Temporal Power: A Study in Supremacy Part 15

Leroy looked at her for a moment in silence.

"Madame, if the King heard your words he might perhaps regret his many follies!" he said courteously;--"But where Society is proved worse, instead of better for a king's influence, is it not somewhat too late to remedy the evil? What of the Queen?"

"The Queen is queen from necessity, not from choice!" said Lotys;--"She has never loved her husband. If she had loved him, perhaps he might,--through her,--have loved his people more!"

There was a note of pathos in her voice that was singularly tender and touching. Anon, as if impatient with herself, she turned to Sergius Thord.

"We must disperse!" she said abruptly; "Daybreak will be upon us before we know it, and we have done no business at all this evening. To enrol three new a.s.sociates is a matter of fifteen minutes; the rest of our time has been wasted!"

"Do not say so, Madame!" interposed Max Graub, "You have three new friends--three new 'sons of your blood,' as you so poetically call them,--though, truly, I for one am more fit to be your grandfather! And do you consider the time wasted that has been spent in improving and instructing your newly-born children?"

Lotys turned upon him with a look of disdain.

"You are a would-be jester;" she said coldly; "Old men love a jest, I know, but they should take care to make it at the right time, and in the right place. They should not play with edge-tools such as I am, though I suppose, being a German, you think little or nothing of women?"

"Madame!" protested Graub, "I think so much of women that I have never married! Behold me, an unhappy bachelor! I have spared any one of your beautiful s.e.x from the cruel martyrdom of having to endure my life-long company!"

She laughed--a pretty low laugh, and extended her hand with an air of queenly condescension.

"You are amusing!" she said,--"And so I will not quarrel with you!

Good-night!"

"Auf wiedersehn!" and Graub kissed the white hand he held. "I shall hope you will command me to be of service to you and yours, ere long!"

"In what way, I wonder," she asked dubiously; "What can you do best?

Write? Speak? Or organize meetings?"

"I think," said Graub, speaking very deliberately, "that of all my various accomplishments, which are many--as I shall one day prove to you--I can poison best!"

"Poison!"

The exclamation broke simultaneously from all the company. Graub looked about him with a triumphant air.

"Ah so,--I know I shall be useful," he said; "I can poison so very beautifully and well! One little drop--one, little microbe of mischief--and I can make all your enemies die of cholera, typhoid, bubonic plague, or what you please! I am what is called a Christian scientific poisoner--that is a doctor! You will find me a most invaluable member of this Brotherhood!"

He nodded his head wisely, and smiled. Sergius Thord laid one hand heavily on his shoulder.

"We shall find you useful, no doubt!" he said, "But mark me well, friend! Our mission is not to kill, but to save!--not to poison, but to heal! If we find that by the death of one traitor we can save the lives of thousands, why then that traitor must die. If we know that by killing a king we destroy a country's abuses, that king is sent to his account.

But never without warning!--never without earnest pleading that he whom the laws of Truth condemn, may turn from the error of his ways and repent before it is too late. We are not murderers;--we are merely the servants of justice."

"Exactly!" put in Paul Zouche; "You understand? We try to be what G.o.d is not,--just!"

"Blaspheme not, Zouche!" said Thord; "Justice is the very eye of G.o.d!--the very centre and foundation of the universe."

Zouche laughed discordantly.

"Excellent Sergius! Impulsive Sergius!--with big heart, big head and no logic! Prove to me this eternal justice! Where does it begin? In the creation of worlds without end, all doomed to destruction, and therefore perfectly futile in their existence? In the making of man, who lives his little day with the utmost difficulty, pain and struggle, and is then extinguished, to be heard of no more? The use of it, my Sergius!--point out the use of it! No,--there is no man can answer me that! If I could see the Creator, I would ask Him the question personally--but He hides Himself behind the great big pendulum He has set swinging--tick--tock!--tick--tock! Life--Death!--Life--Death!--and never a reason why the clock is set going! And so we shall never have justice,--simply because there is none! It is not just or reasonable to propound a question to which there is no answer; it is not just or reasonable to endow man with all the thinking powers of brain, and all the imaginative movements of mind, merely to turn him into a pinch of dust afterwards. Every generation, every country strives to get justice done, but cannot,--merely for the fact that G.o.d Himself has no idea of it, and therefore it is naturally lacking in His creature, man. Our governing-forces are plainly the elements. No Divine finger stops the earthquake from engulfing a village full of harmless inhabitants, simply because of the injustice of such utter destruction! See now!--look at the eyes of Lotys reproaching me! You would think they were the eyes of an angel, gazing at a devil in the sweet hope of plucking him out of h.e.l.l!"

