“Behold your work!”
Pahlen gave a strange gasp. Benningsen looked on with an air of scornful indifference.
If the Ministry had hoped their crime would never be revealed to the public, that hope was now gone. For there, exposed to view behind the railings, was an expanse of canvas, twenty feet by ten, painted with a tableau, vivid and grim in its realism. It represented the interior of a dimly-lit bed-chamber with furnishings of the simplest. Within this chamber were human figures, drawn to life-size, their faces limned with a fidelity that made them instantly recognisable. Benningsen, gazing, saw himself standing with the heel of his boot planted upon the mouth of a struggling figure held down by four grim-faced men, two of whom were drawing the fatal noose around the throat of their victim.
The artist had dealt fairly with Prince Ouvaroff, who was making an attempt to stay the deed. Count Pahlen, more scrupulous, or more craven, than his agents, was represented as standing outside the chamber listening at the partly-opened door, at his feet the wounded body of the faithful Voronetz.
The helplessness of the victim, and the brutal strength of the assassins, formed a contrast that would have moved the least emotional to a sense of horror, pity, and indignation; and, as if to drive home the moral of the picture, there was written at its foot, in Russian, what were erroneously supposed by the crowd to be Paul’s last words, words well adapted to quicken the blood of the coldest Muscovite—
“I LOOK TO MY PEOPLE TO AVENGE ME!”
Whatever weakening of the sentiment may take place in the twentieth century, certain it is that in the early part of the nineteenth the feeling towards the Czar was a sort of religion with the Muscovites of the lower classes. Rule he never so ill, still a Czar was a Czar and his murder the greatest of crimes. So at least the crowd seemed to think, if their looks and words meant anything.
“This is true,” said the student, pointing to the picture, “for the good Empress would never put forth a lie. Ye are murderers! And what saith Holy Writ of such? ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.’”
“It seems, then, that this is a court of justice,” said Benningsen.
He could afford to sneer, for he saw at that moment what the other apparently did not see.