“Dear Miss Amhurst, I cannot afford to fall lower in your estimation than perhaps I deserve, so I must say that this fear which has overcome me is all on account of my friend, and not on my own behalf at all. I am perfectly safe in Russia, being a British subject. My cold and formal Cousin Thaxted is a member of the British Embassy here, and my cold and formal uncle is a Cabinet Minister in England, facts which must be well known to these spy-informed people of St. Petersburg; so I am immune. The worst they could do would be to order me out of the country, but even that is unthinkable. If any one attempted to interfere with me, I have only to act the hero of the penny novelette, draw myself up to my full height, which, as you know, is not that of a pigmy, fold my arms across my manly chest, cry, ‘Ha, ha!’ and sing ‘Rule Britannia,’ whereupon the villains would wilt and withdraw. But Jack has no such security. He is a Russian subject, and, prince or commoner, the authorities here could do what they liked with him. I always think of things when it is too late to act. I wish I had urged Jack ashore at Bar Harbor, and induced him to take the oath of allegiance to the United States. I spoke to him about that coming home in the carriage, and to my amazement he said he wished he had thought of it himself at the time we were over there.

“But enough of this. I daresay he is in no real danger after all. Nevertheless, I shall induce him to pack to-morrow, and we will make for London together, so my next letter will bear a British stamp, and I assure you the air of England will taste good to one benighted Britisher whose name is Alan Drummond.”

CHAPTER X —CALAMITY UNSEEN

THE habit of industry practised from childhood to maturity is not obliterated by an unexpected shower of gold. Dorothy was an early riser, and one morning, entering the parlor from her room she saw, lying upon the table, a letter with a Russian stamp, but addressed in an unknown hand to her friend Katherine Kempt. She surmised that here was the first communication from the Prince, and expected to learn all about it during the luncheon hour at the latest. But the morning and afternoon passed, and Katherine made no sign, which Dorothy thought was most unusual. All that day and the next Katherine went about silent, sedate and serious, never once quoting the humorous Mr. Gilbert. On the third morning Dorothy was surprised, emerging from her room, to see Katherine standing by the table, a black book in her hand. On the table lay a large package from New York, recently opened, displaying a number of volumes in what might be termed serious binding, leather or cloth, but none showing that high coloring which distinguishes the output of American fiction.

“Good-morning, Dorothy. The early bird is after the worm of science.” She held forth the volume in her hand. “Steele’s ‘Fourteen-Weeks’ Course in Chemistry,’ an old book, but fascinatingly written. Dorothy,” she continued with a sigh, “I want to talk seriously with you.”

“About chemistry?” asked Dorothy.

“About men,” said Katherine firmly, “and, incidentally, about women.”

“An interesting subject, Kate, but you’ve got the wrong text-books. You should have had a parcel of novels instead.”

Dorothy seated herself, and Katherine followed her example, Steele’s “Fourteen-Weeks’ Course” resting in her lap.

“Every man,” began Katherine, “should have a guardian to protect him.”

“From women?”

“From all things that are deceptive, and not what they seem.”

“That sounds very sententious, Kate. What does it mean?”

“It means that man is a simpleton, easily taken in. He is too honest for crafty women, who delude him shamelessly.”

“Whom have you been deluding, Kate?”

“Dorothy, I am a sneak.”

Dorothy laughed.

“Indeed, Katherine, you are anything but that. You couldn’t do a mean or ungenerous action if you tried your best.”

“You think, Dorothy, I could reform?” she asked, breathlessly, leaning forward.

“Reform? You don’t need to reform. You are perfectly delightful as you are, and I know no man who is worthy of you. That’s a woman’s opinion; one who knows you well, and there is nothing dishonest about the opinion, either, in spite of your tirade against our sex.”

“Dorothy, three days ago, be the same more or less, I received a letter from John Lamont.”

“Yes, I saw it on the table, and surmised it was from him.”

