“But first I must tell you the story. I could not tell you at once; and since then we have managed so well. But you must know before you go. I am not Polish, not even in name. My father's mother was a Russian woman, but his father was an Irishman, and the name—my name—is Wyndham. My father's given name was 'Metz'—”
Peter had caught it all before her last sentence. “Wyndham” had been enough. He saw clearly the natural and excellent reason for the tenderness of Duke Fallows toward the daughter of Metz Wyndham, and recalled the tragic story of the power and fire of this prophet of the people, who was executed by the Russian government in the midst of the turmoil following Red Sunday—“Metz Wyndham, the notorious Red,” as he was denoted in the subsidized press of Petersburg, though “Metz Wyndham, the peasants' martyr,” was a whisper which seemed destined in the end to silence all such uproar.
“You have heard of him? You knew his story?”
The upturned face shone with a different bloom for his eyes. “Yes,” he answered.
“...I was away from Russia for years—in London and Paris,” she said quickly. “But at last I felt I could not stay longer. I wanted to come back here—where the struggle is so tense and constant. He worked much here in Warsaw. All of his kind come some time to Warsaw. And so the name Solwicz, which I hate; and so the fear when I found you watching me in the street a second time, and my relief to learn that you were not Russian-”
“Of course I understand,” said Peter. He put his hand upon her head. “I was in awe of you before I knew,” he added, “and yet, I always saw that in the most vital moments something of him would come out.... I keep seeing you with him now—what a life for a young girl—what a builder, those years, for a young girl—and how brave you are. Berthe, I have it—you are spoiled for common people because you were brought up with that kind of a man. How clearly I understand last night now!”
“There's another side to that,” she said huskily.
“Oh, I'm sorry—”
The most consummate plotting could not have endeared him to her as those three words.
“Peter, you must see it—the other side. There was no rest with him. All his brilliance, all his brilliant companions were one part, but there was a steady pressure of tragedy about us—from outside. And there was tragic pressure from him. He was subject to the most terrible melancholia. He had enough vision to see the wrong everywhere. It was not mania. There is wrong everywhere, if one looks—in judges and cities, in nations, wars, in the kind of amusements people plunge into—wrong and coarseness and stupidity. He loved men but hated institutions. Sometimes, he would see it all so clearly that the sense of his own powerlessness would come. He would cry, 'One man can't do anything. A man like me can't be heard—oh, I can't make myself heard! It is as if I were shut in a tomb.' He would only have been happy passing from one great crowd to another—harrowing, pleading, electrifying men. He would rise—even alone with me—to the heights of his power—and then fall into the valleys because no one could hear. That was his cry, 'I can't make myself heard! Then often, when he was waiting to speak, the power would come, and leave him drained when he faced his people. He would tell me afterward, 'If I could only have talked to them yesterday, or an hour before!'