“As fast as you can drive,” she said.
The moment Anna Nicolayevna got home she inquired whether Pavel was in his room, and when the porter said that his Highness had not been back since he had left, in the morning, a fresh gust of terror smote her heart and brain. She stole into his room. On the table lay a German pamphlet on Kant and a fresh number of the Russian Messenger, the ultra-conservative magazine published in Moscow. In several places the leaves were cut. A Nihilist was the last person in the world one would expect to read this organ of Panslavists. What Anna Nicolayevna did not know was that the cut pages of the conservative magazine, which Pavel had received from St. Petersburg the day before, contained a hidden revolutionary message. Here and there a phrase, word, or a single letter, was marked, by means of an inkstain, abrasion or what looked like the idle penciling of a reader, these forming half a dozen consecutive sentences.
Anna Nicolayevna was perplexed and her perplexity gave her a new thrill of hope. She was in a quiver of impatience to see her son and have it all out.
The dinner hour came round and Pavel was not there. She could not eat. Every little while she paused to listen for a ring of the door bell. She sent a servant to his room to see if he had not arrived unheard. He had not.
The other people at table were Kostia, in huge red shoulder-straps which made his well-fitting uniform look too large for him; Kostia’s old tutor, a powerful looking German with a bashful florid face, and the countess’ own old governess, an aged Frenchwoman with a congealed smile on her bloodless lips. This restlessness of the countess when Pavel was slow in coming was no news to them, but this time she seemed to feel particularly uneasy. Silence hung over them. The Frenchwoman’s dried-up smile turned to a gleam of compassion. The German ate timidly. This man’s services had practically ceased when Kostia entered the cadet corps, but Anna Nicolayevna retained him in the house for his quiet piety. She had a feeling that so far as the intelligent classes were concerned the simple forms of Protestantism were more compatible with religious sincerity than were the iron-bound formalities of her native church. So, with her heart thirsting for spiritual interest, she found intense pleasure in her theological conversations with this well-read, narrow-minded, honest Lutheran, whose religious convictions she envied.
CHAPTER XIII.
A GENDARME’S SISTER.
WHEN Pavel told his mother that he was going out he expected to meet Makar, who had been in Miroslav for the past four days. Once again he was going to plead with him to give up his scheme. The affair kept Pavel in bad humour, but that morning his mind was occupied by the thought that there was an interesting meeting in store for him. In the evening he was to make the acquaintance of Clara Yavner, the heroine of the Pievakin “demonstration.”