"Not while 'Old Pam' is living."
"'Old Pam'?" said Zabern, puzzled till Paul explained. "Ah! your grand Lord Palmerston, the friend of oppressed nationalities! Well, then, we shall soon have an Anglo-Russian war. Your gallant armies and fleets will be seen ere long off the shores of the Baltic and Euxine. My faith in the bravery of your countrymen enables me to prophesy that they will be victorious. And then will come the day of our triumph!"
The patriotic Zabern, whose days from boyhood had been spent in struggling for the freedom of his fatherland, was now fully convinced that success was at hand.
"Yes," he continued, his eye kindling with enthusiasm; "yes, in the hour of Russia's humiliation, when her treasury is exhausted and her armies demoralized by defeat, there will be an upheaval of Poland; no feeble flash-in-the-pan this time, but a grand national uprising, north, south, east, and west. Little Czernova will be to the fore with her army of twenty thousand under Zabern; the Magyars of Hungary will pour across the border with Kossuth at their head; there will be a combination such as will compel Russia to part with the kingdom she wickedly stole fifty years ago. When I was born Poland was free; I shall die seeing her free again. And the princess—"
"Yes, and the princess?" inquired Paul, as Zabern paused in his utterance.
"Will be a princess no longer. The patriots have agreed that Natalie Lilieska, as the sole surviving descendant of the ancient Jagellons, shall be the queen of resuscitated Poland. Queen? ay, and why not empress? Is she not worthy of an imperial crown?"
Paul's head fairly swam at these words. The sweet, fair, dark-haired maiden who loved him, and who clung to him with such touching fidelity, a future queen—empress! He knew that Barbara would never waver in her attachment to him; to what dazzling heights, then, was he destined to rise?
He glanced at the two gray moonlit figures in the distance—the monk and the nun—conspiring for the creation of a kingdom. How romantically impossible seemed this scheme looked at beforehand! and yet how many of the noblest events in history have been previously declared impossible by political prophets!
"As touching your secret treasure," remarked Paul, "is there not a bill before the Diet,—a bill to seize all monastic wealth and to convert it to state purposes?"
"At this very moment the Diet is putting its veto upon the measure. To-night was fixed for the second reading. Our Polish adherents are assembled in full force to reject it. After to-night we shall hear no more of Lipski's bill. It would be an ill day for us if it should pass. Ostensibly directed against Czernovese monasteries in general, it is really aimed at the Convent of the Transfiguration. The Czerno-Muscovites have a suspicion that the monks of that establishment do other things besides offering perpetual prayers for Poland, and the suspicion is well founded. If public commissioners enter that monastery they will discover not only our store of gold, but likewise the documents relating to our patriotic conspiracy; and more than these, plans and models of Russian fortresses, supplied by our adherents in the Czar's army, who are not a few. The convent contains arms for one hundred thousand men, gunpowder sufficient to blow up all Czernova, and in addition new military engines. Some of the inmates of that convent devote their time to chemistry and mechanics; and in the coming struggle betwixt Poland and Russia we shall have the first use of inventions destined to revolutionize the old-fashioned methods of warfare. In the light of these inventions the numbers of our enemy will count for little. Now you understand why the Convent of the Transfiguration must be kept from the eyes of prying intruders."