Part 2

‘Listen to my conditions,’ she continued. ‘I have said I consent; but I warn you that if there is any loophole for escape from you, I shall take it. You are going away, you say. Nothing must be done till your return, and then the contract shall be fulfilled. Now, go.’

When Lucrece entered the room a few moments later, she found her mistress lying unconscious upon the floor. Looking out of the window, she saw the slim figure of Le Gautier disappearing in the distance, and smiled. He was smiling, too, as he walked away. Nothing remained now but only the final interview with Marie, and to regain possession of the lost moidore. A few weeks at Warsaw, and then——

CHAPTER XV.

Maxwell had been gone a week now, and no tidings of him had reached England, save one letter to say he was in Rome. As Le Gautier turned away from Grosvenor Square, his heart one glow of triumph, he determined that, come what may, the artist should never see England again. When he returned from Warsaw, he calculated that, through Marie St Jean’s assistance, all information concerning the League would be in the hands of the police, freeing him from any further bondage, and throwing all the odium and danger on her. Full of these schemes, he arrived at his lodgings. A telegram was lying on the table. He took it up mechanically, and tore it open. The contents were terse: ‘Visci died this morning from heart disease.’ Le Gautier was wild with rage. Here was a pretty combination, he thought. Nothing now to detain Maxwell in Rome. The victim had fallen by a higher Hand than that of man, and Maxwell was free.

As a Head Centre of the Order, Le Gautier wielded much power, and even now he did not despair, with the command of nearly all the desperadoes in Rome at his command. He had only to get Maxwell arrested in Rome on some false charge and carried to the mountains; and there—after a little delay and a packed meeting of the League—shot. Desperate men such as Le Gautier, especially with such a prize in their grasp, do not long hesitate over such a trifling matter as a human life, and he trusted to his own good luck and native audacity to pull him through.

It was getting dark the same night as he despatched a telegram to Rome, and then turned in the direction of Fitzroy Square. He was as eager now to see Isodore as he had been to encounter Enid in the afternoon, and looked forward not only to a pleasant evening but a remunerative one.

She did not keep him long waiting in the drawing-room ere she sailed in all smiles and welcome. She was looking radiantly beautiful to-night; there was a deeper flush on her face, and a glitter in her glorious eyes not usually seen there—signs of a loving welcome, Le Gautier imagined in his egotistical way. There was, besides, a warmth in her manner and a gladness in the pressure of her hand which inspired him, and sent an electric thrill coursing through his veins.

‘You are looking more transcendently lovely than usual, Marie!’ he exclaimed with a fervour unusual even to him. ‘Every time I see you, there is some additional charm in you to note.’

‘It depends upon whether the observing eye is a prejudiced one,’ she replied with a caressing smile, which brought him at once to her side. ‘You say that now, Hector. How long will you continue to think so?’

‘As long as I have power to think at all—as long as memory serves me. I shall remember you to the last day of my life.’

‘I believe you will,’ Isodore smiled bewilderingly. ‘And yet, strange as it may seem, the time will perhaps come when you will wish you had never seen my face.’

‘You are more than usually enigmatical to-night, Marie. You are a puzzle to me. I do not even know who you are. Tell me something about yourself, and why you are living in this solitude here.’

‘No; not to-night; but, as I have often promised you, I will tell you some time. I will tell you who I am before you go away; and then, when your curiosity is satisfied, you will leave me.’

‘Never!’ Le Gautier exclaimed passionately. ‘Leave you!—the only woman I ever saw that I could really love. Leave you, Marie! How can you entertain the bare idea!’

He would have approached her nearer, but she waved him gently but firmly aside. The distance she kept him fanned his passion all the more. ‘Tell me something about yourself,’ she said. ‘That is a topic which never fails to interest me. How about the League, this Maxwell’s journey? Has he accomplished his mission yet?’

‘He is not likely to, now. Visci is dead!—Gracious powers, Marie! what ails you? Are you ill?’

Isodore uttered a sharp exclamation, and then reeled forward in her chair. Her face was white and drawn, her lips trembled. Gradually her bosom ceased to heave so painfully, and she turned to Le Gautier with a white wan smile, though he could see the fan still trembling in her hands. ‘It is nothing,’ she said with an effort. ‘I am subject to these attacks of the heart, and any news of sudden death always affects me so.—Do not look distressed; it is past now.’

‘There is nothing in the name to cause you any distress?’ Le Gautier asked suspiciously.

