They were now leaving the silence and monotony of the steppe. Wooden cabins, with blue smoke rising from them, began to appear by the roadside, few at first, but by-and-by increasing in number, till they formed a continuous line. Soon the appearance of stone houses and handsome shops, of vehicles and pedestrians, told Wilfrid that he had entered upon the suburbs of the city.
“Hôtel d’Angleterre,” was his reply to the yamchik’s question as to whither the gospodin would be driven.
The hotel in question, a palatial structure, was kept by an Englishman, who bore the homely name of John Smith, a rosy-cheeked, rotund little personage, but having at this time a most lugubrious air, due to the bad state of business. His hotel, he remarked to Wilfrid, was mainly patronised by English visitors, all of whom had taken to flight on the declaration of war, leaving the vast building almost empty.
It was doubtless a very fine thing for patriotic Britons at home to read of their victories by sea and land, but the war fell hard on the English resident in St. Petersburg.
All this, and much more, was detailed by John Smith, whose gloomy prospects Wilfrid tried to brighten with the assurance that it was simply a game of bluff on the part of Paul, who, as soon as he should learn that the tall sails of Nelson’s fleet were coming up the Gulf of Finland, would quickly make peace.
Having paid and dismissed the yamchik, Wilfrid asked for a file of daily newspapers that should cover the period of the previous three weeks. He had found it impossible to procure a newspaper at any of the post-inns on the way; and hence he was in a state of ignorance as to how the world had wagged.
Going out, the landlord soon returned with a file of Russian journals, and, looking cautiously around, said: “If your lordship cares for news fourteen days old, I have here a file of the English Times, and that’s what you won’t find in any other hotel in St. Petersburg. I get them from the English Club, who contrive to have them introduced into Russia without their being seen and ‘blacked’ by the censor. Say nothing about this, or I shall be having a domiciliary visit from the police.”
Taking the papers, Wilfrid sat down and began with the file of the Times, skimming the contents with a quick eye, in the course of which operation he came across a paragraph that caused him for the space of a full minute to sit dumbfounded with surprise.
The paragraph which the Russian censor would certainly have “blacked” out, had the journal in question fallen into his hands, purported to come from the Times correspondent in St. Petersburg, and was worded as follows:—
“A strange story, to be received with some caution, is being whispered among political circles here, to the effect that the unfortunate Czar, Ivan VI., whose life, it will be remembered, was spent wholly in a dungeon, contracted a secret marriage with his gaoler’s daughter, a girl of exquisite beauty.