The Complete Works of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Frances Hodgson Burnett

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СКАЧАТЬ His strong young chest swelled. In all his life, he had never come face to face with black treachery before. He could not grasp it. This gentle and friendly being with the grateful soft voice and grateful soft eyes had betrayed—BETRAYED him! It seemed impossible to believe it, and yet the smile on her curved mouth told him that it was true. When he had sprung to help her, she had been playing a trick! When he had been sorry for her pain and had winced at the sound of her low exclamation, she had been deliberately laying a trap to harm him. For a few seconds he was stunned—perhaps, if he had not been his father’s son, he might have been stunned only. But he was more. When the first seconds had passed, there arose slowly within him a sense of something like high, remote disdain. It grew in his deep boy’s eyes as he gazed directly into the pupils of the long soft dark ones. His body felt as if it were growing taller.

      “You are very clever,” he said slowly. Then, after a second’s pause, he added, “I was too young to know that there was any one so—clever—in the world.”

      The Lovely Person laughed, but she did not laugh easily. She spoke to her companion.

      “A grand seigneur!” she said. “As one looks at him, one half believes it is true.”

      The man with the beard was looking very angry. His eyes were savage and his dark skin reddened. Marco thought that he looked at him as if he hated him, and was made fierce by the mere sight of him, for some mysterious reason.

      “Two days before you left Moscow,” he said, “three men came to see your father. They looked like peasants. They talked to him for more than an hour. They brought with them a roll of parchment. Is that not true?”

      “I know nothing,” said Marco.

      “Before you went to Moscow, you were in Budapest. You went there from Vienna. You were there for three months, and your father saw many people. Some of them came in the middle of the night.”

      “I know nothing,” said Marco.

      “You have spent your life in traveling from one country to another,” persisted the man. “You know the European languages as if you were a courier, or the portier in a Viennese hotel. Do you not?”

      Marco did not answer.

      The Lovely Person began to speak to the man rapidly in Russian.

      “A spy and an adventurer Stefan Loristan has always been and always will be,” she said. “We know what he is. The police in every capital in Europe know him as a sharper and a vagabond, as well as a spy. And yet, with all his cleverness, he does not seem to have money. What did he do with the bribe the Maranovitch gave him for betraying what he knew of the old fortress? The boy doesn’t even suspect him. Perhaps it’s true that he knows nothing. Or perhaps it is true that he has been so ill-treated and flogged from his babyhood that he dare not speak. There is a cowed look in his eyes in spite of his childish swagger. He’s been both starved and beaten.”

      The outburst was well done. She did not look at Marco as she poured forth her words. She spoke with the abruptness and impetuosity of a person whose feelings had got the better of her. If Marco was sensitive about his father, she felt sure that his youth would make his face reveal something if his tongue did not—if he understood Russian, which was one of the things it would be useful to find out, because it was a fact which would verify many other things.

      Marco’s face disappointed her. No change took place in it, and the blood did not rise to the surface of his skin. He listened with an uninterested air, blank and cold and polite. Let them say what they chose.

      The man twisted his pointed beard and shrugged his shoulders.

      “We have a good little wine-cellar downstairs,” he said. “You are going down into it, and you will probably stay there for some time if you do not make up your mind to answer my questions. You think that nothing can happen to you in a house in a London street where policemen walk up and down. But you are mistaken. If you yelled now, even if any one chanced to hear you, they would only think you were a lad getting a thrashing he deserved. You can yell as much as you like in the black little wine-cellar, and no one will hear at all. We only took this house for three months, and we shall leave it tonight without mentioning the fact to any one. If we choose to leave you in the wine-cellar, you will wait there until somebody begins to notice that no one goes in and out, and chances to mention it to the landlord—which few people would take the trouble to do. Did you come here from Moscow?”

      “I know nothing,” said Marco.

      “You might remain in the good little black cellar an unpleasantly long time before you were found,” the man went on, quite coolly. “Do you remember the peasants who came to see your father two nights before you left?”

      “I know nothing,” said Marco.

      “By the time it was discovered that the house was empty and people came in to make sure, you might be too weak to call out and attract their attention. Did you go to Budapest from Vienna, and were you there for three months?” asked the inquisitor.

      “I know nothing,” said Marco.

      “You are too good for the little black cellar,” put in the Lovely Person. “I like you. Don’t go into it!”

      “I know nothing,” Marco answered, but the eyes which were like Loristan’s gave her just such a look as Loristan would have given her, and she felt it. It made her uncomfortable.

      “I don’t believe you were ever ill-treated or beaten,” she said. “I tell you, the little black cellar will be a hard thing. Don’t go there!”

      And this time Marco said nothing, but looked at her still as if he were some great young noble who was very proud.

      He knew that every word the bearded man had spoken was true. To cry out would be of no use. If they went away and left him behind them, there was no knowing how many days would pass before the people of the neighborhood would begin to suspect that the place had been deserted, or how long it would be before it occurred to some one to give warning to the owner. And in the meantime, neither his father nor Lazarus nor The Rat would have the faintest reason for guessing where he was. And he would be sitting alone in the dark in the wine-cellar. He did not know in the least what to do about this thing. He only knew that silence was still the order.

      “It is a jet-black little hole,” the man said. “You might crack your throat in it, and no one would hear. Did men come to talk with your father in the middle of the night when you were in Vienna?”

      “I know nothing,” said Marco.

      “He won’t tell,” said the Lovely Person. “I am sorry for this boy.”

      “He may tell after he has sat in the good little black wine-cellar for a few hours,” said the man with the pointed beard. “Come with me!”

      He put his powerful hand on Marco’s shoulder and pushed him before him. Marco made no struggle. He remembered what his father had said about the game not being a game. It wasn’t a game now, but somehow he had a strong haughty feeling of not being afraid.

      He was taken through the hallway, toward the rear, and down the commonplace flagged steps which led to the basement. Then he was marched through a narrow, ill-lighted, flagged passage to a door in the wall. The door was not locked and stood a trifle ajar. His companion pushed it farther open and showed part of a wine-cellar which was so dark that it was only the shelves СКАЧАТЬ