“Did you? You were quite right. The reading of that letter has revolutionized my character. I am a changed woman, Dorothy, and thoroughly ashamed of myself. When I remember how I have deluded that poor, credulous young man, in making him believe I understood even the fringe of what he spoke about, it fills me with grief at my perfidy, but I am determined to amend my ways if hard study will do it, and when next I see him I shall talk to him worthily like a female Thomas A. Edison.”

Again Dorothy laughed.

“Now, that’s heartless of you, Dorothy. Don’t you see I’m in deadly earnest? Must my former frivolity dog my steps through life? When I call to mind that I made fun to you of his serious purpose in life, the thought makes me cringe and despise myself.”

“Nonsense, Kate, don’t go to the other extreme. I remember nothing you have said that needs withdrawal. You have never made a malicious remark in your life, Kate. Don’t make me defend you against yourself. You have determined, I take it, to plunge into the subjects which interest the man you are going to marry. That is a perfectly laudable ambition, and I am quite sure you will succeed.”

“I know I don’t deserve all that, Dorothy, but I like it just the same. I like people to believe in me, even if I sometimes lose faith in myself. May I read you an extract from his letter?”

“Don’t if you’d rather not.”

“I’d rather, Dorothy, if it doesn’t weary you, but you will understand when you have heard it, in what a new light I regard myself.”

The letter proved to be within the leaves of the late Mr. Steele’s book on Chemistry, and from this volume she extracted it, pressed it for a moment against her breast with her open hand, gazing across at her friend.

“Dorothy, my first love-letter!”

She turned the crisp, thin pages, and began:

“‘You may recollect that foot-note which you marked with red ink in the book you so kindly gave me on the subject of Catalysis, which did not pertain to the subject of the volume in question, and yet was so illuminative to any student of chemistry. They have done a great deal with Catalysis in Germany with amazing commercial results, but the subject is one so recent that I had not previously gone thoroughly into it.’”

Katherine paused in the reading, and looked across at her auditor, an expression almost of despair in her eloquent eyes.

“Dorothy, what under heaven is Catalysis?”

“Don’t ask me,” replied Dorothy, suppressing a laugh, struck by the ludicrousness of any young and beautiful woman pressing any such sentiments as these to her bosom.

“Have you ever heard of a Catalytic process, Dorothy?” beseeched Katherine. “It is one of the phrases he uses.”

“Never; go on with the letter, Kate.”

“‘I saw at once that if I could use Catalytic process which would be instantaneous in its solidifying effect on my liquid limestone, instead of waiting upon slow evaporation, I could turn out building stone faster than one can make brick. You, I am sure, with your more alert mind, saw this when you marked that passage in red.’”

“Oh, Dorothy,” almost whimpered Katherine, leaning back, “how can I go on? Don’t you see what a sneak I am? It was bad enough to cozen with my heedless, random markings of the book, but to think that line of red ink might have been marked in his blood, for I nearly sent the poor boy to his death.”

“Go on, Katherine, go on, go on!”

“‘In my search for a Catalytic whose substance would remain unchanged after the reaction, I quite overlooked the chemical ingredients of one of the materials I was dealing with, and the result was an explosion which nearly blew the roof off the shop, and quite startled poor Drummond out of a year’s growth. However, no real harm has been done, while I have been taught a valuable lesson; to take into account all the elements I am using. I must not become so intent on the subject I am pursuing as to ignore everything else.’ And now, Dorothy, I want to ask you a most intimate question, which I beg of you to answer as frankly as I have confided in you.”

“I know what your question is, Kate. A girl who is engaged wishes to see her friend in the same position. You would ask me if I am in love with Alan Drummond, and I answer perfectly frankly that I am not.”

“You are quite sure of that, Dorothy?”

“Quite. He is the only man friend I have had, except my own father, and I willingly confess to a sisterly interest in him.”

“Well, if that is all—”

“It is all, Kate. Why?”

“Because there is something about him in this letter, which I would read to you if I thought you didn’t care.”

“Oh, he is in love with Jack’s sister, very likely. I should think that would be a most appropriate arrangement. Jack is his best friend, and perhaps a lover would weaken the influence which Tolstoi exerts over an emotional person’s mind. Lieutenant Drummond, with his sanity, would probably rescue a remnant of her estates.”

