The Red Symbol Part 45

I struggled up and looked around me. I knew the place well enough, the long narrow room that had once been the _salle a manger_ in the Va.s.silitzi's Warsaw house, but that, ever since I had known it, had been the princ.i.p.al ward in the amateur hospital inst.i.tuted by Anne. A squalid ward enough, for the beds were made up on the floor, anyhow, and every bit of s.p.a.ce was filled, leaving just a narrow track for the attendants to pa.s.s up and down.

Along that track came a big figure that I recognized at once as Mishka, walking with clumsy caution.

"You are better? That is well," he said in a gruff undertone.

"How did I get here?" I demanded.

"Yossof brought you; he found you walking about the streets, raving mad.

It is a marvel that you were not shot down."

Then I remembered something at least of what had pa.s.sed.

"How long since?" I stammered, putting my hand up to my bandaged head.

"Two days."

"And--?"

"I will answer no questions," he growled in his surliest fas.h.i.+on. "I will send you food and you are to sleep again. He will see you later."

"He--Loris; he is safe, then?"

He nodded, but would say no more, and presently I drifted back into sleep or unconsciousness.

CHAPTER XLVIII

THE GRAND d.u.c.h.eSS Pa.s.sES

I've heard it said that sick or wounded people always die if they have no wish to live, but that's not true. I wanted to die as badly as any one ever did, but yet I lived. I suppose I must have a lot of recuperative energy; anyhow, next time I woke up I felt pretty much as usual, except for the dull throb of the wound across my forehead, which some one had scientifically strapped up. My physical pain counted as nothing compared with the agony of shame and grief I suffered in my soul, as, bit by bit, I recollected all that had happened. I had failed in my trust, failed utterly. I was left to guard her; I ought to have forbidden--prevented--her going out into the street at all; and, when the worst came, I ought to have died with her.

I tried to say something of this to Loris when I was face to face with him once more, in the room where Anne and I had been working when that ill-omened woman, Marie Levinska, interrupted us; but he stopped me with an imperative gesture.

"Do not reproach yourself, my friend. All that one man could do, you did. I know that well, and I thank you. One last service you shall do, if you are fit for it. You shall ride with us to-night when we take her away. Mishka has told you of the arrangements? That is well. If we get through, you will not return here; that is why I have sent for you now."

"Not return?" I repeated.

"No," he answered quietly but decisively. "Once before I begged you to leave us, now I command you to do so; not because I do not value you, but because--she--would have wished it. Wait, hear me out! You have done n.o.ble service in a cause that can mean nothing to you, except--"

"Except that it is a cause that the lady I served lived,--and died--for, sir," I interrupted.

More than once before I had spoken of her to him as the woman we both loved; but now the other words seemed fittest; for not half an hour back I had learned the truth, that, I think, I had known all along,--that she who lay in her coffin in the great drawing-room yonder was, if her rights had been acknowledged, the Grand d.u.c.h.ess Loris of Russia. It was Va.s.silitzi who told me.

"They were married months ago, in Paris,--before she went to England,"

he had said, and for a moment a bitter wave of memory swept over me, though I fought against it. Hadn't I decided long since that the queen could do no wrong, and therefore the deception she had practised counted for nothing? All that really mattered was that I loved her in spite of all; asked nothing more than to be allowed to serve her.

"You served her under a delusion," he rejoined with stern sadness. "And now it is no longer possible for you to serve her even so. I cannot discuss the matter with you; I cannot explain it,--I would not if I could. Only this I repeat. I request--command you, to make your way out of this country as soon as possible, and rejoin your friends in England, or America,--where you will. It may mean more to you than you dare hope or imagine. You will have some difficulty probably, though some of the trains are running again now. I think your safest plan will be to ride to Kutno--or if necessary even to Alexandrovo. Here is a pa.s.sport, permitting you to leave Russia; it is made out in the name you a.s.sumed when you returned as 'William Pennington Gould,' and is quite in order.

And I must ask you, for the sake of our friends.h.i.+p, to accept these"--he took a roll of notes out of the drawer of the writing-table--"and, as a memento,--this. It is the only decoration I am able to confer on a most chivalrous gentleman."

He held out a little case, open, and I took it with an unsteady hand. It contained a miniature of Anne, set in a rim of diamonds. I looked at it,--and at him,--but I could not speak; my heart was too full.

"There is no need of words, my friend; we understand each other well, you and I," he continued, rising and placing his hands on my shoulders.

"You will do as I wish,--as I entreat--insist--?"

"I would rather remain with you!" I urged. "And fight on, for the cause--"

He shook his head.

"It is a lost cause; or at least it will never be won by us. The manifesto, the charter of peace! What is it? A dead letter. Nicholas issued it indeed, but his Ministers ignore it, and therefore he is helpless, his charter futile and the reign of terror continues,--will continue. Therefore I bid you go, and you must obey. So this is our parting, for though we shall meet, we shall be alone together no more.

Therefore, G.o.d be with you, my friend!"

When next I saw him he stood with drawn sword, stern and stately, foremost among the guard of honor round the catafalque in the great drawing-room, where all that remained of the woman we both loved lay in state, ere it fared forth on its last journey.

