Chapter 3

“Then I will ask your permission to accompany you. I, too, have put on a new hat. I am idle. I want something to do. Mon Dieu, I want to talk to a clean and wholesome Englishwoman, just for a change. I know all your old chiefs, my friend. I know where you have been every moment since you made your mark at this business. One watches the quiet men--eh?”

“She will be glad to see you,” said Cartoner, with his slow smile.

“Ah! She is always kind, that lady; for I guess where we are going. She might have been a great woman . . . if she had not been a happy one.”

“I always go to see them when I am in town,” said Cartoner, who usually confined his conversation to the necessaries of daily intercourse.

“And he--how is he?”

“He is as well as can be expected. He has worked so hard and so long in many climates. She is always anxious about him.”

“It is the penalty a woman pays,” said Deulin. “To love and to be consumed by anxiety--a woman's life, my friend. Oddly enough, I should have gone there this afternoon, whether I had met you or not. I want her good services--again.”

And the Frenchman shrugged his shoulders with a laugh, as if suddenly reminded of some grievous error in his past life.

“I want her to befriend some friends of mine, if she has not done so already. For she knows them, of course. They are the Bukatys. Of course, you know the history of the Bukatys of Warsaw.”

“I know the history of Poland,” answered Cartoner, looking straight in front of him with reflective eyes. He had an odd way of carrying his head a little bent forward, as if he bore behind his heavy forehead a burden of memories and knowledge of which his brain was always conscious--as a man may stand in the centre of a great library, and become suddenly aware that he has more books than he can ever open and understand.

“Of course you do; you know a host of things. And you know more history that was ever written in books. You know more than I do, and Heaven knows that I know a great deal. For you are a reader, and I never look into a book. I know the surface of things. The Bukatys are in London. I give you that--to put in your pipe and smoke. Father and son. It is not for them that I seek Lady Orlay's help. They must take care of themselves--though they will not do that. It does not run in the family, as you know, who read history books.”

“Yes, I know,” said Cartoner, pausing before crossing to the corner of St. James's Street, in the manner of a man whose life had not been passed in London streets. For it must be remembered that English traffic is different to the traffic of any other streets in the world.

“There is a girl,” pursued the Frenchman. “Families like the Bukatys should kill their girls in infancy. Not that Wanda knows it; she is as gay as a bird, and quite devoted to her father, who is an old ruffian--and my very dear friend.”

“And what do you want Lady Orlay to do for Princess Wanda?” inquired Cartoner, with a smile. It was always a marvel to him that Paul Deulin should have travelled so far down the road of life without losing his enthusiasm somewhere by the way.

“That I leave to Lady Orlay,” replied Deulin, with an airy wave of his neat umbrella, which imperilled the eyesight of a passing baker-boy, who abused him. Whereupon Deulin turned and took off his hat and apologized.

“Yes,” he said, ignoring the incident, “I would not presume to dictate. All I should do would be to present Wanda to her. 'Here is a girl who has the misfortune to be a Bukaty; who has no mother; who has a father who is a plotter and an old ruffian--a Polish noble, in fact--and a brother who is an enthusiast, and as brave as only a prince can be.' I should say, 'You see that circumstances have thrown this girl upon the world, practically alone--on the hard, hard upper-class world--with only one heart to break. It is only men who have a whole row of hearts on a shelf, and, when one is broken, they take down another, made, perhaps, of ambition, or sport, or the love of a different sort of woman--and, vogue la galere, they go on just as well as they did before.'”

“And my accomplished aunt . . .” suggested Cartoner.

“Would laugh at me, I know that. I would rather have Lady Orlay's laugh than another woman's tears. And so would you; for you are a man of common-sense, though deadly dull in conversation.”

As if to prove the truth of this assertion, Deulin was himself silent until they had ascended St. James's Street and turned to the left in Piccadilly; and, sure enough, Cartoner had nothing to say. At last he broke the silence, and made it evident that he had been placidly following the stream of his own thoughts.

“Who is Joseph P. Mangles?” he asked, in his semi-inaudible monotone.

