Countess Shulski clasped her hands convulsively in her lap, and with all the pride and control of her voice there was a note of anguish, too, which would have touched any heart but one so firmly guarded as Francis Markrute"s.
"Ah, G.o.d!" she said so low that he could only just hear her, "I have paid the price of my body and soul once for them. It is too much to ask it of me a second time--"
"That is as you please," said the financier.
He seldom made a mistake in his methods with people. He left nothing to chance; he led up the conversation to the right point, fired his bomb, and then showed absolute indifference. To display interest in a move, when one was really interested, was always a point to the adversary. He maintained interest could be simulated when necessary, but must never be shown when real. So he left his niece in silence, while she pondered over his bargain, knowing full well what would be the result. She got up from her chair and leaned upon the back of it, while her face looked white as death in the dying afternoon"s light.
"Can you realize what my life was like with Ladislaus?" she hissed. "A plaything for his brutal pleasures, to begin with; a decoy duck to trap the other men, I found afterwards; tortured and insulted from morning to night. I hated him always, but he seemed so kind beforehand--kind to my darling mother, whom you were leaving to die."--Here Francis Markrute winced and a look of pain came into his hard face while he raised a hand in protest and then dropped it again, as his niece went on--"And she was beginning to be ill even at that time and we were so poor--so I married him."
Then she swept toward the door with her empress air, the rather shabby, dark dress making a swirl behind her; and as she got there she turned and spoke again, with her hand on the bronze tracery of the fingerplate, making, unconsciously, a highly dramatic picture, as a sudden last ray of the sinking sun shot out and struck the glory of her hair, turning it to flame above her brow.
"I tell you it is too much," she said, with almost a sob in her voice.
"I will not do it." And then she went out and closed the door.
Francis Markrute, left alone, leant back in his chair and puffed his cigar calmly while he mused.
What strange things were women! Any man could manage them if only he reckoned with their temperaments when dealing with them, and paid no heed to their actual words. Francis Markrute was a philosopher. A number of the shelves of this, his library, were filled with works on the subject of philosophy, and a well-thumbed volume of the fragments of Epicurus lay on a table by his side. He picked it up now and read: "He who wastes his youth on high feeding, on wine, on women, forgets that he is like a man who wears out his overcoat in the summer." He had not wasted his youth either on wine or women, only he had studied both, and their effects upon the thing which, until lately, had interested him most in the world--himself. They could both be used to the greatest advantage and pleasure by a man who apprehended things he knew.
Then he turned to the _Morning Post_ which was on a low stand near, and he read again a paragraph which had pleased him at breakfast:
"The Duke of Glas...o...b..ry and Lady Ethelrida Montfitchet entertained at dinner last night a small party at Glas...o...b..ry House, among the guests being--" and here he skipped some high-sounding t.i.tles and let his eye feast upon his own name, "Mr. Francis Markrute."
Then he smiled and gazed into the fire, and no one would have recognized his hard, blue eyes, as he said softly:
"Ethelrida! _belle et blonde!_"
CHAPTER III
While the financier was contentedly musing in his chair beside the fire, his niece was hurrying into the park, wrapped in a dark cloak and thick veil. She had slipped out noiselessly, a few minutes after she left the library. The sun had completely set now and it was damp and cold, with the dead leaves, and the sodden autumn feeling in the air. Zara Shulski shivered, in spite of the big cloak, as she peered into the gloom of the trees, when she got nearly to the Achilles statue. The rendezvous had been for six o"clock; it was now twenty minutes past, and it was so bad for Mirko to wait in the cold. Perhaps they would have gone on. But no; she caught sight of two shabby figures, close up under the statue, when she got sufficiently near.
They came forward eagerly to meet her. And even in the half light it could be seen that the boy was an undersized little cripple of perhaps nine or ten years old but looking much younger; as it could also be seen that even in his worn overcoat and old stained felt hat the man was a gloriously handsome creature.
"What joy to see you, Cherisette!" exclaimed the child. "Papa and I have been longing and longing all the day. It seemed that six would never come. But now that you are here let me eat you--eat you up!" And the thin, little arms, too long for the wizened body, clasped fondly round her neck as she lifted him, and carried him toward a seat where the three sat down to discuss their affairs.
"I know nothing, you see, Mimo," the Countess Shulski said, "beyond that you arrived yesterday. I think it was foolish of you to risk it. At least in Paris Madame Dubois would have let you stay and owe a week"s rent. But here--among these strangers--"
"Now do not scold us, Mentor," the man answered, with a charming smile.
"Mirko and I felt the sun had fled when you went last Thursday. It rained and rained two--three--days, and the Dubois canary got completely on our nerves; and, heavens above! the Grisoldi insisted upon cooking garlic in his food at every meal!--we had thought to have broken him of the habit, you remember?--and up, up it came from his stove. Body of Bacchus! It killed inspiration. I could not paint, my Cherisette, and Mirko could not play. And so we said: "At least--at least the sun of the hair of our Cherisette must shine in the dark England; we, too, will go there, away from the garlic and the canary, and the fogs will give us new ideas, and we shall create wonderful things." Is it not so, Mirko mio?"
"But, of course, Papa," the boy echoed; and then his voice trembled with a pitiful note. "You are not angry with us, darling Cherisette? Say it is not so?"
