The Countess Lanovitch never quitted her own apartments before mid-day. She had acquired a Parisian habit of being invisible until luncheon-time. The two girls left the castle of Thors in a sleigh with one attendant at ten o’clock in order to reach the hut selected for luncheon by mid-day. Etta did not accompany them. She had a slight headache.
At eleven o’clock Claude de Chauxville returned alone, on horseback. After the sportsmen had separated, each to gain his prearranged position in the forest, he had tripped over his rifle, seriously injuring the delicate sighting mechanism. He found (he told the servant who opened the door for him) that he had just time to return for another rifle before the operation of closing in on the bears was to begin.
“If Madame the Princess,” was visible, he went on, would the servant tell her that M. de Chauxville was waiting in the library to assure her that there was absolutely no danger to be anticipated in the day’s sport. The princess, it would appear, was absurdly anxious about the welfare of her husband—an experienced hunter and a dead shot.
Claude de Chauxville then went to the library, where he waited, booted, spurred, rifle in hand, for Etta.
After a lapse of five minutes or more, the door was opened, and Etta came leisurely into the room.
“Well?” she enquired indifferently.
De Chauxville bowed. He walked past her and closed the door, which she happened to have left open.
Then he returned and stood by the window, leaning gracefully on his rifle. His attitude, his hunting-suit, his great top-boots, made rather a picturesque object of him.
“Well?” repeated Etta, almost insolently.
“It would have been wiser to have married me,” said De Chauxville darkly.
Etta shrugged her shoulders.
“Because I understand you better; Iknowyou better than your husband.”
Etta turned and glanced at the clock.
“Have you come back from the bear-hunt to tell me this, or to avoid the bears?” she asked.
De Chauxville frowned. A man who has tasted fear does not like a question of his courage.
“I have come to tell you that and other things,” he answered.
He looked at her with his sinister smile and a little upward jerk of the head. He extended his open hand, palm upward, with the fingers slightly crooked.
“I hold you, madame,” he said—“I hold you in my hand. You are my slave, despite your brave title; my thing, my plaything, despite your servants, and your great houses, and your husband! When I have finished telling you all that I have to tell, you will understand. You will perhaps thank me for being merciful.”
Etta laughed defiantly.
“You are afraid of Paul,” she cried. “You are afraid of Karl Steinmetz; you will presently be afraid of me.”
“I think not,” said De Chauxville coolly. The two names just mentioned were certainly not of pleasant import in his ears, but he was not going to let a woman know that. This man had played dangerous cards before now. He was not at all sure of his ground. He did not know what Etta’s position was in regard to Steinmetz. Behind the defiant woman there lurked the broad shadow of the man who never defied; who knew many things, but was ignorant of fear.
Unlike Karl Steinmetz, De Chauxville was not a bold player. He liked to be sure of his trick before he threw down his trump card. His method was not above suspicion: he liked to know what cards his adversary held, and one may be sure that he was not above peeping.
“Karl Steinmetz is no friend of yours,” he said.
Etta did not answer. She was thinking of the conversation she had had with Steinmetz in Petersburg. She was wondering whether the friendship he had offered—the solid thing as he called it—was not better than the love of this man.
“I have information now,” went on De Chauxville, “which would have made you my wife, had I had it sooner.”
“I think not,” said the lady insolently. She had dealt with such men before. Hers was the beauty that appealed to De Chauxville and such as he. It is not the beautiful women who see the best side of human nature.
“Even now,” went on the Frenchman, “now that I know you—I still love you. You are the only woman I shall ever love.”
“Indeed!” murmured the lady, quite unmoved.
“Yes; although in a way I despise you—now that I know you.”
“Mon Dieu!” exclaimed Etta. “If you have any thing to say, please say it. I have no time to probe your mysteries—to discover your parables. You know me well enough, perhaps, to be aware that I am not to be frightened by your cheap charlatanism.”
“I know you well enough,” retorted De Chauxville hoarsely, “to be aware that it was you who sold the Charity League papers to Vassili in Paris. I know you well enough, madame, to be aware of your present position in regard to your husband. If I say a word in the right quarter you would never leave Russia alive. I have merely to say to Catrina Lanovitch that it was you who banished her father for your own gain. I have merely to hand your name in to certain of the Charity League party, and even your husband could not save you.”
He had gradually approached her, and uttered the last words face to face, his eyes close to hers. She held her head up—erect, defiant still.
