And now that the deed was over their courage fell again, and they stared at one another in a sort of stupor. There would be a tribunal to face, namely, the nation, and what would it say to this deed of darkness?
Benningsen still maintained his hardihood, at least outwardly.
“Who’d have thought the little ape had so much life in him?” he sneered, looking down upon the body. “We have damaged him a little. But some paint and the doctor’s art will soon make him presentable to the public. You are all witnesses that he died of apoplexy.”
As they stole from the dimly-lighted chamber leaving Ouvaroff to awaken beside the body of his murdered Sire, they caught the faint moaning of the prostrate Voronetz.
“A lad of brave spirit!” commented Benningsen. “’Tis a pity he should die. We’ll send Dr. Wylie to him to see whether he can be mended. But he’ll have to hold his peace.”
Making their way to another quarter of the now alarmed palace the ministers sought the chamber where the two Grand Dukes, Alexander and Constantine, were confined—under sentence of death, so it was believed—and setting the two brothers free gave them an account of their father’s execution, seeking to pacify their grief and indignation by the argument, doubtless a true one, that since Paul would not sign the abdication, no alternative was left but killing. For let them but retire from his bed-chamber, and Paul would at once have called upon his guard to slaughter them; and, having now learned that his two sons were parties to the conspiracy, he would doubtless have included them in the slaughter. It was Alexander’s death or Paul’s, and they chose it should be Paul’s.
“And thus,” said the Duchess, concluding her story, “thus did Paul die. His body lies in state in St. George’s Hall. A solemn mass is chanted twice a day—and twice a day the murderers bend in prayer beside the bier! The mockery of it! Does God sleep that such things can be?”
The Duchess’s narration, correct in the main, as the historian can testify, set Wilfrid’s nerves a-quivering with a variety of emotions. Horror was followed by indignation, and indignation by loathing. The deed itself was black enough in all conscience, but blacker still were the cowardice, the hypocrisy, the lying employed to conceal it.
“In England,” he remarked, “these assassins would be swinging. In Russia they are ministers. Truly, Alexander the Amiable merits his name. He is amiable—very—towards his fathers’ murderers!”