He had dined with a city company; but had dined as a man who knew little of the dinner or of those who ate it. Ten days ago his energy, his buoyant spirits, and his amazing vitality had astonished even his best friends. To-night these qualities were at their lowest ebb—and he had been so silent, so self-concentrated, so obviously distressed, that even a casual acquaintance had remarked the change. To say that a just Nemesis had overtaken him would be less than the truth. He knew that he stood accused, not by a man, but by a nation. And to a nation he must answer.
He locked the door of his room and, drawing a chair to a little Buhl writing-table, set in the window, he opened a drawer and took therefrom a little bundle of papers, upon which he had spent nine sleepless nights and, apparently, would spend still another. They were odd scraps—now of letters, now of legal documents—the précis of a past which could be recited in no court of justice, but might well be told aloud to an unsympathetic world. Had an historian been called upon to deal with such documents, he would have made nothing whatever of them—but Richard Gessner could rewrite the story in every line, could garnish it with passions awakened, fears unnamable, regrets that could not save, despair that would suffer no consolations.
He had stolen Paul Boriskoff's secret from him and thereby had made a fortune. Let it be admitted that the first conception of the new furnace for the refining of copper had come from that white-faced whimpering miner, who could talk of nothing but his nation's wrongs and had no finer ambition in life than to feed his children. He, Richard Gessner, had done what such a fellow never could have done. He had made the furnace commercially possible and had exploited it through the copper mines of the world. Such had been the first rung of that magnificent pecuniary ladder he had afterwards climbed so adroitly. Money he had amassed beneath his grasping hand as at a magician's touch. He regretted, he had always regretted, that misfortune overtook Paul Boriskoff's family—he would have helped them had he been in Poland at the time; but their offences were adjudged to be political; and if the wretched woman suffered harm at the hands of the police, what share had he in it? To this point he charged himself lightly—as men will in justifying themselves before the finger of an hoary accusation. Gessner cared neither for God nor man. His only daughter had been at once his divinity and his religion. Let men call him a rogue, despot, or thief, and he would shrug his shoulders and glance aside at his profit and loss account. But let them call him "fool" and the end of his days surely was at hand.
And so this self-examination to-night troubled itself with no thought of wrongs committed, with no desire to repay, but only with that supreme act of folly, to which the sleeping lad in the room near by was the surest witness. What would the threats of such a pauper as Paul Boriskoff have mattered if the man had stood alone against him? A word to the police, a hundred pounds to a score of ruffians, and he would have been troubled no more. But his quarrel was not with a man but a nation. Perceiving that the friendship of the Russian Government was necessary to many of his mining schemes in the East, he had changed his name as lightly as another would have changed his coat, had cast the garments of a sham patriotism and emerged an enemy to all that he had hitherto befriended, a foe to Poland, a servant to Russia.
Acting secretly and with a strong man's discretion, no bruit of this odd conversion had been made public, no whisper of it heard in the camp of the Revolutionaries. Many knew Maxim Gogol—none had heard of Richard Gessner. His desire for secrecy was in good accord with the plans of a police he assisted and the bureaucracy he bribed. He lived for a while in Vienna, then at Tiflis—he came at length to England where his daughter had been educated; and there he established himself, ostensibly as a wealthy banker, in reality as the secret director of one of the greatest conspiracies against the liberty of a little nation that the world had ever seen.
Upon such a man, the blow of discovery fell with, stunning force. Gessner had grown so accustomed to the security of this suburban life that he could imagine no circumstance which might disturb it. All that he did for the satisfaction of the Russian Government had been cleverly done by agents and deputies. Entitled by his years to leisure, he had latterly almost abandoned politics for a culture of the arts and the sciences, in some branches of which he was a master. His leisure he gave almost entirely to his daughter. To contrive for her an alliance worthy of his own fortune and of her beauty had become the absorbing passion of his life. He studied the Peerage as other men study a balance-sheet. All sorts and conditions of possible husbands appeared at "Five Gables;" were dined, discussed, and dismissed. The older families despised him and would not be appeased. To crown his vexation, his daughter named a lover for herself. He had twice shown Captain Willy Forrest from the door and twice had the man returned. Anna seemed fascinated by this showy adventurer as by none other who visited them. Gessner, for his part, would sooner have lost the half of his fortune than that she should have married him.
These vexations had been real enough ten days ago; but, to-night, a greater made light of them and now they were almost forgotten. Detection had stalked out of the slums to humble this man in an instant and bring him to his knees. Gessner could have recited to you the most trivial detail attending the reception of Paul Boriskoff's letter and the claim it made upon him—how a secretary had passed it to him with a suggestion that Scotland Yard should know of it; how he had taken up the scrawl idly enough to flush before them all an instant later and to feel his heart sink as in an abyss of unutterable dismay. He had crumpled the dirty paper in his hand, he remembered, and thrown it to the ground—to pick it up immediately and smooth it out as though it were a precious document. To his secretary he tried to explain that the writer was an odd fanatic who must be humored. Determined at the first blush to face the matter out, to answer and to defy this pauper Pole who had dared to threaten him, he came ultimately to see that discretion would best serve him. Paul Boriskoff had named Kensington Gardens as a rendezvous where matters might be discussed. Gessner was there to the minute—without idea, without hope, seeking only that pity which he himself had never bestowed upon any human being.
Paul Boriskoff did not hurry to the Gardens, so sure was he of the success of his undertaking. The frowsy black coat, in which he made his bow to the millionaire, had not seen the light for many years—his hat was a wide-brimmed eccentricity in soft felt which greatly delighted the nursemaids who passed him by. Gessner would never have recognized, in the hollow-cheeked, pale-faced, humble creature the sturdy young Pole who had come to him nearly a generation ago and had said, "Our fortunes are made; this is my discovery." Believing at the moment that money would buy such a derelict, body and soul, he opened the negotiations firmly and in that lofty tone which suited Throgmorton Street so well. But five minutes had not passed before he understood his mistake and realized that Boriskoff, the lad who had trusted him, and Boriskoff, the Pole who now threatened him, were one and the same after all.
"I remember you perfectly," he said; "it would be idle to say that I do not. You had some claim in the matter of a certain furnace. Yes, I remember that and would willingly admit it. But, my friend, you fell into trouble with the Government, and what could I do then? Was not I also compelled to leave Poland? Did not I change my name for that very reason? How could I repay the debt? Here in England it is different. You make your existence known to me and I respond at once. Speak freely, then, for I shall hear you patiently."
They were seated on a bench beneath a chestnut in full bloom. Distantly, through a vista of giant trunks, the waters of the Round Pond glimmered in the evening light. Children, worn out by the day, sat idle in groups on the benches of the Long Walk or lagged through a fitful game on the open spaces between the trees. Few observed these two men who thus earnestly recalled the drama of their lives; none remarked their odd association, for were not both obviously foreigners, and who shall dictate a fashion to such as they? Indeed, they conversed without any animation of gesture; the one convulsed by fears he did not dare to express, the other by hopes on the threshold of realization.