“So you see, madame,” he said, “you belong to me.”
She smiled.
“Hand and foot,” he added. “But I am soft-hearted.”
He shrugged his shoulders and turned away.
“What will you?” he said, looking out of the window. “I love you.”
“Nonsense!”
He turned slowly round.
“What?”
“Nonsense!” repeated Etta. “You love power; you are a bully. You love to please your own vanity by thinking that you have me in your power. I am not afraid of you.”
De Chauxville leaned gracefully against the window. He still held his rifle.
“Reflect a little,” he said, with his cold smile. “It would appear that you do not quite realize the situation. Women rarely realize situations in time. Our friend—your husband—has many of the English idiosyncrasies. He has all the narrow-minded notions of honor which obtain in that country. Added to this, I suspect him of possessing a truly Slavonic fire which he keeps under. ‘A smouldering fire—’ You know, madame, our French proverb. He is not the man to take a rational and broad-minded view of your little transaction with M. Vassili; more especially, perhaps, as it banished his friend Stipan Lanovitch—the owner of this house, by the way. His reception of the news I have to tell him would be unpleasant—for you.”
“What do you want?” interrupted Etta. “Money?”
“I am not a needy adventurer.”
“And I am not such a fool, M. de Chauxville, as to allow myself to be dragged into a vulgar intrigue, borrowed from a French novel, to satisfy your vanity.”
De Chauxville’s dull eyes suddenly flashed.
“I will trouble you to believe, madame,” he said, in a low, concentrated voice, “that such a thought never entered my head. A De Chauxville is not a commercial traveller, if you please. No; it may surprise you, but my feeling for you has more good in it than you would seem capable of inspiring. God only knows how it is that a bad woman can inspire a good love.”
Etta looked at him in amazement. She did not always understand De Chauxville. No matter for surprise, perhaps; for he did not always understand himself.
“Then what do you want?” she asked.
“In the meantime, implicit obedience.”
“What are you going to use me for?”
“I have ends,” replied Claude de Chauxville, who had regained his usual half-mocking composure, “that you will serve. But they will be your ends as well as mine. You will profit by them. I will take very good care that you come to no harm, for you are the ultimate object of all this. At the end of it all I see only—you.”
Etta shrugged her shoulders. It is to be presumed that she was absolutely heartless. Many women are. It is when a heartless woman has brains that one hears of her.
“What if I refuse?” asked Etta, keenly aware of the fact that this man was handicapped by his love for her.
“Then I will force you to obedience.”
Etta raised her delicate eyebrows insolently.
“Ah!”
“Yes,” said De Chauxville, with suppressed anger; “I will force you to obey me.”
The princess looked at him with her little mocking smile. She raised one hand to her head with a reflective air, as if a hair-pin were of greater importance than his words. She had dressed herself rather carefully for this interview. She never for a moment overlooked the fact that she was a woman, and beautiful. She did not allow him to forget it either.
Her mood of outraged virtue was now suddenly thrown into the background by a phase of open coquetry. Beneath her eyelids she watched for the effect of her pretty, provoking attitude on the man who loved her. She was on her own territory at this work, playing her own game; and she was more alarmed by De Chauxville’s imperturbability than by any thing he had said.
“You have a strange way of proving the truth of your own statements.”
“What statements?”
She gave a little laugh. Her attitude, her glance, the cunning display of a perfect figure, the laugh, the whole woman, was the incarnation of practised coquetry. She did not admit, even to herself, that she was afraid of De Chauxville. But she was playing her best cards, in her best manner. She had never known them fail.
Claude de Chauxville was a little white about the lips. His eyelids flickered, but by an effort he controlled himself, and she did not see the light in his eyes for which she looked.
“If you mean,” he said coldly, “the statement that I made to you before you were married—namely, that I love you—I am quite content to leave the proof till the future. I know what I am about, madame.”
He took his watch from his pocket and consulted it.
“I must go in five minutes,” he said. “I have a few instructions to give you, to which I must beg your careful attention.”
He looked up, meeting Etta’s somewhat sullen gaze with a smile of triumph.
“It is essential,” he went on, “that I be invited to Osterno. I do not want to stay there long; indeed, I do not care to. But I must see the place. I dare say you can compass the invitation, madame?”
“It will be difficult.”
“And therefore worthy of your endeavor. I have the greatest regard for your diplomatic skill. I leave the matter in your hands, princess.”
