The prince was early astir the next morning. He was a hardy old man, and covered great distances on his powerful horse. Neither cold nor rain prevented him from undertaking journeys to some distant village which had once owned his ancestor as lord and master—in those days when a noble had to pay no more for killing a peasant than a farmer may claim for an injured sheep to-day.
The prince never discussed with Wanda those affairs in which, as a noble, he felt compelled to take an active interest. He had seen, perhaps, enough in the great revolution of his younger days to teach him that women—and even Polish women—should take no part in politics. He believed in a wise and studied ignorance of those things which it is better not to know. He made no reference to Kosmaroff at breakfast the next morning, and Wanda asked no questions. She had not slept until nearly morning, and had heard her father bolt the doors after the departure of the ex-Cossack. She had heard Kosmaroff's light and quick step on the frozen snow as he started on his seven-mile walk to Warsaw.
Cartoner's name, then, was not mentioned during the morning meal, which the prince ate with the deliberation of his years. The morning was bright and sunny, with a crisp air and sufficient frost to keep the snow from melting. The prince had recovered from his anger of the previous evening, and was gay. Wanda, too, seemed light-hearted enough. She was young and strong. In her veins there flowed the blood of a race that had always been “game,” that had always faced the world with unflinching eyes, and had never craved its pity. Her father had lost everything, had lived a life of hardship, almost to privation for one of his rank; and witnessed the ruin or the downfall of all his friends; and yet he could laugh with the merry, while with the mourner it was his habit to purse up his lips beneath the grizzled mustache and mutter a few curt words, not of condolence, but of stimulation to endure.
He liked to see cheerful faces around him. They helped him, no doubt, to carry on to the end of his days that high-handed and dignified fight against ill-fortune which he had always waged.
“If you have a grievance,” he always said to those who brought their tales of woe to his ears, “air it as much as you like, but speak up, and do not whine.”
He had to listen to a great number of such tales, and to the majority of grievances could suggest no cure; for they were the grievances of Poland, and in these later times of Finland also, to which it appears there is no cure.
“I shall make a long round to-day,” he said to Wanda, when he was in the saddle, with his short, old-fashioned stirrup, his great boots covering his knee and thigh from the wind, and his weather-beaten old face looking out from the fur collar of his riding-coat. “It may be the last time this winter. The spring must come soon.”
And he went away at an easy canter.
Wanda, left alone for the whole day in the stillness of this forest farm, had her round to do also. She set out on foot soon after her father's departure, bound to a distant cottage in the depths of the pine-woods. The trees were quiet this morning; for it is only at the time of thaw, when the snow, gathering moisture from the atmosphere, gains in weight and breaks down the branches, that the woods crack as beneath the tread of some stealthy giant. But a frost seems to brace the trees which in the colder weather stand grim and silent, bearing their burden without complaint.
The sky was cloudless and the air quite still. There is no silence like that of a northern pine-wood in winter; for the creatures living in the twilight there have been given by God silent feet and a stealthy habit—the smaller ones going in fear of the larger, and the beasts of prey ever alert for their natural enemy—man. The birds kept for the most part to the outer fringes of the forest, nearer to the crops and the few, far cottages.
Wanda had grown from childhood amid the pines, and the gloomy forest-paths were so familiar as to have lost all power to impress her. In the nursery she had heard tales of wolves and bears, but had never seen them. They might be near or far; they might be watching through the avenues of straight and motionless stems. In their childhood it had been the delight of Martin and herself to trace in the snow the footprints of the wolves—near the house, in the garden, right up to the nursery window. They had gradually acquired the indifference of the peasants who work in the fields, or the woodmen at their labors amid the trees, who are aware that the silent, stealthy eyes are watching them, and work on without fear. The prince had taught the children fearlessness, or, perhaps, it was in their blood, and needed no education. He had taught them to look upon the beasts of the forests not as enemies, but as quiet, watching friends.
Wanda went alone whithersoever she listed, without so much as turning her head to look over her shoulder. The pine-woods were hers; the peasants were her serfs in spirit, if not in deed. Here, at all events, the Bukatys were free to come and go. In cities they were watched, their footsteps dogged by human wolves.
