by Ouida
The Seraph gazed at him with a fixed, astounded horror; he could not believe his senses; he could not realize what he saw. His dearest friend stood mute beneath the charge of lowest villainy — stood powerless before the falsehoods of a Jew extortioner!
“Bertie! Great Heaven!” he cried, well-nigh beside himself, “how can you stand silent there? Do you hear — do you hear aright? Do you know the accursed thing this conspiracy has tried to charge you with? Say something, for the love of God! I will have vengeance on your slanderer, if you take none.”
He had looked for the rise of the same passion that rang in his own imperious words, for the fearless wrath of an insulted gentleman, the instantaneous outburst of a contemptuous denial, the fire of scorn, the lightning flash of fury — all that he gave himself, all that must be so naturally given by a slandered man under the libel that brands him with disgrace. He had looked for these as surely as he looked for the setting of one sun and the rise of another; he would have staked his life on the course of his friend’s conduct as he would upon his own, and a ghastly terror sent a pang to his heart.
Still — Cecil stood silent; there was a strange, set, repressed anguish on his face that made it chill as stone; there was an unnatural calm upon him; yet he lifted his head with a gesture haughty for the moment as any action that his defender could have wished.
“I am not guilty,” he said simply.
The Seraph’s hands were on his own in a close, eager grasp almost ere the words were spoken.
“Beauty, Beauty! Never say that to me. Do you think I can ever doubt you?”
For a moment Cecil’s head sank; the dignity with which he had spoken remained on him, but the scorn of his defiance and his denial faded.
“No; you cannot; you never will.”
The words were spoken almost mechanically, like a man in a dream. Ezra Baroni, standing calmly there with the tranquility that an assured power alone confers, smiled slightly once more.
“You are not guilty, Mr. Cecil? I shall be charmed if we can find it so. Your proofs?”
“Proof? I give you my word.”
Baroni bowed, with a sneer at once insolent but subdued.
“We men of business, sir, are — perhaps inconveniently for gentlemen — given to a preference in favor of something more substantial. Your word, doubtless, is your bond among your acquaintance; it is a pity for you that your friend’s name should have been added to the bond you placed with us. Business men’s pertinacity is a little wearisome, no doubt, to officers and members of the aristocracy like yourself; but all the same I must persist — how can you disprove this charge?”
The Seraph turned on him with a fierceness of a bloodhound.
“You dog! If you use that tone again in my presence, I will double-throng you till you cannot breathe!”
Baroni laughed a little; he felt secure now, and could not resist the pleasure of braving and of torturing the “aristocrats.”
“I don’t doubt your will or your strength, my lord; but neither do I doubt the force of the law to make you account for any brutality of the prize-ring your lordship may please to exert on me.”
The Seraph ground his heel into the carpet.
“We waste words on that wretch,” he said abruptly to Cecil. “Prove his insolence the lie it is, and we will deal with him later on.”
“Precisely what I said, my lord,” murmured Baroni. “Let Mr. Cecil prove his innocence.”
Into Bertie’s eyes came a hunted, driven desperation. He turned them on Rockingham with a look that cut him to the heart; yet the abhorrent thought crossed him — was it thus that men guiltless looked?
“Mr. Cecil was with my partner at 7:50 on the evening of the 15th. It was long over business hours, but my partner to oblige him stretched a point,” pursued the soft, bland, malicious voice of the German Jew. “If he was not at our office — where was he? That is simple enough.”
“Answered in a moment!” said the Seraph, with impetuous certainty. “Cecil! — to prove this man what he is, not for an instant to satisfy me — where were you at that time on the 15th?”
“The 15th!”
“Where were you?” pursued his friend. “Were you at mess? At the clubs? Dressing for dinner? — where — where? There must be thousands of ways of remembering — thousands of people who’ll prove it for you?”
Cecil stood mute still; his teeth clinched on his under lip. He could not speak — a woman’s reputation lay in his silence.
“Can’t you remember?” implored the Seraph. “You will think — you must think!”