Etta shrugged her shoulders and looked past him out of the window. De Chauxville was considering her face carefully.
“Another point to be remembered,” he went on, “is your husband’s daily life at Osterno. The prince is not above suspicion; the authorities are watching him. He is suspected of propagating revolutionary ideas among the peasantry. I should like you to find out as much as you can. Perhaps you know already. Perhaps he has told you, princess. I know that beautiful face! He has told you! Good! Does he take an interest in the peasants?”
Etta did not answer.
“Kindly give me your attention, madame. Does the prince take an interest in the peasants?”
“Yes.”
“An active interest?”
“Yes.”
“Have you any details?”
“No,” answered Etta.
“Then you will watch him, and procure those details.”
Etta’s face was defiant and pale. De Chauxville never took his eyes from it.
“I have undertaken a few small commissions for an old friend of yours, M. Vassili, whom you obliged once before!” he said; and the defiance faded from her eyes.
“The authorities cannot, in these disturbed times, afford to tolerate princes of an independent turn of mind. Such men are apt to make the peasant think himself more important than he is. I dare say, madame, that you are already tired of Russia. It might perhaps serve your ends if this country was made a little too hot for your husband, eh? I see your proud lips quivering, princess! It is well to keep the lips under control. We, who deal in diplomacy, know where to look for such signs. Yes; I dare say I can get you out of Russia—for ever. But you must be obedient. You must reconcile yourself to the knowledge that you have met—your master.”
He bowed in his graceful way, spreading out his hands in mock humility. Etta did not answer him. For the moment she could see no outlet to this maze of trouble, and yet she was conscious of not fearing De Chauxville so much as she feared Karl Steinmetz.
“A lenient master,” pursued the Frenchman, whose vanity was tickled by the word. “I do not ask much. One thing is to be invited to Osterno, that I may be near you. The other is a humble request for details of your daily life, that I may think of you when absent.”
Etta drew in her lips, moistening them as if they had suddenly become parched.
De Chauxville glanced at her and moved toward the door. He paused with his fingers on the handle, and looking back over his shoulder he said:
“Have I made myself quite clear?”
Etta was still looking out of the window with hard, angry eyes. She took no notice of the question.
De Chauxville turned the handle.
“Again let me impress upon you the advisability of implicit obedience,” he said, with delicate insolence. “I mentioned the Charity League; but that is not my strongest claim upon your attention. I have another interesting little detail of your life, which I will reserve until another time.”
He closed the door behind him, leaving Etta white-lipped.
A Russian forest in winter is one of nature’s places of worship. There are some such places in the world, where nature seems to stand in the presence of the Deity; a sunrise at sea; night on a snow-clad mountain; mid-day in a Russian forest in winter. These places and these times are good for convalescent atheists and such as pose as unbelievers—the cheapest form of notoriety.
Paul had requested Catrina and Maggie to drive as quietly as possible through the forest. The warning was unnecessary, for the stillness of snow is infectious, while the beauty of the scene seemed to command silence. As usual, Catrina drove without bells. The one attendant on his perch behind was a fur-clad statue of servitude and silence. Maggie, leaning back, hidden to the eyes in her sables, had nothing to say to her companion. The way lay through forests of pine—trackless, motionless, virgin. The sun, filtering through the snow-laden branches, cast a subdued golden light upon the ruddy upright trunks of the trees. At times a willow-grouse, white as the snow, light and graceful on the wing, rose from the branch where he had been laughing to his mate with a low, cooing laugh, and fluttered away over the trees.
“A kooropatka,” said Catrina, who knew the life of the forest almost as well as Paul, whose very existence was wrapped up in these things.
Far over the summits of the pines a snipe seemed to be wheeling a sentinel round. He followed them as they sped along, calling out all the while his deep warning note, like that of a lamb crouching beneath a hedge where the wind is not tempered.
Once or twice they heard the dismal howl of a wolf—the most melancholy, the weirdest, the most hopeless of nature’s calls. The whole forest seemed to be on the alert—astir and in suspense. The wolf, disturbed in his lair, no doubt heard and understood the cry of the watchful snipe and the sudden silence of the willow-grouse, who loves to sit and laugh when all is safe. A clumsy capercailzie, swinging along over the trees with a great flap and rush of wings, seemed to be intent on his own solitary, majestic business—a very king among the fowls of the air.
