There was pathos in both. Alexander II. had that passion for life which comes to an old man upon marrying a pretty young woman. Yet foreigners who saw him during this period said that he looked like a hunted man. As to Count Melikoff, his advance had been so rapid, he was surrounded by so many enemies at court, and the changes by which he was trying to save the Czar’s life and his own power, were beset by so many obstacles, that he could not help feeling like the peasant of the story who was made king for one day.
Naturally talkative and genially expansive, the Czar’s manner toward people who were admitted to his intimacy was one of amiable informality. The chief pathos of his fate sprang from the discrepancy between the Czar and the man in him, between a vindictive ruthlessness born of a blind sense of his autocratic honour and an affectionate, emotional nature with less grit than pride. Had he been a common mortal he would have made far more friends than enemies.
Count Loris-Melikoff had become accustomed to feel at home in his presence. At this minute, however, as the Czar was watching the snow flakes, with an air of idle curiosity, the Armenian had an overbearing sense of the distance between them. He knew that the Czar was anxious to talk about the revolutionists and that he hated to do so. His heart contracted with common human pity, yet in the silence that divided them it came over him that the man in front of him was the Czar, and a feeling of awe seized him like the one he used to experience at sight of the Emperor long before he was raised to his present position. This feeling passed, however, the moment the Czar began to speak.
“Well?” he said, with sudden directness. “Anything new about that Michailoff fellow?” Alexandre Michailoff was the real name of the Janitor.
“Nothing new so far, your Majesty,” Loris-Melikoff answered obsequiously, yet with something like triumph, as if the powerlessness of the police were only too natural and substantiated his views on the general state of things. “He is one of their chief ringleaders.”
“And this has been known all along,” the Emperor remarked with sad irony. “Such a thing would be inconceivable in any other capital in Europe.”
“Quite so. But I feel that in other countries, the capture of miscreants like ours would be due less to the efficiency of the police than to the cordial coöperation of the public. The trouble is that our police is thrown on its own resources, Sire. It is practically fighting those wretches single-handed.”
The Czar had a fit of coughing, the result of asthma. When it had subsided, he said with an air of suffering:
“Well, that’s your theory. But then their public is not ours. The average Russian is not wide-awake enough to coöperate with the authorities.” He had in mind his own address at Moscow in which he had appealed to the community at large for this very assistance in ferreting out sedition. The Will of the People had come into existence since then.
“Still, if our public were drawn into active coöperation with the Government, if it became habituated to a sense of the monarch’s confidence in itself, it seems reasonable to suppose that the indolence of the community would then disappear. No people is capable of greater loyalty to the throne than your Majesty’s. All that is needed is to lend to this devotion tangibility. This and this alone would enable your Majesty to cure the evil. What the body politic needs is judicious internal treatment. Surgical operations have proven futile. These are my sincerest convictions, your Majesty.”