When I Was Czar

by Arthur W. Marchmont

There was also one other feeble way—to get some communication to the Emperor, telling him the whole thing, and leaving him to act. But while such a plan might possibly do good, it was much more likely to do harm. Prince Kalkov would be immediately consulted—and then the deluge. It was more than probable, indeed, that any message or communication from me would be intercepted by him. So that notion had to go after the other.

Helga’s stubborn refusal to believe that I was no more than just a private individual was of course the bed rock of the mess, and nothing that I had said or done had shaken her belief in the least. Nothing seemed likely to do it, moreover, short of getting the Emperor to stand shoulder to shoulder with me so that she might see us together.

There was, further, the to me unendurable risk of leaving her alone at Brabinsk to face the danger from these wretched Nihilist fanatics. Had the other parts of the problem been capable of solution, that alone would have kept me by her side.

Of all the tests to which a man’s nerve may be subjected, few can be more terrible than the fear of secret assassination. But there is one, and I ran up against it there. To know that there are a number of human wild beasts planning to put a bullet in your head or a knife in your heart is bad enough, but it is infinitely worse when you feel, as I did, that if they failed to do that for me they would probably endeavour to do it for the woman I loved.

And thus I paced the lawn in a mood of intense embarrassment, complicated with a double fear for my own life and for Helga’s.

With that thought in my mind I had a good look round the house. It was, as Boreski had said in his letter, a good place for taking precautions. A square solid stone building, with all the lower windows protected by bars or heavy shutters, and it would be as difficult to break into it as to get out of it.

In my mood then I had a keen appreciation of its strength, and I came back to the front again feeling very thankful to the man who had planned and built it.

It was a dead still evening. The twilight had faded very quickly, and when I had been smoking and worrying myself for about an hour, without getting an inch nearer to any solution of the problem Helga had set me, my ears, which are very keen, caught a sound in the distance.

It was very faint, but before it ceased I recognized the beat of a horse’s hoofs.

I was in a nervously high strung condition, and as I knew that there was no house near enough for me to be able to hear any one who might be driving or riding up to it, I tossed my cigar away and drew back into some bushes to wait for what might be to come.