The Prophet's Mantle

But morning was beginning to break, and with it came fresh snow.

At the foot of the next hill the secretary spoke again.

'Litvinoff, I'm certain I hear hoofs, and a good many of them.'

'So do I. We'll whip on—they can't hear us, the wind blows from them. We'll try another chance presently. I don't think we can win by speed.' He urged on the tired horses with voice and whip, and the weary animals put forth their strength in a wilder gallop. They were now rushing very swiftly through the icy air, and every moment increased the pace.

They had to slacken a little in going up the last and highest hill, near the crown of which they turned back their heads, and saw that what they had been flying from all night was close upon them now.

Over the brow of a lower hill immediately behind them came a band of horsemen, about a dozen strong as it seemed in the pale grey of the dawn.

'We must leave the sleigh,' said Litvinoff. 'Almost in a line across country to the left, not more than two versts off, is the house of Teliaboff; there we are safe for a day or two, if we can get there unseen. It's a desperate chance, but we must try it. Prop up the portmanteau and the furs to look like our figures. We'll tie the reins here, and get out just over the brow. They'll see us as we go over. Those Cossacks have eyes like eagles. We'll lash the horses on, and they'll go some distance without us; and when those devils find we're not in the sleigh they won't know exactly where to begin to search for us. Thank God, it's snowing harder and harder. That will help to hide our traces; and over this broken ground to the left our legs will serve us better than their horses will them.'

'There's barely a chance,' said the secretary. 'Let's stay and fight it out.'

'We'll fight if the worst comes to the worst; but as it is we've a very fair chance of escape. We have our revolvers.'

As they crossed the brow of the hill a wild shout borne by the wind told them that the Count had been right. They had been seen.

Litvinoff stopped the horses, and the two men got out, leaving the counterfeit presentment of themselves, which the secretary's deft hands had invested with a very real appearance.

The Count gave two tremendous lashes, the horses sprang madly forward at three times the pace they had made hitherto, and the two fugitives plunged through the snow to the left of the road.

'Don't go too fast,' whispered Litvinoff; 'you'll need all your wind presently. We've a fair start now, and they can't follow on horseback.'

They had not gone two hundred yards before they heard the troop sweep by.

'We weren't a minute too soon,' the secretary said.

'There goes another of them,' said the Count, as again they caught the sound of a horse's snow-muffled hoofs.

On they went, struggling over rough ground, sometimes waist-deep in snowdrifts, sometimes tripping over concealed stones or broken wood.

'We shall do it now,' said Litvinoff.

'They're on us, by God!' cried the secretary at the same instant.

They turned; they had been tracked, but only by one man. One of the pursuers, who had been a little behind the others, either better trained in this sort of sport than his fellows, or guided by some sixth sense, seemed to have divined what they had done, and had dismounted just at the right place, and followed them on foot.

He gave a yell of triumph as he saw a grey figure struggling up the incline before him.

'Aha, Mr Secretary,' he cried, and, raising his carbine, fired; the grey figure stumbled forward into the snow. 'You're done for, at any rate!'

The Cossack's triumph was a short one. As he dashed forward to secure his fallen quarry, another figure sprang from the snowy brushwood a little ahead of him, walked calmly towards him, raised a revolver, and shot him through the heart.

A week or two later one of those short and inaccurate paragraphs which date from St Petersburg appeared in several European papers. It was to the effect that Count Michael Litvinoff had been captured, after a desperate struggle, near the frontier, and that his private secretary, a young Englishman, had been shot in the fray.

But the French papers knew better, and that report was promptly contradicted.

The Débats, while confirming the news of the secretary's death, asserted that Count Michael Litvinoff was at that moment at the Hôtel du Louvre, and his bankers would have confirmed the statement.

And in the rooms of the Count at the Hôtel du Louvre a haggard, weary-faced man, almost worn out by the desperate excitement and the horrors of the last few weeks, was pacing up and down, unable to get away from the picture, that was ever before his eyes, of his friend's dead face, bloodstained and upturned from the snow, in the cold, grey morning light; unable to escape from that triumphant shout, 'Aha, Mr Secretary, you're done for, at any rate,' which seemed as if it would ring for ever in his ears.

'I would give ten years of my life to undo that night's work. I shall never meet another man quite like him. I wish the brute had shot me,' he said to himself over and over again.

CHAPTER I.

FATHER AND SONS

THE light was fading among the Derbyshire hills. The trees, now almost bare, were stirred by the fretful wind into what seemed like a passionate wail for their own lost loveliness, and on the wide bare stretch of moorland behind the house the strange weird cry of the plovers sounded like a dirge over the dead summer. The sharp, intermittent rain had beaten all the beauty out of the few late autumn flowers in the garden, and it was tender of the twilight to hasten to deepen into a darkness heavy enough to hide such a grey desolate picture.

Inside Thornsett Edge another and a deeper darkness was falling. Old Richard Ferrier was sick unto death, and he alone of all the household knew it. He knew it, and he was not sorry. Yet he sighed.

'What is it, Richard? Can I get you anything?'

A woman sitting behind his bed-curtain leaned forward to put the question—a faded woman, with grey curls and a face marked with deep care lines. It was his sister.

'Where are the boys?'

'Gone to Aspinshaw.'

'Both of them?'

'Yes; I asked Dick to take a note for me, and Roland said he'd go too.'

The old man looked pleased.

'Did you want either of them?' she asked.

'I want them both when they come in.'

'Suppose you are asleep?'

'I shall not sleep until I have seen my sons.'

'Art thee better to-night, Richard?' she asked in a tone of tender solicitude, dropping back, as people so often do in moments of anxiety, into the soft sing-song accent that had once been habitual to her.

'Ay, I'm better, lass,' he said, returning the pressure of the hand she laid on his.

'Wilt have a light?'

'Not yet a-bit,' he answered. 'I like to lie so, and watch the day right out,' and he turned his face towards the square of grey sky framed by the window.

There was hardly more pleasantness left in his life than in the dreary rain-washed garden outside. And yet his life had not been without its triumphs—as the world counts success. He had, when still young, married the woman he passionately loved, and work for her sake had seemed so easy that he had risen from poverty to competence, and from competence to wealth. Born in the poorest ranks of the workers in a crowded Stockport alley, he had started in life as a mill 'hand,' and he was ending it now a millowner, and master of many hands.

He had himself been taught in no school but that of life; but he did not attribute his own success to his education any more than he did the fatuous failure of some University men to their peculiar training; so he had sent his sons to Cambridge, and had lived to see them leave their college well-grown and handsome, with not more than the average stock of prejudices and follies, and fit to be compared, not unfavourably, with any young men in the county.

But by some fatality he had never tasted the full sweetness of any of the fruit his life-tree had borne him. His parents had died in want and misery at a time when he himself was too poor to help them. His wife, who had bravely shared his earlier struggles, did not live to share their reward. She patiently bore the trials of their early married life, but in the comfort that was to follow she had no part. She died, and left him almost broken-hearted. Her memory would always be the dearest thing in the world to him; but a man's warm, living, beating heart needs something more than a memory to lavish its love upon. This something more he found in her children. In them all his hopes had been centred; for them all his efforts had been made. They were, individually, all that he had dreamed they might be, and they were both devoted to him; and yet, as he lay on his deathbed, his mind was ill at ease about them. Did he exaggerate? Was it weakness and illness, the beginning of the end, that had made him think, through these last few weeks, that there was growing up between these two beloved sons a coolness—a want of sympathy, an indisposition to run well in harness together—which might lead to sore trouble?