“An American gentleman--the word is applicable in its best sense--who for his sins, or the sins of his forefathers, has been visited with the most terrible sister a man ever had.”

“So much I know.”

Deulin turned and looked at his companion.

“Then you have met him--that puts another complexion on your question.”

“I have just crossed the Atlantic in the next chair to him.”

“And that is all you know about him?”

Cartoner nodded.

“Then Joseph P. Mangles is getting on.”

“What is he?” repeated Cartoner.

“He is in the service of his country, my friend, like any other poor devil--like you or me, for instance. He spends half of his time kicking his heels in New York, or wherever they kick their heels in America. The rest of his time he is risking his health, or possibly his neck, wherever it may please the fates to send him. If he had been properly trained, he might have done something, that Joseph P. Mangles; for he can hold his tongue. But he took to it late, as they all do in America. So he has come across, has he? Yes, the storm-birds are congregating, my silent friend. There is something in the wind.”

Deulin raised his long, thin nose into the dusty May air and sniffed it.

“Was that girl with them?” he inquired presently--“Miss Netty Cahere?”

“Yes.”

“I always make love to Miss Cahere--she likes it best.”

Cartoner stared straight in front of him, and made no comment. The Frenchman gave a laugh, which was not entirely pleasant. It was rare that his laugh was harsh, but such a note rang in it now. They did not speak again until they had walked some distance northward of Piccadilly, and stopped before a house with white window-boxes. Several carriages stood at the other side of the road against the square railings.

“Is it her day?” inquired Deulin.

“Yes.”

Deulin made a grimace expressive of annoyance.

“And we shall see a number of people we had better not see. But, since we are here, let us go in--with a smile on the countenance, eh? my brave Cartoner.”

“And a lie on the tongue.”

“There I will meet you, too,” replied Deulin, looking into his card-case.

They entered the house, and, as Deulin had predicted, there found a number of people assembled, who noted, no doubt, that they had come together. It was observable that this was not a congregation of fashionable or artistic people; for the women were dressed quietly, and the men were mostly old and white-haired. It was also dimly perceptible that there was a larger proportion of brain in the room than is allotted to the merely fashionable, or to that shallow mixture of the dramatic and pictorial, which is usually designated the artistic world. Moreover, scraps of conversation reached the ear that led the hearer to conclude that the house was in its way a miniature Babel.

The two men separated on the threshold, and Deulin went forward to shake hands with a tall, white-haired woman, who was the centre of a vivacious group. Over the heads of her guests this lady had already perceived Cartoner, who was making his way more slowly through the crowd. He seemed to have more friends there than Deulin. Lady Orlay at length went to meet Cartoner, and as they shook hands, one of those slight and indefinable family resemblances which start up at odd moments became visible.

“I want you particularly to-morrow night,” said the lady; “I have some people coming. I will send a card to your club this evening.”

And she turned to say good-bye to a departing guest. Deulin was at Cartoner's elbow again.

“Here,” he said, taking him by the sleeve and speaking in his own tongue, “I wish to present you to friends of mine. Prince Pierre Bukaty,” he added, stopping in front of a tall, old man, with bushy, white hair, and the air of a mediaeval chieftain, “allow me to present my old friend Cartoner.”

The two men shook hands without other greeting than a formal bow. Deulin still held Cartoner by the sleeve, and gently compelled him to turn towards a girl who was looking round with bright and eager eyes. She had a manner full of energy and spirit, and might have been an English girl of open air and active tastes.

“Princess Wanda,” said the Frenchman, “my friend Mr. Cartoner.”

The eager eyes came round to Cartoner's face, of which the gravity seemed suddenly reflected in them.

“He is the best linguist in Europe,” said Deulin, in a gay whisper; “even Polish; he speaks with the tongue of men and of angels.”

And he himself spoke in Polish.

Princess Wanda met Cartoner's serious eyes again, and in that place, where human fates are written, another page of those inscrutable books was folded over.