There are few paths through the great forests of Poland, of Posen, and of Silesia, and what there are, are usually cut straight and at right angles to each other. There was a path just wide enough to give passage to the narrow timber carts from the farm direct to the woodman's cottage, and so flat is the face of the earth that the distant trees are like the masts of ships half-hidden by the curve of the world. It seems as if one could walk on and on forever, or drop from hunger and fatigue and lie unheeded for years in some forgotten corner. In the better-kept forests the paths are staked and numbered, or else it would be impossible to know the way amid such millions of trees—all alike, all of the same height. But the prince was too poor to vie with the wealthy land-owners of Silesia, and his forests were ill-kept.
In places the trees had fallen across the original path, and the few passers-by had made a new path to one side or the other. Sometimes a tree had grown outward towards the light and air, almost bridging the open space.
Wanda could not, therefore, see very far in front or behind, and was taken by surprise by the thud of a horse's feet on the beaten snow behind her. She turned, thinking it was her father, who for some reason had returned home, and, learning whither she had gone, had followed her. But it was not the prince. It was Cartoner. Before she had quite realized that it was he, he was on his feet leading his horse towards her.
She paused and looked at him, half startled; then, with a curt, inarticulate cry of joy she hurried towards him. Thus were given to them a few of those brief moments of complete happiness which are sometimes vouchsafed to human beings. Which must assuredly be moments stolen from heaven; for angels are so chary with them, giving them to a few favored ones only once or twice in a whole lifetime, and, to the large majority of mankind, never at all.
“Why have you come?” asked Wanda.
“To see you,” replied this man of few words.
And the sound of his voice, the sight of his strong face, swept away all her troubles and anxieties; as if, with his greater physical strength, he had taken a burden which she could hardly lift, and carried it easily. For he always seemed to know how to meet every emergency and face every trouble. A minute ago she had been reflecting with relief that he was not in Poland, and now it seemed as if her heart must break had he been anywhere else. She forgot for the moment all the dangers that surrounded them; the hopelessness of their love, the thousand reasons why they should not meet. She forgot that a whole nation stood between them. But it was only for a moment—a moment borrowed from eternity.
“Is that the only reason?” she asked, remembering with a sort of shock that this world of glittering snow and still pine-trees was not their real world at all.
“Yes,” he answered.
“But you cannot stay in Poland! You must go away again at once! You do not know—” And she stopped short, for their respective positions were such that they always arrived at a point where only silence was left to them.
“Oh, yes,” he answered with a short laugh. “I know. I am going away to-night—to St. Petersburg.”
He did not explain that his immediate departure was not due to the fears that she had half expressed.
“I am so glad.” She broke off, and looked at him with a little smile. “I am so glad you are going away.”
She turned away from him with a sharp sigh. For she had now a new anxiety, which, however, like Aaron's rod, had swallowed all the rest.
“I would rather know that you were safe in England,” she said, “even if I were never to see you again. But,” and she looked up at him with a sort of pride in her eyes—that long-drawn pride of race which is strong to endure—“but you must never be hampered by a thought of me. I want you to be what you have always been. Ah! you need not shake your head. All men say the same of you—they are afraid of you.”
She looked at him slowly, up and down.
“And I am not,” she added, with a sudden laugh. For her happiness was real enough. The best sort of happiness is rarely visible to the multitude. It lies hidden in odd corners and quiet places; and the eager world which, presumably, is seeking it, hurries past and never recognizes it, but continues to mistake for it prosperity and riches, noise and laughter, even fame and mere cheap notoriety.
They walked slowly back towards the farm, and again the gods were kind to them; for they forgot how short their time was, how quickly such moments fly. Much that they had to say to each other may not be expressed on paper, neither can any compositor set it up in type.
They were practical enough, however, and as they walked beneath the snow-clad pines they drew up a scheme of life which was astonishingly unlike the dreams and aspirations of most lovers. For it was devoid of selfishness, and they looked for happiness—not in an immediate gratification of all their desires and an instant fulfilment of their hopes, but in a mutual faith that should survive all separation and bridge the longest span of years. Loyalty was to be their watchword. Loyalty to self, to duty, and to each other.
Wanda did not, like the heroine of a novel, look for a passion that should stride over every obstacle to its object, that should ignore duty, which is only another word for honor, and throw down the spectres, Foresight, Common-sense, Respect, which must arise in the pathway of that madness, a brief passion. She was content, it seemed, that her lover should be wise, should be careful for the future, should take her life into his hands with a sort of quiet mastery as if he had a right to do so—a right, not to ruin and debase, such as is usually considered the privilege of that which is called a great passion and admired as such—but a right to shape, guard, and keep.