There was a feverish entreaty in his voice. That hunted helplessness with which a question so slight yet so momentous was received, was forcing in on him a thought that he flung away like an asp.
Cecil looked both of them full in the eyes — both his accuser and his friend. He was held as speechless as though his tongue were paralyzed; he was bound by his word of honor; he was weighted with a woman’s secret.
“Don’t look at me so, Bertie, for mercy’s sake! Speak! Where were you?”
“I cannot tell you; but I was not there.”
The words were calm; there was a great resolve in them, moreover; but his voice was hoarse and his lips shook. He paid a bitter price for the butterfly pleasure of a summer-day love.
“Cannot tell me! — cannot? You mean you have forgotten!”
“I cannot tell you; it is enough.”
There was an almost fierce and sullen desperation in the answer; its firmness was not shaken, but the ordeal was terrible. A woman’s reputation — a thing so lightly thrown away with an idler’s word, a Lovelace’s smile! — that was all he had to sacrifice to clear himself from the toils gathering around him. That was all! And his word of honor.
Baroni bent his head with an ironic mockery of sympathy.
“I feared so, my lord. Mr. Cecil ‘cannot tell.’ As it happens, my partner can tell. Mr. Cecil was with him at the hour and on the day I specify; and Mr. Cecil transacted with him the bill that I have had the honor of showing you—”
“Let me see it.”
The request was peremptory to imperiousness, yet Cecil would have faced his death far sooner than he would have looked upon that piece of paper.
Baroni smiled.
“It is not often that we treat gentlemen under misfortune in the manner we treat you, sir; they are usually dealt with more summarily, less mercifully. You must excuse altogether my showing you the document; both you and his lordship are officers skilled, I believe, in the patrician science of fist-attack.”
He could not deny himself the pleasure and the rarity of insolence to the men before him, so far above him in social rank, yet at that juncture so utterly at his mercy.
“You mean that we should fall foul of you and seize it?” thundered Rockingham in the magnificence of his wrath. “Do you judge the world by your own wretched villainies? Let him see the paper; lay it there, or, as there is truth on earth, I will kill you where you stand.”
The Jew quailed under the fierce flashing of those leonine eyes. He bowed with that tact which never forsook him.
“I confide it to your honor, my Lord Marquis,” he said, as he spread out the bill on the console. He was an able diplomatist.
Cecil leaned forward and looked at the signatures dashed across the paper; both who saw him saw also the shiver, like a shiver of intense cold, that ran through him as he did so, and saw his teeth clinch tight, in the extremity of rage, in the excess of pain, or — to hold in all utterance that might be on his lips.
“Well?” asked the Seraph, in a breathless anxiety. He knew not what to believe, what to do, whom to accuse of, or how to unravel this mystery of villainy and darkness; but he felt, with a sickening reluctance which drove him wild, that his friend did not act in this thing as he should have acted; not as men of assured innocence and secure honor act beneath such a charge. Cecil was unlike himself, unlike every deed and word of his life, unlike every thought of the Seraph’s fearless
expectance, when he had looked for the coming of the accused as the signal for the sure and instant unmasking, condemnation, and chastisement of the false accuser.
“Do you still persist in denying your criminality in the face of that bill, Mr. Cecil?” asked the bland, sneering, courteous voice of Ezra Baroni.
“I do. I never wrote either of these signatures; I never saw that document until to-night.”
The answer was firmly given, the old blaze of scorn came again in his weary eyes, and his regard met calmly and unflinchingly the looks fastened on him; but the nerves of his lips twitched, his face was haggard as by a night’s deep gambling; there was a heavy dew on his forehead — it was not the face of a wholly guiltless, of a wholly unconscious man; often even as innocence may be unwittingly betrayed into what wears the semblance of self-condemnation.
“And yet you equally persist in refusing to account for your occupation of the early evening hours of the 15th? Unfortunate!”
“I do; but in your account of them you lie!”
