Aladdin of London, or The Lodestar

A glimmer of wan daylight in the Count's bedroom troubled him while he undressed and he drew the curtains with angry fingers. Down there in the dismal streets the Cossacks watched the night-birds going home to bed and envied them alike their condition and its consequences. If Sergius rested a moment at the window, it was to mark the presence of these men and to take heart at it. And this is to say that few who knew him in the social world had any notion of the life he lived apart or guessed that authority stood to him for his shield and buckler against the unknown enemies his labors had created. Perhaps he rarely admitted the truth himself. Light and laughter and music were his friends in so far as they permitted him to forget the inevitable or to deride it.

Here in this room of eloquent shadows he was a different man indeed from the fine fellow of the opera and the barracks--a haunted secret man looking deep into the mysteries and weary for the sun. The brilliant scene he had but just quitted could now be regretted chiefly because he needed the mental anæsthetic with which society alone could supply him. Pale and gaunt and inept in his movements, few would have recognized the Sergius Zamoyski of the dressing-room or named him for the diplomatist whose successes had earned the warmest encomiums of harassed authority. Herein lay a testimony to his success which his bitterest enemy would not have denied him. None knew better than he that the day of reckoning had come for all who opposed revolution in Russia, none had anticipated that day with a greater personal dread.

He closed the curtains, thankful that the Cossacks stood sentinels without, and hungering for sleep which had been denied to him so often lately. If he had any consolation of his thoughts, it lay in the comparative secrecy of his present mission and the fact that to-day would accomplish its purpose. The girl Lois had not confessed Richard Gessner's secret and she would stand presently where confession would not help her. As for this agreeable youth, who certainly had been her lover, he must be coerced into silence, threatened, cajoled, bought. Sergius remembered Alban's fine gospel of life and laughed when he recalled it. This devotion to humanity, this belief in great causes, what was it worth when a woman laughed and her rosy lips parted for a kiss? The world is too busy for the pedants who would stem the social revolution, was his argument--the rich men have too much to do to hide their common frailties that they should put on the habits of the friars. Let this hot gospeller acquire a fortune and he would become as the others before a month had passed. The women would see to that--for were not two of them already about the business?