He could not give them money, because the tax-collector had them all under his thumb and would exact the last kopeck. The question was far above his single-handed reach, and he did not dare to meet it openly and seek the assistance of the few fellow-nobles who faced the position without fear.
He could not see in the brutal faces before him one spark of intelligence, one little gleam of independence and self-respect which could be attributed to his endeavor; which the most sanguine construction could take as resulting from his time and money given to a hopeless cause.
“Well,” he said. “Have you nothing to tell me of your prince?”
“You know him,” answered the man who had spoken from the safe background. “We need not tell you.”
“Yes,” answered Paul; “I know him.”
He would not defend himself.
“There,” he went on, addressing the man whose hand was now bandaged. “You will do. Keep clean and sober, and it will heal. Get drunk and go dirty, and you will die. Do you understand, Ivan Ivanovitch?”
The man grunted sullenly, and moved away to give place to a woman with a baby in her arms.
Paul glanced into her face. He had known her a few years earlier a happy child playing at her mother’s cottage door.
She drew back the shawl that covered her child, with a faint, far-off gleam of pride in her eyes. There was something horribly pathetic in the whole picture. The child-mother, her rough, unlovely face lighted for a moment with that gleam from Paradise which men never know; the huge man bending over her, and between them the wizened, disease-stricken little waif of humanity.