Cartoner had not much to say about his own feelings, which, perhaps, made him rather different from most lovers. He went so far as to consider the feelings of others and to place them before his own, which, of course, is quite unusual. And yet the scheme of life which was his reading of Love, and which Wanda extracted from him that sunny March morning and pieced together bit by bit in her own decided and conclusive way, seemed to content her. She seemed to gather from it that he loved her precisely as she wished to be loved, and that, come what might, she had already enough to make her life happier than the lives of most women.
And, of course, they hoped. For they were young, and human, and the spring was in the air. But their hope was one of those things of which they could not speak; for it involved knowledge of which Wanda had become possessed at the hand of the prince and Martin and Kosmaroff. It touched those things which Cartoner had come to Poland to learn, but not from Wanda.
The smell of the wood-smoke from the chimneys of the farm told them that they were nearing the edge of the forest, and Wanda stopped short.
“You must not go any nearer,” she said. “You are sure no one saw you when you came?”
“No one,” answered Cartoner, whom fortune had favored as he came. For he had approached the farm through the wood, and he had seen Wanda's footsteps in the snow. He had often ridden over the same ground on the very horse which he was now riding, and knew every inch of the way to Warsaw. He could get there without being seen, might even quit the city again unobserved.
For he knew—indeed, Wanda had told him—the dangers that surrounded him. He knew also that these dangers were infinitely greater for Martin and the prince.
“It is only what you foresaw,” she said, “when—when we first understood.”
“No, it is worse than I foresaw,” he answered.
So they parted, with the knowledge that they must not meet again in Poland when their meeting must mean such imminent risk to others. They could not even write to each other while Wanda should be within the circle of the Russian postal service. There was but the one link between them—Paul Deulin; and to him neither would impart a confidence. Deulin had brought about this meeting to-day. Warned by telegram, he had met Cartoner at Warsaw Station, and had counselled him not to go out into the streets. Since he was only waiting a few hours in Warsaw for the St. Petersburg train, he must either sit in the station or take a horse and go for a ride into the country. The Bukatys, by-the-way, were not in town, but at their country house.
“Go and see them,” he added. “A man living on a volcano may surely play with firearms if he wants to. And you are all on the volcano together. Pah! I know the smell of it. The very streets, my friend, reek of catastrophe.”
Wanda was gay and light-hearted to the end. There was French blood in her veins—that gay, good blood which stained the streets of Paris a hundred years ago, and raised a standard of courage against adversity for all the world to imitate so long as history shall exist.
Cartoner turned once in his saddle and saw her standing in the sunlight waving him a farewell, with her eyes smiling and her lips hard pressed. Then he rode on, with that small, small hope to help him through his solitary wanderings which he knew to be identical with the hope of Poland, for which the time was not yet ripe. He was the watcher who sees most of the game, and knew that the time might never ripen till years after Wanda and he had gone hence and were no more seen.
There are few roads in Poland. Sooner or later, Cartoner must needs join the great highway that enters Warsaw from the west, passing by the gates of the cemetery.
Deulin, no doubt, knew this, for Cartoner found him, riding leisurely away from the city, just beyond the cemetery. The Frenchman sat his horse with a straight leg and arm which made Cartoner think of those days ten years earlier, to which Deulin seldom referred, when this white-haired dandy was a cavalry soldier, engaged in the painful business of killing Germans.
Deulin did not think it necessary to refer to the object of Cartoner's ride. Neither did he mention the fact that he knew that this was not the direct way to St. Petersburg.
“I hired a horse and rode out to meet you,” he said, gayly—he was singularly gay this morning, and there was a light in his eye—“to intercept you. Kosmaroff is back in Warsaw. I saw him in the streets—and he saw me. I think that man is the god in the machine. He is not a nonentity. I wonder who he is. There is blood there, my friend.”
He turned his horse as he spoke, and rode back towards the city with Cartoner.
“In the mean time,” he said, “I have the hunger of a beggar's dog. What are we to do? It is one o'clock—and I have the inside of a Frenchman. We are a great people. We tear down monarchies, and build up a new republic which is to last forever, and doesn't. We make history so quickly that the world stands breathless—but we always breakfast before mid-day.”
He took out his watch, and showed its face to Cartoner, with a gesture which could not have been more tragic had it marked the hour of the last trump.
