'Cannon Street Hotel, 9.30 p.m.
EAR MR PETROVITCH,—We were married this morning at St Nicholas Cole Abbey, and we are leaving London by the night mail. I cannot go without thanking you with my whole heart for all you have done for me—for both of us. No words can ever tell you how much I feel what we owe to you. My husband says he owes more to you than I do, but I cannot think that. Good-bye until we see you in Russia. Oh! Heaven bless you, Mr Petrovitch, for all you have done for us.—Yours always gratefully,
Alice Litvinoff.'
In the same envelope was a letter from Alice's husband, and it did not begin in the same way as hers. It ran thus,—
'My dear Litvinoff,—I can't write to you under any but your own name, nor can I sign any other than my own. I kept yours as you wished, and Alice believes herself to be Countess Litvinoff. I shall tell her all that part of my story later, but I shall never tell her of my villainous and insensate desire for a rich wife, and for a life of ease which would have driven me mad in three months. Alice and a life of adventure are worth all the broad acres in creation. Nor shall I tell her that I knew her father. One thing more I must ask you to do for me. Write to Richard Ferrier and let him know that we are married. I think I've used him rather badly. Alice wishes you to say good-bye for her to her good friends Mr and Mrs Toomey. Some kind fate certainly kept watch over my wife while I was playing the fool and dangling after another woman. And Fate has been a thousand times better to me than I deserve. With my dear wife, and the prospect of meeting you soon in Russia, I feel all the old enthusiasm re-awakening. Vive la Révolution!—Your old secretary and friend,
Armand Percival.
'In signing that name I feel as though I were writing with my left hand, it is so awkward to me after all these years.'
Petrovitch sighed as he replaced the letters in their envelope. He had given himself up wholly to the cause he served, and he had suffered for it, and was prepared to suffer more, and generally he was contented, even glad, that it should be so. But sometimes a sudden sense of the utter loneliness of his life came over him, saddening and oppressing him. Then he seemed to himself to be not a man with a life of his own to live and hopes of his own to cherish, but a power passing through the lives of others, helping, guiding, saving, and always after a while fading out of those lives. He had brought these two together, and they were all in all to each other, and he was much to them perhaps, but mainly because he had brought them together. Now he felt that they were lost to him, and he had loved them both—Alice with the love of a strong man for a child, and the other with a deep attachment which dated from the first moment of their meeting, and which had unaccountably withstood all the other's shortcomings. Unaccountably? No? the essence of love is its boundless capacity for pardon; the unaccountable part of it was that he should ever have loved him at all. And they were gone; and gone, as Petrovitch knew well enough, to begin a life whose end, sooner or later, must be the scaffold or the death-in-life of perpetual imprisonment. He had led many a man and many a woman into that path, knowing all that it meant, and he was not sorry. Was it not the path he had himself chosen as being the noblest that any man's feet could tread—the path of utter self-renunciation? But though he was never sorry he was often sad, and sadder than usual on the day when his two friends bade farewell to safety and English soil. He felt lonely and desolate. But Michael Petrovitch never felt his own moral pulse for more than half a minute at a time. He sighed, raised his hand to his chin, and smiled at finding himself reminded that the gesture of passing his hand over his beard, which had grown into a settled habit with him in moments of annoyance or excitement, was no longer possible.
He turned to his table and wrote half-a-dozen letters. There were many arrangements still to make for his journey. Then he rose, put on his hat, and started for Marlborough Villa.
He had not cared to face that dinner where he was to have met his fellow revolutionist. He had written a hasty note of excuse, and had spent the evening and the best part of the night in conference with his morose friend Hirsch, who was a little more morose even than usual on this occasion, owing to what he thought the absurd and unjust leniency with which the pseudo Litvinoff had been treated. He would have been much better satisfied had some sudden and awful judgment overtaken the adventurer who had dared to personate his hero—even had that judgment come in the form of a trial for forgery at the Old Bailey; which fact showed that he was but a weaker brother in the faith that teaches that crime is a disease to be cured, not an offence to be punished. In that conversation with Hirsch the date of Petrovitch's departure had been finally settled, and now he had a few farewell visits to pay. One must certainly be to Mrs Quaid—he had a fancy that he would try to make his parting with Miss Stanley something more than it could be in the presence of that estimable lady. He thought that Clare would not hesitate to say good-bye to him without her hostess's surveillance. At any rate, a chance of being alone with her to say his farewell was what he was bent on trying for. At Marlborough Villa he was shown into the morning-room. It was empty, but in a moment Clare came in.
He was standing with his back to the window. When she saw him she started visibly, and, with an unmistakable gesture of annoyance, was turning to leave the room, when he made a step forward, and she paused and looked at him, and, turning with a complete change of expression, held out her hand.
'How could I have been so absurd?' she said. 'Do you know for the moment I really thought it was Count Litvinoff.'
'I don't wonder at your not quite recognising me. You see I had to sacrifice my beard. I am going back to Russia next week. Disguise will be de rigeur, and beards and disguises are incompatible.'
'Going back to Russia next week?' she repeated slowly, 'and I had so much to say—to ask—'