The Slave of the Lamp Part 9

"Ah! But you are right. The People see you--it is a power!"

"It is," acquiesced Morot fervently.

How he hated this man!

"And you stayed to the last?" inquired Lerac. He was rather white about the lips for a brave man.

"Till the last," echoed Morot, taking up some letters addressed to him which lay on the table.

"And the street was quite clear before they broke through the barrier?"

"Quite--the People did not wait." He seemed to resign himself to conversation, for he put the letters into his pocket and sat down. "Had you," he inquired, "any difficulty in getting them away?"

"Oh no," somewhat loftily and quite unsuspicious of irony. "The pa.s.sages were narrow, of course; but we had allowed for that in our organisation.

Organisation and the People, see you--"

"Yes," replied Morot. "Organisation and the People." Like Lerac, he stopped short, apparently lost in the contemplation of the vast possibilities presented to his mental vision by the mere thought of such a combination.

"Well!" exclaimed the butcher energetically, "I must move on. I have meetings. I merely wished to hear from you that all was right--that no one was caught."

He was bubbling over with excitement and the sense of his own huge importance.

The Citizen Morot raised his secretive eyes.

"Good-night," he said, with an insolence far too fine for the butcher's comprehension.

"Well--good-night. We may congratulate ourselves, I think, Citizen!"

"I congratulate you," said Morot. "Good-night."

"Good-night."

It is probable that, had Lerac looked back, there would have been murder done in the small room behind the tobacco-shop. But the contemptuous smile soon vanished from the face of the Citizen Morot. No smile lingered there long. It was not built upon smiling lines at all.

Then he took up his letters. There were only two of them: one bearing the postmark of a small town in Morbihan, the other hailing from England.

He replaced the first in his pocket unread; the second he opened. It was written in French.

"There are difficulties," it said. "Can you come to me? Cross from Cherbourg to Southampton--train from thence to this place, and ask for Signor Bruno, an Italian refugee, living at the house of Mrs. Potter, a _ci-devant_ laundress."

The Citizen Morot rubbed his chin thoughtfully with the back of his hand, making a sharp, grating sound.

"That old man," he said, "is getting past his work. He is losing nerve; and nerve is a thing that we cannot afford to lose."

Then he turned to the letter again.

"Ah!" he exclaimed suddenly; "St. Mary Western. He is there--how very strange. What a singular coincidence!"

He fell into a reverie with the letter before him.

"Carew is dead--but still I can manage it. Perhaps it is just as well that he is dead. I was always afraid of Carew."

Then he wrote a letter, which he addressed to "Signor Bruno, care of Mrs. Potter, St. Mary Western, Dorset."

"I shall come," he wrote, "but not in the way you suggest. I have a better plan. You must not know me when we meet."

He purchased a twenty-five centime stamp from Mr. Jacquetot, and posted the letter with his own hand in the little wall-box at the corner of the Rue St. Gingolphe.

CHAPTER VIII

FALSE METAL

There was, however, no cricket for Stanley Carew that morning. When they came within sight of the house Mrs. Carew emerged from an open window carrying several letters in her hand. She was not hurrying, but walking leisurely, reading a letter as she walked.

"Just think, Hilda dear," she said, with as much surprise as she ever allowed herself. "I have had a letter from the Vicomte d'Audierne. You remember him?"

"Yes," said the girl; "I remember him, of course. He is not the sort of man one forgets."

"I always liked the Viscount," said Mrs. Carew, pensively looking at the letter she held in her hand. "He was a good friend to us at one time. I never understood him, and I like men whom one does not understand."

Hilda laughed.

"Yes," she answered vaguely.

"Your father admired him tremendously," Mrs. Carew went on to say. "He said that he was one of the cleverest men in France, but that he had fallen in a wrong season, and would not adapt himself. Had France been a monarchy, the Vicomte d'Audierne would have been in a very different position."

Vellacott did not open his own letters. He seemed to be interested in the conversation of these ladies. He was not a reserved man, but a secretive, which is quite a different thing. Reserve is natural--it comes unbidden, and often unwelcome. Secretiveness is born of circ.u.mstances. Some men find it imperative to cultivate it, although their soul revolts within them. In professional or social matters it is often merely an expediency--in some cases it almost feels like a crime.

There are some secrets which cannot be divulged; there are some deceptions which a certain book-keeper will record upon the credit side of our account.

Like most young men who have got on in their calling, Christian Vellacott held his career in great respect. He felt that any sacrifice made for it carried its own reward. He thought that it levelled scruples and justified deceptions.

He knew this Vicomte d'Audierne by reputation; he wished to hear more of him; and so he feigned ignorance--listening.

"What has he written about?" inquired Hilda.

"To ask if he may come and see us. I suppose he means to come and stay."

Vellacott looked what the French call "contraried."

"When?" asked the girl.

"On Monday week."

And then Mrs. Carew turned to her other letters. Vellacott took the budget addressed to him, and walked away to where an iron table and some chairs stood in the shade of a deodar.