“And we dare not show our faces in the streets. At least, I dare not show mine in the neighborhood of yours in Warsaw. For they have got accustomed to me there. They think I am a harmless old man—a dentist, perhaps.”
“My train goes from the St. Petersburg Station at three,” said Cartoner. “I will have some lunch at the other station, and drive across in a close cab with the blinds down.”
And he gave his low, gentle laugh. Deulin glanced at him as if there were matter for surprise in the sound of it.
“Like a monstrosity going to a fair,” he said. “And I shall go with you. I will even lunch with you at the station—a station steak and a beery table. There is only one room at the station for those who eat and those who await their trains. So that the eaters eat before a famished audience like Louis XVI., and the travellers sit among the crumbs. I am with you. But let us be quick—and get it over. Did you see Bukaty?” he asked, finally, and, leaning forward, he sought an imaginary fly on the lower parts of his horse; for, after all, he was only a man, and lacked the higher skill or the thicker skin of the gentler sex in dealing with certain delicate matters.
“No, I only saw the princess,” replied Cartoner. And they rode on in silence.
“You know,” said Deulin, at length, gravely, “if that happens which you expect and I expect, and everybody here is hoping for—I shall seek out Wanda at once, and look after her. I do not know whether it is my duty or not. But it is my inclination; and I am much too old to put my duty before my inclination. So, if anything happens, and there follows that confusion which you and I have seen once or twice before, where things are stirring and dynasties are crumbling in the streets—when friends and foes are seeking each other in vain—you need not seek me or think about our friends in Warsaw. You need only think of yourself, remember that. I shall have eloped—with Wanda.”
And he finished with an odd laugh, that had a tender ring in it.
“Bukaty and I,” he went on, after a pause, “do not talk of these things together. But we have come to an understanding on that point. And when the first flurry is over and we come to the top for a breath of air, you have only to wire to my address in Paris to tell me where you are—and I will tell you where—we are. We are old birds at this sport—you and I—and we know how to take care of ourselves.”
They were now in the outskirts of the town, among the wide and ill-paved streets where tall houses are springing up on the site of the huts once occupied by the Jews who are now quartered in the neighborhood of the Nowiniarska market-place. For the chosen people must needs live near a market-place, and within hearing of the chink of small coin. In the cities of eastern Europe that have a Jews' quarter there is a barrier erected between the daily lives of the two races, though no more than a narrow street may in reality divide them. Different interests, different hopes, aspirations, and desires are to be found within a few yards, and neighbors are as far apart as if a frontier line or the curse of Babel stood between them.
Cartoner and Deulin, riding through the Jewish quarter, were as safe from recognition as if they were in a country lane at Wilanow; for the men hurrying along the pavements were wrapped each in his own keen thought of gain, and if they glanced up at the horsemen at all, merely looked in order to appraise the value of their clothes and saddles—as if there were nothing beyond. For them, it would seem there is no beyond; nothing but the dumb waiting for the removal of that curse which has lasted nineteen hundred years, and instead of wearing itself out, seems to gain in strength as the world grows older.
“We will go by the back ways,” said Cartoner, “and need never see any of our world in Warsaw at all.”
The streets were crowded by men, for the women live an in-door life in an atmosphere that seems to bleach and fatten. The roads were little used for wheel traffic; for the commerce by which these people live is of so retail a nature that it seems to pass from hand to hand in mysterious cloth bundles and black stuff bags. The two horsemen were obliged to go slowly through the groups, who never raised their heads, or seemed to speak above a whisper.
“What do they talk of—what do they think—all day?” said Cartoner. And, indeed, the quiet of the streets had a suggestion of surreptitiousness. Even the children are sad, and stand about in melancholy solitude.
“I would sooner be a dog,” answered Deulin, with a shake of the shoulders, as if Care had climbed into the saddle behind him. “Sooner a dog.”
