“Ah, child, I forgot. So little do you know as yet of wrong and cruelty, that the story of the efforts to redress them falls without meaning on your ear. But the young do well to remember much they cannot understand. As for me, I was born a serf, like my father and my father’s father; and these lips of mine shall be silent in the grave ere they forget to praise Alexander Paulovitch. Before his time we were bought and sold like the beasts of the field. You might read a notice in the window of a shop, ‘To be sold:—An active and capable servant, and a good milch cow. Inquire within.’ This he forbade; forbidding also the removal of peasants from the land. He permits and encourages the nobles to set their serfs at liberty whenever they will; and if they are without land, he himself advances them money to purchase their homesteads. He has deprived their lords of the dangerous privilege of sending them to Siberia without a trial; nor dare any one, however rich or great, use his serfs with harshness or cruelty. Amongst many stories of his interference on behalf of the oppressed, I remember one concerning a great lady, whose name I will not tell you, as she lives in this city. From that love of money which the priests tell us is a root of all evil, she neglected her sick and aged serfs, and allowed them to suffer from want. The Czar heard of it, and he sent his own physician to minister to these poor suffering peasants, whom no man cared for. Dr. Wylie—so they call him—a shrewd, clever Scotchman, took care to order his patients so many expensive remedies and comforts that the princess, by the time she had paid for wine and wheaten flour, and I know not what besides, had also learned the useful lesson that nothing costs so dear in the long run as a duty neglected. Nor has the Czar given the mujik that which costs him nothing. He refuses absolutely to grant men as serfs to his courtiers; and thus he has dried up the unfailing stream of wealth wherewith all the Czars that went before him have enriched and rewarded their servants without impoverishing themselves. God give it back to him in the prayers of the poor! Moreover, I have heard that every year, out of his own treasure, he lays by one million of roubles to aid in the fulfilment of his beloved and cherished dream—to make the body of every mujik on the soil of holy Russia as free as his soul is already in the sight of God.”
The rapt, kindling expression of his face as he spoke thus impressed the children deeply. He seemed to be gazing far away into some “white starry distance” where he could see the fruition of that glorious dream. But gradually the light faded, and the shadow passed once more over the aged face.
“Who shall see that day?” he murmured sadly. “Not the old; their work is quickly over, while God’s work goes on but slowly. No, not the old; they are content to lie down in hope, waiting for what God will let them see in the resurrection morning. But the young.—He is young yet, this Czar God has given us, whose youthful dreams are not of pleasure, or conquest, or glory, but of loosing the heavy burdens, letting the oppressed go free, and breaking every yoke. Shall it be given to him to see the desire of his heart? It may be—before his hairs are white as mine. But it may not. I have heard the priests say that, after all, it was not Moses who led the children of Israel into the Promised Land.”
Ivan and Feodor waited in respectful silence until his reverie was over. Then Ivan began to question him upon a subject about which he was interested, and indeed perplexed.
“Dädushka, why do you seem to think the Czar ought not to have made this peace with Napoleon for which all the bells in the city have been ringing?”
“There be many reasons, boy—good reasons and bad, noble reasons and selfish. Of the selfish reasons I need not tell you. You are now surrounded by merchants; you will soon be surrounded by nobles. No doubt you will hear lamentations enough from both—for the luxuries wherewith English commerce supplied the tables of the one, and the gold with which it filled the purses of the other. But what, perhaps, you will never hear, is the truth that lies buried beneath that stream of idle talk. Have you ever, in Nicolofsky, listened on winter nights to the low howling of the wolves amidst the snow? There is a horrible story I remember hearing in my childhood about a woman—a mother—who was making a winter journey in her sledge with her five little ones. Perhaps you too know the tale? The famished pack with their demon voices howled around her sledge. To save all the rest, as she fondly dreamed, she sacrificed one child, her youngest. Then a moment of respite, a verst or two gained upon the savage pursuers—a wild, fleeting gleam of hope. Then—then;—but I need not go on. She reached her journey’s end alone, to die the next day, accursed and broken-hearted.[12] Forget the story if you can, but remember the awful lesson. The taste for blood grows with what it feeds on, and the doom of the coward only comes the more quickly from his guilty efforts to avert it. The French are wolves, and Napoleon is a demon. Already has he devoured the nations of Germany, and it has but whetted his appetite for fresh victims. He deceives the Czar—who is young, and likes to think others as true and generous as himself—with his offers of peace. But the peace he offers is only from the lip out; for he hates us, and he will never cease to hate us. Why not? We stand upright, while the other nations—all except the English—bow down and kiss his feet. But they are all infidels, those Frenchmen. They believe neither in God, nor saint, nor devil. Therefore I think that if we had put our trust in God, and gone to war with them again, he would have protected holy Russia, the land of his people and of his orthodox Church.”
Old Petrovitch, in speaking thus, expressed the thoughts and feelings of the mass of his countrymen. They were ignorant and superstitious, but they were devout. They believed in “the God of Russia,” and in the Czar as the first of his servants. A time was drawing near when this belief of theirs should be tried in the furnace heated seven times. The trial proved beyond a doubt that metal was there, genuine and enduring; but how much was the pure gold of faith, and how much the iron of a fierce fanaticism? There is one test potent to divide between the gold and the iron. The fanatic may endure like a martyr and fight like a hero; but when the battle is past, and the victory won, he will trample on the fallen like a tyrant;—for his God is the God of vengeance. But while the man of faith can suffer and fight, and that with a heroism as undaunted, he can also pardon;—for his God is the God of mercy, and He whose “right hand holds him up” makes him “great” with “His gentleness.”