‘I have heard the name before, if that is what you mean. Tell me all you know of this Carlo Visci.’

‘I did not say his name was Carlo,’ Le Gautier observed, somewhat sharply. ‘I can tell you nothing more. When I reached home this afternoon, I had a telegram to say he was dead.’

‘And this Maxwell, what of him? I suppose he will return home now?’

‘He has been somewhat dilatory in obeying orders. No; he will not return. He will be detained at Rome for the present.’

‘Tell me why you hate this Englishman so.’

Le Gautier started. ‘How do you know I hate him?’ he asked. ‘I have never said so.’

‘Not in so many words; but in gesture and look, when you speak of him, your actions are eloquent, my friend. He has crossed your path. Ah, well, I like a good hater. Maxwell will suffer yet.’

‘Yes,’ Le Gautier exclaimed involuntarily, ‘he will.’

Isodore rose and walked to the piano, where she sat for a moment striking the chords idly. ‘When do you go to Warsaw?’ she asked.

‘I have six days remaining to me.—Marie, the time has come when we must no longer delay. The pear is ripe now; all my plans are matured. I have only to hold up my hand and the League will vanish.’

All this time, Isodore played on softly, musingly, the music serving like the accompaniment of a song to force the speaker’s voice. As he stood there, and she answered him, she never ceased to play the soft chords.

‘Then you have everything prepared?’

‘Yes, everything is ready.’ He drew a low seat to her side, and seated himself there. ‘All the names are made out, the whole plot prepared.’

‘And you propose to hand them over to me. It is a great compliment; and I suppose I must take them. I would run greater risks than this for your sake and—my own.’

She took one hand from the ivory keys and held it out to him. Drawing a packet from his pocket, he gave it to her. She thrust it in her bosom, and ran her fingers over the keys again.

‘All is there, I suppose,’ she asked, ‘down to the minutest detail, everything necessary to betray the League and pull it up root and branch? You have taken good care to shield yourself, I presume?’

‘Of course.—And now, to talk of more pleasant things. You know I am going away in a few days; and when I return, I shall expect to find myself perfectly free.’

‘You may depend upon me. I will do all I can for you.’

Le Gautier looked up sharply—the words were coldly, sternly uttered, but the quiet placid smile never left her face.

‘How strangely you speak! But oh, Marie—my Marie, the only woman I ever loved, you will stand by me now, and help me, for both our sakes! Look at me, and say you will do what I ask!’

Isodore looked down, smiling brightly. ‘Yes, I will do what you ask,’ she said. ‘And so you really love me?’

‘Passionately and sincerely, such as I never expected to love woman yet.’

‘I am glad to hear you say that,’ Isodore replied with a thrill of exultation in her voice. ‘I have waited and hoped for the time to come; but never in my wildest dreams did I look for this.’

‘With your nobleness and beauty, how could it be otherwise? I should be more than a man—or less—if I looked upon you unmoved.’

‘Then, for the first time for years, I am happy.’

Le Gautier started to his feet rapturously. He did not understand her yet; he thought the soft earnest words all for him. He would have caught her there and then in his eager arms, but again she repulsed him. ‘No, no!’ she cried; ‘I have not proved you yet. Let things remain as they are till you return again to England.’

How strange, Le Gautier thought vaguely, that she should use words so similar to those of Enid to a precisely similar plea. Despite his passion, he had not thrown all prudence to the winds.

‘You had better leave me now,’ Isodore continued—‘leave me to think and dwell over this thing.’

‘But what about my badge of membership? I dare not leave England without that.’

‘I had almost forgotten it in this interesting conversation. It is not in my possession; it is in Paris. You have a meeting of the League before you go for final instructions. Come to me after that, and you shall have it. I am going to Paris to-morrow, and will bring it with me.’

‘You are a witch!’ Le Gautier exclaimed with admiration. ‘You seem to know as much as the mysterious Isodore, that princess who never shows herself unless danger besets the League. If she is the wonder men who have seen her say she is, they stand in dire need of her now.’

‘Beware how you talk so lightly of her—she has the gift of fernseed. At this very moment she may know of your perfidy.’

‘Perfidy is a hard word, my queen, and sounds not prettily.—And now, good-night. And you will not fail me?’

‘I will _not_ fail you,’ Isodore replied with the stern inflection Le Gautier had noticed before, and marvelled over. ‘I never fail.’

‘A woman, and never fail!’

