“It is Félice. It is your daughter.”
She crossed the floor, obeying one of those curious instincts which refuse to lend themselves to analysis.
The stranger took her into his arms.
“Yes, you are Félice,” he said. “Thank God, you are safe after all.”
“But you?”
“I am your father,” he announced. “I have been in prison in Russia for eleven years—thanks to that man,” he added, turning his head once more towards Protinoff.
“But he told me that he was my father,” Félice cried in amazement.
“He will answer before long for more crimes than that,” the newcomer pronounced coldly. “Have you anything to say to me, you horde of reprobates, you false servants, you miserable lying troop of parasites? Anything to say to me, whom you hoped never to see again in this world?”
“Your Highness,” Serge Protinoff sobbed, “there is nothing to say. Only this. The Princess I took myself safely to her destination. I betrayed you to Agonoff, the revolutionary inspector of the district. My own safety was the price. As to the money, we kept it all. We left the Princess with nothing, except what she had from Madame de Sandillac. We paid her nothing. After her marriage—”
“Her what?” was the passionate interruption.
“I do not know who you are, sir,” Andrew intervened, “but I am your daughter’s husband. We have been married a year. I met her in France. It was my motor which was responsible for the accident when Madame de Sandillac was killed. We were married a month afterwards. I have done my best to make her happy. I think she will tell you that she is happy. As for this crowd, Félice believed that they were all her relatives. Somehow or other they managed to make her swear that she would never let me into the secret of their existence. They were afraid, of course, that they might be traced through her, or that I should discover, as I, of course, soon would have done, that they were frauds. It was only yesterday that I came into this affair at all. Charles rushed down with some wild story as to their being persecuted by a Bolshevist revolutionary society and appealed for help. I bought them tickets for America and was sending them off there to-morrow.”
The two men looked into each other’s eyes. The newcomer drew a sigh of relief. The wave of passionate anger which had flooded his face subsided.
“It is a blow to me,” he acknowledged, “to find my daughter married. Félice is very young. You can guess the story. I saw the storm coming, sent her away to safety, and trusted this horde of reprobates with fifty thousand pounds for Madame de Sandillac. She was to keep it for her. You see what has happened. As for them—”
Once more he looked scornfully around at the cowering figures cringing before him.
“Félice,” he expostulated, “do you mean that you could think seriously that these people were your relatives?”
“I was four years old,” she reminded him, “when I left Russia. I simply knew that their faces were familiar to me. That is all I could ever remember.”
“Serge Protinoff was my steward, and these my servants, before the revolution,” her father explained. “The family had a farm on one of my southern estates. I trusted that man Protinoff, simply because I had to trust somebody, for the storm came suddenly, and I was to have been one of its first victims.”
Félice held his arm. There was ecstasy in her eyes and joy in her quivering tone.
“But this is wonderful!” she cried. “It is such a weight from my heart, what you tell me, for they all frightened me so. But now I know that I am safe, dear father, and very, very happy—happier now than ever.”
Andrew glanced round the room at the shivering little crowd. Dimly he seemed to understand the queer, inherited terror of the rod which for generations had swayed the Russian peasant. They were still like stricken creatures.
“What about that story of your escape?” he asked Serge Protinoff.
“False, every word of it,” was the trembling admission. “I never killed anybody in my life. I never had the courage. It was the terror of yesterday’s news which brought Charles to you. We saw in the papers—that he had arrived in London—and we knew then that concealment was no longer any use.”
“The Grand Duke Carol—” Andrew exclaimed.
Félice’s father inclined his head.
“That is my name,” he said. “According to the papers, I disappeared the second day of the revolution. My disappearance was to a fortress at Odessa. I have been near to death a hundred times, but I had great estates down there, and, although I had always been an ardent supporter of my relative Nicholas, I treated my people well, and sometimes when there were rumours that I was to be killed, they half stormed the prison. It is my own people who managed my escape,” he concluded.
There was a short silence. Serge Protinoff buried his face in his hands. Anna was sobbing. Charles was seated at the table, his head supported by his hands. Andrew was suddenly conscious of a wave of contemptuous pity for them all.
“Look here, sir,” he ventured, addressing his newly discovered father-in-law, “I don’t know what you want to do about these people, but they don’t seem worth powder and shot to me. There are the tickets for America, everything arranged. Why not let them go—clear them out of the country and not be bothered with them again. Félice didn’t suffer, except that she was poor all her girlhood. She’s all right now, and they haven’t fallen on any specially good times.”
Protinoff looked up with a gleam of hope in his watery eyes.
“The money did me no good,” he groaned. “Everything I touched was loss, loss, loss. We have been penniless now for months, except for what Félice brought us.”
The newcomer held up his hand, palm outwards. They all stumbled to their feet.
“My son-in-law has spoken,” he said. “Out of this country as fast as train and steamboat can get you! Never let me see the face of any one of you again. On that condition, you can go free… . Come, Félice! Come, my son-in-law!”
They hurried out into the street, Félice clinging to her father’s arm. Andrew led the way to his car.
“My God, what an atmosphere!” he exclaimed, opening his cigarette case. “Won’t you try one of these, sir?”
His father-in-law accepted with a smile.
“I see,” he said gravely, “that my daughter has married an Englishman indeed. I have known many of your country people. They thrive always on fresh air and open windows.”
“You knew my father, sir,” Andrew told him. “He was at St. Petersburg, as it was then, in your time. I heard him speak of you often.”
They stepped into the car. Behind them the family of Protinoff were recklessly throwing everything they possessed into bags and trunks.
CHAPTER XXVIII