And it was borne in upon Netty that Uncle Joseph had received some order; that he was pluming his ragged old wings for flight.
XXXIII
Thin Ice
It was not yet midday when Paul Deulin called at the Bukaty Palace.
“Is the prince in?” he asked. “Is he busy?” he added, when the servant had stood back with a gesture inviting him to enter. But the man only shrugged his shoulders with a smile. The prince, it appeared, was never busy. Deulin found him, in fact, in an armchair in his study, reading a German newspaper.
The prince looked at him over the folded sheet. They had known each other since boyhood, and could read perhaps more in each other’s wrinkled and drawn faces than the eyes of a younger generation were able to perceive. The prince pointed to the vacant armchair at the other side of the fireplace. Deulin took the chair with that leisureliness of movement and demeanor of which Lady Orlay, and Cartoner, and others who were intimate with him, knew the inner meaning. His eyes were oddly bright.
They waited until the servant had closed the door behind him, and even then they did not speak at once, but sat looking at each other in the glow of the wood-fire. Then Deulin shrugged his shoulders, and made, with both hands outspread, a gesture indicative of infinite pity.
“Do you know?” said the prince, grimly.
“I knew at eight o’clock this morning. Cartoner advised me of it by a cipher telegram.”
“Cartoner?” said the prince, interrogatively.
“Cartoner is in Petersburg. He went there presumably to attend this—pleasing denouement.”
The prince gave a short laugh.
“How well,” he said, folding his newspaper, and laying it aside reflectively—“how well that man knows his business. But why did he telegraph to you?”
“We sometimes do each other a good turn,” explained Deulin, rather curtly. “It must have happened yesterday afternoon. One can only hope that—it was soon over.”
The prince laughed, and looked across at the Frenchman with a glitter beneath his shaggy brows.
“My friend,” he said, “you must not ask me to get up any sentiment on this occasion. Do not let us attempt to be anything but what God made us—plain men, with a few friends, whom one would regret; and a number of enemies, of whose death one naturally learns with equanimity. The man was a thief. He was a great man and in a great position, which only made him the greater thief.”
The prince moved his crippled legs with an effort and contemplated the fire.
“He is dead,” he went on, after a pause, “and there is an end to it. I do not pray that he may go to eternal punishment. I only want him to be dead; and he is dead. Voilà! It is a matter of rejoicing.”
“You are a ruffian; I always said you were a ruffian,” said Deulin, gravely.
“I am a man, my friend, who has an object in life. An object, moreover, which cannot take into consideration a human life here or there, a human happiness more or less. You see, I do not even ask you to agree with me or to approve of me.”
“My friend, in the course of a long life I have learned only one effective lesson—to judge no man,” put in Deulin.
“Remember,” continued the prince, “I deplore the method. I understand it was a bomb. I take no part in such proceedings. They are bad policy. You will see—we shall both see, if we live long enough—that this is a mistake. It will alienate all sympathies from the party. They have not even dared to approach me with any suggestion of cooperation. They have approached others of the Polish party and have been sent about their business. But—well, one would be a fool not to take advantage of every mishap to one’s enemy.”
Deulin held up one hand in a gesture imploring silence.
“Thin ice!” he said, warningly.
“Bah!” laughed the other. “You and your thin ice! I am no diplomatist—a man who is afraid to look over a wall.”
“No. Only a man who prefers to find out what is on the other side by less obvious means,” corrected the Frenchman. “One must not be seen looking over one’s neighbor’s wall—that is the first commandment of diplomacy.”
“Then why are you here?” asked the prince, abruptly, with his rough laugh.
And Paul Deulin suddenly lost his temper. He sat bolt upright in his chair, and banged his two hands down on the arms of it so that the dust flew out. He glared across at the prince with a fierceness in his eyes that had not glittered there for twenty years.
“You think I came here to pry into your affairs—to turn our friendship into a means for my own aggrandizement? You think that I report to my government that which you and I may say to each other, or leave unsaid, before your study fire? Was it not I who cried ‘Thin ice’?”
“Yes—yes,” answered the prince, shortly. And the two old friends glared at each other gleams of the fires that had burned fiercely enough in other days. “Yes—yes! but why are you here this morning?”
“Why am I here this morning? I will tell you. I ask you no questions, I want to know nothing of your schemes and plans. You can run your neck into a noose if you like. You have been doing it all your life. And—who knows?—you may win at last. As for Martin, you have brought him up in the same school. And, bon Dieu! I suppose you are Bukatys, and you cannot help it. It is your affair, after all. But you shall not push Wanda into a Russian prison! You shall not get her to Siberia, if I can help it!”
“Wanda!” said the prince, in some surprise—“Wanda!”
“Yes. You forget—you Bukatys always have forgotten—the women. Warsaw is no place for Wanda today. And today’s work—tonight’s work—is no work for Wanda!”
“Tonight’s work! What do you mean?”
The prince sat forward
