The Vultures Part 9

"She has already made a few--this evening," put in the Frenchman, with a significant gesture of his gloved hand.

"Ah!"

"Not one who can hurt her, I think. I can see to that. The usual enemy--of a pretty girl--that is all."

He broke off with a sudden laugh. Once or twice he had laughed like that, and his manner was restless and uneasy. In a younger man, or one less experienced and hardened, the observant might have suspected some hidden excitement. Lady Orlay turned and looked at him curiously, with the frankness of a friends.h.i.+p which had lasted nearly half a century.

"What is it?"

He laughed--but he laughed uneasily--and spread out his hands in a gesture of bewilderment.

"What is what?"

Lady Orlay looked at her fan reflectively as she opened and closed it.

"Reginald Cartoner has turned up quite suddenly," she said. "Mr. Mangles has arrived from Was.h.i.+ngton. You are here from Paris. A few minutes ago old Karl Steinmetz, who still watches the nations en amateur, shook hands with me. This Prince Bukaty is not a nonent.i.ty. All the Vultures are a.s.sembling, Paul. I can see that. I can see that my husband sees it."

"Ah! you and yours are safe now. You are in the backwater--you and Orlay--quietly moored beneath the trees."

"Finally," continued Lady Orlay, without heeding the interruption, "you come to me with a light in your eye which I have seen there only once or twice during nearly fifty years. It means war, or something very like it--the Vultures."

She gave a little s.h.i.+ver as she looked round the room. After a short silence Deulin rose suddenly and held out his hand.

"Good-bye," he said. "You are too discerning. Good-bye."

"You are going--?"

"Away," he answered, with a wave of the hand descriptive of s.p.a.ce. "I must go and pack my trunks."

Lady Orlay had not moved when Mr. Mangles came up to say good-night.

Miss Julia P. Mangles bowed in a manner which she considered impressive and the world thought ponderous. Netty Cahere murmured a few timid words of thanks.

"We shall hope to see you again," said Lady Orlay to Mr. Mangles.

"'Fraid not," he answered; "we're going to travel on the Continent."

"When do you start?" asked her ladys.h.i.+p.

"To-morrow morning."

"Another one," muttered Lady Orlay, watching Mr. Mangles depart. And her brief reverie was broken into by Reginald Cartoner.

"You have come to say good-bye," she said to him.

"Yes."

"You are going away again?"

"Yes."

"And you will not tell me where you are going."

"I cannot," answered Cartoner.

"Then I will tell you," said Lady Orlay, who, as Paul Deulin had said, was very experienced and very discerning.

"You are going to Russia, all of you."

VII

AT THE FRONTIER

Daylight was beginning to contend with the brilliant electric illumination of the long platform as that which is called the Warsaw Express steamed into Alexandrowo Station. There are many who have never heard of Alexandrowo, and others who know it only too well.

How many a poor devil has dropped from the footboard of the train just before these electric lights were reached--to take his chance of crossing the frontier before morning--history will never tell! How many have succeeded in pa.s.sing in and out of that dread railway station with a false pa.s.sport and a steady face, beneath the searching eye of the officials, Heaven only knows! There is no other way of pa.s.sing Alexandrowo--of getting in or out of the kingdom of Poland--but by this route. Before the train is at a standstill at the platform each one of the long corridor carriages is boarded by a man in the dirty white trousers, the green tunic and green cap, the top-boots, and the majesty of Russian law. Here, whatever time of day or night, winter or summer, it is always as light as day, thanks to an unsparing use of electricity.

There are always sentries on the outer side of the train. The platform is a prison-yard--the waiting rooms are prison-yards.

With a pa.s.sport in perfect order, vised for here and there and everywhere, with good clothes, good luggage, and nothing contraband in baggage or demeanor, Alexandrowo is easy enough. Obedience and patience will see the traveller through. There is no fear of his being left in the huge station, or of his going anywhere but to his avowed and rightful destination. But with a pa.s.sport that is old or torn, with a visa which bears any but a recent date, with a restless eye or a hunted look, the voyager had better take his chance of dropping from the footboard at speed, especially if it be a misty night.

Like sheep, the pa.s.sengers are driven from the train in which not so much as a newspaper is left. Only the sleeping-car is allowed to go through, but it is emptied and searched. The travellers are penned within a large room where the luggage is inspected, and they are deprived of their pa.s.sports. When the customs formalities are over they are allowed to find the refreshment-room, and there console themselves with weak tea in tumblers until such time as they are released.

The train on this occasion was a full one, and the great inspection-room, with its bare walls and glaring lights, crammed to overflowing. The majority of the travellers seemed, as usual, to be Germans. There were a few ladies. And two men, better dressed than the others, had the appearance of Englishmen. They drifted together--just as the women drifted together and the little knot of shady characters who hoped against hope that their pa.s.sports were in order. For the most part, no one spoke, though one German commercial traveller protested with so much warmth that an examination of his trunks was nothing but an intrusion on the officer's valuable time that a few essayed to laugh and feel at their ease.

Reginald Cartoner, who had been among the first to quit Lady Orlay's, was an easy first across the frontier. He had twelve hours' start of anybody, and was twenty-four hours ahead of all except Paul Deulin, whose train had steamed into Berlin Station as the Warsaw Express left it. He seemed to know the ways of Alexandrowo, and the formalities to be observed at the frontier, but he was not eager to betray his knowledge.

He obeyed with a silent patience the instructions of the white-ap.r.o.ned, black-capped porter who had a semi-official charge of him. He made no attempt to escape an examination of his luggage, and he avoided the refreshment-room tea.

Cartoner glanced at the man, whose appearance would seem to indicate that he was a fellow-countryman, and made sure that he did not know him.

Then he looked at him again, and the other happened to turn his profile.

Cartoner recognized the profile, and drew away to the far corner of the examination-room. But they drifted together again--or, perhaps, the younger man made a point of approaching. It was, at all events, he who, when all had been marshalled into the refreshment-room, drew forward a chair and sat down at the table where Cartoner had placed himself.

He ordered a cup of coffee in Russian, and sought his cigarette-case. He opened it and laid it on the table in front of Cartoner. He was a fair young man, with an energetic manner and the clear, ruddy complexion of a high-born Briton.

"Englishman?" he said, with an easy and friendly nod.

"Yes," answered Cartoner, taking the proffered cigarette. His manner was oddly stiff.

"Thought you were," said the other, who, though his clothes were English and his language was English, was nevertheless not quite an Englishman.

There was a sort of eagerness in his look, a picturesque turn of the head--a sense, as it were, of the outwardly pictorial side of existence.

He moved his chair, in order to turn his back on a Russian officer who was seated near, and did it absently, as if mechanically closing his eye to something unsightly and conducive to discomfort. Then he turned to his coffee with a youthful spirit of enjoyment.

"All this would be mildly amusing," he said, "at say any other hour of the twenty-four, but at three in the morning it is rather poor fun. Do you succeed in sleeping in these German schlafwagens?"

"I can sleep anywhere," replied Cartoner, and his companion glanced at him inquiringly. It seemed that he was sleepy now, and did not wish to talk.

"I know Alexandrowo pretty well," the other volunteered, nevertheless, "and the ways of these gentlemen. With some of them I am quite on friendly terms. They are inconceivably stupid; as boring as--the multiplication-table. I am going to Warsaw; are you? I fancy we have the sleeping-car to ourselves. I live in Warsaw as much as anywhere."