There was a sternness inflexible as steel in the brief sentence. Under it for an instant, though not visibly, Baroni flinched; and a fear of the man he accused smote him, more deep, more keen than that with which the sweeping might of the Seraph’s fury had moved him. He knew now why Ben Davis had hated with so deadly a hatred the latent strength that slept under the Quietist languor and nonchalance of “the d —— d Guards’ swell.”
What he felt, however, did not escape him by the slightest sign.
“As a matter of course you deny it!” he said, with a polite wave of his hand. “Quite right; you are not required to criminate yourself. I wish sincerely we were not compelled to criminate you.”
The Seraph’s grand, rolling voice broke in; he had stood chafing, chained, panting in agonies of passion and of misery.
“M. Baroni!” he said hotly, the furious vehemence of his anger and his bewilderment obscuring in him all memory of either law or fact, “you have heard his signature and your statements alike denied once for all by Mr. Cecil. Your document is a libel and a conspiracy, like your charge; it is false, and you are swindling; it is an outrage, and you are a scoundrel; you have schemed this infamy for the sake of extortion; not a sovereign will you obtain through it. Were the accusation you dare to make true, I am the only one whom it can concern, since it is my name which is involved. Were it true — could it possibly be true — I should forbid any steps to be taken in it; I should desire it ended once and forever. It shall be so now, by God!”
He scarcely knew what he was saying; yet what he did say, utterly as it defied all checks of law or circumstance, had so gallant a ring, had so kingly a wrath, that it awed and impressed even Baroni in the instant of its utterance.
“They say that those fine gentlemen fight like a thousand lions when they are once roused,” he thought. “I can believe it.”
“My lord,” he said softly, “you have called me by many epithets, and menaced me with many threats since I have entered this chamber; it is not a wise thing to do with a man who knows the law. However, I can allow for the heat of your excitement. As regards the rest of your speech, you will permit me to say that its wildness of language is only equaled by the utter irrationality of your deductions and your absolute ignorance of all legalities. Were you alone concerned and alone the discoverer of this fraud, you could prosecute or not as you please; but we are subjects of its imposition, ours is the money that he has obtained by that forgery, and we shall in consequence open the prosecution.”
“Prosecution?” The echo rang in an absolute agony from his hearer; he had thought of it as, at its worst, only a question between himself and Cecil.
The accused gave no sigh, the rigidity and composure he had sustained throughout did not change; but at the Seraph’s accent the hunted and pathetic misery which had once before gleamed in his eyes came there again; he held his comrade in a loyal and exceeding love. He would have let all the world stone him, but he could not have borne that his friend should cast even a look of contempt.
“Prosecution!” replied Baroni. “It is a matter of course, my lord, that Mr. Cecil denies the accusation; it is very wise; the law specially cautions the accused to say nothing to criminate themselves. But we waste time in words; and, pardon me, if you have your friend’s interest at heart, you will withdraw this very stormy championship; this utterly useless opposition to an inevitable line of action. I must attest Mr. Cecil; but I am willing — for I know to high families these misfortunes are terribly distressing — to conduct everything with the strictest privacy and delicacy. In a word, if you and he consult his interests, he will accompany me unresistingly; otherwise I must summon legal force. Any opposition will only compel a very unseemly encounter of physical force, and with it the publicity I am desirous, for the sake of his relatives and position, to spare him.”
A dead silence followed his words, the silence that follows on an insult that cannot be averted or avenged; on a thing too hideously shameful for the thoughts to grasp it as reality.
In the first moment of Baroni’s words Cecil’s eyes had gleamed again with that dark and desperate flash of a passion that would have been worse to face even than his comrade’s wrath; it died, however, well-nigh instantly, repressed by a marvelous strength of control, whatever its motive. He was simply, as he had been throughout, passive — so passive that even Ezra Baroni, who knew what the Seraph never dreamed, looked at him in wonder, and felt a faint, sickly fear of that singular, unbroken calm. It perplexed him — the first thing which had ever done so in his own peculiar paths of finesse and of intrigue.
