Some of the kneeling throng, conjecturing from his attitude that he was a foreigner, ventured to give him good-natured advice.
“Kneel to the Czar, little father!” they cried. “Kneel if you would escape the knout. See! his eye is upon you.”
That fact made no difference in Wilfrid’s attitude. Determined to assert his English manhood he stood erect as a palm.
Other Englishmen besides Wilfrid had declined to bow the knee, but they had been strong in the knowledge that they could obtain the protection of Lord Whitworth, the British Ambassador. Wilfrid had no such hope to sustain him, since the withdrawal of that minister, on the outbreak of the war, had left Paul free to do as he liked with those obstinate Englishmen who refused to acknowledge his divinity.
“Halt!” yelled the little figure, who, for his size, possessed marvellous lung power. “Halt! Stop that music!”
The regiment ceased its marching, the band its playing. There was a terrible silence as the Czar, with a glare in his eye, marched straight up to Wilfrid. A shiver of expectancy ran through the throng. Some wriggled forward upon their knees with a view of getting into a better position for watching the sequel.
Wilfrid, who had seen not a few kings in his day, thought that the being now advancing towards him was the sorriest specimen of sovereignty he had ever met with—a very Caliban of royalty. He could scarcely bring himself to believe that the grotesque creature to whom all were kneeling as to a god could really be the crowned head of a vast empire.
He beheld a man, short of stature, bald and wrinkled, with a leaden complexion and large, glaring, dark eyes. The countenance was of the true Kalmuck type, so frightfully ugly that, if history speak truly, its owner shrank from looking into a mirror. (His wife, it is said, fainted at the first sight of him.) Certain it is that, differing from his predecessors, he forbade his likeness to be stamped on the coinage, with the result that since his time the Czar’s head has not figured on the Russian currency.
As if he were some character in a comic opera, whose part it was to burlesque royalty, he wore a shabby old military surtout reaching down to his heels, jack-boots with immense spurs, and an enormous cocked hat carried beneath his arm. No matter how many degrees of frost the thermometer might register, that hat was never seen upon his head. It seemed as if he had set himself to contradict the current opinion that St. Petersburg is the coldest capital in Europe. Cold? when a man can walk about in the open air without furs and without a hat! Pooh, don’t talk such stuff as that, sir!
Thus arrayed he was accustomed to play at soldiering by parading through the streets at the head of a regiment of footguards, flourishing a baton, marching on tip-toe with mincing air, and looking so like a little bantam that if he had flapped his arms and cried, “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” one would have felt little surprise.