A SECOND COURTSHIP.
THE Czar was still in Livadia with his bride, abandoning himself to his second youth with a passion that was tinged with the pathos of imminent tragedy, when Count Loris-Melikoff telegraphed to him a plea for the lives of two revolutionists who had been sentenced to death, one of these being Alexandre, the man in whose lodgings the gendarmes had found a diagram of the Imperial dining hall. The distinguished Armenian was contemplating reforms which he expected to leave no room for terrorism, and it was for the sake of these measures as well as of the Emperor himself, that he was averse to having the bitterness of the revolutionists quickened by new executions. If they only let the Czar live until those projects had been carried out, he thought, their conspiracies would lose all reason of existence; at any rate, the surreptitious support which they received from men of high social position would be withdrawn.
But his despatch was followed by one from the Czarowitz, who, echoing the views of the anti-Melikoff party at court, urged his father not to show signs of weakness, and the sentence was allowed to stand.
At about nine o’clock in the morning of a cold autumn day, a fortnight after the meeting of the Executive Committee which Clara attended, Pavel stood on a chair nailing a clothes rack to the wall. The room was Clara’s. It was on the fifth floor of a house near a corner, with windows commanding the two intersecting streets, where her window signals could be seen at a considerable distance. She rented it furnished, with samovar service, but the curtains and some bits of bric-à-brac had been bought by Pavel who took more interest in these things and was handier about the house than she. He himself lived in the house of a distant relative, an elderly widow, who took great pride in him and had no doubt that he led the life of the average young man of his class, that is to say, he spent his nights and his mamma’s rubles on an endless crop of wild oats. To Clara’s landlady he was known as a brother of hers. On the present occasion he had found his fiancée out, but a mark on the door had told him that she would soon be back. Presently she came in. She wore a tall fur cap and her cheeks gleamed, exhaling the freshness of girlish health and of the cold weather of the street, but she looked grave. Pavel threw away his hammer and pounced down upon her with open arms. She repulsed him gently.
“Stop,” she whispered, drearily, unbuttoning her cloak and drawing a newspaper from its inner pocket. “There is terrible news this morning.”
The execution of Alexandre and the other revolutionist had taken place the day before, and the newspapers were allowed to print a very brief account of it—how they bade each other good-bye on the scaffold and how, when Alexandre saw the death-shroud on his friend, his eyes filled with tears. The two condemned men had been great chums for several years, Alexandre having once wrested the other from a convoy. Now they died together.
As Pavel read the account of the double execution, standing by the window, a flush of overpowering despair shot into his chest and diffused itself through his legs.
“They have choked them after all,” he gasped out.