“I was looking for you,” she said; “you, who always know where everybody is. Where is Mr. Mangles? An undersecretary was asking for him a moment ago.”
“Mangles is listening to the music in the library—comparatively happy by himself behind a barricade of flowers.”
“And that preposterous woman?”
“That preposterous woman is in the refreshment-room.”
Thus they spoke of the great lecturer on Prison Wrongs.
“You have seen the Bukatys?” inquired Lady Orlay. “I called on them the moment I received your note from Paris. They are here tonight. I have never seen such a complexion. Is it characteristic of Poland?”
“I think so,” replied Deulin, with unusual shortness, looking away across the room.
Lady Orlay’s clever eyes flashed round for a moment, and she looked grave. It was as if she had pushed open the door of another person’s room.
“I like the old man,” she said, with a change of tone. “What is he?”
“He is a rebel.”
“Proscribed?”
“No—they dare not do that. He was a great man in the sixties. You remember how in the great insurrection an unfailing supply of arms and ammunition came pouring into Poland over the Austrian frontier—more arms than the national government could find men for.”
“Yes, I remember that.”
“That is the man,” said Deulin, with a nod of his head in the direction of the Prince Bukaty, who was talking and laughing near at hand.
“And the girl—it is very sad—I like her very much. She is gay and brave.”
“Ah!” said Deulin, “when a woman is gay and brave—and young—Heaven help us.”
“Thank you, Monsieur Deulin.”
“And when she is gay and brave, and … old … milady—God keep her,” he said with a grave bow.
“I liked her at once. I shall be glad to do anything I can, you know. She has a great capacity for making friends.”
“She has already made a few—this evening,” put in the Frenchman, with a significant gesture of his gloved hand.
“Ah!”
“Not one who can hurt her, I think. I can see to that. The usual enemy—of a pretty girl—that is all.”
He broke off with a sudden laugh. Once or twice he had laughed like that, and his manner was restless and uneasy. In a younger man, or one less experienced and hardened, the observant might have suspected some hidden excitement. Lady Orlay turned and looked at him curiously, with the frankness of a friendship which had lasted nearly half a century.
“What is it?”
He laughed—but he laughed uneasily—and spread out his hands in a gesture of bewilderment.
“What is what?”
Lady Orlay looked at her fan reflectively as she opened and closed it.
“Reginald Cartoner has turned up quite suddenly,” she said. “Mr. Mangles has arrived from Washington. You are here from Paris. A few minutes ago old Karl Steinmetz, who still watches the nations en amateur, shook hands with me. This Prince Bukaty is not a nonentity. All the Vultures are assembling, Paul. I can see that. I can see that my husband sees it.”
“Ah! you and yours are safe now. You are in the backwater—you and Orlay—quietly moored beneath the trees.”
“Finally,” continued Lady Orlay, without heeding the interruption, “you come to me with a light in your eye which I have seen there only once or twice during nearly fifty years. It means war, or something very like it—the Vultures.”
She gave a little shiver as she looked round the room. After a short silence Deulin rose suddenly and held out his hand.
“Goodbye,” he said. “You are too discerning. Goodbye.”
“You are going—?”
“Away,” he answered, with a wave of the hand descriptive of space. “I must go and pack my trunks.”
Lady Orlay had not moved when Mr. Mangles came up to say good night. Miss Julia P. Mangles bowed in a manner which she considered impressive and the world thought ponderous. Netty Cahere murmured a few timid words of thanks.
“We shall hope to see you again,” said Lady Orlay to Mr. Mangles.
“ ’Fraid not,” he answered; “we’re going to travel on the Continent.”
“When do you start?” asked her ladyship.
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Another one,” muttered Lady Orlay, watching Mr. Mangles depart. And her brief reverie was broken into by Reginald Cartoner.
“You have come to say goodbye,” she said to him.
“Yes.”
“You are going away again?”
“Yes.”
“And you will not tell me where you are going.”
“I cannot,” answered Cartoner.
“Then I will tell you,” said Lady Orlay, who, as Paul Deulin had said, was very experienced and very discerning.
“You are going to Russia, all of you.”
VII
At the Frontier
Daylight was beginning to contend with the brilliant electric illumination of the long platform as that which is called the Warsaw Express steamed into Alexandrowo Station. There are many who have never heard of Alexandrowo, and others who know it only too well.
How many a poor devil has dropped from the footboard of the train just before these electric lights were reached—to take his chance of crossing the frontier before morning—history will never tell! How many have succeeded in passing in and out of that dread railway station with a false passport and a steady face, beneath the searching eye of the officials, Heaven only knows! There is no other way of passing Alexandrowo—of getting in or out of the kingdom of Poland—but by this route. Before the train is at a standstill at the platform each one of the long corridor carriages is boarded by a man in the dirty white trousers, the green tunic and green cap, the top-boots, and the majesty of Russian law. Here, whatever time of day or night, winter or summer, it is always as light as day, thanks to an unsparing use of electricity. There are always sentries on the outer side of the train. The platform is a prison-yard—the waiting rooms are prison-yards.
With a passport in perfect order, vised for here and there and everywhere, with good clothes, good luggage, and nothing contraband in baggage or demeanor, Alexandrowo is easy enough. Obedience