"My little one! How can you! I could never be angry with my Mirko, no matter what he did!" And the two pools of ink softened from the expression of the black panther into the divine tenderness of the Sistine Madonna, as she pressed the frail, little body to her side and pulled her cloak around it.
"Only I fear it cannot be well for you here in London, and if my uncle should know, all hope of getting anything from him may be over. He expressly said if I would come quite alone, to stay with him for these few weeks, it would be to my advantage; and my advantage means yours, as you know. Otherwise do you think I would have eaten of his hateful bread?"
"You are so good to us, Cherisette," the man Mimo said. "You have, indeed, a sister of the angels, Mirko mio; but soon we shall be all rich and famous. I had a dream last night, and already I have begun a new picture of grays and mists--of these strange fogs!"
Count Mimo Sykypri was a confirmed optimist.
"Meanwhile you are in the one room, in Neville Street, Tottenham Court Road. It is, I fear, a poor neighborhood."
"No worse than Madame Dubois"," Mimo hastened to rea.s.sure her, "and London is giving me new ideas."
Mirko coughed harshly with a dry sound. Countess Shulski drew him closer to her and held him tight.
"You got the address from the Grisoldi? He was a kind little old man, in spite of the garlic," she said.
"Yes, he told us of it, as an inexpensive resting place, until our affairs prospered, and we came straight there and wrote to you at once."
"I was greatly surprised to receive the letter. Have you any money at all now, Mimo?"
"Indeed, yes!" And Count Sykypri proudly drew forth eight bits of French gold from his pocket. "We had two hundred francs when we arrived. Our little necessities and a few paints took up two of the twenty-franc pieces, and we have eight of them left! Oh, quite a fortune! It will keep us until I can sell the "Apache." I shall take it to a picture dealer"s to-morrow."
Countess Shulski"s heart sank. She knew so well of old how long eight twenty-franc pieces would be likely to last! In spite of Mirko"s care and watching of his father that gentleman was capable of giving one of them to a beggar if the beggar"s face and story touched him, and any of the others could go in a present to Mirko or herself--to be p.a.w.ned later, when necessity called. The case was hopeless as far as money was concerned with Count Sykypri.
Her own meager income, derived from the dead Shulski, was always forestalled for the wants of the family--the little brother whom she had promised her dead and adored mother never to desert.
For when the beautiful wife of Maurice Grey, the misanthropic and eccentric Englishman who lived in a castle near Prague, ran off with Count Mimo Sykypri, her daughter, then aged thirteen, had run with her, and the pair had been wiped off the list of the family. And Maurice Grey, after cursing them both and making a will depriving them of everything, shut himself up in his castle, and steadily drank himself to death in less than a year. And the brother of the beautiful Mrs. Grey, Francis Markrute, never forgave her either. He refused to receive her or hear news of her, even after poor little Mirko was born and she married Count Sykypri.
For on the father"s side, the Markrute brother and sister were of very n.o.ble lineage; even with his bar sinister the financier could not brook the disgrace of Elinka. He had loved her so--the one soft side of his adamantine character. Her disgrace, it seemed, had frozen all the tenderness in his nature.
Countess Shulski was silent for a few moments, while both Mimo and Mirko watched her face anxiously. She had thrown back her veil.
"And supposing you do not sell the "Apache," Mimo? Your own money does not come in until Christmas; mine is all gone until January, and it is the cold winter approaching--and cold is not good for Mirko. What then?"
Count Sykypri moved uneasily. A tragic look grew in his handsome face; his face that was a mirror of all pa.s.sing emotions; his face that had been able to express love and romance, devotion and tenderness, to wile a bird from off a tree or love from the heart of any woman. And even though Zara Shulski knew of just how little value was anything he said or did yet his astonishing charm always softened her irritation toward his f.e.c.klessness. So she repeated more gently:
"What then?"
Mimo got up and flung out his arms in a dramatic way.
"It cannot be!" he said. "I must sell the "Apache!" Besides, if I don"t: I tell you these strange, gray fogs are giving me new, wonderful thoughts--dark, mysterious--two figures meeting in the mist! Oh! but a wonderful combination that will be successful in all cases."
Mirko pressed his arm round his sister"s neck and kissed her cheek, while he cooed love words in a soft Slavonic language. Two big tears gathered in Zara Shulski"s deep eyes and made them tender as a dove"s.
She drew out her purse and counted from it two sovereigns and some shillings which she slipped into Mirko"s small hand.
"Keep these, pet, for an emergency," she said. "They are all I have, but I will--I must--find some other way for you soon: and now I shall have to go. If my uncle should suspect I am seeing you I might be powerless to help further."
They walked with her to the Grosvenor Gate, and reluctantly let her leave them; and then they watched her, as she sped across the road between the pa.s.sing taxi-cabs. When they saw the light from the opening door and her figure disappearing between the tall servants who had come to open it, the two poor, shabby figures walked on with a sigh, to try to find an omnibus which would put them down somewhere near their dingy bedroom in Neville Street, Tottenham Court Road. And as they reached the Marble Arch there came on a sharp shower of icy rain.
Countess Shulski, however poorly dressed, was a person to whom servants were never impertinent; there was something in her bearing which precluded all idea of familiarity. It did not even strike Turner, or James, that her clothes were what none of the housemaids would have considered fit to wear when they went out. The remark the lordly Turner made, as he arranged some letters on the hall table, was:
"A very haughty lady, James--quite a bit of the Master about her, eh?"