The Vultures Part 10

He paused to feel in his pocket, not for his cigarettes this time, but for a card.

"I know who you are," said Cartoner, quietly: "I recognized you from your likeness to your sister. I was dancing with her forty-eight hours ago in London."

"Wanda?" inquired the other, eagerly. "Dear old Wanda! How is she? She was the prettiest girl in the room, I bet."

He leaned across the table.

"Tell me," he said, "all about them. But, first, tell me your name.

Wanda writes to me nearly every day, and I hear about all their friends--the Orlays and the others. What is your name? She is sure to have made mention of it in her letters."

"Reginald Cartoner."

"Ah! I have heard of you--but not from Wanda."

He paused to reflect.

"No," he added, rather wonderingly, after a pause. "No, she never mentioned your name. But, of course, I know it. It is better known out of England than in your own country, I fancy. Deulin--you know Deulin?--has spoken to us of you. No doubt we have dozens of other friends in common. We shall find them out in time. I am very glad to meet you. You say you know my name--yes, I am Martin Bukaty. Odd that you should have recognized me from my likeness to Wanda. I am very glad you think I am like her. Dear old Wanda! She is a better sort than I am, you know."

And he finished with a frank and hearty laugh--not that there was anything to laugh at, but merely because he was young, and looked at life from a cheerful standpoint.

Cartoner sipped his coffee, and looked reflectively at his companion over the cup. "Cartoner," Paul Deulin had once said to a common friend, "weighs you, and naturally finds you wanting." It seemed that he was weighing Prince Martin Bukaty now.

"I saw your father also," he said, at length. "He was kind enough to ask me to call, which I did."

"That was kind of you. Of course we know no one in London--no one, I mean, who speaks anything except English. That is a thing which is never quite understood on the Continent--that if you go to London you must speak English. If you cannot, you had better hang yourself and be done with it, for you are practically in solitary confinement. My father does not easily make friends--you must have been very civil to him."

"According to my lights, I was," admitted Cartoner.

Martin laughed again. It is a gay heart that can be amused at three in the morning.

"The truth is," continued Martin, in his quick and rather heedless way, "that we Poles are under a cloud in Europe now. We are the wounded man by the side of the road from Jerusalem down to Jericho, and there is a tendency to pa.s.s by on the other side. We are a nation with a bad want, and it is n.o.body's business to satisfy it. Everybody is ready, however, to admit that we have been confoundedly badly treated."

He tossed off his coffee as he spoke, and turned in his chair to nod an acknowledgment to the profound bows of a gold-laced official who had approached him, and who now tendered an envelope, with some murmured words of politeness.

"Thank you--thank you," said Prince Martin, and slipped the envelope within his pocket.

"It is my pa.s.sport," he explained to Cartoner, lightly. "All the rest of you will receive yours when you are in the train. Mine is the doubtful privilege of being known here, and being a suspected character. So they are doubly polite and doubly watchful. As for you, at Alexandrowo you rejoice in a happy obscurity. You will pa.s.s in with the crowd, I suppose."

"I always try to," replied Cartoner. Which was strictly true.

"You see," went on Martin, not too discreetly, considering their environments, "we cannot forget that we were a great nation before there was a Russian Empire or an Austrian Empire or a German Empire. We are a landlady who has seen better days; who has let her lodgings to three foreign gentlemen who do not pay the rent--who make us clean their boots and then cast them at our heads."

The doors of the great room had now been thrown open, and the pa.s.sengers were pa.s.sing slowly out to the long, deserted platform. It was almost daylight now, and the train was drawn up in readiness to start, with a fresh engine and new officials. The homeliness of Germany had vanished, giving place to that subtle sense of discomfort and melancholy which hangs in the air from the Baltic to the Pacific coast.