“Oh, well, if you can talk as indifferently as that, you are all right, Dorothy. No, there is no other woman in the case. Here’s what Jack says:

“‘It is amazing how little an Englishman understands people of other nations. Here is my tall friend Drummond marching nonchalantly among dangers of which he has not the least conception. The authorities whom he thinks so courteous are fooling him to the top of his bent. There is, of course, no danger of his arrest, but nevertheless the eyes of the police are upon him, and he will not believe it, any more than he will believe he is being hoodwinked by the Foreign Minister. What I fear is that he will be bludgeoned on the street some dark night, or involved in a one-sided duel. Twice I have rescued him from an imminent danger which he has not even seen. Once in a restaurant a group of officers, apparently drunk, picked a quarrel and drew swords upon him. I had the less difficulty in getting him away because he fears a broil, or anything that will call down upon him the attention of his wooden-headed cousin in the Embassy. On another occasion as we were coming home toward midnight, a perfectly bogus brawl broke out suddenly all around us. Drummond was unarmed, but his huge fists sent sprawling two or three of his assailants. I had a revolver, and held the rest off, and so we escaped. I wish he was safely back in London again.’ What do you think of that, Dorothy?”

“I think exactly what Mr. Lamont thinks. Lieutenant Drummond’s mission to Russia seems to me a journey of folly.”

“After all, I am glad you don’t care, Dorothy. He should pay attention to what Jack says, for Jack knows Russia, and he doesn’t. Still, let us hope he will come safely out of St. Petersburg. And now, Dot, for breakfast, because I must get to work.”

Next morning Dorothy saw a letter for herself on the table in the now familiar hand-writing, and was more relieved than perhaps she would have confessed even to her closest friend, when she saw the twopence-halfpenny English stamp on the envelope. Yet its contents were startling enough, and this letter she did not read to Katherine Kempt, but bore its anxiety alone.

DEAR MISS AMHURST:

I write you in great trouble of mind, not trusting this letter to the Russian post-office, but sending it by an English captain to be posted in London. Two days ago Jack Lamont disappeared; a disappearance as complete as if he had never existed. The night before last, about ten o’clock, I thought I heard him come into his shop below my room. Sometimes he works there till daylight, and as, when absorbed in his experiments, he does not relish interruptions, even from me, I go on with my reading until he comes upstairs. Toward eleven o’clock I thought I heard slight sounds of a scuffle, and a smothered cry. I called out to him, but received no answer. Taking a candle, I went downstairs, but everything was exactly as usual, the doors locked, and not even a bench overturned. I called aloud, but only the echo of this barn of a room replied. I lit the gas and made a more intelligent search, but with no result. I unlocked the door, and stood out in the street, which was quite silent and deserted. I began to doubt that I had heard anything at all, for, as I have told you, my nerves lately have been rather prone to the jumps. I sat up all night waiting for him, but he did not come. Next day I went, as had been previously arranged, to the Foreign Office, but was kept waiting in an anteroom for two hours, and then told that the Minister could not see me. I met a similar repulse at the Admiralty. I dined alone at the restaurant Jack and I frequent, but saw nothing of him. This morning he has not returned, and I am at my wit’s end, not in the least knowing what to do. It is useless for me to appeal to the embassy of my country, for, Jack being a Russian, it has no jurisdiction. The last letter I received from you was tampered with. The newspaper extract you spoke of was not there, and one of the sheets of the letter was missing. Piffling business, I call it, this interfering with private correspondence.

Such was the last letter that Alan Drummond was ever to send to Dorothy Amhurst.

CHAPTER XI —THE SNOW

SUMMER waned; the evenings became chill, although the sun pretended at noon that its power was undiminished. Back to town from mountain and sea shore filtered the warm-weather idlers, but no more letters came from St. Petersburg to the hill by the Hudson. So far as our girls were concerned, a curtain of silence had fallen between Europe and America.

