CHAPTER XX.

IMPROVING PROSPECTS.

Clare Stanley was the mistress of Aspinshaw, and of a good deal of bricks and mortar, stocks and shares, and Three per Cent. Consols besides. Mrs Stanley was comfortably provided for, but it was Clare who was to profit by the hard work, the self-denial and forethought of some three generations of Stanleys, or, as some might think, of their greed, their grasping, and their over-reaching of their less crafty fellow-men.

The will that had laid the burden of wealth upon her, at an age when most young women of her class are engaged in constant differences with their parents and guardians on the subject of pin-money, had been the one act of eccentricity of Mr Stanley's whole life.

For some days her grief for her father's loss had been too absorbing to permit of her thinking of much else besides, but on this first day of the new year she felt more able to think, and as she sat alone by the drawing-room fire she began for the first time to realise her position. About one thing she had made up her mind; she must leave this horrible house, where the shadow had fallen on her which she felt just then could never be lifted again.

Between Clare and her father's second wife there had always been perfectly cordial relations, but they were not bound together by any ties of love.

Mrs Stanley had always done her duty to her husband and his child, but hers was a cold nature, and not one which had drawn out Clare's heart towards itself. She was now going to stay with her own relatives, and was perfectly willing to take her step-daughter with her; but the girl decided, without much need for reflection, that there would be many things better than to be buried alive in a Yorkshire village, with no one more congenial to talk to than Mrs Stanley or Mrs Stanley's relations, whom Clare had been wont to term 'the fossils.'

An unposted letter lay on the little table at her elbow, in which she had accepted an invitation to spend an indefinite time with the Quaids. She thought that in London, away from the associations of the recent past, she would be better able to plan out the course of her future life. She knew that that course would now be a very different one from what it would have been had she had the planning of it three months ago, before she met Count Litvinoff or spent that evening at the Cleon. She was sorrowfully glad that her father's will was what it was, for she was conscious in a vague sort of way that wealth meant power, and she was determined that in her hands it should mean power to do good and to make others happy. Her plans went no further than this at present, and she knew that even to carry this out she would need teaching and help and counsel from those who had more experience of the world and its needs than she had. It was, perhaps, this thought that had mainly influenced her in her acceptance of Mrs Quaid's very kind and cordial invitation, for Marlborough Villa was not the most unlikely place in the world at which to meet some one who had just that which she lacked. There she had first been forced to think; perhaps there she would first be taught how to act.

Why does one never learn at school the things one needs when one leaves it? 'How much there is to know--how much there is for me to learn,' she said to herself, with a little sigh, leaning forward and gazing into the glowing fire, resting her elbow on her knee and her cheek on her clasped hands.

She started and rose at a loud, clanging ring of the door-bell. As she had expected, the servant announced 'Count Litvinoff.' He came forward with a low and deferential bow.

'You must forgive me,' he said, 'for calling on you on Sunday afternoon, which, I believe, is not the rule in England; but I heard that you were leaving Aspinshaw to-morrow, and I could not run the risk of not seeing you again.'

'We are always pleased to see you,' said Clare; 'but I am not going to London for some time yet. There will be a good deal of law business, I suppose, and it is not fair to carry the trouble of that to my friend's house. Is Mr Roland well?'

'He is on duty,' said Litvinoff; 'he has gone to a chapel with his aunt, which is good of him, as his views are not that way.'

Clare drew a breath of relief. She had not felt comfortable in Roland's presence since that interview with Litvinoff in the National Gallery.

'I myself shall be returning to London in a few weeks,' the young man went on. 'I have already stayed as long as I at first intended to do, but now Ferrier is good enough to wish me to stay until the household at Thornsett Edge is broken up.'

'Ah, yes, I had forgotten that. What a horrible thing! What are they going to do?'

'I believe Mr Roland will live with his aunt at Chelsea.'

'We seem to be all going to London,' said Clare, with an effort to be as cheerful as possible.

'True; but London is so vast, and in it I know so few people whom you are likely to know, that I feel I might as well be going back to Siberia for any chance I shall have of seeing you.' This with the air of one who would as soon go to Siberia as not while he was about it.

'Oh, I daresay we shall see each other,' she answered, leaning back in her chair and trifling with a big screen of peacock's feathers, which she had idly taken up. 'I'm going to stay with a lady who is madly anxious to know you.'

Count Litvinoff looked intensely surprised, as though that had been almost impossible.

'I think I told you about her,' she continued; 'Mrs Quaid, who belongs to the Cleon, you know, where I heard all about Socialism, you remember?'