The old house was full of subdued sounds, for as soon as darkness fell, by ones and twos, men and women were silently admitted and pa.s.sed as silently up the staircase to pay their last homage to their martyr.

Nearly all of them had flowers in their hands,--red flowers,--sometimes only a single spray, but always those fatal geranium blossoms that were the symbol of the League. They laid them on the white pall, or scattered them on the folds that swept the ground, till the coffin seemed raised above a sea of blood.

Every detail of that scene is photographed on my memory. The great room, hung with black draperies and brilliantly lighted by a mult.i.tude of tall wax candles; the air heavy with incense and the musky odor of the flowers; the two priests in gorgeous vestments who knelt on either side, near the head of the coffin, softly intoning the prayers for the dead; the black-robed nuns who knelt at the foot, silent save for the click of their rosaries; and the ghostly procession of men and women, many of them wounded, all haggard and wan, that pa.s.sed by, and paused to gaze on the face that lay framed, as it were, beneath a panel of gla.s.s in the coffin-lid, from which the pall was drawn back. Many of them, men as well as women, were weeping pa.s.sionately; some pressed their lips to the gla.s.s; others raised their clenched hands as if to register a vow of vengeance; a few,--a very few,--knelt in prayer for a brief moment ere they pa.s.sed on.

I stood at my post, as one of the guard, and watched it all in a queer, impersonal sort of way, as if my soul was somehow outside my body.

Although I stood some distance away, the quiet face under the gla.s.s seemed ever before my eyes; for I had looked on it before this solemn ceremonial began. How fair it was,--and yet how strange; though it was unmarred, unless there was a wound hidden under the strip of white ribbon bound across the forehead and almost concealed by the softly waving chestnut hair. But even the peace of death had not been able to banish the expression of anguish imprinted on the lovely features. Above the closed eyelids, with their long, dark lashes, the brows were contracted in a frown, and the mouth was altered, the white teeth exposed, set firmly in the lower lip. Still she was beautiful, but with the beauty of a Medusa. I could not think of that face as the one I had known and loved; it filled me with pity and horror and indignation, indeed; but--it was the face of a stranger.

Why had I not been content to remember her as I had known her in life!

She seemed so immeasurably removed from me now; and that not merely because I could no longer think of her as Anne Pendennis,--only as "The Grand d.u.c.h.ess Anna Catharine Petrovna, daughter of the Countess Anna Va.s.silitzi-Pendennis, and wife of Loris Nicolai Alexis, Grand Duke of Russia," as the French inscription on the coffin-plate ran,--but also because the mystery that had surrounded her in life seemed more impenetrable than ever now that she was dead.

Where was her father, to whom she had seemed so devotedly attached when I first knew her? Even supposing he was dead, why was he ignored in that inscription, save for the mere mention of his surname, the only indication of her mixed parentage. She had never spoken of him since that day at the hunting-lodge when she had said I must ask nothing concerning him. I had obeyed her in that, as in all else, and had even refrained from questioning Va.s.silitzi or any other who might have been able to tell me anything about Anthony Pendennis. Besides, there had been no time for queries or conjectures during all the feverish excitement of these days in Warsaw. But now, in this brief and solemn interlude, all the old problems recurred to my mind, as I stood on guard in the death-chamber; and I knew that I could never hope to solve them.

The ceremony was over at last. As in a dream I followed the others, and, at a low-spoken word of command, filed past the catafalque, with a last military salute, though I was no longer in uniform, for Mishka had brought me a suit of civilian clothes.

In the same dazed way I found myself later riding near the head of the procession that pa.s.sed through the dark silent streets, and out into the open country. I didn't even feel any curiosity or astonishment that a strong escort of regular cavalry--lancers--accompanied us, or when I recognized the officer in command as young Mirakoff, whom I had last seen on the morning when I was on my way to prison in Petersburg. He didn't see me,--probably he wouldn't have known me if he had,--and to this day I don't know how he and his men came to be there, or how the whole thing was arranged. Anyhow, none molested us; and slowly, through the sleeping city, and along the open road, the cortege pa.s.sed, ghostlike, in the dead of night. The air was piercingly cold, but the sky was clear, like a canopy of velvet spangled with great stars.

Mishka rode beside me, and at last, when we seemed to have been riding for an eternity, he laid his hand on my rein, and whispered hoa.r.s.ely, "Now."

Almost without a sound we left the ranks, turned up a cross-road, and, wheeling our horses at a few paces distant, waited for the others to go by; more unreal, more dreamlike than ever. Save for the steady tramp of the horses' feet, the subdued jingle of the harness and accoutrements, they might have been a company of phantoms. I saw the gleam of the white pall above the black bulk of the open hea.r.s.e,--watched it disappear in the darkness, and knew that the Grand d.u.c.h.ess had pa.s.sed out of my life forever.

Still I sat, bareheaded, until the last faint sounds had died away, and the silence about us was only broken by the night whisper of the bare boughs above us.

"Come; for we have yet far to go," Mishka said aloud, and started down the cross-road at a quick trot.

CHAPTER XLIX

THE END OF AN ACT