V

AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE

Prince Bukaty was an affable old man, with a love of good wine and a perfect appreciation of the humorous. Had he been an Englishman, he would have been an honest squire of the old Tory type, now fast fading before facilities for foreign travel and a cheap local railway service. But he was a Pole, and the fine old hatred which should have been bestowed upon the Radicals fell to the lot of the Russians, and the contempt hurled by his British prototype upon Dissent was cast upon Commerce as represented in Poland by the thrifty German _emigre_.

The prince carried his bluff head with that air which almost invariably bespeaks a stormy youth, and looked out over mankind from his great height as over a fine standing crop of wild oats. As a matter of fact, he had grown to manhood in the years immediately preceding those wild early sixties, when all Europe was at loggerheads, and Poland seething in its midst, as lava seethes in the crater of a volcano.

The prince had been to England several times. He had friends in London. Indeed, he possessed them in many parts of the world, and, oddly enough, he had no enemies. To his credit be it noted that he was not an exile, which is usually another name for a scoundrel. For he who has no abiding city generally considers himself exempt from the duties of citizenship.

“They do not take me seriously,” he said to his intimate friends; “they do not honor me by recognizing me as a dangerous person; but we shall see.”

And the Prince Bukaty was thus allowed to go where he listed, and live in Warsaw if he so desired. Perhaps the secret of this lay in the fact that he was poor; for a poor man has few adherents. In the olden times, when the Bukatys had been rich, there were many professing readiness to follow him to the death--which is the way of the world. “You have but to hold up your hand,” cries the faithful follower. But wise men know that the hand must have something in it. The prince had been young and impressionable when Poland was torn to pieces, when that which for eight centuries had been one of the important kingdoms of the world was wiped off the face of Europe, like writing off a slate. He was not a ruffian, as Deulin had described him; but he was a man who had been ruffled, and nothing could ever smooth him.

He was too frank by nature to play a hopeless game with the cunning and the savor of spite which hopeless games require. If he liked a man, he said so; if he disliked one, he was equally frank about it. He liked Cartoner on the briefest of brief introductions, and said so.

“It is difficult to find a man in London who speaks anything but English, and of anything but English topics. You are the narrowest people in the world--you Londoners. But you are no Londoner; I beg your pardon. Well, then, come and see me to-morrow. We are in a hotel in Kensington--will you come? That is the address.”

And he held out a card with a small gold crown emblazoned in the corner, after the mode of eastern Europe. Cartoner reflected for a moment, which was odd in a man whose decisions were usually arrived at with lightning speed. For he had a slow tongue and a quick brain. There are few better equipments with which to face the world.

“Yes,” he said at length; “it will give me much pleasure.”

The prince glanced at him curiously beneath his bushy eyebrows. What was there to need reflection in such a small question?

“At five o'clock,” he said. “We can give you a cup of the poisonous tea you drink in this country.”

And he went away laughing heartily at the small witticism. People whose lives are anything but a joke are usually content with the smallest jests.

It was scarcely five o'clock the next day when Cartoner was conducted by a page-boy to the Bukatys' rooms in the quiet old hotel in Kensington. The Princess Wanda was alone. She was dressed in black. There is in some Varsovian families a heritage of mourning to be worn until Poland is reinstated. She was slightly but strongly made. Like her father and her brother, there was a suggestion of endurance in her being, such as is often found in slightly made persons.

“I came as early as I could,” said Cartoner, and, as he spoke, the clock struck.

The princess smiled as she shook hands, and then perceived that she had not been intended to show amusement. Cartoner had merely made a rather naïve statement in his low monotone. She thought him a little odd, and glanced at him again. She changed color slightly as she turned towards a chair. He was quite grave and honest.

“That is kind of you,” she said, speaking English without the least suspicion of accent; for she had had an English governess all her life. “My father will take it to mean that you wanted to come, and are not only taking pity on lonely foreigners. He will be here in a minute. He has just been called away.”

“It was very kind of him to ask me to call,” replied Cartoner.

