Lost trumpet

THE LOST TRUMPET
130
knowingly to his death, though this money had given
him all that he had passionately longed for in one
month—freedom and ease and Pelagueya. And the
Princess Pelagueya Bourrin, descendant of boyars
from the low lands of Kazan, was sole controller
and inheritor, as Gault’s mistress, of the money
wrung from a feverish war-time English Govern¬
ment. . . . Pelagueya was talking to me.
“It will haunt me—oh, horribly ! and especially
at nights—all that you’ve shown me to-day. Anton,
will you help me ? We’ll organize some Central
Charity for the Warrens. I’ll endow a big fund—I’ll
give it a million—and we’ll place it in the hands of
some trustworthy native committee. People of the
Wafd, perhaps. And it will be for relieving destitu¬
tion—with no questions asked as to how any desti¬
tute came to be so. That for the essential condition
in endowing the Fund. No one has any right to
question the destitute—I never realized before the
horror of that ... We can save thousands yearly
in the lanes behind those khans. You will help
me ?”
It was a difficult thing to do, with her eager face
cupped in her hands, awaiting my consent. But I
did it. I thought of the starving miners in the English
coalfields and the long queues of the unemployed
there; the serfs on England’s green and pleasant
land. And were not the Gault monies invested
in France ?—France, with its rat-like peasant
life, its bitter strugglings as of rats in a sewer. And
no money in investments was static, these days of