By these ways they reached the station, and there found a messenger to take the horses to their stable. All through the streets they had passed men in one uniform or another, who looked stout and well-fed, who strode in the middle of the pavement, while the Poles, whose clothes were poor and threadbare, shuffled aside in their patched and shambling boots to make way for the conqueror. Sometimes they would turn and look back at some sword-bearer who was more offensive than usual, with reflective eyes as if marking him in order to know him at a future time. As is always the case, it was the smaller officials who were the most offensive—the little Jacks-in-office from the postal administration, the common officers, the hundred obscure civil servants who wear a sword and uniform unworthily in any one of the three European empires. On the other hand, the men in real authority, and notably the officers of the better regiments, sought to conciliate by politeness and a careful retention of themselves in the background. But these well-intentioned efforts were of small avail; for racial things are stronger than human endeavor or the careful foresight of statesmen. Here in Warsaw the Muscovite, the Pole, the Jew—herding together in the same streets, under the same roof, obedient to one law, acknowledging one sovereign—were watching each other, hating each other.
At the street corners the smart, quiet police took note of each foot-passenger, every carriage, every stranger passing in a hired droschki. Cartoner and Deulin could see from the passing glance beneath the flat, green cap that they were seen and recognized at every turn. On the steps of the station they were watched with a polite pretense of looking the other way by two of the higher officials of the Russian-speaking police.
“I do not mind them,” said Deulin, passing through the doorway to the booking-office. “It is not of them that we need be afraid. We are doing no harm, and they cannot send us out of the country while our passports hold out. They have satisfied themselves as to that. For they have been through my belongings twice, in my rooms at the Europe—I know when my things have been touched—they or some one else. Perhaps Kosmaroff; who knows?”
Thus he talked on in characteristic fashion, saying a hundred nothings as only Frenchmen and women can, touching life lightly like a skilled musician, running nimble fingers over the keys, and striking a chord half by accident here and there which was sonorous and had a deeper meaning. He ordered the luncheon, argued with the waiter, and rallied him on the criminal paucity of his menu.
“Yes,” he said, “let it be beef. I know your mutton. It tastes like the smell of goat. So give us beef—your railway beef, which has travelled so far, but not by train. It has come on foot, to be killed and cut up by a locomotive, to be served by a waiter who has assuredly failed as a stoker.”
He sat down as he spoke, and rearranged the small table, covered by a doubtful cloth, through which could be felt the chill of the marble underneath. Deulin always took the lead in these small matters, and Cartoner accepted his decision without comment. The Frenchman knew him so well, it seemed, that he knew his tastes, or suspected his indifference. While he thus rattled on he glanced sharply from time to time at his companion, and when the waiter was finally sent away with a hundred minute instructions, he turned suddenly to Cartoner.
“You are absorbed. What are you thinking about?” he said.
“I was thinking how well you speak Polish. And yet you have only been here once before,” answered the Englishman, bluntly.
“When I was a young man there were opportunities of learning Polish in Paris,” said Deulin. “Yes—I learned Polish when I was young——”
He had arranged the table to his satisfaction, had picked up several objects to examine them and replace them with care on the exact spot from whence he had taken them, and was now looking round the room with large, deep-lined eyes which were always tired and never at rest.
“When one is young, one learns so much in a short time, especially if that time is ill-spent,” he said, airily. “That is why the virtuous are such poor company; they have no backbone to their past. With the others—'nous autres'—it is the evil deeds that form a sort of spinal column to our lives, rigid and strong, upon which to lean in old age when virtue is almost a necessity.”
Finally he came round in his tour of inspection to the face opposite to him.
“Do you know,” he said, sharply, “you are devilish absent-minded. It is a bad habit. It makes the world think that you have something on your mind. And having nothing on its own mind—or no mind to have anything on—it hates you for your airs of superiority.”
He took up the bottle of wine which the waiter had set upon the table in front of him, inspected the label, and filled two glasses. He tasted the vintage, and made a wry face. Then he raised his shoulders with an air or reconciliation to the inevitable.
“When I was a young—a very young diplomatist—an old scoundrel in gold spectacles told me that one of the first rules of the game was to appear content with that which you cannot alter. We must apply that rule to this wine. It is our old friend, Chateau la Pompe. It will not hurt you. It will not loosen your tongue, my friend, you need not fear that.”
He spoke so significantly that Cartoner looked across the table at him.
“What do you mean?”
Deulin laughed and made no answer.
“Do you think that my tongue requires loosening?”
And the Frenchman stroked his mustache as he looked thoughtfully into the steady, meditating eyes.
“It is not,” he said, “that you assume a reserve which one might think unfair. It is merely that there are so many things which you do not think worth saying, or wise to speak of, or necessary to communicate, that—well—there is nothing left but silence. And silence is sometimes dangerous. Not as dangerous as speech, I allow—but dangerous, nevertheless.”
