"Is it true that it's all off between you and Lois--all the Court says
it is. That's why she went away, they say--is it true, Alb, or are they
telling lies? I can't believe it myself. You're not the sort to give a
girl over--not one that's stood by you as well as Lois. Tell me it ain't
true or I shall think the worse of you."

The question staggered him and he could not instantly answer it. Was it
true or false? Did he really love little Lois and had he still an
intention to marry her? Alban had never looked the situation straight in
the face until this moment.

"I never tell secrets," he exclaimed a little lamely, and turning upon
his heel, he shut his ears to the hard laugh which greeted him and went
on, as a man in a dream, to old Boriskoff's garret. A lamp stood in the
window there and the tap of a light hammer informed him that the
indefatigable Pole was still at work. In truth, old Paul was bending
copper tubing--for a firm which said that he had no equal at the task
and paid him a wage which would have been despised by a
crossing-sweeper.

Alban entered the garret quietly and was a little startled by the sharp
exclamation which greeted him. He knew nothing, of course, of the part
this crafty Pole had played or what his own change of circumstance owed
to him. To Alban, Paul Boriskoff was just the same mad revolutionary as
before--at once fanatic and dreamer and, before then, the father of Lois
who had loved him. If the old fellow had no great welcome for the young
Englishman to-night, let that be set down to his sense of neglect and,
in some measure, to his daughter's absence.

"Good evening, Mr. Boriskoff, you are working very late to-night."

Alban stood irresolute at the door, watching the quick movements of the
shaggy brows and wondered what had happened to old Paul that he should
be received so coolly. Had he known what was in the Pole's mind he would
have as soon have jumped off London Bridge as have braved the anger of
one who judged him so mercilessly in that hour. For Boriskoff had heard
the stories which Hampstead had to tell, and he had said, "He will ruin
Lois' life and I have put the power to do so in his hands."

"The poor do not choose their hours, Alban Kennedy. Sit down, if you
please, and talk to me. I have much to say to you."

He did not rise from his chair, but indicated a rude seat in the corner
by the chimney and waited until his unwilling guest had taken it. Alban
judged that his own altered appearance and his absence from Union Street
must be the cause of his displeasure. He could guess no other reason.

"Do you love my daughter, Alban Kennedy?"

"You know that I do, Paul. Have we not always been good friends? I came
to tell you about a piece of great good fortune which has happened to me
and to find out why Lois had not written to me. You see for yourself
that there is a great change in me. One of the richest men in London
considers that I have a claim, to some of his money--through some
distant relative, it appears--and I am living at his house almost as
his own son."

"Is that why you forget your old friends so quickly?"

"I have never forgotten them. I wrote to Lois twice."

"Did you speak of marriage in your letters?"

The lad's face flushed crimson. He knew that he could not tell Paul
Boriskoff the truth.

"I did not speak of marriage--why should I?" he exclaimed; "it was never
your wish that we should speak of it until Lois is twenty-one. She will
not be that for more than three years--why do you ask me the question
to-night?"

"Because you have learned to love another woman."

A dead silence fell in the room. The old man continued to tap gently
upon the coil of tube, rapidly assuming a fantastic shape under the
masterly touch of a trained hand. A candle flickered by him upon a crazy
table where stood a crust of bread and a lump of coarse cheese. Not
boastfully had he told Richard Gessner that he would accept nothing for
himself. He was even poorer than he had been six weeks ago when he
discovered that his old enemy was alive.

[Illustration: "You love another woman, Alban Kennedy, and you have
wished to forget my daughter."]

"You love another woman, Alban Kennedy, and you have wished to forget my
daughter. Do not say that it is not the truth, for I read it upon your
face. You should be ashamed to come here unless you can deny it. Fortune
has been kind to you, but how have you rewarded those for whom she has
nothing? I say that you have forgotten them--been ashamed of them as
they have now the right to be ashamed of you."

He put his hammer down and looked the lad straight in the face. Upon
Alban's part there was an intense desire to confess everything and to
tell his old friend of all those distressing doubts and perplexities
which had so harassed him since he went to Hampstead. If he could have
done so, much would have been spared him in the time to come. But he
found it impossible to open his heart to an alien,--nor did he believe
Paul Boriskoff capable of appreciating the emotions which now tortured
him.

"I have never been ashamed of any of my friends," he exclaimed hotly;
"you know that it is not true, Paul Boriskoff. Where are the letters
which I wrote to Lois? Why has she not answered them? If I had been
ashamed, would they have been written? Cannot you understand that all
which has happened to me has been very distracting. I have seen a new
life--a new world, and it is not as our world. Perhaps there is no more
happiness in it than in these courts and alleys where we have suffered
so much. I cannot tell you truly. It is all too new to me and naturally
I feel incapable of judging it. When I came to you to-night it was to
speak of our old friendship. Should I have done so if I had forgotten?"

Old Paul heard him with patience, but his anger none the less remained.
The shaggy eyebrows were at rest now, but the eyes were never turned
from Alban's face.

"You are in love with Anna Gessner," he said quietly; "why do you not
tell Lois so?"

"I cannot tell her so--it would not be true. She will always be the
same little Lois to me, and when she is twenty-one I will marry her."

"Ha--when she is twenty-one. That seems a long time off to one who is
your age. You will marry her, you say--a promise to keep her quiet while
you make love to this fine lady who befools you. No, Alban Kennedy, I
shall not let Lois imagine any such thing; I shall tell her the truth.
She will choose another husband--that is my wish and she will obey it."

"You are doing me a great injustice, Paul Boriskoff. I do not love
Anna--perhaps for a moment I thought that I did, but I know now that I
was deceiving myself. She is not one who is worthy of being loved. I
believed her very different when first I went to Hampstead."

"Tell me no such thing. I am an old man and I know men's hearts. What
shall my daughter and her rags be to you now that you have fine clothes
upon your back? You are as the others--you have knelt down at the shrine
of money and there you worship. This woman in her fine clothes--she is
your idol. All your past is forgotten immediately you see her. A great
gulf is set between you and us. Think not that I do not know, for there
are those who bring me the story every day. You worship Anna Gessner,
but you live in a fool's paradise, for the father will forbid you to
marry her. I say it and I know. Be honest and speak to my daughter as I
have spoken to you to-night."

He raised his hammer as though he would resume his work, and Alban began
to perceive how hopeless an argument would be with him while in such a
mood. Not deficient in courage, the lad could not well defend himself
from so direct an attack, and he had the honesty to admit as much.

"I shall tell Lois the truth," he said: "she will then judge me and say
whether you are right or wrong. I came here to-night to see if I could
help you both. You know, Paul Boriskoff, how much I wish to do so. While
I have money, it is yours also. Have not Lois and I always been as your
children? You cannot forbid me to act as a son should, just because I
have come into my inheritance. Let me find you a better home and take
you away from this dismal place. Then I shall be doing right to worship
money. Will you not let me do so? There is nothing in life half so good
as helping those we love--I am sure of it already, and it is only five
weeks since I came into my inheritance. Give me the right and let me
still call you father."

Old Paul was much affected, but he would not let the lad see as much.
Avoiding the question discreetly but not unkindly, he muttered, "No, no,
I need no help. I am an old man and what happens to me does not matter."
And then turning the subject swiftl

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