Amid the topmost branches of the pines the wind whispered and stirred like a child in sleep; but beneath all was still. Every branch stood motionless beneath its burden of snow. The air was thin, exhilarating, brilliant—like dry champagne. It seemed to send the blood coursing through the veins with a very joy of life.
Catrina noted all these things while cleverly handling her ponies. They spoke to her with a thousand voices. She had roamed in these same forests with Paul, who loved them and understood them as she did.
Maggie, in the midst as it were of a revelation, leaned back and wondered at it all. She, too, was thinking of Paul, the owner of these boundless forests. She understood him better now. This drive had revealed to her a part of his nature which had rather puzzled her—a large, simple, quiet strength which had developed and grown to maturity beneath these trees. We are all part of what we have seen. We all carry with us through life somewhat of the scenes through which we passed in childhood.
Maggie knew now where Paul had learnt the quiet concentration of mind, the absorption in his own affairs, the complete lack of interest in the business of his neighbor which made him different from other men. He had learnt these things at first hand from God’s creatures. These forest-dwellers of fur and feather went about their affairs in the same absorbed way, with the same complete faith, the same desire to leave and be left alone. The simplicity of Nature was his. His only craft was forest craft.
“Now you know,” said Catrina, when they reached the hut, “why I hate Petersburg.”
Maggie nodded. The effect of the forest was still upon her. She did not want to talk.
The woman who received them, the wife of a keeper, had prepared in a rough way for their reception. She had a large fire and bowls of warm milk. The doors and windows had been thrown wide open by Paul’s orders. He wanted to spare Maggie too intimate an acquaintance with a Russian interior. The hut was really a shooting-box built by Paul some years earlier, and inhabited by a head-keeper, one learned in the ways of bear and wolf and lynx. The large dwelling-room had been carefully scrubbed. There was a smell of pine-wood and soap. The table, ready spread with a simple luncheon, took up nearly the whole of the room.
While the two girls were warming themselves, a keeper came to the door of the hut and asked to see Catrina. He stood in the little door-way, completely filling it, and explained that he could not come in, as the buckles and straps of his snow-shoes were clogged and frozen. He wore the long Norwegian snow-shoes, and was held to be the quickest runner in the country.
Catrina had a long conversation with the man, who stood hatless, ruddy, and shy.
“It is,” she then explained to Maggie, “Paul’s own man, who always loads for him and carries his spare gun. He has sent him to tell us that the game has been ringed, and that the beaters will close in on a place called the Schapka Clearing, where there is a woodman’s refuge. If we care to put on our snow-shoes, this man will guide us to the clearing and take care of us till the battue is over.”
Of course Maggie welcomed the proposal with delight, and after a hasty luncheon the three glided off through the forest as noiselessly as they had come. After a tiring walk of an hour and more they came to the clearing, and were duly concealed in the hut.
No one, the keeper told the ladies, except Paul, knew of their presence in the little wooden house. The arrangements of the beat had been slightly altered at the last moment after the hunters had separated. The keeper lighted a small fire and shyly attended to the ladies, removing their snow-shoes with clumsy fingers. He closed the door, and arranged a branch of larch across the window so that they could stand near it without being seen.
They had not been there long before De Chauxville appeared. He moved quickly across the clearing, skimming over the snow with long, sweeping strides. Two keepers followed him, and after having shown him the rough hiding-place prepared for him, silently withdrew to their places. Soon Karl Steinmetz came from another direction, and took up his position rather nearer to the hut, in a thicket of pine and dwarf oak. He was only twenty yards away from the refuge where the girls were concealed.
It was not long before Paul came. He was quite alone, and suddenly appeared at the far end of the clearing, in very truth a mighty hunter, standing nearly seven feet on his snow-shoes. One rifle he carried in his hand, another slung across his back. It was like a silent scene on a stage. The snow-white clearing, with long-drawn tracks across it where the snow-shoes had passed, the still trees, the brilliant sun, and the blue depths of the forest behind; while Paul, like the hero of some grim Arctic saga, a huge fur-clad Northern giant, stood alone in the desolation.
From his attitude it was apparent that he was listening. It was probable that the cries of the birds and the distant howl of a wolf told his practised ears how near the beaters were. He presently moved across to where De Chauxville was hidden, spoke some words of advice or warning to him, and pointed with his gloved hand in the direction whence the game might be expected to come.