Cartoner looked at him and waited. Across the little table the two schools went out to meet each other—the old school of diplomacy, all words; the new, all silence.
“Listen,” said the Frenchman. “I once knew a man into whose care was given the happiness of a fellow-being. There is a greater responsibility, by-the-way, than the well-being of a whole nation, even of one of the two greatest nations in the world. And that is a care which you and I have had upon our shoulders for a brief hour here and there. It was the old story; for it was the happiness of a woman. God knows the man meant well! But he bungled it. Bon Dieu—how he bungled it! He said too little. Ever since he has talked too much. She was a Polish woman, by-the-way, and that has left a tenderness, nay, a raw place, in my heart, which smarts at the sound of a Polish word. For I was the man.”
“Well,” asked Cartoner, “what do you want to know?”
“Nothing,” answered the other, quick as thought. “I only tell you the story as a warning. To you especially, who take so much for said that has not been said. You are strong, and a man. Remember that a woman—even the strongest—may not be able to bear such a strain as you can bear.”
Cartoner was listening attentively enough. He always listened with attention to his friend on such rare occasions as he chose to be serious.
“You know,” went on Deulin, after a pause, during which the waiter had set before him a battered silver dish from which he removed the cover with a flourish full of promise—“you know that I would give into your care unreservedly anything that I possessed, such as a fortune, or—well—a daughter. I would trust you entirely. But any man may make a mistake. And if you make a mistake now, I shall never forgive you—never.”
And his eyes flashed with a sudden fierceness as he looked at his companion.
“Is there anything I can do for you, my friend?” he asked, curtly.
“You have already promised to do the only thing I would ask you to do in Warsaw,” replied Cartoner.
Deulin held up one hand in a gesture commanding silence.
“Not another word—they cost you so much, a few words—I understand perfectly.”
Then with a rapid relapse into his gayer mood he turned to the dish before him.
“And now let us consider the railway beef. It promises little. But it cannot be so tough and indigestible as the memory of a mistake—I tell you that.”
The most liberal-minded man in Russia at this time was the Czar. He had chosen his ministers from among the nobles who were at least tolerant of advance, if they did not actually advocate it. Much as he hated to make a change, he had in one or two instances parted with old and trusted servants—friends of his boyhood—rather than forgo one item of his policy. In other cases he had appealed to the memory of their long friendship in order to bring his nobles not to his own way of thinking, for he could not do that, but to his own plan of action.
“I do not agree with you, but I will serve you,” had answered one of these, and the Czar, who did not know where to turn to find the man he needed, accepted such service.
For a throne stands in isolation, and no man may judge another by looking down upon him, but must needs descend into the crowd, and, mingling there on a lower level, pick out for himself the honest man or the clever man—or that rare being, the man who is both.
Kings and emperors may not do this, however. Despots dare not. Alexander II. acted as any ordinary man acts when he finds himself in a position to confer favors, to make appointments, to get together, as it were, a ministry, even if this takes no more dignified a form than a board of directors. He suspected that the world contained precisely the men he wanted, if he could only let down a net into it and draw them up. How, otherwise, could he select them? So he did the usual thing. He looked round among his relations, and, failing them, the friends of his youth. For an emperor, popularly supposed to have the whole world to choose from, has no larger a choice than any bourgeois looking round his own small world for a satisfactory executor.
Coming to the throne, as he did, in the midst of a losing fight, his first task was to conclude a humiliating peace. He must needs bow down to the upstart adventurer of France, who had tricked England into a useless war in order to steady his own tottering throne.
Alexander II., moreover, came to power with the avowed intention of liberating the serfs, which intention he carried out, and paid for with his own life in due time. Russia had been the only country to stand aloof on the slave question, thus branding herself in two worlds as still uncivilized. The young Czar knew that such a position was untenable. “Without the serf the Russian Empire must crumble away,” his advisers told him. “With the serf she cannot endure,” he answered And twenty-two millions of men were set free. In this act he stood almost alone; for hardly a single minister was with him heart and soul, though many obeyed him loyally enough against their own convictions. Many honestly thought that this must be the end of the Russian Empire.
It is hard to go against the advice of those near at hand; for their point of view must always appear to be the same as one's own, while counsel from afar comes as the word of one who is looking at things from another stand-point, and may thus be more easily mistaken.
