PETER stepped across the threshold of the open door, and into the shaft of light spilling through the partly curtained doorway of the room beyond. Looking to the end of this vista of light, he saw the figure of a man sitting in a chair by a table. The head and upper part of this man’s body were only vaguely visible and merged against the dark background of the far wall. But his boots were silhouetted in the radiance of the beams of the lamp which shot downward under the shade—boots that looked grotesquely large and misshapen, for their shadows were cast upon the floor in elongated outline.
Katerin stopped at the curtained doorway, and by a gesture, bade Peter enter before her. He went on, and as he neared the lamp on the table, he saw that the figure in the chair was a frail old man with his head tied up in a bandage. And behind the chair, better hidden by the gloom, was a man standing, whom Peter took for a servant hovering over his master with watchful care. Only the face of the moujik was plainly visible to Peter, and his eyes shining with the reflected light of the lamp, like two luminous pin-pricks, were boring across the room at Peter. The tense alertness of the moujik’s posture suggested an animal crouching for a spring.
Katerin passed Peter, and approached her father. She said, “Our friend has come to us,” and to Peter, “This is my father.”
Peter’s heels came together, and he bowed low. When he looked at the old man again, the withered head, wrapped in the encircling bandage, was nodding gently as if with a palsy. And the bent shoulders leaned forward under a gray blanket, to peer at the visitor. The right hand, hidden beneath the blanket over his legs, seemed to be trembling, while his left hand lifted from his knee made a motion toward a chair—it was a thin, bony hand, more like a claw than a hand.
“I bid you welcome, sir,” piped Michael, hoarsely. “But I have little hospitality to offer a guest under this roof.”
“May God’s blessings fall upon you, sir,” replied Peter, his heart quickened by sympathy with this pathetic old ruin of a man—a man who, like his own father as Peter thought, had suffered the life of an exile under the cruel rule of the Governor, Michael Kirsakoff. Here, Peter supposed, was another victim, in feeble senility, still pursued and threatened by Zorogoff and the same Governor Kirsakoff who had brought about the death of Peter’s father, and thrown the boy Peter into a big prison. And these thoughts fed the inward flame of hatred which burned through Peter’s being against Michael Kirsakoff—the very man before him, and on whom he had just called for the blessing of God! Here was his enemy of old, and he looked upon him, yet knew him not.
For a time the two men peered at each other, one knowing that an enemy was before him, and one thinking that he was in the presence of a friend. But Peter saw nothing in the old man which brought to mind anything of Michael Kirsakoff. Katerin, as Vashka, the samovar girl, had so arranged the shaded lamp, and the chairs, that her father’s face should not stand out clearly in light against a dark background. Also the bandage hid the jaws and cheeks of Michael in such a way that the old man’s facial contour was blurred. Age had done much to hide Michael, and Peter’s memory was clinging to his own picture of Kirsakoff of twenty years before. And Peter had adjusted his mind to the finding of Kirsakoff as a result of this interview, and somewhere beyond it, so it would have been hard to convince him that Kirsakoff was now before him.
“You come as an American officer, yet my daughter tells me that you are one of us—a Russian who has come back to help Russia,” said Michael.
“Yes, and it is twenty years since I saw my native land,” said Peter, as he sat down.
“Ah, it is a sad home-coming for one of the motherland’s children,” sighed Michael. “They say now that the people will rule at last.”