It subsequently transpired that Paul was asking De Chauxville the whereabouts of Steinmetz, who had gained his place of concealment unobserved by either. De Chauxville could give him no information, and Paul went away to his post dissatisfied. Karl Steinmetz must have seen them; he must have divined the subject of their conversation; but he remained hidden and gave no sign.
Paul’s post was behind a fallen tree, and the watchers in the hut could see him, while he was completely hidden from any animal that might enter the open clearing from the far end. He turned and looked hard at the hut; but the larch branch across the window effectually prevented him from discovering whether any one was behind it or not.
Thus they all waited in suspense. A blackcock skimmed across the open space and disappeared unmolested. A wolf—gray, gaunt, sneaking, and lurching in his gait—trotted into the clearing and stood listening with evil lips drawn back. The two girls watched him breathlessly. When he trotted on unmolested, they drew a deep breath as if they had been under water. Paul, with his two rifles laid before him, watched the wolf depart with a smile. The girls could see the smile, and from it learnt somewhat of the man. The keeper beside them gave a little laugh and looked to the hammers of his rifle.
And still there was no sound. It was still, unreal, and like a scene on the stage. The birds, skimming over the tops of the trees from time to time, threw in as it were a note of fear and suspense. There was breathlessness in the air. A couple of hares, like white shadows in their spotless winter coats, shot from covert to covert across the open ground.
Then suddenly the keeper gave a little grunt and held up his hand, listening with parted lips and eager eyes. There was a distinct sound of breaking branches and crackling underwood.
They could see Paul cautiously rise from his knees to a crouching attitude. They followed the direction of his gaze, and before them the monarch of these forests stood in clumsy might. A bear had shambled to the edge of the clearing and was standing upright, growling and grumbling to himself, his great paws waving from side to side, his shaggy head thrust forward with a recurring jerk singularly suggestive of a dandy with an uncomfortable collar. These bears of Northern Russia have not the reputation of being very fierce unless they are aroused from their winter quarters, when their wrath knows no bounds and their courage recognizes no danger. An angry bear is afraid of no living man or beast. Moreover, these kings of the Northern forests are huge beasts, capable of smothering a strong man by falling on him and lying there—a death which has come to more than one daring hunter. The beast’s favorite method of dealing with his foe is to claw him to death, or else hug him till his ribs are snapped and crushed into his vitals.
The bear stood poking his head and looking about with little, fiery, bloodshot eyes for something to destroy. His rage was manifest, and in his strength he was a grand sight. The majesty of power and a dauntless courage were his.
It was De Chauxville’s shot, and while keeping his eye on the bear, Paul glanced impatiently over his shoulder from time to time, wondering why the Frenchman did not fire. The bear was a huge one, and would probably carry three bullets and still be a dangerous adversary.
The keeper muttered impatiently.
They were watching Paul breathlessly. The bear was approaching him. It would not be safe to defer firing another second.
Suddenly the keeper gave a short exclamation of astonishment and threw up his rifle.
There was another bear behind Paul, shambling toward him, unseen by him. All his attention was riveted on the huge brute forty yards in front of him. It was Claude de Chauxville’s task to protect Paul from any flank or rear attack; and Claude de Chauxville was peering over his covert, watching with blanched face the second bear; and lifting no hand, making no sign. The bear was within a few yards of Paul, who was crouching behind the fallen pine and now raising his rifle to his shoulder.
In a flash of comprehension the two girls saw all, through the panes of the closed window. It was still singularly like a scene on the stage. The second bear raised his powerful fore-paws as he approached. One blow would tear open Paul’s brain.
A terrific report sent the girls staggering back, for a moment paralyzing thought. The keeper had fired through the window, both barrels almost simultaneously. It was a question how much lead would bring the bear down before he covered the intervening dozen yards. In the confined space of the hut, the report of the heavy double charge was like that of a cannon; moreover, Steinmetz, twenty yards away, had fired at the same moment.
The room was filled with smoke. The two girls were blinded for an instant. Then they saw the keeper tear open the door and disappear. The cold air through the shattered casement was a sudden relief to their lungs, choked with sulphur and the fumes of spent powder.
In a flash they were out of the open door; and there again, with the suddenness of a panorama, they saw another picture—Paul kneeling in the middle of the clearing, taking careful aim at the retreating form of the first bear. They saw the puff of blue smoke rise from his rifle, they heard the sharp report; and the bear rolled over on its face.
