The Golden Bough. Gibbs George

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СКАЧАТЬ they should be upon his body now."

      "Ah! I will inquire." And getting up quickly, Monsieur Khodkine made his way out of the room in the direction of the adjoining apartment.

      Tanya, a warning finger to her lips, joined Rowland immediately. It seemed that she must have been near the door, waiting for the chance to speak with him alone.

      "You were careful?" she asked.

      "As careful as a person may be who walks on a floor carpeted with egg-shells," said Rowland with a smile.

      "He asked if I had told you anything, given you anything?"

      Rowland nodded.

      "He has gone to search the body," he said.

      "For the paper I gave you," whispered Tanya. "I found it in the pocket-book of Kirylo Ivanitch. I took it-there in the garden as I knelt beside him. You have committed it to memory?"

      "Yes. Droite 72 Gauche 23 Droite 7-"

      "Sh-! You can remember it?"

      "Yes."

      "Then destroy it quickly."

      Rowland struck a match, lighted the scrap of paper and threw it into the hearth. She went toward the door, stood in a tense moment of listening and then quickly returned.

      "Do not trust him, Monsieur, and be upon your guard against him always. For the present nothing more. I shall contrive to meet you tonight."

      She walked to the chair which Monsieur Khodkine had left and motioned Rowland to another, and then raising her voice, spoke easily in a conversational tone of the members of the Council who were to join them later in the day. A few moments later Monsieur Khodkine, his brows troubled in thought, came into the room.

      "You found nothing?" asked Tanya.

      "His watch, the talisman, some keys, a little money. Nothing else."

      "What was it you were looking for, Monsieur?" enquired Rowland.

      Khodkine glanced at Tanya and shrugged.

      "A memorandum-it does not matter."

      CHAPTER VI

      ZOYA

      During the afternoon other members of the Council of Nemi reached the village and arrived at the gate in the wall where Issad, clad in his dark robes and sensible of his own importance, greeted them with all solemnity and conducted them to the house where Tanya Korasov, Khodkine and Rowland received them. First, Shestov, who was blonde, bald and slightly pock-marked, with a long neck consisting mostly of tendons and Adam's apple. Shestov spoke French with a thickness of tongue which gave the impression of a being constantly under the influence of liquor, – a mere impediment of the speech, for as Rowland afterward discovered, no spirits of any kind had ever passed his lips. Then came Liederman and Mademoiselle Colodna. Liederman was heavy, Hebraic and noisy; Irina Colodna silent, abstracted and intense; Monsieur Barthou, mild mannered, quiet but eager, his sandy hair cropped short, his little red-rimmed eyes magnified many fold behind his enormous goggles. And lastly Madame Rochal.

      If internationalism was the keynote of Monsieur Khodkine's politics, the term might in a general way be applied to the curious and striking personality of Madame Rochal, for she reflected such an intense cosmopolitanism that it was at first difficult to identify her with any nation of Europe. Her name might have been French, Russian or Spanish, and her gown might have come from Paris or Vienna. She spoke all languages, French, German, Russian, English with equal facility, each it seemed with a slight accent or tinge of the others, but without preference or favor. Her eyes, set a little obliquely in her head, were of the night, dark and unfathomable, and her hair, black with a faint green-violet gloss, was folded back at each side over her ears like the two wings of a raven. She was jeweled, exotic, slightly tinted, and exhaled a faint suggestion of daintily mingled perfumes. To all appearances she was less than thirty in years, though in her eyes lurked the wisdom of the centuries.

      All of these persons were informed by Monsieur Khodkine, the earliest arrival, of the tragic event of the morning and of Philip Rowland's share in it. Monsieur Khodkine pitched his drama in a low key, spoke with great seriousness and earnestly requested the new arrivals to consider the evidence in the light of their own understanding and showed them the body of Ivanitch and the broken Bough, in token of the fulfillment of the prophecy. As to his own mind, he said, that was already made up. As a member of the Order, he would take commands from none other than Monsieur Rowland, who was now the President of the Order of Nemi. Rowland said nothing and stood soberly trying not to laugh, studying this queerly assorted company who had listened to the Russian, regarding the American with a new and rather morbid interest, appraising him (so Rowland thought) as one examines an egg which one expects to devour.

      Whatever the others may have thought, only Liederman was outspoken. He got up, swaying from one foot to the other, like a great brown bear, his hairy fists clenched, his black brows beetling as he roared his opinions in a French tinged abominably with gutterals.

      "Pfui! A new priest and an American! You have a doctrine over in your country. You should permit us to apply it here-Europe for Europeans, Monsieur-We do not need to go so far-

      "But the laws of the Order-" broke in Khodkine.

      "Pouf, Grisha Khodkine. We are no longer children, believing in the necromancy of the middle ages. I for one am no exorcist. We live in no day of incantations, nor can we accept the idols which a past age has set up for us. The train of coincidences is extraordinary, but let us accept it as such and end the matter. The Council of Nemi has borne with Kirylo Ivanitch, because as we all know he formed a proper buffer between our conflicting aims. But Kirylo Ivanitch is dead. When our numbers are filled, let us elect a leader, a Priest if you still choose to call him such, who will conduct our meetings and do our bidding. As for this Monsieur Rowland-" and he gave a grunt, "as far as I am concerned, he may very well go upon his way."

      "That is impossible," came the cold, clear voice of Madame Rochal, her strange eyes fixed on Rowland's face. "The new Leader of the Order of Nemi has already been selected in accordance with a Destiny which it is not my privilege-nor yours, Herr Leiderman, to thwart."

      Herr Leiderman stopped rocking and stared at the speaker, a look of sudden perplexity at his brows.

      "You! Zoya!" he roared.

      "I," she returned with a quick flash of her eyes. "And why not? God knows we need new wits to bring us harmony. Why not Monsieur Rowland's?"

      "But-"

      She shrugged and turned to Shestov who was speaking.

      "Madame Rochal is not often wrong and her influence is not to be despised. For Russia I can speak. A man who is willing to offer his own blood unselfishly in sacrifice for a nation not his own, is a friend to Freedom and to Russia."

      The red-rimmed eyes of Monsieur Barthou blinked enormously behind his goggles. "I am for the old order of things-as they have been since the beginning-"

      "And shall be everlastingly," said Khodkine sententiously. "Amen. And you, Irina Colodna?" he asked.

      "What has been, shall be," she replied in her soft Italian accent. "Whatever happens-the order must not be broken."

      "Bah!" thundered Liederman, "and jeopardize our leadership of the cause of the world by investing this adventurer, this soldier of fortune, with the right to-"

      "Hush! СКАЧАТЬ