‘Not in my promises. If I make a vow or pledge my word, I can wait five years or ten to fulfil it.—Good-night. And when we meet again, you will not say I have belied my contract.’

When Valerie entered some minutes later, she found Isodore with firm-set face and gleaming eyes. ‘My brother is dead,’ she said quietly. ‘Poor Carlo! And he loved me so at one time. Now, he can never know.’

‘Dead!’ Valerie exclaimed. ‘You do not mean to say’——

‘That Maxwell killed him?—No. His heart has been failing for years, long before I left Rome; his life was not worth an hour’s purchase. But I have no time to mourn over him now.—Let me see if I can do a little good with my useless occupation. I start for Rome to-morrow.’

Valerie looked at her friend in stupid astonishment.

‘I cannot explain to you now. Maxwell is free to return home. As you know, it means destruction to Le Gautier’s plans, if he does. I dared not press him too closely to-night; but Maxwell will be detained in Rome, in all probability by Paulo Lucci, till some charge can be trumped up for his destruction. But Lucci and his band dare not cross me; my power is too great for that. To-morrow, I leave for Rome, and pray heaven that I may not be too late!’

AMERICAN TRAITS.

It is usual in this country to regard the Americans as a homogeneous people, and to accept the Yankee as a fair type of the whole nation. But this is a fallacy. The inhabitants of the South, and more especially the descendants of the early French and Spanish colonists to be found in the Gulf States, differ radically in their morals, manners, and customs from the population of other sections of the Union. It is not, however, our purpose in this paper to enter into an extended disquisition upon the characteristics of the people of the United States, our object being simply to touch briefly upon a few of their more prominent traits. The Puritan element in the character of the first settlers of New England has exercised an influence upon social life there which has not been confined to that limited area, but has made itself felt, in a more or less marked degree, throughout the whole of the Northern States. The differences of race and climate have, however, not only been obstacles to the inhabitants of the South accepting the Puritan standard of morals, but have also prevented the development of those traits of character to be found in the population of other parts of the country, and which are more peculiarly distinctive of the Americans as a people. We shall therefore limit ourselves to dealing with those national characteristics which have come under our observation in the Northern States.

That submission to the will of the majority which is inculcated by democratic institutions has exercised a marked influence upon the social no less than upon the political life of the people of the United States, save in the late Slave States. It has not only had the result of preventing the development of individuality of character, but likewise has considerably modified that obstinacy of temper and dogged tenacity of opinion which are to be found in the Anglo-Saxon race. The late Lord Beaconsfield on one occasion said in the House of Commons that a gentleman who had spent several years in America had declared to him that it was his belief that ‘the citizens of the republic were the most tractable people in the world, and the readiest open to conviction by argument.’

In the United States, the absence of that segregation of the various grades of society which exist in Europe is evinced by the habits and manners of the masses in that country. If the national independence of character be occasionally pushed too far, and degenerate into offensive self-assertion, at least it prevents any approach to servility. No inequality of position or circumstances will induce a native of any of the Northern States to submit to being dealt with in the manner or spoken to in the tone which, in England, the man in broadcloth too frequently adopts, as a matter of course, towards the man in fustian. The late Sydney Godolphin Osborne used to relate how, once, a respectable artisan said to him: ‘I like you, my lord; there is nothing of the gentleman about you.’ The meaning of the speaker was undoubtedly that Lord Osborne did not treat him in the patronising manner that members of the higher class usually address those whom they regard as their social inferiors. Now, no one perhaps has a keener appreciation of the advantages of wealth and education than the American; but that the possessor of them should feel himself justified in using towards the man who lacks these adventitious gifts the language of a superior to an inferior, is what he cannot understand, and which he will not for one moment put up with. An anecdote Thackeray used to relate of an experience of his when in the United States well illustrates this trait of the people. While in New York, he expressed to a friend a desire to see some of the ‘Bowery Bhoys,’ who, he had heard, were a class of the community peculiar to that city. So one evening he was taken to the Bowery, and he was shown a ‘Bhoy.’ The young man, the business of the day being over, had changed his attire. He wore a dress-coat, black trousers, and a satin waistcoat; whilst a tall hat rested on the back of his head, which was adorned with long well-greased hair—known as ‘soap-locks’—a style which the rowdies of that day affected. The youth was leaning against a lamp-post, smoking an enormous cigar; and his whole aspect was one of ineffable self-satisfaction. The eminent novelist, after contemplating him for a few moments with silent admiration, said to the gentleman by whom he was accompanied: ‘This is a great and gorgeous creature!’ adding: ‘Can I speak to him without his taking offence?’