Steinmetz and the keeper were walking toward Paul. Claude de Chauxville, standing outside his screen of brushwood, was staring with wide, fear-stricken eyes at the hut which he had thought empty. He did not know that there were three people behind him, watching him. What had they seen? What had they understood?
Catrina and Maggie ran toward Paul. They were on snow-shoes, and made short work of the intervening distance.
Paul had risen to his feet. His face was grave. There was a singular gleam in his eyes, which was not a gleam of mere excitement such as the chase brings into some men’s eyes.
Steinmetz looked at him and said nothing. For a moment Paul stood still. He looked round him, noting with experienced glance the lay of the whole incident—the dead form of the bear ten yards behind his late hiding-place, one hundred and eighty yards from the hut, one hundred and sixty yards from the spot whence Karl Steinmetz had sent his unerring bullet through the bear’s brain. Paul saw it all. He measured the distances. He looked at De Chauxville, standing white-faced at his post, not fifty yards from the carcass of the second bear.
Paul seemed to see no one but De Chauxville. He went straight toward him, and the whole party followed in breathless suspense. Steinmetz was nearest to him, watching with his keen, quiet eyes.
Paul went up to De Chauxville and took the rifle from his hands. He opened the breech and looked into the barrels. They were clean; the rifle had not been fired off.
He gave a little laugh of contempt, and, throwing the rifle at De Chauxville’s feet, turned abruptly away.
It was Catrina who spoke.
“If you had killed him,” she said, “I would have killed you!”
Steinmetz picked up the rifle, closed the breech, and handed it to De Chauxville with a queer smile.
When the Osterno party reached home that same evening the starosta was waiting to see Steinmetz. His news was such that Steinmetz sent for Paul, and the three men went together to the little room beyond the smoking-room in the old part of the castle.
“Well?” said Paul, with the unconscious hauteur which made him a prince to these people.
The starosta spread out his hands.
“Your Excellency,” he answered, “I am afraid.”
“Of what?”
The starosta shrugged his narrow shoulders in cringing deprecation.
“Excellency, I do not know. There is something in the village—something in the whole country. I know not what it is. It is a feeling—one cannot see it, one cannot define it; but it is there, like the gleam of water at the bottom of a deep well. The moujiks are getting dangerous. They will not speak to me. I am suspected. I am watched.”
His shifty eyes, like black beads, flitted from side to side as he spoke. He was like a weasel at bay. It was the face of a man who went in bodily fear.
“I will go with you down to the village now,” said Paul. “Is there any excuse—any illness?”
“Ah, Excellency,” replied the chief, “there is always that excuse.”
Paul looked at the clock.
“I will go now,” he said. He began his simple preparations at once.
“There is dinner to be thought of,” suggested Steinmetz, with a resigned smile. “It is half-past seven.”
“Dinner can wait,” replied Paul in English. “You might tell the ladies that I have gone out, and will dine alone when I come back.”
Steinmetz shrugged his broad shoulders.
“I think you are a fool,” he said, “to go alone. If they discover your identity they will tear you to pieces.”
“I am not afraid of them,” replied Paul, with his head in the medicine cupboard, “any more than I am afraid of a horse. They are like horses; they do not know their own strength.”
“With this difference,” added Steinmetz, “that the moujik will one day make the discovery. He is beginning to make it now. The starosta is quite right, Paul. There is something in the air. It is about time that you took the ladies away from here and left me to manage it alone.”
“That time will never come again,” answered Paul. “I am not going to leave you alone again.”
He was pushing his arms into the sleeves of the old brown coat reaching to his heels, a garment which commanded as much love and respect in Osterno as ever would an angel’s wing.
Steinmetz opened the drawer of his bureau and laid a revolver on the table.
“At all events,” he said, “you may as well have the wherewithal to make a fight of it, if the worst comes to the worst.”
“As you like,” answered Paul, slipping the fire-arm into his pocket.
The starosta moved away a pace or two. He was essentially a man of peace.
Half an hour later it became known in the village that the Moscow doctor was in the house of one Ivan Krass, where he was prepared to see all patients who were now suffering from infectious complaints. The door of this cottage was soon besieged by the sick and the idle, while the starosta stood in the door-way and kept order.
Within, in the one dwelling-room of the cottage, were assembled as picturesque and as unsavory a group as the most enthusiastic modern “slummer” could desire to see.