"Such a hope would be vain in your case, Zouche," said Lotys tranquilly; "You make your own h.e.l.l, and you must live in it! Nevertheless, in some of the wild things you say, there is a grain of truth. If I were G.o.d, I should be the most miserable of all beings, to look upon all the misery I had myself created! I should be so sorry for the world, that I should put an end to all hope of immortality by my own death."

She made this strange remark with a simplicity and wistfulness which were in striking contrast to the awful profundity of the suggestion, and all her auditors, including the half-tipsy Zouche, were silent.

"I should be so sorry!" she repeated; "For even as a mortal woman my pity for the suffering world almost breaks my heart;--but if I were G.o.d, I should have all the griefs of all the worlds I had made to answer for,--and such an agony would surely kill me. Oh,--the pain, the tears, the mistakes, the sins, the anguish of humanity! All these are frightful to me! I do not understand why such misery should exist! I think it must be that we have not enough love in the world; if we only loved each other faithfully, G.o.d might love us more!"

Her eyes were wet; she caught her breath hard, and smiled a little difficult smile. Something in her soul transfigured her face, and made it for the moment exquisitely lovely, and the men around her gazed at her in evidently reverential silence. Suddenly she stretched out both her hands:

"Good-night, children!"

One by one the would-be-fierce a.s.sociates of the Revolutionary Committee bent low over those fair hands; and then quietly saluting Sergius Thord, as quietly left the room, like schoolboys retiring from a cla.s.s where the lessons had been more or less badly done. Paul Zouche was not very steady on his feet, and two of his comrades a.s.sisted him to walk as he stumbled off, singing somewhat of a ribald rhyme in _mezza-voce_.

Pasquin Leroy and his two friends were the last to go. Lotys looked at them all three meditatively.

"You will be faithful?" she said.

"Unto death!" answered Leroy.

She came close up to him, placing one hand on his arm, and glanced meaningly towards Sergius Thord, who was standing at the threshold watching Zouche stumbling down the dark stairs.

"Sergius is a good man!" she said; "One of the mistaken geniuses of this world,--savage as a lion, yet simple as a child! Whoever, and whatever you are, be true to him!"

"He is dear to you?" said Leroy on a sudden impulse, catching her hand; "He is more to you than most men?"

She s.n.a.t.c.hed away her hand, and her eyes lightened first with wrath, then with laughter.

"Dear to me!" she echoed,--"to Me? No one man on earth is dearer to me than another! All are alike in my estimation,--all the same barbaric, foolish babes and children--all to be loved and pitied alike! But Sergius Thord picked me out of the streets when I was no better than a stray and starving dog,--and like a dog I serve him--faithfully! Now go!"

She stretched out her hand in an att.i.tude of command, and there was nothing for it but to obey. They therefore repeated their farewells, and in their turn, went out, one by one, down the tortuous staircase.

Sholto, the hunchback, was below, and he let them out without a word, closing and barring the door carefully behind them. Once in the street and under the misty moonlight, Pasquin Leroy nodded a careless dismissal to his companions.

"You will return alone?" enquired Max Graub.

"Quite alone!" was the reply.

"May I not follow you at a distance?" asked Axel Regor.

Leroy smiled. "You forget! One of the rules we have just sworn to conform to, is--'No member shall track, follow or enquire into the movements of any other member.' Go your ways! I will thank you both for your services to-morrow."

He turned away rapidly and disappeared. His two friends remained gazing somewhat disconsolately after him.

"Shall we go?" at last said Max Graub.

"When you please," replied Axel Regor irritably,--"The sooner the better for me! Here we are probably watched,--we had best go down to the quay, and from thence----"

He did not finish his sentence, but Graub evidently understood its conclusion--and they walked quickly away together in quite an opposite direction to that in which Leroy had gone.

Meanwhile, up in the now closed and darkened house they had left behind them, Lotys stood looking at Sergius Thord, who had thrown himself into a chair and sat with his elbows resting on the table, and his head buried in his hands.

"You make no way, poor Sergius!" she said gently. "You work, you write, you speak to the people, but you make no way!"

He looked up fiercely.