Mrs. Selldon hesitated. Then, under the cover of the general roar of conversation, she said in a low voice:—
“You have guessed quite rightly. He is one of the Nihilists who were concerned in the assassination of the late Czar.”
“You don’t say so!” exclaimed Mark Shrewsbury, much startled. “Is it possible?”
“Indeed, it is only too true,” said Mrs. Selldon. “I heard it only the other morning, and on the very best authority. Poor Gertrude Morley! My heart bleeds for her.”
Now I can’t help observing here that this must have been the merest figure of speech, for just then there was a comfortable little glow of satisfaction about Mrs. Selldon’s heart. She was so delighted to have “got on well,” as she expressed it, with the literary lion, and by this time dessert was on the table, and soon the tedious ceremony would be happily over.
“But how did he escape?” asked Mark Shrewsbury, still with the thought of “copy” in his mind.
“I don’t know the details,” said Mrs. Selldon. “Probably they are only known to himself. But he managed to escape somehow in the month of March 1881, and to reach England safely. I fear it is only too often the case in this world—wickedness is apt to be successful.”
“To flourish like a green bay tree,” said Mark Shrewsbury, congratulating himself on the aptness of the quotation, and its suitability to the Archediaconal dinner-table. “It is the strangest story I have heard for a long time.” Just then there was a pause in the general conversation, and Mrs. Selldon took advantage of it to make the sign for rising, so that no more passed with regard to Zaluski.
Shrewsbury, flattering himself that he had left a good impression by his last remark, thought better not to efface it later in the evening by any other conversation with his hostess. But in the small hours of the night, when he had finished his bundle of proofs, he took up his notebook and, strangling his yawns, made two or three brief, pithy notes of the story Mrs. Selldon had told him, adding a further development which occurred to him, and wondering to himself whether “Like a Green Bay Tree” would be a selling title.
After this he went to bed, and slept the sleep of the just, or the unbroken sleep which goes by that name.