He and the priest parted outside the gates, one to vespers, the other to seek the Countess and Ian. Father Constantine excused himself from the Countess' table that evening; he preferred to eat in his room when Great Russians were in the house. Besides, he had much to do and knew the General liked to sit over his meals. On his way to the Countess' boudoir, which was used as an office in connection with the little hospital, he met Roman again.
"That Jew was right, Father," he threw over his shoulder. "The spy is here, and my men are to have the shooting of him to-morrow at daybreak."
Father Constantine had a busy hour with Ian's agent, a surgeon and some refugees who came in from a village ten versts off. All these people now walked in and out of the Countess' boudoir, once a sacred spot, as if it were a mill. He and the agent had disposed of the last fugitive and he was going up to the wards when a Russian corporal blundered in.
"What do you want in here?" he asked sharply. It annoyed him to see these louts use his patroness' room as a passage.
He said something in Russian; Father Constantine had made a point, all his life, not to speak that language, but he understood that an officer upstairs had asked for a priest.
"Tell him I'll see him to-morrow."
The man saluted, grinned and said:
"He will be dead to-morrow."
Then the priest remembered the spy they had caught: it was he. The wards would have to wait. He sent a message up to Vanda and told the soldier to take him to the condemned man.
They made their way through the broad passages and landings which were blocked with wounded waiting for treatment, and up a winding stair which led to the turret. It was silent as the tomb till they disturbed an owl and some rats, and almost as dark. Father Constantine had not been up there since Ian was a boy and kept pets which could not stop outside in the winter. He remembered one winter when Roman and Joseph kept a young dog fox up there in the hopes of taming it. But it was never even friendly and when the first signs of spring came through the chinks of its prison, it gnawed the staple from its chain and made off into the fields. He felt glad that this Prussian prisoner would not get away so easily.