The flat was now furnished, and the beginning of autumn saw it occupied by the two friends. Realization in this instance lacked the delight of anticipation. At last Katherine was the bachelor girl she had longed to be, but the pleasures of freedom were as Dead Sea fruit to the lips. At last Dorothy was effectually cut off from all thoughts of slavery, with unlimited money to do what she pleased with, yet after all, of what advantage was it in solving the problem that haunted her by day and filled her dreams by night. She faced the world with seeming unconcern, for she had not the right to mourn, even if she knew he were dead. He had made no claim; had asked for no affection; had written no word to her but what all the world might read. Once a week she made a little journey up the Hudson to see how her church was coming on, and at first Katherine accompanied her, but now she went alone. Katherine was too honest a girl to pretend an interest where she felt none. She could not talk of architecture when she was thinking of a man and his fate. At first she had been querulously impatient when no second communication came. Her own letters, she said, must have reached him, otherwise they would have been returned. Later, dumb fear took possession of her, and she grew silent, plunged with renewed energy into her books, joined a technical school, took lessons, and grew paler and paler until her teachers warned her she was overdoing it. Inwardly she resented the serene impassiveness of her friend, who consulted calmly with the architect upon occasion about the decoration of the church, when men’s liberty was gone, and perhaps their lives. She built up within her mind a romance of devotion, by which her lover, warning in vain the stolid Englishman, had at last been involved in the ruin that Drummond’s stubbornness had brought upon them both, and unjustly implicated the quiet woman by her side in the responsibility of this sacrifice. Once or twice she spoke with angry impatience of Drummond and his stupidity, but Dorothy neither defended nor excused, and so no open rupture occurred between the two friends, for a quarrel cannot be one-sided.

But with a woman of Katherine’s temperament the final outburst had to come, and it came on the day that the first flurry of snow fell through the still air, capering in large flakes past the windows of the flat down to the muddy street far below. Katherine was standing by the window, with her forehead leaning against the plate glass, in exactly the attitude that had been her habit in the sewing-room at Bar Harbor, but now the staccato of her fingers on the sill seemed to drum a Dead March of despair. The falling snow had darkened the room, and one electric light was aglow over the dainty Chippendale desk at which Dorothy sat writing a letter. The smooth, regular flow of the pen over the paper roused Katherine to a frenzy of exasperation. Suddenly she brought her clenched fist down on the sill where her fingers had been drumming.

“My God,” she cried, “how can you sit there like an automaton with the snow falling?”

Dorothy put down her pen.

“The snow falling?” she echoed. “I don’t understand!”

“Of course you don’t. You don’t think of the drifts in Siberia, and the two men you have known, whose hands you have clasped, manacled, driven through it with the lash of a Cossack’s whip.”

Dorothy rose quietly, and put her hands on the shoulders of the girl, feeling her frame tremble underneath her touch.

“Katherine,” she said, quietly, but Katherine, with a nervous twitch of her shoulders flung off the friendly grasp.

“Don’t touch me,” she cried. “Go back to your letter-writing. You and the Englishman are exactly alike; unfeeling, heartless. He with his selfish stubbornness has involved an innocent man in the calamity his own stupidity has brought about.”

“Katherine, sit down. I want to talk calmly with you.”

“Calmly! Calmly! Yes, that is the word. It is easy for you to be calm when you don’t care. But I care, and I cannot be calm.”

“What do you wish to do, Katherine?”

“What can I do? I am a pauper and a dependent, but one thing I am determined to do, and that is to go and live in my father’s house.”

“If you were in my place, what would you do Katherine?”

“I would go to Russia.”

“What would you do when you arrived there?”

“If I had wealth I would use it in such a campaign of bribery and corruption in that country of tyrants that I should release two innocent men. I’d first find out where they were, then I’d use all the influence I possessed with the American Ambassador to get them set free.”

“The American Ambassador, Kate, cannot move to release either an Englishman or a Russian.”

“I’d do it somehow. I wouldn’t sit here like a stick or a stone, writing letters to my architect.”

“Would you go to Russia alone?”