Paul, standing by the table with two paraffin lamps placed behind him, saw each suppliant in turn, and all the while he kept up a running conversation with the more intelligent, some of whom lingered on to talk and watch.
“Ah, John the son of John,” he would say, “what is the matter with you? It is not often I see you. I thought you were clean and thrifty.”
To which John the son of John replied that the winter had been hard and fuel scarce, that his wife was dead and his children stricken with influenza.
“But you have had relief; our good friend the starosta—”
“Does what he can,” grumbled John, “but he dare not do much. The barins will not let him. The nobles want all the money for themselves. The Emperor is living in his palace, where there are fountains of wine. We pay for that with our taxes. You see my hand—I cannot work; but I must pay the taxes, or else we shall be turned out into the street.”
Paul, while attending to the wounded hand—an old story of an old wound neglected, and a constitution with all the natural healing power drained out of it by hunger and want and vodka—Paul, ever watchful, glanced round and saw sullen, lowering faces, eager eyes, hungry, cruel lips.
“But the winter is over now. You are mistaken about the nobles. They do what they can. The Emperor pays for the relief that you have had all these months. It is foolish to talk as you do.”
“I only tell the truth,” replied the man, wincing as Paul deliberately cut away the dead flesh. “We know now why it is that we are all so poor.”
“Why?” asked Paul, pouring some lotion over a wad of lint and speaking indifferently.
“Because the nobles—” began the man, and some one nudged him from behind, urging him to silence.
“You need not be afraid of me,” said Paul. “I tell no tales, and I take no money.”
“Then why do you come?” asked a voice in the background. “Some one pays you; who is it?”
“Ah, Tula,” said Paul, without looking up. “You are there, are you? The great Tula. There is a hardworking, sober man, my little fathers, who never beats his wife, and never drinks, and never borrows money. A useful neighbor! What is the matter with you, Tula? You have been too sparing with the vodka, no doubt. I must order you a glass every hour.”
There was a little laugh. But Paul, who knew these people, was quite alive to the difference of feeling toward himself. They still accepted his care, his help, his medicine; but they were beginning to doubt him.
“There is your own prince,” he went on fearlessly to the man whose hand he was binding up. “He will help you when there is real distress.”
An ominous silence greeted this observation.
Paul raised his head and looked round. In the dim light of the two smoky lamps he saw a ring of wild faces. Men with shaggy beards and hair all entangled and unkempt, with fierce eyes and lowering glances; women with faces that unsexed them. There were despair and desperation and utter recklessness in the air, in the attitude, in the hearts of these people. And Paul had worked among them for years. The sight would have been heart-breaking had Paul Howard Alexis been the sort of man to admit the possibility of a broken heart. All that he had done had been frustrated by the wall of heartless bureaucracy against which he had pitched his single strength. There was no visible progress. These were not the faces of men and women moving up the social scale by the aid of education and the deeper self-respect that follows it. Some of them were young, although they hardly looked it. They were young in years, but old in life and misery. Some of them he knew to be educated. He had paid for the education himself. He had risked his own personal freedom to procure it for them, and misery had killed the seed.
He looked on this stony ground, and his stout heart was torn with pity. It is easy to be patient in social economy when that vague jumble of impossible ideas is calmly discussed across the dinner-table. But the result seems hopelessly distant when the mass of the poor and wretched stand before one in the flesh.
Paul knew that this little room was only a specimen of the whole of Russia. Each of these poor peasants represented a million—equally hopeless, equally powerless to contend with an impossible taxation.
He could not give them money, because the tax-collector had them all under his thumb and would exact the last kopeck. The question was far above his single-handed reach, and he did not dare to meet it openly and seek the assistance of the few fellow-nobles who faced the position without fear.
He could not see in the brutal faces before him one spark of intelligence, one little gleam of independence and self-respect which could be attributed to his endeavor; which the most sanguine construction could take as resulting from his time and money given to a hopeless cause.
“Well,” he said. “Have you nothing to tell me of your prince?”
“You know him,” answered the man who had spoken from the safe background. “We need not tell you.”
“Yes,” answered Paul; “I know him.”
He would not defend himself.
“There,” he went on, addressing the man whose hand was now bandaged. “You will do. Keep clean and sober, and it will heal. Get drunk and go dirty, and you will die. Do you understand, Ivan Ivanovitch?”