'Oh, yes, I remember,' said Litvinoff, which was true. He did.

'I do hope I shall see you again, because you and Mr Petrovitch are the only two people I know who can help me.'

'It is a great privilege my fellow-countryman shares with me, Miss Stanley. May I be the first to hear of what help you stand in need?'

'I daresay you have heard,' she answered, 'that my father'--here her voice trembled a little--'has left me nearly all his money, and it is mine now, though I am not of age.'

Ah, no, Count Litvinoff had certainly not heard that.

'And then, you see,' she went on, knitting her brows under the stress of the difficulty she found in putting her thoughts into words, 'the question is, what am I to do with it? A little time ago I should have found it easy enough to do with it what every one else does; but I have been thinking a great deal--a very great deal lately--ever since I heard Mr Petrovitch; and now I feel the responsibility of it so much more than I should have done before.'

Count Litvinoff thought to himself that that was the sort of responsibility he was admirably adapted to share. He merely looked sympathetic, and Miss Stanley went on.

'And then I feel sure money may be a fearful curse if one doesn't use it properly. Of course, I can't disguise from myself that this money was made in the usual way, and that others have lost all that my father and his father have gained, and I wish I could think of some way in which it might give as much happiness as it would have done had it been left in the hands of the workers who toiled to produce it. You are one who should be able to advise me. What shall I do?'

Litvinoff's hair almost stood on end. This was getting his own coin back with a vengeance.

'My dear Miss Stanley,' he said gravely, 'if I were to advise you in the only way which seems possible to me now, your friends would all look upon me as your worst enemy--as an adventurer, as a rogue. Whereas I desire to be looked on as your faithful friend and servant--as the man who, more than all others, would go through fire and water to do you the slightest service.'

'I should hardly have thought you would have cared what my friends or anybody else thought of you,' was Miss Stanley's only reply to this fervid declaration.

'Under most circumstances,' said the Count, with a little wave of his hand, 'I do care for nothing and for nobody; but'--he went on, with a slight tremor in his voice--'rather than incur the dislike of any one whom you respect and love, I would abjure every principle, and sacrifice every cause.'

'I asked for advice,' said Clare, not seeing her way to a more direct answer.

'I know you did,' he spoke rapidly, dropping into a foreign accent; 'and I--I cannot give it you, Miss Stanley. Let me tell you one thing. You know--you have heard, you have read--how in Russia, when money is wanted for our cause, it is the duty of some of us to get it--to persuade it out of those who have. That has often been my duty, and I have never failed. I have taken, over and over again, all, all from those as young as you, and have left them with nothing. I have had to raise enthusiasm by every means, to urge to self-sacrifice, and then to take unsparingly. There are men now, my _friends_, who, if they knew that you--rich, young, enthusiastic--had asked me for _advice_, and that I had refused to give it, would say, "Michael Litvinoff has become traitor," and would kill me like a rat. But,' he went on, rising and stretching out his clenched fist, 'did I know that a legion of such men were outside that door, armed and waiting for me, and hearing every word I speak, I would still say that for no cause in the world must you make sacrifices or must you suffer; and I would still say that I would serve you before all causes.'

'Count Litvinoff, I can hear no more of this. Please talk of something else.'

'Ah! now yet once more I have offended you. It is part of my unhappy lot that whenever I speak in earnest I offend you. But I can't talk of something else to-day. I must say adieu, Miss Stanley. If I stayed I should disobey you, and I cannot disobey you.'

'Good-bye, then,' said Clare, extending her hand.

He caught her hand, held it tightly an instant, bent over it as though he were about to raise it to his lips, then dropped it as if it had burned him. 'Adieu,' he said, 'I know that in England the hand-shake means forgivenness, and that once more I am forgiven--for speaking the truth--and that I may see you again.'

Clare did not gainsay it, and he left the room.

Count Litvinoff was marching back to Thornsett with a very elate step, and a good deal of military swagger, and Clare had resumed her thinking--she was thinking of him, and he was thinking of her. He thought aloud, as usual.

'H'm,' he said to the grey stone walls on each side of him, and to the plovers who were wheeling and screaming overhead, '_la belle_ was offended, but not so much. When she thinks over it she will say,--"He is not a good patriot and friend of liberty, this Litvinoff, for he forgets his mistress, _La Révolution_; therefore he is unfaithful." Ay, but she will add, "He only forgets her when I am near, and he is only unfaithful for me," _C'est bien--c'est bien--c'est très bien!_' he added, vaulting a gate and making a short cut home.