“No, I should take my father with me.”

“That is an excellent idea, Kate. I advise you to go north by to-night’s train, if you like, and see him, or telegraph to him to come and see us.”

Kate sat down, and Dorothy drew the curtains across the window pane and snapped on the central cluster of electric lamps.

“Will you come with me if I go north?” asked Kate, in a milder tone than she had hitherto used.

“I cannot. I am making an appointment with a man in this room to-morrow.”

“The architect, I suppose,” cried Kate with scorn.

“No, with a man who may or may not give me information of Lamont or Drummond.”

Katherine stared at her open-eyed.

“Then you have been doing something?”

“I have been trying, but it is difficult to know what to do. I have received information that the house in which Mr. Lamont and Mr. Drummond lived is now deserted, and no one knows anything of its former occupants. That information comes to me semi-officially, but it does not lead far. I have started inquiry through more questionable channels; in other words, I have invoked the aid of a Nihilist society, and although I am quite determined to go to Russia with you, do not be surprised if I am arrested the moment I set foot in St. Petersburg.”

“Dorothy, why did you not let me know?”

“I was anxious to get some good news to give you, but it has not come yet.”

“Oh, Dorothy,” moaned Katherine, struggling to keep back the tears that would flow in spite of her. Dorothy patted her on the shoulder.

“You have been a little unjust,” she said, “and I am going to prove that to you, so that in trying to make amends you may perhaps stop brooding over this crisis that faces two poor lone women. You wrong the Englishman, as you call him. Jack was arrested at least two days before he was. Nihilist spies say that both of them were arrested, the Prince first, and the Englishman several days later. I had a letter from Mr. Drummond a short time after you received yours from Mr. Lamont. I never showed it to you, but now things are so bad that they cannot be worse, and you are at liberty to read the letter if you wish to do so. It tells of Jack’s disappearance, and of Drummond’s agony of mind and helplessness in St. Petersburg. Since he has never written again, I am sure he was arrested later. I don’t know which of the two was most at fault for what you call stubbornness, but I believe the explosion had more to do with the arrests than any action of theirs.”

“And I was the cause of that,” wailed Katherine.

“No, no, my dear girl. No one is to blame but the tyrant of Russia. Now the Nihilists insist that neither of these men has been sent to Siberia. They think they are in the prison of ‘St. Peter and St. Paul.’ That information came to me to-day in the letter I was just now answering. So, Katherine, I think you have been unjust to the Englishman. If he had been arrested first, there might be some grounds for what you charge, but they evidently gave him a chance to escape. He had his warning in the disappearance of his friend, and he had several days in which to get out of St. Petersburg, but he stood his ground.”

“I’m sorry, Dorothy. I’m a silly fool, and to-day, when I saw the snow—well, I got all wrought up.”

“I think neither of the men are in the snow, and now I am going to say something else, and then never speak of the subject again. You say I didn’t care, and of course you are quite right, for I confessed to you that I didn’t. But just imagine—imagine—that I cared. The Russian Government can let the Prince go at any moment, and there’s nothing more to be said. He has no redress, and must take the consequences of his nationality. But if the Russian Government have arrested the Englishman; if they have put him in the prison of ‘St. Peter and St. Paul,’ they dare not release him, unless they are willing to face war. The Russian Government can do nothing in his case but deny, demand proof, and obliterate all chance of the truth ever being known. Alan Drummond is doomed: they dare not release him. Now think for a moment how much worse my case would be than yours, if—if—” her voice quivered and broke for the moment, then with tightly clenched fists she recovered control of herself, and finished: “if I cared.”

“Oh, Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy!” gasped Katherine, springing to her feet.

“No, no, don’t jump at any false conclusion. We are both nervous wrecks this afternoon. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t care—I don’t care, except that I hate tyranny, and am sorry for the victims of it.”

“Dorothy, Dorothy!”

“We need a sane man in the house, Kate. Telegraph for your father to come down and talk to us both. I must finish my letter to the Nihilist.”

“Dorothy!” said Katherine, kissing her.