The Reason Why | Page 8

refused to receive her or
hear news of her, even after poor little Mirko was born and she married
Count Sykypri.
For on the father's side, the Markrute brother and sister were of very
noble lineage; even with his bar sinister the financier could not brook
the disgrace of Elinka. He had loved her so--the one soft side of his
adamantine character. Her disgrace, it seemed, had frozen all the
tenderness in his nature.
Countess Shulski was silent for a few moments, while both Mimo and
Mirko watched her face anxiously. She had thrown back her veil.
"And supposing you do not sell the 'Apache,' Mimo? Your own money
does not come in until Christmas; mine is all gone until January, and it
is the cold winter approaching--and cold is not good for Mirko. What

then?"
Count Sykypri moved uneasily. A tragic look grew in his handsome
face; his face that was a mirror of all passing emotions; his face that
had been able to express love and romance, devotion and tenderness, to
wile a bird from off a tree or love from the heart of any woman. And
even though Zara Shulski knew of just how little value was anything he
said or did yet his astonishing charm always softened her irritation
toward his fecklessness. So she repeated more gently:
"What then?"
Mimo got up and flung out his arms in a dramatic way.
"It cannot be!" he said. "I must sell the 'Apache!' Besides, if I don't: I
tell you these strange, gray fogs are giving me new, wonderful
thoughts--dark, mysterious--two figures meeting in the mist! Oh! but a
wonderful combination that will be successful in all cases."
Mirko pressed his arm round his sister's neck and kissed her cheek,
while he cooed love words in a soft Slavonic language. Two big tears
gathered in Zara Shulski's deep eyes and made them tender as a dove's.
She drew out her purse and counted from it two sovereigns and some
shillings which she slipped into Mirko's small hand.
"Keep these, pet, for an emergency," she said. "They are all I have, but
I will--I must--find some other way for you soon: and now I shall have
to go. If my uncle should suspect I am seeing you I might be powerless
to help further."
They walked with her to the Grosvenor Gate, and reluctantly let her
leave them; and then they watched her, as she sped across the road
between the passing taxi-cabs. When they saw the light from the
opening door and her figure disappearing between the tall servants who
had come to open it, the two poor, shabby figures walked on with a
sigh, to try to find an omnibus which would put them down somewhere
near their dingy bedroom in Neville Street, Tottenham Court Road.

And as they reached the Marble Arch there came on a sharp shower of
icy rain.
Countess Shulski, however poorly dressed, was a person to whom
servants were never impertinent; there was something in her bearing
which precluded all idea of familiarity. It did not even strike Turner, or
James, that her clothes were what none of the housemaids would have
considered fit to wear when they went out. The remark the lordly
Turner made, as he arranged some letters on the hall table, was:
"A very haughty lady, James--quite a bit of the Master about her, eh?"
But she went on to the lift, slowly, and to her luxurious bedroom, her
heart full of pain and rage against fate. Here she sat down before the
fire, and, resting her chin on her two hands, gazed steadily into the
glowing coals.
What pictures did she see of past miseries there in the flames? Her
thoughts wandered right back to the beginning. The stern, peculiar
father, and the gloomy castle. The severe governesses--English and
German--and her adorable, beautiful mother, descending upon the
schoolroom like a fairy of light, always gay and sweet and loving. And
then of that journey to a far country, where she saw an old, old, dying
gentleman in a royal palace, who kissed her, and told her she would
grow as beautiful as her grandmother with the red, red hair. And there
in the palace was Mimo, so handsome and kind in his glittering
aide-de-camp's uniform, who after that often came to the gloomy castle,
and, with the fairy mother, to the schoolroom. Ah! those days were
happy days! How they three had shrieked with laughter and played
hide-and-seek in the long galleries!
And then the blank, hideous moment when the angel fairy had gone,
and the stern father cursed and swore, and Uncle Francis' face looked
like a vengeful fiend's. And then a day when she got word to meet her
mother in the park of the castle. How