“Our turn will come!”
“The mice will bury the cat!”
On the night between the first and second of December, the Tsar’s condition became so much worse that he ordered his confessor, the Archimandrite Theodosius, to be summoned and received the last rites of the Church. Neither Catherine nor Ménshikoff quitted the sick chamber. The residents of foreign courts, Russian Ministers, Senators, spent the night in the Winter Palace. When Alexis came in the morning to inquire about his father, the latter did not receive him, yet the sudden hush of the crowd which let him pass, the servile bows, the searching looks, pale faces, especially of his stepmother and Ménshikoff, told Alexis of the nearness of that which had always seemed to him so remote, so well-nigh impossible. His heart sank, his breath came quick and short, whether from joy or terror he knew not.
The same day, towards evening, he went to see Kikin, and the two had a long talk together. Kikin lived on the outskirts of the town, hard by the Ochta quarter. Thence the Tsarevitch returned straight home.
The sleighs dashed across the desert wood and wide empty streets, like vistas in a forest, with scarcely noticeable rows of log buildings buried in the snow drifts. The moon itself was invisible; but the air was filled with bright moonlit sparks. The snow did not fall from on high. The wind sent it in whirlwinds and in pillars like smoke. The luminous snowstorm sparkled and foamed in the dull blue sky like wine in a goblet.
He breathed the frosty air with delight. He felt bright as though his soul also was filled with a wild, luminous, intoxicating storm, and as the hidden moon lit up the storm, so also was his brightness due to a hidden thought, which though afraid to own, he yet felt to be the cause of his heady fear and joy.
Dim lights were glimmering through the bluish moonlit mist. They came from the frost-rimed windows of the huts, which, overhung with icicles, suggested drunken eyes glowing from under hoary eyebrows.
“Perhaps,” he thought, looking at them, “people are there drinking my health, the health of ‘Russia’s Hope’!” and his elation increased.
On his return, he sat down before the hearth where the embers were faintly glowing, and ordered Afanássieff to prepare him a hot drink. The room was dark, the candles had not yet been brought in. Alexis loved the dusk. Suddenly in the glow of the embers there flared up the blue centre of the spirit flame. The moonlit snowstorm peered with its blue eyes into the room through the transparent faery designs of the frost. Behind the window panes there quivered also a huge, living, blue, delirious flame.
Alexis was relating to Afanássieff his conversation with Kikin; it was the outline of a plot drawn up in case flight was inevitable and return only possible after his father’s death, which he thought would soon happen—the Tsar was suffering from epilepsy, and such people do not live long.