The one placed in ignorance between them, at once as it were the judge and champion of his brother-at-arms, felt wild and blind under this unutterable shame, which seemed to net them both in such close and hopeless meshes. He, heir to one of the greatest coronets in the world, must see his friend branded as a common felon, and could do no more to aid or to avenge him than if he were a charcoal-burner toiling yonder in the pine woods! His words were hoarse and broken as he spoke:
“Cecil, tell me — what is to be done? This infamous outrage cannot pass! cannot go on! I will send for the Duke, for—”
“Send for no one.”
Bertie’s voice was slightly weaker, like that of a man exhausted by a long struggle, but it was firm and very quiet. Its composure fell on Rockingham’s tempestuous grief and rage with a sickly, silencing awe, with a terrible sense of some evil here beyond his knowledge and ministering, and of an impotence alike to act and to serve, to defend and to avenge — the deadliest thing his fearless life had ever known.
“Pardon me, my lord,” interposed Baroni, “I can waste time no more. You must be now convinced yourself of your friend’s implication in this very distressing affair.”
“I!” The Seraph’s majesty of haughtiest amaze and scorn blazed from his azure eyes on the man who dared say this thing to him. “I! If you dare hint such a damnable shame to my face again, I will wring your neck with as little remorse as I would a kite’s. I believe in his guilt? Forgive me, Cecil, that I can even repeat the word! I believe in it? I would as soon believe in my own disgrace — in my father’s dishonor!”
“How will your lordship account, then, for Mr. Cecil’s total inability to tell us know he spent the hours between six and nine on the 15th?”
“Unable? He is not unable; he declines! Bertie, tell me what you did that one cursed evening. Whatever it was, wherever it was, say it for my sake, and shame this devil.”
Cecil would more willingly have stood a line of leveled rifle-tubes aimed at his heart than that passionate entreaty from the man he loved best on earth. He staggered slightly, as if he were about to fall, and a faint white foam came on his lips; but he recovered himself almost instantly. It was so natural to him to repress every emotion that it was simply old habit to do so now.
“I have answered,” he said very low, each word a pang— “I cannot.”
Baroni waved his hand again with the
same polite, significant gesture.
“In that case, then, there is but one alternative. Will you follow me quietly, sir, or must force be employed?”
“I will go with you.”
The reply was very tranquil, but in the look that met his own as it was given, Baroni saw that some other motive than that of any fear was its spring; that some cause beyond the mere abhorrence of “a scene” was at the root of the quiescence.
“It must be so,” said Cecil huskily to his friend. “This man is right, so far as he knows. He is only acting on his own convictions. We cannot blame him. The whole is — a mystery, an error. But, as it stands, there is no resistance.”
“Resistance! By God! I would resist if I shot him dead, or shot myself. Stay — wait — one moment! If it be an error in the sense you mean, it must be a forgery of your name as of mine. You think that?”
“I did not say so.”
The Seraph gave him a rapid, shuddering glance; for once the suspicion crept in on him — was this guilt? Yet even now the doubt would not be harbored by him.
“Say so — you must mean so! You deny them as yours; what can they be but forgeries? There is no other explanation. I think the whole matter a conspiracy to extort money; but I may be wrong — let that pass. If it be, on the contrary, an imitation of both our signatures that has been palmed off upon these usurers, it is open to other treatment. Compensated for their pecuniary loss, they can have no need to press the matter further, unless they find out the delinquent. See here” — he went to a writing-cabinet at the end of the room, flung the lid back, swept out a heap of papers, and wrenching a blank check from the book, threw it down before Baroni— “here! fill it up as you like, and I will sign it in exchange for the forged sheet.”
Baroni paused a moment. Money he loved with an adoration that excluded every other passion; that blank check, that limitless carte blanche, that vast exchequer from which to draw! — it was a sore temptation. He thought wistfully of the welsher’s peremptory forbiddance of all compromise — of the welsher’s inexorable command to “wring the fine-feathered bird,” lose whatever might be lost by it.