The man grunted sullenly, and moved away to give place to a woman with a baby in her arms.
Paul glanced into her face. He had known her a few years earlier a happy child playing at her mother’s cottage door.
She drew back the shawl that covered her child, with a faint, far-off gleam of pride in her eyes. There was something horribly pathetic in the whole picture. The child-mother, her rough, unlovely face lighted for a moment with that gleam from Paradise which men never know; the huge man bending over her, and between them the wizened, disease-stricken little waif of humanity.
“When he was born he was a very fine child,” said the mother.
Paul glanced at her. She was quite serious. She was looking at him with a strange pride on her face. Paul nodded and drew aside the shawl. The baby was staring at him with wise, grave eyes, as if it could have told him a thing or two if it had only been gifted with the necessary speech. Paul knew that look. It meant starvation.
“What is it?” asked the child-mother. “It is only some little illness, is it not?”
“Yes; it is only a little illness.”
He did not add that no great illness is required to kill a small child. He was already writing something in his pocket-book. He tore the leaf out and gave it to her.
“This,” he said, “is for you—yourself, you understand? Take that each day to the starosta and he will give you what I have written down. If you do not eat all that he gives you and drink what there is in the bottle as he directs you, the baby will die—you understand? You must give nothing away; nothing even to your husband.”
The next patient was the man whose voice had been heard from the safe retreat of the background. His dominant malady was obvious. A shaky hand, an unsteady eye, and a bloated countenance spoke for themselves. But he had other diseases more or less developed.
“So you have no good to tell of your prince,” said Paul, looking into the man’s face.
“Our prince, Excellency! He is not our prince. His forefathers seized this land; that is all.”
“Ah! Who has been telling you that?”
“No one,” grumbled the man. “We know it; that is all.”
“But you were his father’s serfs, before the freedom. Let me see your tongue. Yes; you have been drinking—all the winter. Ah! is not that so, little father? Your parents were serfs before the freedom.”
“Freedom!” growled the man. “A pretty freedom! We were better off before.”
“Yes; but the world interfered with serfdom, because it got its necessary touch of sentiment. There is no sentiment in starvation.”
The man did not understand. He grunted acquiescence nevertheless. The true son of the people is always ready to grunt acquiescence to all that sounds like abuse.
“And what is this prince like? Have you seen him?” went on Paul.
“No; I have not seen him. If I saw him I would kick his head to pieces.”
“Ah, just open your mouth a little wider. Yes; you have a nasty throat there. You have had diphtheria. So you would kick his head to pieces. Why?”
“He is a tchinovnik—a government spy. He lives on the taxes. But it will not be for long. There is a time coming—”
“Ah! What sort of a time? Now, you must take this to the starosta. He will give you a bottle. It is not to drink. It is to wash your throat with. Remember that, and do not give it to your wife by way of a tonic as you did last time. So there are changes coming, are there?”
“There is a change coming for the prince—for all the princes,” replied the man in the usual taproom jargon. “For the Emperor too. The poor man has had enough of it. God made the world for the poor man as well as for the rich. Riches should be equally divided. They are going to be. The country is going to be governed by a Mir. There will be no taxes. The Mir makes no taxes. It is the tchinovniks who make the taxes and live on them.”
“Ah, you are very eloquent, little father. If you talk like this in the kabak no wonder you have a bad throat. There, I can do no more for you. You must wash more and drink less. You might try a little work perhaps; it stimulates the appetite. And with a throat like that I should not talk so much if I were you. Next!”
The next comer was afflicted with a wound that would not heal—a common trouble in cold countries.
While attending to this sickening sore Paul continued his conversation with the last patient.
“You must tell me,” he said, “when these changes are about to come. I should like to be there to see. It will be interesting.”
The man laughed mysteriously.
“So the government is to be by a Mir, is it?” went on Paul.
“Yes; the poor man is to have a say in it.”
“That will be interesting. But at the Mir every one talks at once and no one listens; is it not so?”
The man made no reply.
“Is the change coming soon?” asked Paul coolly.
But there was no reply. Some one had seized the loquacious orator of the kabak, and he was at that moment being quietly hustled out of the room.
After this there was a sullen silence, which Paul could not charm away, charm he never so wisely.
When his patients had at last ebbed away he lighted a cigarette and walked thoughtfully back to the castle. There was danger in the air, and this was one of those men upon whom danger acts as a pleasant stimulant.