CHAPTER I
Alexis had his eyes fixed on the door through which Peter was expected to enter.
The yellow February sun flooded the small reception room of the Preobrazhensky Palace, a house almost as white and plain as the Tsar’s house in Petersburg. The windows opened on a landscape familiar to Alexis from earliest childhood; a snow-covered field dotted with black crows, grey walls of barracks, prison buildings, earth ramparts with pyramids of cannon balls, sentry houses and motionless sentinels outlined against the transparent emerald sky. Sparrows were chirping on the window-sill, just as in spring; clear drops fell like tears from stalactites of ice. It was nearing midday, an odour betrayed the cooking of a cabbage pie. The monotonous ticking of a clock’s pendulum alone broke the silence.
The Tsarevitch had been calm, almost gay, throughout the journey from Naples back to Russia: a kind of insensibility seemed to have possessed him; he had been unable to realize what was happening to him, or why and whither he was being taken back.
Only now, sitting waiting with Tolstoi in the reception room and gazing, just as on that nervous night in Naples, at a fatal door, he seemed to awake and begin at last to understand. Just as then he trembled as in a fever, now crossing himself with muttering prayers, now gripping Tolstoi’s hand:
“Peter Andreitch! Peter Andreitch! what will happen? I confess I am afraid!”
Tolstoi tried to pacify him with his velvety voice “Courage, your Highness! A sin confessed is half forgiven. With God’s help everything will arrange itself, slowly, gently and peacefully——”
The Tsarevitch did not listen, he was rehearsing the speech he had prepared:—