Alexander II., called suddenly to reign over one-tenth part of the human race, men of different breed and color, of the three great contending religions and a hundred minor churches, was himself a nervous, impressionable man, suffering from ill-health, bowed down with the weight of his great responsibility. His father died in his arms, broken-hearted, bequeathing him an empire invaded by the armies of five European nations, hated of all the world, despised of all mankind. Even to-day there is a sinister sound in the very name of Russian. Men turn to look twice at one who comes from that stupendous empire. It is said that an hereditary melancholy broods beneath the weightiest earthly crown. History tells that none wearing it has ever reached a hale old age. Soldiers still hearty, still wearing the sword they have carried through half a dozen campaigns, bow to-day in the Winter Palace before their sovereign, having taken the oath of allegiance to four successive Czars.
Half in, half out of Europe, Alexander II. awoke with his own hand the great nation still wrapped in the sleep of the Middle Ages, only to find that he had stirred a slumbering power whose movements were soon to prove beyond control. He poured out education like water upon the surface of a vast field full of hidden seed, which must inevitably spring up wheat or tares—a bountiful harvest of good or a terrific growth of evil. He made reading and writing compulsory to the whole of his people. With a stroke of the pen he threw aside the last prop to despotic rule. Yet he hoped to continue Czar of All the Russias. This tall, pale, gentle, determined man was a man of courage. When the time came he faced the consequence of his own temerity with an unflinching eye.
“What do you want of me?” he asked, the very moment after he had been saved almost by a miracle from assassination. For he knew that he was giving more than was wise. It is said that he was puzzled and thoughtful after each attempt upon his life.
The war with Turkey was the first sign that Russia was awakening—that the soldiers knew how to read and write. It was the first time in history that the nation forced a Czar to declare war, and Servia was full of Russian volunteers fighting for Christian Slavs before the Emperor realized that he must fight—and fight alone, for no nation in Europe would help him. He had taught Russia to read; had raised the veil of ignorance that hung between his people and the rest of civilization. They had read of the Bulgarian atrocities, and there was no holding them.
To rule autocratically what was then the vastest empire in the world was in itself more than one brain could compass. But in addition to his own internal troubles, Alexander II. was surrounded by European difficulties. England, his steady, deadly enemy, despite a declaration of neutrality, was secretly helping Turkey. Austria, as usual, the dog waiting on the threshold, was ready to side with the winner—for a consideration. No wonder this man was always weary. It is said that all through his reign he received and despatched telegrams at any hour of the night.
No wonder that his heart was hardened towards Poland. The most liberal-minded Czar had his mean point, as every man must have. There are many great and good men who will write a check readily enough and look twice at a penny. There are many who will give generously with one hand while grasping with the other that which is really the property of their neighbor. Alexander's mean point was Poland.
On the occasion of his first imperial visit to Warsaw he said, in the cold, calm voice which was so hated and feared: “Gentlemen, let us have no more dreams.” Eleven years later he reminded an influential deputation of Polish nobles of the unforgiven and unforgotten words, commending the caution to their attention again. He paid frequent visits to Warsaw on one excuse or another. This dreamer would have no dreaming in his dominion. This mean man must ever be looking at his hoard. The chief interest in the study of a human life lies around the inexplicable. If we were quite consistent we should be entirely dull. No one knows why this liberal autocrat was mean to Poland.
From Warsaw, the city which has been commanded to stand still, Cartoner travelled across the plains of endless snow towards the north. He found as he progressed a hundred signs of the awakening. The very faces of the people had changed since he last looked upon them only a few years earlier. These people were now a nation, conscious of their own strength. They had fought in a great and victorious war, not because they had been commanded to fight, but because they wanted to. They had followed with understanding the diplomatic warfare that succeeded the signing of the treaty of San Stefano. They had won and lost. They were men, and no longer driven beasts.
It was evening when Cartoner arrived at St. Petersburg. The long northern twilight had begun, and the last glow of the western sky was reflected on the golden dome of St. Isaac's, while the arrowy spire of the Admiralty shot up into a cloudless sky.
