Эдит Несбит - The Prophet's Mantle

His walk to-day was not a pleasant one, and more than once he felt inclined to turn back. But he persevered, and when he reached the house which he had seen her enter he asked a woman on the ground floor if Miss Hatfield lived there.

'There's a young person named Hatfield in the front attic,' was the reply, as the informant stared with all her eyes at the Count, who was certainly an unusual sort of apparition in Spray's Buildings.

As he strode up the dirty, rotten stairs, stumbling more than once, he thought to himself, as Dick had done, that Alice did not make her new life profitable, whatever it was.

'Poor girl!' he thought; 'if she's of the same mind now as she was when I saw her last, I suppose I must find an opportunity of doing good by stealth.'

The house, though poor enough, did not seem to be one of those overcrowded dens of which we have heard so much lately, and which a Royal Commission is to set right, as a Royal Commission always does set everything right. Or perhaps the lodgers were birds of prey, who only came home to roost at uncertain hours; or beasts of burden, who were only stabled at midnight to be harnessed again at sunrise. At anyrate, the Count saw no one on the stairs, and he saw no one in the front attic either. Not only no one, but no thing. The door and window were both open. The room appeared to have been swept and garnished, but was absolutely empty of everything but fog. There was another door opposite, but it was closed and locked.

'She's evidently not here. We'll try lower down.' But before he had time to turn he heard a foot on the stairs, coming up with the light and springy tread which is the result of good and well-fitting boots, and which does not mark those who walk through life, from the cradle to the grave, shod in boots several sizes too large and several pounds too heavy.

He glanced over the broken banisters, and recoiled hastily.

'The gentle Roland, by all that's mysterious!' he said, 'Now, what on earth can he want here? At anyrate, he'd better not see me .'

The landing on which he stood was very dark, and there was a heap of lumber, old boxes, a hopelessly broken chair, a tub, and some boards. Litvinoff crept behind them, and in his black coat and the obscurity of the dusky landing and the dark afternoon he felt himself secure. He had hardly taken up this position when Roland Ferrier's head appeared above the top stair, to be followed cautiously by the rest of him. He cast a puzzled look round the empty attic, tried the closed door, and, turning, went downstairs again.

Litvinoff was just coming out of his not over savoury lurking-place when he heard a voice on the landing below, which was not Roland's.

'Parbleu!' he said to himself; 'it rains Ferriers here this afternoon. Here's the engaging Richard, and evidently not in the best of tempers.'

He evidently was not—if one might judge by his voice, which was icy with contempt as he said sneeringly, 'So this was the engagement you were going to put off, was it?'

'Yes, it was. At least I am here to put off an engagement; but I don't know what you know about it,' said Roland, 'and I don't know what you mean by following me about like this. What business have you here? This isn't Aspinshaw, that you need dog my footsteps.'

'I came here to try and find out whether my father's son was a scoundrel or not, and you've answered the question for me by being here.'

'Upon my word,' said Roland's voice, 'I think you must be out of your mind.'

It isn't often that the thought which would restrain comes into one's mind at the moment when restraint is most needed; but just then Dick did think of his father and his dying wishes, and the remembrance helped him to speak more calmly than he would otherwise have done.

'Once for all, then, will you tell me why you are here, Roland?'

'Yes, I will, though I don't acknowledge your right to question me. I had an appointment, with that Frenchman we met last night, for this evening, but I've lost his address. I knew it was in this court, and I was walking about on the chance of finding him, when I'm almost sure I saw Litvinoff come in here. I made after him, feeling sure he was going to the same place as I was.'

'And where is Litvinoff?'

'He seems to have disappeared, or else I was mistaken. Now, what have you got to say?'

'This. You lie!'

It sounded hardly like Richard's voice, so hoarse and choked with passion was it; and so full of insult and scorn that Roland at last lost control of himself.

'Stand back, you raving maniac,' he said, 'and let me pass! The same roof mustn't cover us two any longer, and don't speak again to me this side of the grave.'

The listener, leaning forward eagerly to catch every word, heard Roland's foot dash down the staircase. There was a moment of perfect silence, and then came a long-drawn sigh from Richard Ferrier.

'Now then, young man, what's all this to-do about? I should like to know what you mean by quarrelling in places that don't belong to you, and terrifying respectable married women out of their seven senses.' It was a shrill woman's voice that spoke, and a door opened on the landing where young Ferrier stood.

'I'm very sorry, madam,' said Richard, in tones calm enough now. 'I didn't intend to disturb anyone. Will you kindly tell me if anyone lives here named Hatfield?'

'There was a young woman of that name in the front attic, but she left sudden this morning.'

'Do you know where she's gone?'

'No, I don't.'

'Does anyone in the house know?'

'No. I'm the landlady, and she'd have told me if she told anyone.'

'Thank you,' he said, and turned to pass down the staircase.

'Stay, though,' he said; 'have you any Frenchmen lodging here?'

'I don't want no dratted furriners here, and I haven't got none, thank God!'

'Of course not,' said Ferrier to himself, and strode downstairs.

'No foreigners here? Don't be too sure, my good woman,' Litvinoff muttered to himself, as he heard the landlady's door close to a continued accompaniment of reiterated objections in that lady's shrill treble. 'I'd better get out of this house of mystery at once. I trust that the outraged female proprietor of this staircase will not demand my blood. Well, whatever happens, I suppose we shall not see the amiable brothers to-night, and that will mean a tête-à-tête ,' he added, as he came out from his dusty retirement, and carefully removed all traces of the same from his clothes. When he found himself once more in the chill, foggy, outside air, he looked up and down the court, and smiled.

'The situation becomes interesting,' he said to himself, 'and demands another of these very excellent cigars.'

IT seemed a very long walk home to Alice Hatfield, after that Sunday evening lecture. She felt almost as though she could never reach her lodging. It was such weary work to keep putting one tired foot before the other. And somehow she was so much more easily tired now than she used to be in her Derbyshire home, where she had been used to breast the steepest hills without even a quickened breath. She wished she had not gone; she had derived no pleasure from the evening, and had only gained a sharper heartache from the sight of a certain face, which had been, and was still for that matter, the dearest face in the world to her. She felt re-awakened too in her a liking for a different life among different surroundings; the life she had given up of her own free will three months ago. She had been much alone in that other life, it is true, and her thoughts had not made solitude sweet; but she had seen him sometimes, and now she was quite alone—always—save for the few slight acquaintances she had made in the house where she lived. In that other life, which now looked brighter than it had ever done when it was hers, she had been racked and tortured by her conscience, which had at last forced her to try and silence it by renouncing what she had sacrificed everything to gain, and by voluntarily adopting this strange, hard way of living. But now that that gloomy monitor was on her side, it failed to give that comfort and support which one is taught to expect from it.