There was a simple directness in his manner of speech which was quite new to the Princess Wanda. She had known few Englishmen, and her own countrymen had mostly the manners of the French. She had never met a man who conveyed the impression of purpose and of the habit of going straight towards his purpose so clearly as this. Cartoner had not come to pay an idle visit. She wondered why he had come. He did not rush into conversation, and yet his silence had no sense of embarrassment in it. His hair was turning gray above the temples. She could see this as he took a chair near the window. He was probably ten years older than herself, and gave the impression of experience and of a deep knowledge of the world. From living much alone he had acquired the habit of wondering whether it was worth while to say that which came into his mind--which is a habit fatal to social success.

“Monsieur Deulin dined with us last night,” said the princess, following the usual instinct that silence between strangers is intolerable. “He talked a great deal of you.”

“Ah, Deulin is a diplomatist. He talks too much.”

“He accuses you of talking too little,” said Wanda, with some spirit.

“You see, there are only two methods of leaving things unsaid, princess.”

“Which is diplomacy?” she suggested.

“Which is diplomacy.”

“Then I think you are both great artists,” she said, with a laugh, as the door opened and her father entered the room.

“I only come to ask you a question--a word,” said the prince. “Heavens! your English language! I have a man down-stairs--a question of business--and he speaks the oddest English. Now what is the meaning of the word jettison?”

Cartoner gave him the word in French.

“Ah!” cried the prince, holding up his two powerful hands, “of course. How foolish of me not to guess. In a moment I will return. You will excuse me, will you not? Wanda will give you some tea.”

And he hurried out of the room, leaving Cartoner to wonder what a person so far removed above commerce could have to do with the word jettison.

The conversation returned to Deulin. He was a man of whom people spoke continually, and had spoken for years. In fact, two generations had found him a fruitful topic of conversation without increasing their knowledge of him. If he had only been that which is called a public man, a novelist or a singer, his fortune would have been easy. All his advertising would have been done for him by others. For there was in him that unknown quantity which the world must needs think magnificent.

“I want you to tell me all you know about him,” said the princess in her brisk way. “He is the only old man I have ever seen whose thoughts have not grown old too. And, of course, one wonders why. He is the sort of person who might do anything surprising. He might fall in love and marry, or something like that, you know. Papa says he is married already, and his wife is in a mad asylum. He says there is a tragedy. But I don't. He has no wife--unless he has two.”

“I know nothing of that side of his life. I only know his career.”

“I do not care about his career,” said the princess, lightly. “I go deeper than careers.”

She looked at Cartoner with a wise nod and a shrewd look in her gay, blue eyes.

“A man's career is only the surface of his life.”

“Then some men's lives are all surface,” said Cartoner.

Wanda gave a little, half-pitying, half-contemptuous jerk of her head.

“Some men have the soul of an omnibus-horse,” she replied.

Cartoner reflected for a moment, looking gravely the while at this girl, who seemed to know so much of life and to have such singularly clear and decisive views upon it.

“What would you have them do beyond going on when required and stopping when expedient--and avoiding collisions?” he inquired.

“I should like them to break the omnibus up occasionally,” she answered, “and take a wrong turning sometimes, just to see if a little happiness lay that way.”

“Yes,” he laughed. “You are a Pole and a Bukaty. I knew it as soon as I saw you.”

“One must do something. We were talking of such things last night, and Monsieur Deulin said that his ideal combination in a man was an infinite patience and a sudden premeditated recklessness.”

“Now you have come down to a mere career again,” said Cartoner.

“Not necessarily.”

The prince came into the room again at this moment.

“What are you people discussing,” he asked, “so gravely?”

He spoke in French, which was the language that was easiest to him, for he had been young when it was the fashion in Poland to be French.

“I do not quite know,” answered Cartoner, slowly. “The princess was giving me her views.”

“I know,” retorted the old man, with his rather hollow laugh. “They are long views, those views of hers.”

Cartoner was still standing near the window. He turned absently and looked out, down into the busy street. There he saw something which caused him intense surprise, though he did not show it; for, like any man of strong purpose, his face had but one expression, and that of thoughtful attention. He saw Captain Cable, of the _Minnie_, crossing the street, having just quitted the hotel. This was the business acquaintance of Prince Bukaty's, who had come to speak of jettison.