"I hope you will stay a long time in Warsaw," said Martin, as they walked up the platform. "My father and sister will be coming home before long, and will be glad to see you. We will do what we can to make the place tolerable for you. We live in the Kotzebue, and I have a horse for you when you want it. You know we have good horses in Warsaw, as good as any. And the only way to see the country is from the saddle. We have the best horses and the worst roads."

"Thanks, very much," replied Cartoner. "I, of course, do not know how long I shall stay. I am not my own master, you understand. I never know from one day to another what my movements may be."

"No," replied Martin, in the absent tone of one who only half hears.

"No, of course not. By-the-way, we have the races coming on. I hope you will be here for them. In our small way, it is the season in Warsaw now. But, of course, there are difficulties--even the races present difficulties--there is the military element."

He paused and indicated with a short nod the Russian officer who was pa.s.sing to his carriage in front of them.

"They have the best horses," he explained. "They have more money than we have. We have been robbed, as you know. You, whose business it is."

He turned, with his foot on the step of the carriage. He was so accustomed to the recognition of his rank that he went first without question.

"Yes," he said, with a laugh, "I had quite forgotten that it is your business to know all about us."

"I have tried to remind you of it several times," answered Cartoner, quietly.

"To shut me up, you mean?" asked the younger man.

"Yes."

Martin was standing at the door of Cartoner's compartment. He turned away with a laugh.

"Good-night," he said. "Hope you will get some more sleep. We shall meet again in a few hours."

He closed the sliding door, and as the train moved slowly out of the station Cartoner could hear the cheerful voice--of a rather high timbre--in conversation with the German attendant in the corridor. For, like nearly all his countrymen, Prince Martin was a man of tongues. The Pole is compelled by circ.u.mstances to learn several languages: first, his own; then the language of the conqueror, either Russian or German, or perhaps both. For social purposes he must speak the tongue of the two countries that promised so much for Poland and performed so little--England and France.

Cartoner sat on the vacant seat in his compartment, which had not been made up as a bed, and listened thoughtfully to the pleasant tones. It was broad daylight now, and the flat, carefully cultivated land was green and fresh. Cartoner looked out of the window with an unseeing eye, and the sleeping-carriage lumbered along in silence. The Englishman seemed to have no desire for sleep, though, not being an impressionable man, he was usually able to rest and work, fast and eat at such times as might be convenient. He was considered by his friends to be a rather cold, steady man, who concealed under an indifferent manner an almost insatiable ambition. He certainly had given way to an entire absorption in his profession, and in the dogged acquirement of one language after another as occasion seemed to demand.

He had been, it was said, more than usually devoted to his profession, even to the point of sacrificing friends.h.i.+ps which, from a social and possibly from an ambitious point of view, could not have failed to be useful to him. Martin Bukaty was not the first man whom he had kept at arm's-length. But in this instance the treatment had not been markedly successful, and Cartoner was wondering now why the prince had been so difficult to offend. He had refused the friends.h.i.+p, and the effect had only been to bring the friend closer. Cartoner sat at the open window until the sun rose and the fields were dotted here and there with the figures of the red-clad peasant women working at the crops. At seven o'clock he was still sitting there, and soon after Prince Martin Bukaty, after knocking, drew back the sliding door and came into the compartment, closing the door behind him.

"I have been thinking about it," he said, in his quick way, "and it won't do, you know--it won't do. You cannot appear in Warsaw as our friend. It would never do for us to show special attention to you.

Anywhere else in the world, you understand, I am your friend, but not in Warsaw."

"Yes," said Cartoner, "I understand."

He rose as he spoke, for Prince Martin was holding out his hand.

"Good-bye," he said, in his quiet way, and they shook hands as the train glided into Warsaw Station.

In the doorway Martin turned and looked back over his shoulder.

"All the same, I don't understand why Wanda did not mention your name to me. She might have foreseen that we should meet. She is quick enough, as a rule, and has already saved my father and me half a dozen times."

He waited for an answer, and at length Cartoner spoke.

"She did not know that I was coming," he said.

VIII

IN A REMOTE CITY