Alexis turned in his saddle and looked keenly into his companion’s face.
“Do you know,” he said, “I believe you founded the Charity League?”
Steinmetz laughed in his easy, stout way.
“It founded itself,” he said; “the angels founded it in heaven. I hope a committee of them will attend to the eternal misery of the dog who betrayed it.”
“I trust they will, but in the meantime I stick to my opinion that it is unnecessary for me to leave the country. What have I done? I do not belong to the League; it is composed entirely of Russian nobles; I don’t admit that I am a Russian noble.”
“But,” persisted Steinmetz quietly, “you subscribe to the League. Four hundred thousand rubles—they do not grow at the roadside.”
“But the rubles have not my name on them.”
“That may be, but we all—they all—know where they are likely to come from. My dear Paul, you cannot keep up the farce any longer. You are not an English gentleman who comes across here for sporting purposes; you do not live in the old Castle of Osterno three months in the year because you have a taste for mediaeval fortresses. You are a Russian prince, and your estates are the happiest, the most enlightened in the empire. That alone is suspicious. You collect your rents yourself. You have no German agents—no German vampires about you. There are a thousand things suspicious about Prince Pavlo Alexis if those that be in high places only come to think about it. They have not come to think about it—thanks to our care and to your English independence. But that is only another reason why we should redouble our care. You must not be in Russia when the Charity League is picked to pieces. There will be trouble—half the nobility in Russia will be in it. There will be confiscations and degradations: there will be imprisonment and Siberia for some. You are better out of it, for you are not an Englishman; you have not even a Foreign Office passport. Your passport is your patent of nobility, and that is Russian. No, you are better out of it.”
“And you—what about you?” asked Paul, with a little laugh—the laugh that one brave man gives when he sees another do a plucky thing.
“I! Oh, I am all right! I am nobody; I am hated of all the peasants because I am your steward and so hard—so cruel. That is my certificate of harmlessness with those that are about the Emperor.”