Cartoner knew Captain Cable well, and his specialty in maritime skill. He had seen war waged before now with material which had passed in and out of the _Minnie's_ hatches.

The prince did not refer again to the affairs that had called him away. The talk naturally turned to the house where they had first met, and Wanda mentioned that her father and she were going to the reception given by the Orlays that evening.

“You're going, of course?” said the prince.

“Yes, I am going.”

“You go to many such entertainments?”

“No, I go to very few,” replied Cartoner, looking at Wanda in his speculative way.

Then he suddenly rose and took his leave, with a characteristic omission of the usual “Well, I must be off,” or any such catch-word. He certainly left a great deal unsaid which this babbling world expects.

He walked along the crowded streets, absorbed in his own thoughts, for some distance. Then he suddenly emerged from that quiet shelter, and accepted the urgent invitation of a hansom-cab driver to get into his vehicle.

“Westminster Bridge,” he said.

He quitted the cab at the corner of the bridge, and walked quickly down to the steamboat-landing.

“Where do you want to go to?” inquired the gruff, seafaring ticket-clerk.

“As far as I can,” was the reply.

A steamer came almost at once, and Cartoner selected a quiet seat over the rudder. He must have known that the _Minnie_ was so constructed that she could pass under the bridges, for he began to look for her at once. It was six o'clock, and a spring tide was running out. All the passenger traffic was turned to the westward, and a friendly deck-hand, having leisure, came and gave Cartoner his views upon cricket, in which, as was natural in one whose life was passed on running water, his whole heart seemed to be absorbed. Cartoner was friendly, but did not take advantage of this affability to make inquiries about the _Minnie_. He knew, perhaps, that there is no more suspicious man on earth than a river-side worker.

The steamer raced under the bridges, and at last shot out into the Pool, where a few belated barges were drifting down stream. A number of steamers lay at anchor, some working cargo, others idle. The majority were foreigners, odd-shaped vessels, with funnels like a steam threshing-machine, and gayly painted deck-houses.

In one quiet corner, behind a laid-up excursion-boat and a file of North Sea fish-carriers, lay the _Minnie_, painted black, with nothing brighter than a deep brown on her deck-house, her boats painted a shabby green. She might have been an overgrown tug or a superannuated fish-carrier.

Cartoner landed at the Cherry Orchard Pier, and soon found a boatman to take him to the _Minnie_.

“Just took the skipper on board a few minutes ago, sir,” he said. “He must have come down by the boat before yours.”

A few minutes later Cartoner stood on the deck of the _Minnie_, and banged with his fist on the cover of the cabin gangway, which was tantamount to ringing at Captain Cable's front door.

The sailor's grim face appeared a moment later, emerging like the face of a hermit-crab from its shell. The frown slowly faded, and the deep, unwashed wrinkles took a kindlier curve.

“It's you, Mr. Cartoner,” he said. “Glad to see you.”

“I was passing in a steamer,” answered Cartoner, quietly, “and recognized the _Minnie_.”

“I take it friendly of you, Mr. Cartoner, remembering the rum time you and me had together. Come below. I've got a drop of wine somewhere stowed away in a locker.”

VI

THE VULTURES

“I suppose,” Miss Mangles was saying--“I suppose, Joseph, that Lady Orlay has been interested in the work without our knowing it?”

“It is possible, Jooly--it is possible,” replied Mr. Joseph P. Mangles, looking with a small, bright, speculative eye out of the window of his private sitting-room in a hotel in Northumberland Avenue.

Miss Mangles was standing behind him, and held in her hand an invitation-card notifying that Lady Orlay would be at home that same evening from nine o'clock till midnight.

“This invitation,” said the recipient, “accompanied as it is by a friendly note explaining that the shortness of the invitation lies in the fact that we only arrived the day before yesterday, seems to point to it, Joseph. It seems to indicate that England is prepared to give me a welcome.”

“On the face of it, Jooly, it would seem--just that.”