She rose slowly, turned, and seized the letter as a starving man seizes food. There was something almost wolf-like in her eyes.
“Steinmetz,” she exclaimed, reading the address. “Steinmetz. Oh! why won’t he write to me?”
She tore open the letter, read it, and stood holding it in her hand, looking out over the trackless pine-woods with absorbed, speculative eyes. The sun had just set. The farthest ridge of pine-trees stood out like the teeth of a saw in black relief on the rosy sky. Catrina Lanovitch watched the rosiness fade into pearly gray.
“Madame the Countess awaits mademoiselle for tea,” said the maid’s voice suddenly, in the gloom of the door-way.
“I will come.”
The village of Thors—twenty miles farther down the river Oster, twenty miles nearer to the junction of that river with the Volga—was little more than a hamlet in the days of which we write. Some day, perhaps, the three hundred souls of Thors may increase and multiply—some day when Russia is attacked by the railway fever. For Thors is on the Chorno-Ziom—the belt of black and fertile soil that runs right across the vast empire.
Karl Steinmetz, a dogged watcher of the Wandering Jew—the deathless scoffer at our Lord’s agony, who shall never die, who shall leave cholera in his track wherever he may wander—Karl Steinmetz knew that the Oster was in itself a Wandering Jew. This river meandered through the lonesome country, bearing cholera germs within its waters. Whenever Osterno had cholera it sent it down the river to Thors, and so on to the Volga.
Thors lay groaning under the scourge, and the Countess Lanovitch shut herself within her stone walls, shivering with fear, begging her daughter to return to Petersburg.
It was nearly dark when Karl Steinmetz and the Moscow doctor rode into the little village, to find the starosta, a simple Russian farmer, awaiting them outside the kabak.
Steinmetz knew the man, and immediately took command of the situation with that unquestioned sense of authority which in Russia places the barin on much the same footing as that taken by the Anglo-Indian in our eastern empire.