The Warsaw Railway Station is in a quiet part of the town, and the streets through which Cartoner drove in his hired sleigh were almost deserted. It was the hour of the promenade in the Summer Garden, or the drive in the Newski Prospect, so that all the leisured class were in another quarter of the town. St. Petersburg is, moreover, the most spacious capital in the world, where there is more room than the inhabitants can occupy, where the houses are too large and the streets too wide. The Catherine Canal was, of course, frozen, and its broken surface had a dirty, ill-kept air, while the snow was spotted with rubbish and refuse, and trodden down into numberless paths and crossings. Cartoner looked at it indifferently. It had no history yet. The streets were silent beneath their cloak of snow. All St. Petersburg is silent for nearly half the year, and is the quietest city in the world, excepting Venice.
The sleigh sped across the Nicholas Bridge to the Vasili Island. The river showed no signs of spring yet. The usual pathways across it were still in use. The Vasili Ostrov is less busy than that greater part of the city which lies across the river. Behind the academy of Arts, and leading out of the Bolshoi Prospect, are a number of parallel streets where quiet people live—lawyers and merchants, professors at the university or at one or other of the numerous schools and colleges facing the river and looking across it towards the English Quay.
It was to one of these streets that Cartoner had told his driver to proceed, and the man had some difficulty in finding the number. It was a house like any other in the street—like any other in any other street. For St. Petersburg is a monstrous town, showing a flat face to the world, exhibiting to the sky a flat expanse of roof broken here and there by some startling inequality, the dagger-like spire of St. Peter and St. Paul, the great roof of the Kasan Cathedral, the dome of St. Isaac's—the largest cathedral in the world.
When the sleigh at length drew up with a shrill clang of bells the door-keeper came from beneath the great porch without enthusiasm. His was a quiet house, and he did not care for strangers, especially at this time, when every man looked askance at a new-comer and the police gave the dvorniks no peace. He seemed to recognize Cartoner, however, for he raised his hand to his peaked cap when he answered that the gentleman asked for was within.
“On the second floor. You will remember the door,” he said, over his shoulder, as Cartoner, having paid the driver, hurried towards the house, leaving the dvornik to bring the luggage.
Cartoner's summons at the door on the second floor was answered by a clumsy Russian maid-servant, who smiled a broad, good-natured recognition when she saw him, and, turning without a word, led the way along a narrow passage. The smell of tobacco smoke and a certain bareness of wall and floor suggested a bachelor's home. The maid opened the door of a room and stood aside for Cartoner to pass in.
Seated near an open wood-fire was a man with grizzled hair and a short, brown beard, which had the look of concealing a determined chin. He was in the act of filling a wooden pipe from a jar on the table, and he stood up, pipe in hand, to greet the new-comer.
“Ah!” he said. “I was wondering if you would come, or if you had got other work to do.”
“No, I am at the same work. And you?”
“As you see,” replied the bearded man, dragging forward a chair with his foot and seating himself again before the fire. “I am here still, where you left me”—he paused to make a brief calculation—“five years ago. I stayed here all through the war—all through the Berlin Congress, when it was not good to be an Englishman in Petersburg. But I stayed. Tallow! It does not sound heroic, but the world must have its tallow. And there is a simplicity about commerce, you know.”
He gave a short laugh—the laugh of a man who had tried something and failed. Something that was not commerce, for his voice and speech had a ring of other things.
“Can you put me up?” asked Cartoner. “Only for a few days, perhaps.”
“As long as you stay in Petersburg you stay in these rooms,” replied the other, gravely.
Cartoner nodded his thanks and sat down. Their attitude towards each other had the repose which is only existent in a friendship that has lasted since childhood.
“Well?” he inquired.
“Gad!” exclaimed the other, “we are in a queer way. I went to the opera the other evening. He showed his face in the imperial box and the house was empty in half an hour. He always drives alone in his sleigh now, so that only one royal life may go at a time. They'll get him—they'll get him! And he knows it.”
“Fools!” said Cartoner.
“They are worse than fools,” answered the other. “The man is down, and they strike him. His asthma is worse. He has half a dozen complaints. His policy has failed. It was the finest policy ever tried in Russia. He is the finest Czar they have ever had. He gave them trial by jury; he abolished corporal punishment. Fools! they are the scum of this earth, Cartoner!”
“I know,” replied Cartoner, in his gentle way, “students who cannot learn—workmen who will not work—women whom no one will marry.”
“Yes, the sons and daughters of the serfs that he emancipated. It makes one sick to talk of them. Let me hear about yourself.”
“Well,” answered Cartoner, “I have had nothing to eat since breakfast.”
“That is all you have to tell me about yourself?”
“That is all.”