Garrassime glanced at her flashing eyes, at her white, furious face, and suddenly he dropped to his knees before her, in a dumb attitude of passionate entreaty, his hands clasped and upstretched to her. At last he spoke: “You are our Lady, our hereditary Providence, our all-powerful Mistress!” he said, almost as pale as she. “Have mercy upon them—upon yourself also—Highness. Do not show the people that you do not care—that you really are a stranger to them. They are a strange sort here, Highness. You do not know—you do not know!”
Tears of anguish were in the eyes of the giant as he knelt there at her feet, almost on the sumptuous folds of her gown. His inheritance and training admitted of no other belief than that those living on the land were born to look up to their Princes and Princesses, and that these latter had been put into the world for few other purposes than to help the peasants—no longer serfs, and therefore no longer valuable property—as long as they needed help. It was a simple and direct creed, encouraged by Basil, easily assimilated and followed, and in his heart Garrassime prayed passionately that she might not close her eyes and ears to his entreaties; that God would not allow her to harden her heart.
Trembling with fright, Laurence once more stepped back. Her hatred of Russia and everything Russian was so intense for the moment that it obliterated the feeling of satisfied vanity which at times had come to her when she saw her husband’s vassals—hers also by marriage if she had so willed it—grovel at her feet. A half-crazed desire to fly for safety deadened all other sensations, and her voice was dry and hoarse as she again ordered Garrassime to leave her presence, to hurry—only hurry—preparations for her departure.
Slowly the devoted man rose to his feet, and for an instant their eyes met like two blades naked for combat; then the servant lowered his gaze and, forcing himself to humility, bowed profoundly.
“I must obey,” he said, sorrowfully. “But Your Highness assuredly does not comprehend the evil that will be done—the anger of His Excellency, nor what the people are capable of if the sickness spreads, and stricken by panic, they feel themselves forsaken. We of the Castle cannot restrain them. They will break. I, Garrassime, know them well—although I am not of them. They will become uncontrollable—unrestrainable. I implore Your Highness not to decide anything in haste. God knows what they might be exasperated into doing—perhaps prevent Your Highness from leaving the place, and”—he added, desperately—“if Your Highness goes, they will feel—and justly so—that there is great danger: that they are lost.”
“But this is intolerable—unthinkable! Am I a prisoner here in my own Castle—prisoner of that mob of diseased brutes?”
She glanced affrightedly around her at the ancient tapestries shadowing the thick walls with uncouth figures, at the grim effigies in knightly mail that with their tall lances so helplessly guarded the great room, and finally at the row of unshuttered windows slowly darkening to the night, and through which she saw a swift gleam of powdered snow, a mere haze of sifting atoms fine as dust, but which she knew might precede a tourmente.
“Ah, God!” she cried. “Is there no help for me? No one who can come and release me from this torture?”
Garrassime was staring—staring—staring at her in her now disheveled beauty, his lips slowly curling back from his sharp white teeth.
“The Duchess!” Laurence suddenly shrieked. “She is at Palitzinovna. Send for the Duchesse de Salvières. She will know how to deal with this. She may still come in time. Surely she will not refuse to come! You don’t think she will refuse, Garrassime?”