Honor and old ideals, I fear
Are with the snows of yester-year,
Or like old houses—straitly mewed
In some sequestered solitude.
A Russian forest is assuredly one of the most impressive of all sights, especially in winter when the world has put on its ermine mantle. Soundless in its depths as the deeps of the sea—hushed in its silence like the great Sahara—save when an overloaded branch succumbs to its weight of snow and breaks with the dry crack of a gun, it seems utterly untenanted by beast or bird. The latter always congregate on the fringes of the villages, where grain is always to be found, owing to the gracious custom which causes every inhabitant at harvest-time to hang a sheaf beneath the eaves; while the bears have withdrawn into the comfortable quarters they have prudently arranged for themselves at the first serious hint of real cold. Wolves there are, on the prowl in the sly, shambling fashion which is peculiarly their own, but after sundown only—at least until emboldened by starvation. Now and then a ptarmigan, as white as the bitter season itself, flits heavily above the underlying thicket, though his appearance is as rare almost as when a capercailzie (kurópatkà) starts up to break the stillness with a tumult of wings and a sifting of powdery snow.
In the “wealthy” forests belonging to great territorial nobles, broad paths—or narrow roads—are cut and numbered, like the allées of some colossal park, and there, sleighs as also saddle-horses, become the easy means of pleasure to the owners or their guests. For there are few sensations more exhilarating and buoyant than to gallop upon those clear, smooth avenues between the serried trunks of trees, upbearing like the pillars of some Gothic cathedral the roof of a silent world.
Such a forest was that skirting the estate of the Duchesse de Salvières, née Palitzin, and in the dark before a bitter November dawn—bitter even for that glacial region—this charming person herself, masked to the eyes in fur, was driving her tröika furiously in the direction of Tverna. To drive a tröika, whether on earth or on snow, is an accomplishment seldom acquired by women, but Tatiana-Vassilièvna de Salvières—who never lost an occasion of declaring that she was not a woman—knew the art as thoroughly as the foremost yèmshik in Muscovy.
Her above-mentioned pretensions were, fortunately, not borne out by any stigma of masculinity, either physical or mental—unless one could class in the latter category a fixity of purpose, a calm courage, and an inexhaustible fund of dogged endurance; which qualities, either singly or in combination, are wholly foreign to the feminine nature. Extremely lovely still, with her graceful oval face lighted by deep dark-gray eyes, and framed in warm-chestnut hair threaded already with narrow ribbons of clear silver, her short, authoritative nose, her firm, well-arched mouth and obstinate little chin, deft by a characteristic fossette, she was what the French graphically call faite au tour (made on a turner’s lathe). She was not tall, but admirably proportioned: slim-waisted, full-hipped, and square-shouldered, and her hands, extraordinarily small, but yet in no way resembling the useless, tapering, monkey-like variety so dear to flashy novelists under the appellation of mains de Duchesse, were shaped on an especially artistic model, which showed both character and strength. Her feet followed suit, amusingly high-arched, eminently aristocratic, and yet capable of being stood upon with supple energy, under any and every circumstance, and from her whole being there emanated a vigor, a self-reliance, and a savoir-faire altogether uncommon in these slouchy, spineless, neurasthenic days.
Such was the sister-in-law given by a far-seeing Providence to Laurence Seton, Princess Basil Palitzin, and lucky it was for her that this was so, for, to put it mildly, that fair daughter of Albion was just then seriously dismayed by a certain hornet’s nest that she had wilfully broken open.
After her unwilling and ungracious return from “abroad,” as she distinguished between Russia and other more fortunate European countries, Laurence had consented, not without painfully apparent reluctance, to reintegrate the Castle of Tverna during the hunting and shooting season. Great parties of guests had then filled the place and made life endurable to her for the time being; but when these had departed and she had succeeded in making her husband promise to take her to Petersburg for the winter, a sudden call to the bedside of an aunt who was also his godmother—a relationship very seriously considered in Russia—had forced him to leave in haste just as the first heavy snow was beginning to fall. He had not done so without many qualms of anxiety; for not only did he by now fully realize the unpopularity of his wife on his estates, but also the fact that the peasants’ restlessness was slowly increasing, owing to the scantiness of the last harvest. Every precaution had been taken by him, however, to protect Laurence from any sort of annoyance during an absence that might be prolonged if he found his aged relative in danger; but notwithstanding this he had left Tverna with a heavy heart and an anxious mind.
Alone, or practically so, in the grim old cradle of her husband’s race—for her maternal instincts had remained utterly undeveloped, and her little son’s absence was always preferred by her to his company—Laurence found time hanging wearily on her hands. From morning till night, dressed with the costliness and splendor she was so fond of, she paced about the long enfilades of salons and galleries between which all the doors remained wide open, Russian fashion, bemoaning her unlucky fate. Now and again she paused before one or another of the interminable lines of windows fronting upon the steppe—the rooms were kept so warm that there was no rime on the glass—and could have shrieked aloud at the awful immensity stretched out beneath her. To this peculiar mind the prospect held no beauty, no grandeur even, though it possessed both in a great and marked measure. The Castle itself, built as it were from the rock whereon it stands, is gray as its gray escarpments, abrupt and uncompromising—a fortress armed cap-à-pie, impregnable to assault from three sides. At its back rises the mountainous ridge punctuated by the “Tverna rock”—as it is designated—which quickly broadens into an upland, miles and miles wide, dense with forest that, after a fashion, shelters the vast sweep of the rearward walls.
Basil had already been gone two weeks, and little by little Laurence’s exasperation had been growing to unbearable proportions, when one afternoon, as she, according to her custom, was trailing her fur-bordered velvets up and down the first floor, Garrassime presented himself before her—hands crossed upon breast, and head bowed, as is the rule of inferiors toward their masters there.