Receiving an answer in the affirmative, Thackeray went up to the fellow, on the pretext of asking his way, and said: ‘My good man, I want to go to Broome Street.’

But the unlucky phrase, ‘My good man,’ roused the gall of the individual spoken to. Instead, therefore, of affording the information sought, the ‘Bhoy’—a diminutive specimen of humanity, scarcely over five feet in height—eyeing the tall form of his interlocutor askance, answered the query in the sense that his permission had been asked for the speaker to visit the locality in question, and he said, patronisingly: ‘Well, sonny, yer kin go thar.’

When Thackeray subsequently related the incident, he laughingly declared that he was so disconcerted by the unexpected response, that he had not the courage to continue the dialogue.

The question, however, differently put would, in all probability, have elicited a civil answer from ninety-nine out of a hundred of the members of the class to which the man belonged. In fact, the discourtesy, and even rudeness, of which some travellers in the United States complain have arisen from the fact of their failing to appreciate the difference existing between the social systems of that country and their own.

The wide gulf in culture which in England separates the upper and middle classes from the lower orders, does not exist in America. This has arisen from various causes. In the first place, the great bulk of the people of the Union are much better educated than is as yet the case in this country. The admirable system of common or, as they are termed, ‘public’ schools which prevails in America affords facilities for all children obtaining a sound English education without the payment by their parents of any school fees, and at a trifling cost to the taxpayer in all sections of the Union, and especially in the West, where large grants have been made of the State lands in support of the public schools. In the second place, the social status of the working classes who are _natives_ of the United States has been raised by the fact that the Americans are almost exclusively engaged in avocations demanding intelligence and skilled labour. This has been owing to the circumstance that upon the coloured population and the Irish and German immigrants have devolved those coarse and irksome occupations which have to be followed by a portion of the inhabitants of other countries. To give one instance of this alone, it may be stated that rarely is a native American citizen, man or woman, found occupying the position of a domestic servant in any of the Atlantic cities.

The wages, too, commanded by artisans and mechanics averaging nearly double those of the same class in other countries, it follows, necessarily, that vice and crime—the inevitable concomitants of a state of society in which the condition of the mass of the lower classes is but one step removed from absolute indigence, as is the case in most European countries—are not nearly so prevalent in America. In the New England States, where the foreign population is small, there is not a country in Europe—possibly with the exception of Holland—where there is so little crime. Few persons, indeed, are aware how much the foreign element in the community, in many of the States, contributes to the statistics of the offences which come under the cognisance of the criminal tribunals. In the State of New York alone, seventy per cent. of the infractions of the law are committed by the Irish, whilst the fair ratio of this class in proportion to the whole population would be a little less than twenty per cent.

One of the most marked characteristics of the Americans is their rooted determination to resist any legislation which shall recognise any class distinctions in the community. Of course, no one contends that the man of wealth, education, and culture is not the superior, in one sense of the word, of him who lacks these. The equality insisted upon is simply this: that no class of society shall make the circumstance of enjoying these adventitious advantages a ground for the members of it basing a claim to be a separate caste, possessing rights and privileges—fenced in by law—denied to the bulk of their countrymen. This sentiment found expression in the opposition which the proposal met with, a few years ago, that persons in the Civil Service of the Federal government should be irremovable, save for misconduct, instead of being turned out of their places after every change of administration, as had previously been the case. It was argued that fixity of tenure of office would have the result of creating a bureaucracy, the members of which would come in time to regard themselves as a privileged class. That these apprehensions were unfounded, experience of the practical working of the new system of government patronage has proved. But the very fact of the objection having been raised at all shows how sensitive public opinion was on the subject.

One noticeable feature of American society is that in none of the Northern States does an officer in the army or navy enjoy the social status that he commands in all European countries. Holmes, in _The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_, has commented upon this trait of his countrymen. He says: ‘It is curious to observe of how small account military folk are held among our Northern people. Our young men must gild their spurs, but they need not win them. The equal division of property keeps the younger sons of rich people above the necessity of military service. Thus, the army loses one element of refinement, and the moneyed upper classes forget what it is to count heroism amongst their virtues. Still, I don’t believe in any aristocracy without pluck as its backbone. Ours may show it when the day comes, if ever it does come.’